A PLUME BOOK

A (BRIEF) HISTORY OF VICE

Matthew Black

From a young age ROBERT EVANS realized he was more into sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll than things like “wearing a tie” or “commuting to an office.” He always assumed these desires would lead him to a lucrative career as a panhandler or a drug mule. But it turned out there was another option: writing. As an editor for Cracked since 2013, Robert Evans has interviewed sources ranging from Nevada brothel workers to partisan militia on the front lines of the Ukrainian Civil War. He currently lives in a fortified compound in the Pacific Northwest and, occasionally, his car.

PLUME

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Copyright ©2016 by Robert Evans

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Names: Evans, Robert, 1988- author.

Title: A (brief) history of vice : how bad behavior built civilization / Robert Evans.

Description: New York : Plume, [2016]

Identifiers: LCCN 2015048289 | ISBN 9780147517609 (hardcover)

Subjects: LCSH: Vice—History. | Civilization, Modern.

Classification: LCC BJ1534 .E93 2016 | DDC 179/.809—dc23

LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015048289

Penguin is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity. In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers; however, the story, the experiences, and the words are the author’s alone. Some names and identifying characteristics have been changed to protect the privacy of the individuals involved.

Version_1

For Cynthia

Contents

About the Author

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Introduction

Chapter 1: Mother Nature: History’s First Bartender

Chapter 2: Music: The First Drug?

Chapter 3: Celebrity Worship and the Greek Who Predicted TMZ

Chapter 4: How Drunken Parties Birthed (and Broke) Civilizations

Chapter 5: How Bad Behavior Saved Civilization

Chapter 6: Godstitution: The Hidden History of Sex Work

Chapter 7: Drugs, the Birth of Religion, and How to Trip Like a Philosopher

Chapter 8: Ancient Greek Acid and the Birth of Science

Chapter 9: Tobacco and Marijuana: Twins Displaced by Time

Chapter 10: Drugged Cultures and Acid Wars

Chapter 11: The Shrub That Conquered the World

Chapter 12: The Coffee-Drinking Bad Boys of Ancient Islam

Chapter 13: How We Evolved to Be Kinky

Chapter 14: The Hijacking of Genius: A Deep History of Designer Drugs

Chapter 15: The Curious History of Salamander Brandy

Conclusion

Acknowledgments

Introduction

When I was in fifth grade, a DARE officer came to our classroom to lecture us on the dangers of narcotics. He visited once a week for a couple of months, bringing along posters with pictures of drugs on them and walking us through scary facts and “facts” about various narcotics. I’m sure I learned a lot of nonsense about MDMA drilling holes in brains and psychotic pot-fueled murders, but I don’t remember finding that class ridiculous. My city, Plano, Texas, was the heroin capital of America at the time. Ten young Planoian kids died of overdoses in that year alone.

Many of my teachers knew at least one of the kids who died in what Rolling Stone writer Mike Gray called the “Texas Heroin Massacre.” It scared the shit out of every parent in the city. And as a result, our drug education program tripled down on the fear mongering. Any possible drug we might do, including alcohol or tobacco, was seen as a possible gateway to shooting a needleful of death up our arms. At the end of that DARE course my classmates and I each signed a contract promising that we’d never ever do any drugs.

DARE’s “nothing beats sobriety” attitude didn’t stick with me. I don’t think it stuck with most kids who took the course. A 2009 analysis of twenty studies of the DARE program’s efficacy concluded that teens who participated in the program were no less likely to experiment with drugs than teens who didn’t.

I didn’t wait long to start experimenting. I had my first drink at seventeen, my first hit of weed at nineteen, and my first hallucinogenic experience about two months after that, when a friend and I took heavy doses of a “research chemical” (a drug too young to be illegal yet) called 2Ci. My friend had bought it from some shady Canadian company using a precursor to Bitcoin. And while I was falling in love with the vast narcotic bounty of the twenty-first century, the US government was slowly pulling back from its war on marijuana and begrudgingly starting to approve some of the first research into the medicinal use of psychedelics in a generation.

This was all part of a broader trend: The public is starting to gain a new appreciation for all the things we once called vice. In 2003, the therapeutic value of sex work was confirmed when sexual surrogacy (literally, people having sex with patients to help them with some sexual dysfunction) was ruled legal across the country. Full frontal nudity and outright depictions of sexual acts have gone from the domain of porn and a few art movies to playing major roles in some of the most popular shows on television. Our national attitude toward drugs is slowly slipping from “Just Say No” to “Maybe Say Yes Sometimes.”

Vice is experiencing a resurgence in public sympathy. In the last few years, you’ve probably read articles like the one The New York Times published in 2013 titled “How Beer Gave Us Civilization,” which advanced the idea that early humans started settling down on farms so they could produce more sweet booze. But, as I learned from talking to the scientist behind the study cited in that article, the real theory is much more interesting. “Beer” didn’t give birth to civilization alone. The desire to hold bigger and better feasts featuring, yes, beer, but also piles of food and music, is what led to the birth of human civilization.

We literally started building towns and, eventually, cities so that we could throw cooler parties.

See, I’m a nerd. So when I realize I like something (in this case “general debauchery”), my natural impulse is to start reading as much about it as I can. That’s how I learned that one of the first great victories for women’s rights in history was thanks to a prostitute who became an empress. It’s also how I learned that modern genetic science was made possible by two different scientists’ acid trips.

And as I learned more about the wonderful ways vice has changed human history, I read about the long-extinct ways people used to enjoy their vices. Frankly, I was inspired. I experimented with ancient Native American nose pipes. I ate balls of coffee and butter in the style of the ancient Ethiopians. I went without eating for four days and drank wine mixed with barley and cheese to see if it would make me trip like a Greek philosopher. I hunted after a mythical hallucinogenic drink made by drowning poisonous salamanders in booze.

The book that follows is everything I’ve ever learned about the things we pretend not to like in polite company. It’s a celebration of the brave, drunken pioneers who built our globe-spanning civilization. Reading this book will arm you with more than just information; it will provide you with step-by-step guides for re-creating the intoxicating experiences of our ancestors. I hope what I’ve written here will help you appreciate the importance of vice in our shared human history and understand that, if we’re able to get higher than any people before us, it’s only because we’re standing on the shoulders of giants.

The most important history lesson I ever learned started with a big white bucket of rotting fruit in the kitchen of my first apartment.

I was nineteen at the time—too young to buy booze, but too old to spend my weekends sober. It was a conundrum. Sure, I knew people who were over twenty-one and willing to buy me alcohol. But most of them were just as shady as you’d expect based on the fact that they were willing to buy alcohol for teenagers. Also, I was poor enough that my options for affordable drinking were limited to six-dollar bottles of leaded vodka and, if I was really hard up, Boone’s Farm.

But a good friend of mine made beer in his kitchen, and he’d walked me through the basic chemistry of the fermentation process. I knew it started with yeast, the one-celled fungi that live in vast colonies, feast on sugar, and poop out alcohol. Brewers simply trapped yeast, a bunch of rotting sugary plant matter, and water in a container and let it all sit for a while until, eventually, beer happened.

I couldn’t afford to brew beer, though. A five-gallon batch cost upward of forty dollars in ingredients, a fortune in teenager money. Thankfully, there was a dirtier, easier, route: I could buy a bunch of cheap fruit, mash it up, toss it into a bucket with water and yeast, and let that turn into something foul but intoxicating. My friends and I called the resultant brew “hobo jug wine,” and here is the recipe we used:

Ingredients

1 five-gallon food-grade plastic bucket

1 length of hose, a finger’s width or so

1 smaller bucket

Enough pineapples/oranges/apples/whatever fruit to fill up half the bucket

Directions

Peel and chop the fruit and fill the bucket half full of fruit. Mash it into a pulp, and then add water, and cane sugar, if you feel like really taking your sobriety to task. If you’re as poor as I was, you can make do with grabbing five gallons’ worth of fruit juice concentrate from the grocer’s freezer in lieu of honest, God-fearing fruit. Drop a packet of yeast (Fleischmann’s bread yeast works just fine) into the mixture, stir, and stick the top of the bucket on.

