The W.o.D, The Big Three
The W.o.D, Continuum Drug Use
The W.o.D Morphine
Morphine
Morphine is the principal psychoactive alkaloid of opium. The German pharmacist Friedrich Sertürner worked on its isolation in 1803–1805, publishing his results in a short note in 1805.
The significance of his findings was not generally understood until he published a longer piece in Annalen der Physic in 1817. Commercial production began when Heinrich Emanuel Merck, founder of the pharmaceutical dynasty, undertook it in 1827.
By then Sertürner had moved on to other projects, among them the improvement of military ªrearms. A multi-talented but erratic man who may have become addicted to his own discovery, Sertürner faded into obscurity after his death in 1841, only to have his reputation revived during World War I.
His contributions to alkaloidal chemistry were widely recognized, as was morphine’s in dispensability in treating the maimed and wounded. Morphine was pure and therefore of predictable therapeutic action. It was soluble in water and injectable; hypodermic medication had been developed chiefly with morphine in mind. Injection was free of gastric side effects.
It had a more rapid onset of action. And it was more potent and euphorigenic. Consequently, it had a much greater addiction liability. The net result of all these changes was the emergence, in the late twentieth century, of an illicit international heroin industry whose size, smuggling capacity, and marketing sophistication surpassed anything that had preceded it.
To explain the simultaneous spread of mass heroin addiction, observes the historian Alfred McCoy, commentators have stressed the reasons why addicts have turned to its use: unemployment, alienation, the youth drug culture. Granting that these are all factors, an exclusive emphasis on addicts’ motivations “ignores the fundamental fact that heroin is a mass-market commodity with salesmen and distributors just like cigarettes, alcohol, or aspirin.
The rising numbers of younger users can sample drugs like heroin because they are sold at standard prices and are available at hundreds of distribution points in major cities across the globe...Without global production and distribution systems, there can be no mass addiction to cocaine or heroin.
Distribution
“A sense of such ease, such relaxation, had come on me that I felt I could not stand, I had to sink in a chair,” the neurologist Oliver Sacks wrote of his ªrst trial of kava.
The beverage, in wide use throughout Oceania, is made from the root of Piper methysticum, a member of the pepper family. Sacks allowed that he was “stoned, but sweetly, mildly, so that one felt, so to speak, more nearly oneself.” He slept deeply and awoke clear and refreshed—virtues not characteristic of caffeinated or alcoholic drinks.
Taken in the right amount in the right circumstances, kava produces a wonderful, clean high. Why then is it not the world’s most popular drug? Why has kava drinking remained largely conªned to the Paciªc islands?1 Betel is another interesting case.
The chewing of betel quid, the areca palm seed mixed with slaked lime and wrapped in a betel leaf, dates to per haps 7000 b.c. Something like a tenth of the world’s population now in dulges in the practice. It is a pleasant stimulant, similar in effect to tobacco.
When asked what betel chewing was like, the British biologist J. B. S. Haldane, a man of considerable wit, rolled his eyes toward heaven and con tinued chewing. Yet almost all betel chewers live in east Africa, southern or southeastern Asia, or the western Paciªc. Why has betel chewing failed to spread elsewhere?
The most basic historical answer is that, for kava or betel or any other psy choactive plant to have achieved global distribution and cultivation in both hemispheres, it ªrst had to catch on among western Europeans as a medi cine, recreational drug, or trade good. Merchants, colonizers, and seamen from Portugal, Spain, Holland, England, and France were primarily respon sible for distributing drugs in the four centuries after Columbus.
They had the power and technology to ensure that what they valued and used spread around the world—often quite rapidly, as in the cases of tobacco and coffee. Their ships, terrariums, plantations, and bookkeeping were the essential means of the global psychoactive revolution. Still, why did they favor some psychoactive plants and not others?
Logistical drawbacks are more plausible. Coca’s reception in Europe was clouded and delayed by the perishability problem. The requirement of grow ing and shipping more than one plant ingredient may have retarded the spread of betel-quid chewing.
But the most clear-cut case of a drug whose progress was checked by logistical difªculties is that of qat (pronounced “cot,” also spelled khat). As with coca, users chew or infuse qat leaves. One of its alkaloids, cathinone, closely resembles amphetamine. Although Europe ans first encountered and described the plant in 1603, its commercial cultiva tion and use remained conªned to East Africa and the Arabian peninsula. Qat leaves lost potency, and therefore value, faster than those of almost any other psychoactive plant.
Not until after World War II did Ethiopian and other producers partially overcome this problem by the costly expedient of trucking fresh, night-harvested leaves to airªelds for early-bird shipment in cargo planes.
Although medical anthropologists have challenged the fairness of these perceptions, they discouraged consumption among Arab and western consumers who did not want for stimulants that left their bowels open, teeth white, and pocketbooks intact.
Immigrants and refu gees accustomed to qat’s charms still seek the drug, but import seizures and raids against would-be qat farmers have kept supplies short.
Drugs can, of course, become global commodities despite the efforts of police and cus toms, but they generally do so in such concentrated forms as heroin, cocaine, or hashish. Qat, by contrast, is bulky and difªcult to conceal.
The widespread native use of hallucinogens was probably not coincidental. One theory is that the Asians who migrated to the Americas across the Sibe rian land bridge were already familiar with ºy-agaric mushrooms.
Their shamans relied on these and perhaps other hallucinogenic plants to enter the spirit world, where they divined the source of troubles and interceded on behalf of ailing bodies and sick souls. They were culturally programmed to seek out substances that would help them slip into ecstatic trances.
The people whose descendants would be called “Indians” brought this trans formative quest for spirit plants into the western hemisphere along with their bows, spear-throwers, and dogs. And they were spectacularly successful, col lectively discovering and using some 100 hallucinogenic plants.
Peyote, mes cal beans, morning-glory seeds, psilocybic mushrooms, and Banisteriopsis caapi are just a few of the better-known examples. Civilized Eurasians knew nothing of these plants and possessed only a puny folk armamentarium of hallucinogens, despite their greater land area and advantage of ancient habitation.
Tobacco is the obvious exception to Furst’s generalization. Indians em ployed tobacco, especially the hardy Nicotiana rustica, in a variety of rituals. Modern strains of rustica yield tobacco products containing up to 16 percent nicotine. Shamans smoked, sniffed, infused, ate, or otherwise absorbed so much of this potent plant that they hallucinated to, and sometimes beyond, the brink of fatal overdose.
Early English critics of tobacco, most notably James I, mentioned the drug’s idolatrous role. Why not, the king asked sar castically, imitate the Indians’ nakedness and devil-worship too? Yet moral ar guments did not prevail.
The black robes and their allies, who succeeded for centuries in suppressing, conªning, and driving underground much native hallucinogen use, failed utterly to stamp out tobacco. Some missionaries be came tobacco addicts themselves.
