Food of the Gods

The dominator mentality has always resisted change, almost as if it sensed the possibility of a kind of change that would leave it bereft of its power once and for all. In the phenomenon of the indole hallucinogens that prescient fear has born bounteous fruit—nothing less than the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. To eat it is to become as gods, and

When the tea market collapsed, the distributing system that had been put in place and capitalized by the British East India Company turned to the production and selling of opium and the exploitation of the Chinese population that was outside of the colonial system proper. The invention of morphine (1803) and then heroin (1873) carries us to the thr

My own contention is that Stropharia cubensis, or a conspecific coprophilic species, was well established in Africa, Anatolia, and perhaps the Iranian Plateau millennia before the coming of the Indo-Europeans.

the breakup of Christian medieval Europe occurred as a result of an epidemic obsession with the new, the exotic, and the delightful—in short with consciousness-expanding substances.

evidence of the failure of science to nurture the soul of humanity is everywhere around us.

Such descriptions go a long way toward making clear why the “artificial paradise” was so alluring to the Romantic imagination: it was almost as though one were made for the other. And, indeed, the Romantics, with their attention to the dramatic moods of nature and their cultivation of a sensitivity that their critics found “feminine,” bear all the

Chocolate, made from the ground beans of a native Amazonian tree, Theobroma cacao, contains only small amounts of caffeine but is rich in caffeine’s near-relative theobromine. Both are chemicals with close relatives that occur endogenously in normal human metabolism. Like caffeine, theobromine is a stimulant, and the addictive potential of chocolat

Governments that had dealt drugs with impunity for centuries suddenly found themselves, in the new atmosphere of temperance and social reform, forced to legislate this lucrative trade out of the realm of ordinary commerce and into the status of an illicit activity. Governments would now make their drug money in kickback schemes and in situations in

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.