This next part’s critical: Booze gives off a lot of CO2 while it’s fermenting. You’ll want to make a little hole in the lid of the bucket and run the hose out of it and into the smaller bucket filled with water. That hose will let enough CO2 escape that your large bucket won’t explode into shards of painful plastic-y shrapnel. (If you don’t run the hose into water, you’ll get some fruit bits spewed everywhere.) Alternatively, you can buy what’s known as an airlock from your local brew store, as well as a five-gallon plastic brew bucket with a hole already in place. Either way, let the vile brew sit for two to four weeks.

Tavia Morra

My first batch of hobo jug wine burbled away in the kitchen for three weeks before we pulled the top off and decanted it into bottles. I won’t pretend the brew smelled good, but I’ll remind you that I was nineteen and living in my first apartment. The smell of fermenting fruit was far from the worst odor to seep out of that kitchen. All that mattered was that it worked. I’d crafted an alcoholic beverage.

It was slightly sour, a little sweet, and tasted more than a bit like bread mold. But it also gave off the telltale burn of alcohol as it slid down my throat, and by the third glass I was no longer sober and thus much less judgmental of the flavor. At the time, all I knew was that I’d cracked the code to being a drunk teenager without any money. It was only years later, while researching this book, that I realized my young self had inadvertently re-created something very close to the first booze our primate ancestors ever swigged.

Ancient Alcohol in the Animal Kingdom

Humans aren’t the only species with an appreciation for alcohol, or even the only ones with a tendency to take that appreciation too far. In 2002, a pack of elephants (young and male, of course) tramped into a village in Assam, India, stole a bunch of wine, and went on a violent, drunken bender that cost six people their lives. So alcohol problems aren’t unique to Homo sapiens, but we’re certainly the species that’s taken alcohol the furthest.

It’s easy to imagine some starving ancient human shoveling a handful of decomposing marula fruit down his throat and, a few seconds later, realizing he felt fucking excellent. But the story of humankind’s introduction to alcohol actually starts much earlier, before men or women or anything remotely human ever existed. Our ability to metabolize alcohol, and thus get drunk, originated in some of the very first primates on earth. The enzyme ADH4 is what lets us (and gorillas and monkeys) digest alcohol, and the variation of this enzyme that lets our species appreciate the ethanol in a whiskey sour first showed up around ten million years ago.

This means there have been hominids drinking much longer than there have been human beings. The obvious question is: Why did we hold on to this adaptation? The primates who first started using alcohol must’ve been rewarded for their ability to tolerate it and their desire to seek it out. And reward in that last sentence means “they had lots of tiny, drunken animal sex.” A casual look at your city’s main drag on a Friday night illustrates the most confusing part of this story: Drunken people aren’t good at anything but starting fistfights, puking out of car windows, and having trouble with their erections.

And yet alcohol is the one drug we know our primate grand-daddies and -mommies were doing millions of years ago. So have we always loved drinking to excess? The most likely answer lies in the most aptly named theory in scientific history . . .

The Drunken Monkey Hypothesis

According to the “Drunken Monkey Hypothesis,” there’s a damn good reason our ancestors started drinking well before the evolutionary time line’s equivalent of five P.M. The Drunken Monkey Hypothesis (yes, that’s the real name) states that regular drinking carried substantial benefits for our adorable, furry forbearers.

By the time fruit starts fermenting, it’s gotten absolutely as ripe as it’s going to get. Ripe also means “full of sugar” and thus full of calories. You need a lot of calories when your whole day is spent swinging from trees and fleeing from jaguars. After all, one of alcohol’s most well known side effects is the beer belly. Beer and wine and liquor are all dense with calories. A regular drinking habit combined with a regular eating habit leads to a much fatter animal. Humans today aren’t huge fans of all those extra calories, but that’s only because whole gas stations full of them assault our waistlines on an hourly basis.

One of the great challenges for any species in the wild is simply not starving to death. When you can travel from points A to B only by walking or running and have to hunt and gather all your food, you burn a lot more fuel just staying alive. Alcohol guaranteed our ancestors more precious, life-giving calories. The telltale scent of fermentation was an easy way for them to know when a food was at its most caloric. Keeping a solid buzz was enough of an advantage that our simian great-[X]-grandparents developed noses specifically attuned to the odor of ethanol.

Scientists have even gone so far as to confirm that drinking alcohol while eating food makes you take in more calories than if you just did one after the other. Mixing booze and food is such a good survival strategy that the only monkeys who fucked enough to pass on their genes were the ones who drank. And yes, there’s hard scientific evidence to support that claim.

Frank Wiens and Annette Zitzmann, animal physiologists from the University of Bayreuth, Germany, noted in 2008 that pen-tailed tree shrews really seemed to prefer getting their calories from fermented fruit nectar than from anything else.

In evolutionary terms, these guys are the distant uncle Mom refuses to talk about.

Pen-tailed tree shrews are significant, because in addition to looking like the result of a raccoon mating with a pear, they’re considered to be the spitting image of the first preprimates, genetically speaking. And while these guys have a lot in common with our earliest ancestors, they also share something with Russian dockworkers; namely, the ability to put away nine or more drinks in a night without feeling it. The pen-tailed tree shrew lives its life like one giant bar crawl, with tree branches as its taps and fermenting palm nectar in lieu of craft beer.

That nectar, colonized by naturally occurring air yeasts, can hit 3 to 4 percent alcohol by the time a shrew starts slurping it up. Nine beers seem like more than a tiny little rat-monkey should be able to handle without being too fucked-up to avoid danger. But the pen-tailed tree shrew takes its alcohol like a Yeltsin. The fact that the jungles of Malaysia aren’t filled with drunken shews falling from the sky and splattering on the ground is proof that alcohol doesn’t affect them quite the same way it affects us.

Again, scientists suspect the pen-tailed tree shrew is very close to our early primate ancestors. This suggests that our ability to enjoy alcohol’s intoxicating effects came after our desire to seek out and consume it. We started our relationship with alcohol because it made us less likely to starve to death. Over time we gained the ability to stand upright and, eventually, invent Netflix. Somewhere along that time line we also started getting drunk from alcohol, and not just fat.

Today alcohol is the most widely consumed intoxicant on earth. We spend well over a trillion dollars a year, worldwide, to get our buzz on, and for more sacred purposes than mere drunkenness; Christian churches across the world use wine to represent the blood of their god. The ancient Greeks and Romans took the opposite tack, and turned their alcohol into a god, Dionysus. There’s absolutely no drug on earth that our species has carried further or invested more creativity into than alcohol. And it all started with fermented palm nectar.

The Curious History of Palm Trees and Alcohol

Palm trees are almost enough to make one believe in the existence of a booze-loving God. The bertam palm, favored by the pen-tailed tree shrew, is essentially a living bar. It secretes a constant flow of nectar into hundreds of little flowers during the month and a half when its pollen is ripening. These flowers are colonized by a special sort of yeast, which ferments the nectar immediately. Small animals, like the tree shrew, are drawn by the smell of sugar and the irresistible allure of an open bar.

Visits to the bertam palm tavern benefit both the fuzzy little alcoholics and the tree itself. The tree shrews get open taps to binge on, and the palm gets a small, drunken army to help spread its pollen far and wide. The arrangement is dizzyingly complex: Yeasts feed off sugars in the nectar, and the brewery-like aroma of those fermenting sugars draws in tree shrews, sloths, and other animals. While each bertam palm gives off nectar for only a short time each year, individual members of the species are all fertile at different times throughout the year, ensuring a regular supply of free sugar beer for the sundry lushes of Malaysia.

The bertam palm isn’t the only species of palm tree with a penchant for providing hooch to primates. Phoenix dactylifera, the date palm tree, is believed to be one of humankind’s earliest sources of alcohol. The syrup produced by palm trees is so high in sugar, and the plants themselves so friendly to yeast, that each plant is basically its own self-contained brewery.

Fermenting beer of any worthwhile strength can take two to three weeks, and usually a fair bit longer. Once tapped and exposed to the air, palm syrup can reach 4 percent alcohol by volume (ABV) in just two hours. In parts of Sri Lanka and Malaysia, a lot of “wine” is still prepared this way today. It’s not uncommon for people to drink upward of a liter in a day. This palm wine is nearly always consumed within a day or so of being fermented (evidently the taste doesn’t age well).

