Peter Furst has researched the role of enemas and clysters in Mesoamerican medicine and shamanism:

Few plants can lay claim to such complex and tangled relationships to human beings as can the opium poppy and the tobacco plant. Both plants are central to extremely addictive behaviors in human beings that shorten life and burden society with medical and financial consequences.

In the course of his alchemical studies, Jung encountered the accounts of the cabiri, the fairylike, alchemical children whose appearance, or felt presence, is a part of the late stages of the alchemical opus.5 These alchemical children are similar to the small helping spirits that the shaman calls to his aid. Jung saw them as autonomous portions

If Soma is Stropharia cubensis, then the tradition could be traced unbroken back to prehistoric Africa.

Coffee was widely blamed for the death of the French minister Colbert, who died of

In the United States at the turn of the century, racist rumormongering fanned the hysterical fear that southern blacks, maddened by cocaine, might attack whites. In 1906 the Pure Food and Drug Act was passed;

There is something to the notion that the architectural styles and design motifs of Mughal Delhi or tenth-century Isfahan are somehow derivative of or inspired by the visions of hashish. And there is something to the notion that alcohol channeled the development of social forms and cultural self-image in feudal Europe.

Distilled spirits, in contrast, were not known to the ancients

Medieval Europe was one of the most constipated, neurotic, and woman-hating societies ever to exist.