Why drug history?

Drugs and spices play an outsized role in world history — but it's often a hidden one

Somewhat by accident, I’ve now written two books about the history of drugs. This was not by design. When I entered grad school in 2008, I had two goals: to work with Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, whose articles I had admired when I was an undergrad, and to come up with a dissertation topic involving the Elizabethan magus John Dee. I succeeded at the former, but not the latter. The dissertation I did end up writing evolved into my first book, The Age of Intoxication, a history of the early modern drug trade focused on the Portuguese and British empires. And now, as of two weeks ago, I’ve got a second book abut drug history out in the world: Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science, which the publisher describes as a “revisionist take on the history of psychedelics in the twentieth century.”

I’ve been deeply grateful for the uniformly positive reviews Tripping on Utopia has gotten so far, including a terrific review article about the book in this week’s New Yorker. That article, plus Alexis Turner’s thoughtful review in Science, give a great overview of what I was trying to do. (It also got on the LA Times Bestseller list, which was cool to see.)

Not so cool to see: the emergence of a small but coordinated “review bombing” campaign directed at Tripping on Utopia’s Amazon and Goodreads pages by members of an organization called the Bateson Idea Group. The people writing the reviews, few of whom appear to have actually read the book, have evidently decided that I’m intent on sullying the good name of one of the figures featured in it, the anthropologist Gregory Bateson.

For the record, I admire Bateson, and I think that fact comes across — as Margaret Talbot’s New Yorker review puts it, Bateson and Mead are “the most sympathetic figures in the book.” But so it goes. In academia, this kind of territorial behavior is not unheard of. What was different here was the pettiness of it — not just the review bombing, but a series of social media posts that seemed designed to rouse people to indignant anger. I’m not going to respond in kind, but I did want to set the record straight regarding the specific facts in dispute, which turn out to be surprisingly few. So if you want to get into the weeds, here is a detailed rebuttal, complete with excerpts from the primary sources I drew on.

And if you’ve actually read Tripping on Utopia and want to leave a review on Amazon or Goodreads, I would be hugely appreciative.

Going forward, as I transition from the book to helping my wife prep for the birth of our second child (which will be any day now!), I’ve been reflecting on this experience. Why did a book that, in part, explores Bateson’s involvement in psychedelic drug research rouse such outrage in this small quarter of the internet? As you’ll see in the rebuttal I linked to above, part of it comes from the false claim that I misinterpreted a specific document relating to Bateson’s work in the Office of Strategic Services in WWII. But part of it is also, I think, the belief that there is something improper about associating a historical figure with drugs, especially in the world of science.

I don't see it this way. To show how figures like Bateson and Margaret Mead contributed to early psychedelic science is, from my perspective, to enlarge their reputation and add to their historical significance. But from another perspective, such links to supposedly “unscientific” endeavors must necessarily diminish their scientific authority. Although I reject this stigma around psychedelics and other drugs, it undoubtedly holds true in many quarters.¹

Perhaps most of all, it’s present in the history books.

For the rest of this post, I’d like to think through the question of why drug use has, until fairly recently, been such a difficult thing for historians to write about — and why, for this very reason, it’s such an important and interesting historical subject.

Detail from David Teniers, Monkeys Smoking and Drinking, c. 1660, Museo el Prado.

Drug history is a backdoor to cultural history

Powdered Egyptian mummy. Iron shavings. Gold leaf. Radium. “The fresh corpse of an unblemished red-haired man.” Rhubarb. All of these things have been considered medicinal or recreational drugs at various times in the past. (Yes, even the red-haired man).

For this reason, the key fact you encounter when you dig into drug history is that the boundaries around the concept are constantly changing. The early modern drug trade was the early modern spice trade. This comes across quite clearly in 16th mercantile records like the one shown below, which tend to use the term “drug” (droga) to describe both opium and the ingredients you’d find in a pumpkin spice latte:

These hazy semantic boundaries extended well beyond the drug/spice divide. For instance, how to define “narcotic”? Or opiate? The answers found in 17th and 18th century books can be surprising. The famed English natural philosopher Francis Bacon, for instance, speculated in 1623 that coffee was an opiate!

Naturally, all categories change over time. But a distinctive feature of drug history is the degree to which focusing on the ways that we categorize, describe, and debate drugs can shed new light on bigger cultural and social changes.

The opioid crisis is a case in point.