I spoke to Dr. Brian Hayden, an archaeologist who’s dedicated much of his life to the noble pursuit of studying ancient humans’ drinking habits. He pointed out that the ease with which palm sap ferments makes it a perfect solution for Muslims who want to drink and still maintain plausible deniability.

“I was working in Northern Africa for a while, and the palm sap they used to sell in the markets . . . well, Muslims aren’t supposed to drink alcohol but this stuff was fermenting as you bought it. Just bubbling away.”

Palm syrup is like the opposite of honey. Humans have used both to make alcoholic beverages since time immemorial. But honey takes a very long time to ferment: Most meads (honey-based wines) take many months to properly prepare. Even modern quick mead, loaded with other fruits to provide the yeast with more easily fermentable sugars, takes a good six weeks to brew. Meanwhile, palm syrup turns into booze almost immediately, but gets only worse with time.

Palm trees clearly want us to get drunk, fast. On the opposite side of things, I imagine bees would be pretty pissed at us if they knew we were turning their precious honey into bad-decision fuel. But the relative difficulty of fermenting honey, and the dangers involved in acquiring it, made honey wine far more prized by ancient drinkers. Palm wine never really took off on a global scale, but you can probably stroll down the aisles of your local liquor store and find mead today.

I can’t help but feel a little sad at that. We’ve forgotten our roots. Primates weren’t introduced to the wonders and terrors of alcohol by honeybees. The bertam palm didn’t exist ten million years ago, but the odds are good that something very much like the date palm tree was one of the earth’s first bartenders.

And just how would its drinks have tasted? Well . . .

HOW TO: Brew Ur-Booze

I’m going to answer the question right now, before we get to a recipe. Ur-booze tastes fucking awful. Unless you’ve got an absolutely unquenchable sweet tooth or a borderline sexual obsession with the flavor of cough syrup, you will not enjoy ur-booze. You’ll struggle to finish a cup of the stuff. But if what I’ve described sounds good, or if you just hate your taste buds, here’s what you’ll need . . .

Ingredients

24 ounces pure organic palm syrup

12 ounces water (optional)

1 packet yeast

1 one-gallon brew bucket and airlock

Finding palm syrup is a little easier said than done. I had hoped to use sugar from a date palm tree, since that seems to have been the first sugar-bearing palm that human beings would’ve hung out around. It was easy to find syrup made from dates, but not from the sap of the tree itself. Part of that has to do with the fact that countries like Bangladesh have banned the sale (or export) of date palm sap due to its tendency to get infected with horrific bat-borne illnesses.

Date palm syrup is harvested in the simplest manner imaginable: Some dude hacks a hole in a tree with a machete, and then hangs a bucket under it to collect the sap overnight. Bats come out at night, and, thanks to rampant deforestation, buckets of free sap are one of the few reliable food sources left to them. So they sup on date syrup and leave some of their own fluids behind in the process. Unfortunately for the sap lovers of the world, those fluids sometimes contain the deadly Nipah virus.

Without going into too much detail, Nipah kills the heck out of people. There’s no vaccine or cure, and local governments have turned to banning palm sap rather than risk deadly outbreaks. So yeah, no date palm sap for us. Thankfully, the date palm and the bertam palm aren’t the only sugariffic species of palm tree on the planet. Southeast Asia and India are home to Caryota urens, which has a very similar and supersugary sap that’s sold as syrup in parts of Oregon and California. You can buy some yourself by Googling “Kandy Mountain.”

Directions

The goal here is to re-create the first, accidentally alcoholic sip a primate ever took. It won’t pay to be fancy. Simply take your palm syrup, pour it into your brew bucket, and add the yeast. I added water to my brew, mainly to wash the extra couple of ounces of syrup out of my bottles. Kandy Mountain’s stuff is expensive, and I didn’t want to waste a drop.

Fermentation should start almost immediately. My batch grew a fizzy, white foamy head within a couple of hours. By that night, the airlock was bubbling like crazy. The yeast did its

work gleefully. Twenty-four hours later, I poured about a half pint of ur-booze into my cup and steeled myself to try it. Even watered down it tasted thick and incredibly sweet, like a lukewarm shot of melted Skittles.

There was alcohol in it, yes, but a very mild amount, 2 to 3 percent. Drinking that half pint made my teeth feel like I’d just chug-chewed a half gallon of OJ mixed with scraps of aluminum foil. It was almost unbearable. Getting drunk off ur-booze would’ve required an act of titanic willpower. But that’s not to say it lacked any positive aspects. The sugar rush was wonderful. I had my first sip late at night, at the end of a tiring day, and within a few minutes of finishing the cup I was up and about, cleaning and organizing my room at a twitchy, manic pace more reminiscent of Adderall than alcohol. (The subsequent sugar crash was as awful as you’d expect.)

I shared the ur-booze with my fiancée, Magenta. She’s got a mighty sweet tooth, and I wanted to make sure this stuff wasn’t disgusting just to my palate. She also found it much too sweet, and couldn’t even drink enough to get that sugar high. I elected to wait and let it ferment for two more days before sharing it with a group of friends.

That didn’t work, either. Out of the six people I convinced to try ur-booze, only one person thought it was palatable, comparing it to a liqueur like Kahlúa. The reaction of my friend and coworker David Bell was more typical:

“I dare you to try and get drunk on this. It has the consistency of what I imagine sperm tastes like, and just a little fizziness. It’s garbage.”

He’s almost right. Straight ur-booze is undrinkable. But there is one delicious use for the stuff, and I’d like to introduce you all to a new cocktail with a very old ingredient.

The Ur-Ish Coffee

The only test subject who liked ur-booze suggested pouring a shot of it into a cup of hot black coffee. I poured a shot’s worth of ur-booze into a mug of coffee, stirred vigorously, and sipped. Now it was delicious. I don’t prefer my coffee with sugar, but the ur-booze added a pleasant amount of sweetness to a very bitter cup of coffee. It set off the coffee’s natural flavor nicely, and while the alcohol content wasn’t particularly noticeable, the surge of sugar-induced energy mixed well with the caffeine.

Ur-ish coffee isn’t the right drink to start your day with. Alcohol isn’t an early morning thing for most people, and if you are a dawn drinker you’ll get much more buzz for your buck out of a bloody Mary or a traditional Irish coffee. I recommend ur-ish coffee as an early evening drink. Break out a few mugs for you and your friends before heading out to a concert or a bar or any other weekend activity at which you plan on drinking. It gives enough energy to push you through that late-afternoon slump.

Try this recipe for yourself, mix it with coffee for palatability, and take it at the start of a long night of (responsible) drinking. Let the cloying, fizzy sweetness connect you to the first primates who started us down a long and winding road that led, millions of years later, to every glass of craft beer, wine, or fine liquor you’ve ever sipped.

Is music a drug?

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a drug is any substance “which has a physiological effect when ingested or otherwise introduced into the body.” Classifying sound as a “substance” seems sort of iffy at first. But sound waves consist of atoms, which do have mass.

An easier question to answer is: Does sound have a physiological effect on the human body? The short answer is yes. The long answer is everything you read after this point, and it starts with a doctor at Columbia University named Oliver Sacks. He was a pioneer in the field of Musical Drugification. Before his death in 2015, Dr. Sacks used music to treat a variety of patients, including people paralyzed by Parkinson’s disease and kids suffering from ADHD. His work with the latter group is particularly relevant to this book, because the way music actually helps ADHD sufferers makes it seem pretty mind altering.

People with ADHD often have a genetic variant of the normal dopamine receptor in the brain. We’ll read more about this fun little mutation, DRD4-7R, in a later chapter. But for now it’s important you know that DRD4-7R is associated with the sort of people who indulge in more novelty-seeking behavior than most. They’re motivated to try new experiences because their brains don’t reward them with as much dopamine for sitting around and focusing as the brains of people with normal receptors do.

Dopamine is our brain’s carrot on a stick. It’s the neurotransmitter responsible for every feeling of satisfaction in your life. It’s the chemical that brings us the famous rush of victory. People with ADHD can benefit from therapy that trains their brains to release more dopamine when they’re, say, sitting and reading quietly. And, as it happens, music is one way to artificially open up the floodgates of our brain’s dopamine vault.

Two scientists, Valorie Salimpoor and Mitchel Benovoy, headed up a 2011 study published in Nature Neuroscience, which used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machines to confirm that music does trigger dopamine release in people. They noted that subjects experienced intense pleasure and even, occasionally, feelings of craving for their preferred music. How much dopamine are we talking about here? Salimpoor and Benovoy saw increases of around 6 to 9 percent when most participants listened to their favorite jams, which is roughly in line with eating a delicious meal. One participant saw a 21 percent increase in dopamine levels, which is on par with what you’d get from taking a bump of cocaine.

You may not think of listening to your favorite band as getting a fix, but in a physiological sense it very much is. And music isn’t only a drug in the sense that it gets your brain to give up the happy chemicals. In 2004 two scientists with the University of Tsukuba, Japan, Den’etsu Sutoo and Kayo Akiyama, found that Mozart’s music lowered blood pressure in rats with hypertension.

I’m going to guess that those rats weren’t already big fans of Mozart before the study started. Certain rhythms simply interact with the brain in ways that produce measurable physical changes, whether or not the brain in question considers itself a fan of those rhythms. The case for music as a drug is rather strong, even if the effects of a blistering guitar solo on the brain aren’t always quite as pronounced as, say, a needleful of China white.

Whether or not you buy that music is a drug, there’s no arguing with the fact that the right rhythm can alter human consciousness. This means that music would’ve been one of the very first, if not the very first method of intoxication available to early humans. The oldest musical instruments we’ve ever found are around forty thousand years old. Beer brewing, the oldest known form of human intoxicant manufacture, goes back only to about 12,000 to 13,000 BCE. The earliest psychedelic use by humans was either San Pedro cactus or Psilocybe mushrooms back in 8000 or 9000 BCE.

So human beings have been getting high on sound for a very, very long time. And there’s even some evidence that prehistoric people figured out how to build the Stone Age equivalent of a kick-ass sound system to up their dose . . .

Stonehenge: Built for Raves?

Guessing the date of any human construction built by people who didn’t have writing is kind of a crapshoot. Scientists are pretty damn sure Stonehenge was begun sometime between 3000 and 2200 BCE. Eight hundred years is almost a three-United-States-long gap, but that’s downright precise compared with our understanding of exactly why the ’Henge was built in the first place.

The popular theories range from plausible (monument to the ancestors, giant astronomical calendar) to “alien landing pad.” The theory you probably haven’t heard is that Stonehenge was built as a giant sound system. It’s the ancient equivalent of a massive concert hall or, more appropriately for England, a DJ booth in a derelict London warehouse.

Research by scientists from the universities of Salford, Bristol, and Huddersfield suggests that the placement of the rocks within the original Stonehenge would’ve had an acoustic effect easily noticeable to human ears, and thus to the prehistoric Britons who spent their lives slowly hauling it into place. Dr. Bruno Fazenda, a scientist who’s dedicated years of his life to studying Stonehenge’s acoustics, is appropriately cautious about these findings. And when I contacted him, he warned me away from assuming that Stonehenge had any single purpose.

We should assume that Stonehenge was built with Swiss Army pragmatism and the best minds of an ancient people. The resources required to feed and care for the workers hauling those stones would’ve been significant. Five thousand years ago, human society on most of the planet still hadn’t perfected the art of not being eaten by wolves. These practical ancients probably had more than one use in mind for the ’Henge they spent generations constructing.

But if Stonehenge was built, in part, to act as a venue for music, it would explain one of the great mysteries of the monument’s construction. All the smaller rocks at Stonehenge are made of bluestones, or spotted dolerite, which most archaeologists believe were hauled in from nearly two hundred miles away (although one theory gives a glacier credit for most of the moving). There were plenty of big stones much closer than the bluestones. Why would the builders have spent so much effort to seek out those specific stones?

Well, modern acoustic science is starting to unravel what Paleolithic musicians knew from experience. Researchers from the Royal College of Art in London found that many of the bluestones in the Preseli Hills in Wales (the probable origin of the Stonehenge bluestones) have a tendency to ring when hit. The bluestones were even tested by actual percussionists, who were able to use them like glockenspiels. (A glockenspiel is like a xylophone, but German.)

One difficulty in testing any of these theories comes from the fact that Stonehenge is a precious cultural artifact, and not something people are generally allowed to hit with sticks. Current law even forbids the use of many kinds of electronics within Stonehenge. Fortunately, there exists in this world a full-scale model of Stonehenge in the United States. It lives at a museum in Maryhill, Washington, and was built at the behest of a millionaire.

Sam Hill—the man, not the old-timey euphemism for hell—spent his career building roads across the Pacific Northwest. He didn’t actually build them; huge teams of laborers did that. But Sam owned the company they worked for, and he got rich enough off the profits that he was able to commission his own damn Stonehenge as a monument. That’s a bellwether of human progress: What was once the labor of generations can now be built at the whimsy of a rich man.

In fairness to Sam, his motivations for building a fake Stonehenge were rather nobler than “upstage those shiftless cavemen.” He wanted to create a monument to the millions of young men who died fighting in World War I. At that point, the prevailing belief was that Stonehenge had been built as a sacrificial altar. In Hill’s mind, World War I was an altar upon which millions had been sacrificed, pointlessly. A full-scale replica of history’s most famous pagan murder shrine seemed a fitting tribute.

Hill’s monument was actually the first memorial to the dead of World War I built in the United States. In reality, there’s very little evidence that Stonehenge was used for human sacrifice. Many people have been buried around the area over the centuries, but only a few show signs of having been executed and perhaps sacrificed. A lot of shit has happened at Stonehenge over the ages, but we can be fairly confident that it wasn’t built with the express intent of acting as a Murdertorium.

The Maryhill monument is still a lovely gesture, and, appropriately enough, Sam Hill himself is buried there. I’m grateful to him, because this monument’s existence gave me the opportunity to test just how good an amp Stonehenge might’ve been.

The Science of a Stone Age Discotheque

The Maryhill monument is made out of concrete, not bluestone or any other kind of natural rock. But the original builders took great care to give it a texture as close to the actual ’Henge as possible. Dr. Fazenda’s team from the University of Salford chose to do their groundbreaking work on Stonehenge’s acoustics there, because the difference in sound between Hill’s monument and the real thing was negligible.

Their research found that the level of sound reverberation at the Maryhill Stonehenge was in line with what you’d expect from a competently constructed contemporary lecture hall. The study found an increase in acoustic activity that had a notable effect on speech as well as chanting. And while any large, circular room is bound to have some sort of reverberatory properties, the unique construction of the original Stonehenge is more complex than that.

The colored-in stones represent the fullest original configuration of Stonehenge, before time and tourists fucked it up. Fortunately, the Maryhill monument is built as a replica of the full, original ’Henge. Tavia Morra

Those interstitial rings of stone have a big impact on the overall acoustics, refracting and diffusing sound waves. According to the University of Salford’s report, that means “sound waves at any point in the space are likely to be traveling in many directions rather than from a specific direction.”

This actually prevents the formation of echoes, and causes sound to reverberate in such a way that it tends to be equally audible anywhere within the circle. But I wasn’t interested in some kind of fancy Stone Age podium. The news articles I’d read about Dr. Fazenda’s work at Stonehenge had all had titles like:

“Stonehenge Was an Ancient Rave Spot” (Discovery News, 2013)

“Stonehenge: One Totally Awesome Rave Location” (NBC News, 2009)

Dr. Fazenda’s own 2012 article on the subject, “Acoustics of Stonehenge,” University of Salford, was super informative but very dry—lots of math, not even one use of the word rave or the phrase totally awesome. But then I came across some interviews with Dr. Rupert Till, the musical archaeologist who’d helped Dr. Fazenda conduct tests on the Maryhill monument.