“Everyone used fentanyl for decades without noticing,” a dentist complained to me recently, “and now patients are terrified of it.” Fentanyl is not just a drug anymore, if it ever was. It’s become a signifier for a set of fears, desires, and conflicts that, collectively, help define the social history of the present. This is far from the first time such a thing has happened. Think crack in the 1980s, or gin in the 1720s, or tobacco in the 1610s. There’s something distinctly polarized and polarizing about drugs. Few terms in common use have such a wide spectrum of legal and cultural associations: there are drug dealers and drug stores, miracle drugs and drug addicts. This is why the term itself is almost impossible to define. It’s not a technical term at all. It’s an ever shifting and highly charged cloud of a society’s most persistent preoccupations.

At times, in fact, it’s even been visualized as such:

For more on this fascinating image, see my post on it from 2015.

This, I think, is part of why historians took so long to jump wholeheartedly into drug history (as distinct from the history of medicine, on the one hand, or the history of “social vice” or the like, on the other). It’s hard to sink your teeth into something that’s constantly shifting. And, I suspect, it was also not considered a topic that would propel a historian’s career forward.

Recreational drugs, as opposed to pharmaceuticals, are inherently controversial and socially charged, often in ways that would not have fit with the professional self-presentation of a historian in the first half of the twentieth century. It’s not surprising, given this, that terms like “drug historian” and “drug history” begin to increase in usage right around the late 1960s and 1970s, alongside fields like “history of sexuality.”

Google N-Gram charts like this are never something to put much stock in, but I will say that this chart reflects my own subjective sense of the field. There was, it seems to me, a surge in excellent academic histories of drugs in the 1990s and 2000s. Some favorites include Marcy Norton on tobacco and chocolate, Paul Freedman on medieval spices (especially his second chapter, “Spices as Drugs”), David Courtwright’s Forces of Habit, and Mike Jay on drugs in the 19th century.

On the more popular history side of things, since around the turn of the millennium, there’s been a robust interest in spices and drugs within the larger “Commodity: a History” subgenre:

More than economic impacts — though I find those fascinating — I’m interested in drugs’ intellectual and cultural impact. What other commodities are so deeply charged with cultural associations and moral baggage? What is more potent? “Fentanyl,” as noted above, has the power of a magical incantation in politics today, just as “dope” did in the Nixon years.

Drugs as lenses for understanding past minds

Drugs are also very important factors in intellectual history. One reason has to do with the ways that metaphors and debates around drugs give insight into how historical figures envisioned their own minds.

Humphry Osmond, the scientist who coined the word “psychedelic” in 1957, has an interesting take on this. This is Osmond speaking at a meeting on the history of psychedelics at Oscar Janiger’s house in 1979:

It's very interesting that the mind described by Thomas Willis in 1670 was a kind of mirror. The reason why he described that — the mirror was then an extremely fashionable new invention. Then the mind that Freud described, if you remember, was a magic lantern. That’s what projection comes from, and this was the latest thing. Then the mind became a telephone-exchange. Then it became a kind of television thing. And I gather the latest thing is to say is it’s a hologram… it’s apparently a thing we always do.

Today, the ways we think and talk about the mind are frequently borrowed from the neuroscience of drugs. A number of key brain receptors, for instance, are named after the drugs that activate them (for instance, cannabinoid receptors and muscarinic receptors). Likewise, in the realm of self-help and popular science, hundreds of books use drug metaphors to help us make sense of our own minds.

The history of drugs and spices is messy, contradictory, and contentious. But it’s also central to the larger patterns of cultural and intellectual history. The history of drugs is a chemical distillation of who we are and the stories we tell about ourselves.

And that’s why I’ve now written two books about drug history without really meaning to.

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Weekly links

• Bing Crosby and the forgotten history of the Aurotone, a kind of proto-psychedelic film designed for use in mental health treatments in the ‘40s. (Open Culture)

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Isaac Campos

, author of one of the best of the more recent crop of social and cultural histories of drugs (Home Grown: Marijuana and the Origins of Mexico’s War on Drugs, 2014) has a newsletter called “History on Drugs.”

• “Maria Sibylla Merian was a botanical artist of exceptional originality and a respected scholar of the natural sciences. She was also a successful businesswoman who paid little attention to the conventions of her day." (British Museum)

• Analyzing the Historical Rate of Catastrophes (Bounded Regret/Jacob Steinhardt)

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As always, I welcome all comments. Thank you for reading!

1. Yesterday, for instance, I had a fascinating conversation with an Episcopalian pastor who participated in a psychedelic study circa 2015 and found the experience life-changing, in a highly positive way — but, at least at first, almost impossible to talk about with colleagues. In those pre-Michael Pollan days, there was still a stigma surrounding psychedelic use, especially in religious circles. Only in the past few years has he begun to open up about just how significant it was for him.