He painted a much more vivid picture, comparing the likely musical style of the Stonehenge builders to samba music: fast paced, with large bands and hundreds of participants. Dr. Till himself even compared the scene to a rave in “Songs of the Stones,” a 2010 paper in the Journal of the Independent Association for the Study of Popular Music. He stated that the acoustics of Stonehenge implied a “large number of people” gathering to play “amplified, simple, rhythmic repetitive music” to achieve a “trance-like state.” Dr. Till continued:

Similar activities are present at “rave” events within Electronic Dance Music Culture . . . which has been described by many commentators as having ritualistic or religious meaning for its participants.

If Dr. Till is correct, modern raves and music festivals aren’t some sign of modern decadence ushered in by the hippie era. Rather, they’re a very old piece of human culture reasserting itself after a long dormancy. But what does he mean by “trance-like state”?

The Weird Science of Mind-Altering Beats

Every drum has a natural resonant frequency. If you beat the drum at a particular tempo, it’ll produce louder, clearer notes. Spaces, like concert halls and auditoriums, have a resonant frequency, too. And if you match that frequency you can cause the space to resonate, producing a hum not unlike running your finger along the rim of a very large glass.

Doctors Till and Fazenda estimated Stonehenge’s resonant frequency at around 10 Hz. Hertz, or Hz, is a science-talk way of measuring the number of counts per second of sound. Ten hertz is between 150 and 160 beats per minute (BPM). So the theory is that enough ancients playing loudly enough at a steady 150 BPM pace would’ve caused the whole ’Henge to hum like an enormous Tibetan prayer bowl.

So how does a loud hum bring us to tranced-out Stone Age raves? The answer is brainwave entrainment: the use of certain frequencies to induce specific states of mind. Thoughts and feelings are measured as brainwaves. Different states of mind tend to correspond to different frequencies of brainwaves. For example, sleeping is associated with theta brainwaves, between 4 and 7 Hz. The brain of a relaxed or meditating person tends to be full of alpha brainwaves, between 8 and 14 Hz.

You’ll notice 10 Hz is smack-dab in the middle of that alpha brainwave range. Dr. Till’s theory is that enough drummers, keeping that perfect frequency, would’ve caused a 10 Hz hum powerful enough to entrain the brains of a large number of listeners. Dr. Till stopped short of calling Stonehenge an ancient mind-control device . . . but that’s basically what it was.

At some point, the rocks of Stonehenge were even modified to amplify this acoustic effect. Dr. Till notes that the walls are “curved and polished, purposefully shaped.The inner stones are concave, but the outer stones are not . . . presumably for acoustic effect.”

You can test the effect of brainwave entrainment on yourself by downloading some “binaural beats.” These are often described as “sounds that get you high!” by people on the Internet. In technical terms, a binaural beat is created by playing sounds in each ear of differing frequency. The two beats “entrain” the brain, causing it to vibrate at a frequency equal to the difference between both beats. So a 410 Hz beat in one ear and a 400 Hz beat in the other would entrain your brain to a 10 Hz alpha brainwave state.

Note that you will not get fucked-up on binaural beats. You might notice a mild relaxation effect from listening to a beat designed to sink you into an alpha state, or slight agitation from a higher-hertz beat designed to amp you up to a beta brainwave. The ability of binaural beats to alter human consciousness is highly debated. An exhaustive clinical review of twenty studies conducted by Drs. Tina Huang and Christine Charyton (funded by the Transparent Corporation, a brainwave entrainment software company) suggests that brainwave entrainment can be used to relieve headaches and stress, and even to provide relief from PMS. But more recent research conducted by Patrick McConnell and Brett Froeliger (et al) for a 2014 article in Frontiers in Psychology (“Auditory Driving of the Autonomic Nervous System”) saw “no observable” physiological changes in subjects. Although those subjects did report feeling vaguely better and more relaxed.

So the jury is still very much out on binaural beats. For my own part, I can assure you that all those claims of sounds that simulate drug trips are wildly exaggerated. You can go Googling around to test it for yourself, but if you’re looking for aurally induced acid, you’ll be disappointed.

That said, the use of rhythm as a pain reliever is quite well documented. And you don’t need to listen to any weird computer-generated tones, either. If you’re ever in severe pain, with no meds in sight, pop on one of your favorite songs instead and start singing along.

Research published by Bernatzky Goetze in the 2011 paper “Emotional Foundations of Music as a Non-pharmacological Pain Management Tool in Modern Medicine” suggests that music has an impact on the brain’s opioid receptors, which may help reduce the sensation of pain and amount of pain medication needed by a patient. This paper also suggests that most scientists are terrible at developing clickable titles.

In cases in which the use of painkillers in surgery is considered too dangerous for the patient, music is often used to take the edge off. I once interviewed a man who had only Mozart to comfort him through open-heart surgery; his health issues were severe enough that his doctors couldn’t risk any kind of anesthetic. He said the music helped—although he’d have much preferred an IV full of opiates.

Interestingly enough, while playing a patient’s favorite music tends to work best, music chosen by another person can also work. Sometimes it’s even more effective, which suggests that rhythm may have some beneficial health effect whether or not it’s music you particularly enjoy.

Of course, the people who built Stonehenge didn’t even have the wheel. It seems almost absurd to imagine them knowing enough about acoustics to build a giant mind-control amp. And the truth is that while we can test the acoustics of Stonehenge and say, “Yes, this setup can amplify sound,” we can’t know that the ancients built it with that purpose in mind.

Today, everyone reading this is beset by hundreds of man-made sounds, some barely audible, every second of every day. We’ve gotten very good at tuning them out and focusing only on the sounds we care about. Ancient humans lived in a world with few man-made sounds.

It’s significant that we’ve been building musical instruments more than twice as long as we’ve been brewing alcohol. In The Origins of Music, published in 1999, Walter Freeman of Berkeley University suggested that humans might have been making music longer than we’ve been starting fires. In an age before drugs, before cities, before any other comforts existed, the dopamine high of listening to really good music was one of the most intense experiences people could make for themselves.

So maybe the builders of Stonehenge would’ve had enough musical know-how to, at the very least, recognize the acoustic powers of the structure they were building and modify it to work even better.

And how well did it work? I had to find out.

HOW TO: Re-create a Stone Age Rave

The Maryhill Stonehenge monument is open to the public. Anyone with a few hundred bucks can reserve it for a private gathering, and anyone with zero bucks can still show up with a twenty-person samba band and start doing some science. I was in that latter group.

My friend Brandon played in sambAmore, a drums-and-horns samba ensemble based out of Arcata, California. He and the band were touring in Washington in June 2015 and I was able to convince them to take a four-hour detour to Maryhill to help me test the Ravehenge theory.

Before we left I started emailing with Dr. Rupert Till, who had conducted the original study. He advised us to have drummers standing inside the outer ring of stones, their backs to the outer stones, facing toward the center. He also guessed that we’d need “200 ideally” to make it work. sambAmore has only twenty members, and not all of them play drums.

We gave it a try anyway, and started with the band’s ten drummers spaced out evenly across one side of the ’Henge, facing toward the center.

They started at a middling volume and 156 beats per minute. I stood directly south of the band, facing them, about even with the big concrete slab in the center. The hum became evident within twenty or thirty seconds, and it seemed to grow louder with time. It was almost like the drone of a didgeridoo.

Matt Black

My cameraman, Matt, stood on the far side of the ’Henge from me, inside one of the inner trilithons. In his video of the event, the hum isn’t really evident until the first minute in, and it gets its loudest around two minutes in. Watching the videos makes it clear just how big a difference the listener’s position has on the effect: The band sounded substantially larger where I was standing, even though Matt was closer.

After a few minutes, we decided to split the band: Half of them would increase their volume and continue drumming, while the other half would join me in the center and listen for the hum. The drummers started up again, and the hum returned. It was an exciting moment, and musicians started scrambling around the ’Henge listening for changes in the hum.

Matt Black

It didn’t take long for the musicians of sambAmore to start playing with Stonehenge like it was a giant new drum powered by other drums. Brandon hit on the idea of having four drummers with big Brazilian surdos play while walking counterclockwise just inside the outer wall of the structure.

Within a minute or so the drummers drew even with the trilithons on the opposite side. A band member standing under the tallest of the inner trilithons called everyone over, shouting, “Hold it, hold it, don’t move!” to the band and then, “Walk over here!” to everyone else.

A chorus of ohs, ahhhs, and holy fucks followed for the next minute or so; the area immediately in front of, and behind the largest trilithon, pictured here . . .

Matt Black

. . . was definitely the best seat in the house. Standing under the center of the trilithon, or directly in front of it, the reverb was so intense it sounded almost like being on the inside of a gong.

Depending on where you stood, the hum took from a few seconds to a whole minute to grow clearly audible. At one point, we placed each of the four surdo drummers on opposing quarters of the ’Henge, facing inward. It took between ten and fifteen seconds for the hum to grow audible again. From my position in the center, by the altar, the drone had a deeper, more bass-y, sound.

The most important takeaway here is that Stonehenge’s unique acoustic properties would’ve been

1. immediately obvious to the musicians playing inside it; and

2. highly malleable.

In the space of two hours, the musicians of sambAmore found several different ways to alter the pitch and tone of the Stonehenge hum. Perhaps Stonehenge’s thousand years of construction were akin to a tuning process, experimenting with different stone shapes and configurations, continually testing the quality of the sound produced and slowly dialing in on the ideal shape to produce the best acoustic effect.

The results of this experiment seem pretty damn conclusive to me, at least as far as saying, “Yes, Stonehenge has acoustic properties that would’ve been immediately obvious to ancient musicians.” Not just the hum, but also the natural resonant properties of the stone circles made music played within the ’Henge sound louder and richer. It was almost like being inside a tiny opera house.

But what about all that brainwave entrainment stuff? The drumming and hum of the ’Henge were right at 10 Hz. I can’t say I noticed my own brain falling into a trance-like state. None of the musicians reported anything like that, either. (I think we were all too excited playing with Stonehenge to attempt meditation.) Perhaps with an even larger band the sound would’ve been truly mind altering.

There was a certain giddiness, however, among the band and the observers when we started figuring out how to manipulate the hum. It was exciting to hear stone and concrete sing. Perhaps, to the musicians of a quieter and lonelier age, the hum of Stonehenge would’ve sounded like the earth itself was playing with them.

The genesis of this chapter came when I was standing in line at Ralphs, the grocery store nearest to my former home in Los Angeles. As with almost every large store, grocery and otherwise, the lane leading up to the cashier was lined with candy and soda on one side, and eye-catching copies of Us, GQ, People, and even less savory fare, like the National Enquirer, on the other. Every one of these periodicals sells itself with the same basic tactic: celebrity faces, and juicy stories about their ridiculous lives. My artist mocked up a representative sample, in case you live in some isolated jungle tribe and stumbled upon this book in the wreckage of a plane crash.

Congratulations on somehow learning English!

Depending on your perspective, these magazines are either a symbol of our modern degeneracy or a chance to exclaim, “Holy shit, did you see Jennifer Aniston’s baby bump?” Even if you hate celebrity culture, you can’t deny that those famous faces have a magnetic pull on the brains of billions of people. That’s not hyperbole, by the way, nor did I drop Jen Aniston’s name at random.

Back in the late oughts a neuroscientist named Itzhak Fried was fiddling about in the brains of people with severe epilepsy, as neuroscientists are wont to do. Brain surgery is often performed while the patient is conscious. And since his patients were awake, their brains as exposed as an exhibitionist on a crowded bus, Dr. Fried decided to try an experiment. He showed a subject a series of seemingly random images: animals, strangers, and even a few celebrities. At one point a picture of Ms. Aniston popped up, and Dr. Fried watched a neuron in the medial temporal lobe fire.

He tried it on other patients and saw the exact same result. For some reason, every brain he studied had a special reaction to Jennifer Aniston. Seeing other people didn’t set off the neuron, but seeing different celebrities did set off different neurons in some of the patients. Each of those celebrity neurons was actually just the tip of a memory iceberg, buried deep within each patient’s brain, consisting of uncounted thousands of neurons.

I’d love to give you some sort of fascinating and enlightening reason why, but we just don’t know yet. Some neuroscientists, like Dr. Fried, suspect that those deeply buried stacks of neurons hold all our memories and recollections of a person. The Big Boss Neuron on top acts sort of like an intruder alarm, letting the brain’s Aniston Archives know it’s time to fire up, because she’s been spotted.

Other neuroscientists disagree. But whatever the reason behind it, there’s no doubt that something in our brains is hardwired to react differently to famous people. The fact that we’ve never met Ms. Aniston doesn’t matter; your gray matter knows she’s important for some reason, and now it’s on the lookout for her wherever you go.

This fact leads me to an uncomfortable truth about the human condition. As comforting as it is to blame our obsession with celebrities on the Internet and mass media, it in fact comes from a much deeper, older place. And if you aren’t afraid to swallow your pride and admit that we are, in fact, hardwired to give some fraction of a fuck what Donald Trump has to say, I’ll do my best to take you back to where this all started . . .

Monkeys, and Celebrity at the Dawn of Time

That glossy rack of magazines obsessing over the sundry pregnancies, drug addictions, and diet tips of Western glitterati feels like a clear sign of the times. Only in an era of untold opulence and freedom from want would people dedicate hours of their lives and their precious, precious money to stare at the faces of strangers. It’s the kind of thing you just assume hunter-gatherers wouldn’t have crammed into their schedule, if only because they had saber-toothier matters to worry about back then.

But that irresistible impulse to pay attention to a few stars among our number isn’t unique to modern humans . . . or to humans, as it turns out. Back in 2005, several scientists at Duke University got a bunch of monkeys and housed them in pairs. Periodically, each monkey was given a choice between receiving delicious juice or receiving a different amount of juice along with a picture. The pictures were either of low-status-monkey faces, high-status-monkey faces, or candid butt shots of female monkeys.

Scientists call this a “perineum shot,” but we all know the truth.

Michael Platt / Duke Institute for Brain Sciences

I talked to Dr. Michael Platt, one of the architects of the study/trailblazers of simian pornography. Here’s how he described the results:

Monkeys (presumably unconsciously) give up juice to see pictures of female genitals and pictures of high-status monkeys, and you have to give them extra juice to look at other categories.

Now, remember, these monkeys weren’t living in a normal social group. They were housed in pairs, but in the same general monkey-storing area as all the other adorable little furry porn fiends in the study. Despite a total lack of contact, they were still able to tell which monkeys belonged at the top of the social ladder, and which ones belonged on the bottom.

If you’ve ever been in a colony of monkeys who are housed in pairs but who have visual, auditory, and olfactory access to each other, you get the definite impression that they develop a social hierarchy as well as other relationships despite never interacting through touch.

There’s surely some interesting commentary there about how shouting and body odor were the original Facebook, but I don’t want to get too off track. What matters here is that monkeys are willing to give up resources to gaze at the beautiful (monkey-)people who top their social hierarchy, even if they’ve never had a chance to meet those (monkey-)people in person. So what do monkeys get out of staring at pictures of elite strangers? What do we get?

Knowledge. Dr. Platt described the faces of high-status monkeys as having a “high information content.” Monkeys are great social learners. By paying close attention to the faces (and behaviors) of their more socially successful neighbors, they can learn from them. There’s a fine line here; the studied monkeys paid less for faces, even high-status faces, that seemed threatening. But in general they were happy to sacrifice some of their resources (juice is like monkey gold) for a chance to study their betters.

Macaques aren’t early humans, but it’s sensible to hypothesize that Dr. Platt’s experiment hit on a behavior that’s existed in primates for quite a while. It’s easy to see how paying attention to the people with the most food/opportunities to shoot their DNA down to another generation would have paid off, even in hunter-gatherer days. And it’s also easy to see how that pragmatic behavior would have grown over time, as our social groups grew larger and our definition of success widened from “not starving and having lots of sex” to “living in mansions and having lots of sex.”

In a way, our modern problems with obesity and runaway celebrity obsession share a common cause. Both of these modern plagues started with people tapping into a powerful, primal need and finding a way to sate it on demand for a nominal fee.

When Fandom Becomes a Disease

In 2002, a group of psychologists designed the “Celebrity Attitude Scale.” It’s basically a test you can give someone to tell if he or she just really likes famous person X, or if you should start filing the paperwork for a restraining order on X’s behalf.

The Celebrity Attitude Scale presents respondents with a series of statements about their attitude toward “MFC,” or “my favorite celebrity.” Since I’m a big fan of Patrick Stewart, I’m going to use his name from here on out because it makes me smile. The statements range from fairly innocuous (“Keeping up with news about Patrick Stewart is an entertaining pastime”) to straight-up terrifying (“I would gladly die in order to save the life of Patrick Stewart”) to really just . . . weird (“If I were lucky enough to meet Patrick Stewart, and he asked me to do something illegal as a favor, I would probably do it”).

The scale has respondents give a number between 1 (“strongly disagree”) and 5 (“strongly agree”) to each question and then places them into one of three categories, depending on their grade. If I’m just the kind of guy who likes to catch any movie or TV show Patrick Stewart shows up in, I’d go in the “entertainment social” category. If I was just dead certain that deep down, he and I had some sort of spiritual connection, I’d qualify as “intense personal.” And if I’m the kind of fan who’d happily dive in front of a bullet aimed at Sir Patrick while carrying a butt full of his illegal drugs, I’d probably qualify as “borderline pathological.”

The Celebrity Attitude Scale is still quite new, but early surveys done on limited samples of people suggest that celebrity worship is a common and growing phenomenon. The effects can be more subtle than you might guess, not just wide-eyed fans shrieking themselves hoarse on YouTube. Remember: Our brains reward us for paying attention because it makes evolutionary sense to emulate successful people. It’s only when that urge is coupled with the modern world that things get weird.

That deeply programmed drive to emulate the most successful among us can now be taken literally, thanks to the wonders of plastic surgery. Case in point: a 2010 study by PhDs John Maltby and Liz Day in the Journal of Adolescent Health that looked into the impact of celebrity obsession on cosmetic surgery rates among young people. More than two hundred thousand teens receive some form of cosmetic surgery in the United States each year. The Maltby-Day study found that this demographic was particularly prone to at least one form of celebrity worship: 22.8 percent were described as the mild “entertainment social” version, 8 percent rated as “intense personal,” and 2.5 percent qualified as “borderline pathological.” All those numbers are markedly higher than they are in the general “real adult” population.

All those hundreds of hours spent obsessing over the photoshopped perfection of the world’s Tatums and Cyruses have a real impact. The Maltby-Day study found that those people with an “intense personal” obsession with a celebrity were markedly more likely to go under the knife. (An “entertainment social” interest doesn’t seem to have had this effect.)

The body of research in the field of “how looking at airbrushed beautiful people fucks kids up” is actually quite broad. A 2006 study found that just watching a few minutes of music videos featuring thin models caused an increase in body dissatisfaction among sixteen- to nineteen-year-old girls. Self-esteem didn’t seem to have any protective effect; even girls who felt good about their bodies were affected. It goes beyond just the idolization of skinny, airbrushed bodies. A 2011 study by Eleni-Marina Ashikali and Helga Dittmar of the British Psychological Society suggests that merely focusing on the lavish lifestyles and material possessions of a famous person can have a negative impact on many women’s body image.

At this point, the bulk of the research on how mass media affects body image has focused on women, particularly teenage girls. But don’t worry, lads: we’re next. Over the last decade or so of movies, male protagonists have gone from handsome and fit to superhuman eighty-ab’d muscle-support systems with faces. If you want to be a leading man today, you’ve got to commit to working out like it’s a full-time job, shooting yourself full of human growth hormone and severely dehydrating yourself the day before a shirtless scene (it makes the ab muscles look bigger, you see).

Somehow, somewhere along the line, our natural inclination to learn from the most successful among us got twisted into doomed attempts to emulate people who might as well be mythic figures. The most famous actors have personal trainers, teams of graphic designers, and PR representatives whose sole goal is to hide every sign of aging and unmarketable personal habit from public view. No amount of crunches and face-lifts will turn you into a myth, or a god, and yet that’s what our most famous people have become.

The Weird Relationship Between Celebrity Worship and Religion

If you want to take a look at the ancient equivalent of a tabloid magazine, look no further than the mythology of the Greeks. A stroll down that pre-checkout aisle of your local supermarket does a pretty good job of catching you up on which beautiful rich famous people are impregnating/sleeping with which other beautiful rich famous people. If you were a citizen of Athens in 300 BCE, you’d have to consult the nearest priest to scratch that same voyeuristic itch.

Here’s a brief list of some of the different people and things Zeus slept with across the annals of Greek myth:

1. A swan. (Zeus was also a swan at the time. It’s complicated.)

2. His sister, Demeter.

3. His niece, Demeter’s daughter, Persephone.

4. Europa, the moon goddess, whom he banged while taking the form of a white bull for some reason.

I could keep going for pretty much the rest of this book, but I think you get the point. Ancient religion and today’s tabloid culture clearly have at least a few things in common. Back in 2013, I read an article by Carian Thus of United Academics Magazine (“Like a Prayer—Is Fame the New Religion?”) that wondered if, in an era of declining religiosity, the cult of celebrity might be stepping in to fill the void in millions of hearts.

Religion News Service (a DC nonprofit) put together a graph of religious activity in the United States from 1952 to 2012. It paints a pretty stark picture of God’s modern-day social cachet:

A representation of the original graph, with a diving board added for panache. Tavia Morra

The story is much the same worldwide: A 2011 study by Northwestern University found that people with religious “non-affiliation” formed one of the fastest-growing minority groups across much of the world. A Gallup poll in 2012 showed that, on average, 13 percent of the world’s population considers itself to be atheist. That’s a 9 percent increase since 2005. I won’t hammer home this point any longer: Religious worship is in decline across the globe.

But celebrity worship is on a troubling upswing. And there’s a definite connection to be made between the two. We’ve established that people will obsess over (and even get plastic surgery) in order to be more like their favorite famous people. More than emulate a specific famous person, many of us want to be famous. That’s a common desire, especially among young people, who are also more likely to skip out on church and religious belief altogether.

One major traditional function of religion has been to help assuage and moderate the believer’s fear of death. Belief in a God generally comes with a belief in some sort of afterlife. And as fewer and fewer of us believe in literal life after death, we start looking for a less literal sort of immortality: fame.

Researchers have devised two sentences to provoke what they call “mortality salience” in respondents. That’s a fancy way of saying “make them actively fear the reaper.” Once you’ve primed them with these lines . . .

1. “Please describe the emotions the thought of your own death arouses in you.”

2. “Jot down, as specifically as you can, what you think will happen to you physically as you die and once you are physically dead.”

. . . your subjects will feel their mortality is salient as shit, and presumably give you honest answers about how death’s grim inevitability makes them feel. A 2007 study in the journal Self and Identity found that mortality salience led to a greater desire for fame in people, specifically the super-lame kind of “fame” that comes with paying to have a star named after you. Thoughts of death didn’t just make people want to be famous, though; it also made them want to connect more with the celebrities they already admired. People primed with thoughts of their own demise were more likely to report liking modern art only if it was made by a celebrity.

Celebrity worship climbs as religious worship falls. Our society isn’t the first to have experienced this phenomenon. It happened in ancient Greece around 300 BCE, if the classical scholar Eric Dodds is correct. Since the good folks at Gallup weren’t around back then, he had to look at the tombstones of long-dead Greek commoners to gauge their attitudes toward religion. He noticed a declining number of references to the gods or an afterlife as the Hellenistic period rolled along. This growth in nonbelief was met with a growth in fandom-like cults of personality around famous figures like the first king of unified Macedon, Demetrius I.

This is made incredibly clear by an ode to Demetrius I, written after he saved the city of Athens from a different Demetrius who’d tried to conquer it: “Other gods are either far away, or do not have ears, or do not exist, or pay no attention to us, whereas you we see present, not wooden or stone but real.”

Writing about this ode in his 1951 book, The Greeks and the Irrational, Mr. Dodd reflected:

When the old gods withdraw, the empty thrones cry out for a successor, and with good management, or even without management, almost any perishable bag of bones may be hoisted into the vacant seat.

He wouldn’t have been at all surprised by Dr. John Maltby’s 2004 finding that “religious puritanism” has a protective effect against celebrity worship. People who believe strongly in the rules prescribed by their deity have a clear guide for how they should live their lives. They don’t feel as strong a need to look to the examples of other people.

Because the truth is, whether you believe in a god or not, we’re all looking for some sort of cheat sheet to the big existential questions. Why are we here? How should I act? What is it OK for me to have sex with? Even monkeys know those answers don’t all come from within. And while some people get their answers from philosophy, from history, or from the admirable people in their own lives . . . a lot of us will always look to the person who seems to be having the most fun.

It all started with a beer.

By “it,” I mean all of human civilization and civic organization. And by “beer,” I mean something that technically falls under the same umbrella as the six-pack (or case) in your fridge, despite looking and tasting quite different.

I started this book by taking you back to the prehistory of humankind’s love affair with fermented beverages. Primates have been drinking alcohol since long before Homo sapiens ever stepped onto the world stage. But humans brought something very important to booze: intention.

The ability to make alcohol out of fruit (etc.) has been with our species all along; our skin is permanent home to a variety of yeasts. Conventional drunken archaeology places the first organized beer brewing between the eighth and fourth millennia BCE. That’s, at least, around 1,500 years after the birth of agriculture, and it makes beer roughly contemporaneous to the birth of cities and human civilization.

But archaeologists have long suspected that the brewmaster’s art goes back even further to the Natufian Period (12,500–9,500 BCE). See, the grains required to brew beer don’t have much nutritional value in their raw state, and it’s a pain in the ass to shell and husk them into something you can turn into proper cereal. There were other foods more easily available to Neolithic humans. They had animals to face/spear, fruit to pick, roots to chew, a vast array of options that didn’t involve sitting down on a plot of land and inventing agriculture.

Beer, and the promise of unlimited future beer, would’ve made that sacrifice much more palatable. In 2013, a team of archaeologists (Brian Hayden, Neil Canuel, and Jennifer Shanse) published a paper, What Was Brewing in the Natufian?, that makes a strong, albeit circumstantial, case that civilization evolved because our ancestors grew tired of “nature alcohol,” and started craving a more reliable fix. Farming is the only way to make enough grain to ensure a regular, consistent rate of beer production. So farmers we became.

As I pointed out in the introduction, you may have read references to Dr. Hayden’s article before. When it came out in 2013, the Internet exploded with a variety of articles like “How Beer Gave Us Civilization” (The New York Times) and “How Beer Created Civilization” (Forbes). Dr. Hayden thinks those summaries oversimplify the truth and leave out something really awesome.

Feasts were like the United Nations of the Natufian world. Tribes would invite their neighbors, even their enemies, and use the celebration as an opportunity to brag about how badass they were. Feasting was a way to project power, as well as to cement alliances and work out political disagreements. Dr. Hayden described the whole process to me:

There was sort of a rotating system of feasting. So one family has a feast one week, another family has a feast another week . . . and then there’s the rotating feasts, one house [after] another. It keeps going on and on. These societies are much more social than contemporary industrial society. And all the social relationships are cemented with beer.

Rather than describe it as “beer created civilization,” Dr. Hayden suggested an alternate summary of his work: “Complex communities do more feasting, brewed beverages represent more of an investment in resources and as such are high value and high status. People focused on making more of it, and one consequence of that was increased agriculture.”

It’s weird to me that the Internet just ran with the beer angle and completely missed a chance to sensationalize Dr. Hayden’s much cooler point. Parties are the basis of international government. Brewing beer wasn’t the sole focus of agriculture. But because it was so well loved and such a status symbol, producing enough of it was of major importance to the state, such as it was 14,000 years ago.

The very earliest recipe known to archaeology is an ancient Sumerian guide to brewing beer. It’s written in the form of a hymn to the goddess of beer, Ninkasi (literally, “the lady who fills the mouth” [sexual innuendo hadn’t been invented yet]), and it describes in detail the ancient Sumerian beer-brewing process.

That process started with the baking of bread made from barley flour, malted barley, and honey. Delicious as that sounds, this bread, bappir, wasn’t for eating. It would be baked twice and stored until the time came to crumble it into a mixture of smashed dates and water and then brew it into a hearty, unfiltered beer. This probably wasn’t the first beer in history, but it’s the first beer—the first anything, in fact—that we have a recipe for.

The ancient Sumerians were all about beer. It wasn’t an occasional indulgence for them. It was the duct tape that held their society together and kept it productive. Most homes would brew their own beer, for regular consumption, and the government brewed and distributed a liter of beer per day for its employees. I can’t help but think the DMV would move much more smoothly if we instituted the same policy for our government workers. Who needs a pension plan, anyway?

Sumerians likely brewed their beer together with family and friends, and they consumed it the same way. The earliest pictorial depiction of alcohol consumption in the historical record dates back to about 4000 BCE, and it shows something recognizable even today as a party.

Artist re-creation of the original pictograph.   Tavia Morra

That’s not a hookah those dudes are sucking on. It’s a huge beer-filled vase, and they’re drinking out of it with straws. It’s a little like setting up individual taps for each person’s face, only less hygienic. This picture makes one thing very clear: Backwash is a problem literally as old as human society.

At this point, reader, you know me well enough to guess what comes next: It’s time for another experiment.

HOW TO: Drink Like a Sumerian

Full disclosure: I’m not the first person to try and re-create this oldest of recipes. Not even close. The Anchor Brewing Company developed its own version of Sumerian bread beer in 1989. And as I researched this chapter I came across a detailed recipe for Sumerian beer in a 2007 article in Brew Your Own magazine by Dan Mouer.

Both those recipes are based on interpretations of the “Hymn to Ninkasi,” the nineteenth-century BCE religious devotional that doubles as a very rough guide to brewing Sumerian beer. It’s not a perfect recipe by any means, and several steps are left up to the determination of the brewer. But I’m going to try and re-create it as directly as possible here. First you’ll need date wine. And unless you live in Egypt or by a particularly adventurous Whole Foods, you’re going to have to make your own.

Date Wine Ingredients (Per 5 Gallons)

1 five-gallon food-grade plastic bucket or wooden barrel

A large metal bowl, 2 gallons (-ish)

An airlock (found in homebrew stores/Internets all around)

3.5 pounds dates

1 packet yeast, either bread yeast or wine yeast (found in your local brew store)

Directions

The hymn doesn’t go into detail on how the date wine is brewed, just that it gets mixed together in the final product. A lot of date wine recipes involve extra sugar, black tea, etc. I’m keeping this as simple as possible. The Sumerians didn’t have black tea, and they were probably still in enough awe of the whole “rotting fruit turns into awesome” process to not mess around too much with the basics.

Mash your dates with a potato masher or, if you’re really dedicated, the stone from a very old mortar and pestle. Once properly mashed, pour in water and simmer on low heat until the water takes on the color of the dates. Then dump the whole mix into your brew bucket, add enough water to fill your five-gallon bucket up to a little less than four gallons.

Now dump in your yeast. The ancient Sumerians would’ve just (unknowingly) used the natural yeast hitching a ride on the outside of those dates. My dates, and probably your dates, had to be washed of pesticides—and nearly everything else—before being turned into wine. We’re going to have to cheat a little with our yeast if we want to be sure all those dates weren’t bought in vain. I used a champagne yeast, but a cider yeast or even just some Fleischmann’s bread yeast will all do the trick.

Seal the wine, put in your airlock, and let it sit for a week. About four days into that process, it’s time to bake up the bappir.

Bappir Ingredients

3 pounds malted barley

1 pound barley flour

1.25 pounds raw honey

Water

Directions

This one’s going to take a little bit of creativity on our part to turn into an actual recipe. Here’s what the “Hymn to Ninkasi” (Miguel Civil translation) gives us:

You are the one who handles the dough, [and] with a big shovel,

Mixing in a pit, the bappir with sweet aromatics,

Ninkasi, You are the one who handles

the dough, [and] with a big shovel,

Mixing in a pit, the bappir with [date]-honey.

You are the one who bakes the bappir in the big oven,

Puts in order the piles of hulled grains,

Ninkasi, you are the one who bakes

the bappir in the big oven,

Puts in order the piles of hulled grains,

The whole poem is like that, people. It gives Ninkasi credit for every stage of beer’s production as if there weren’t legions of hardworking brewers handling sweet aromatics and, uh, shoveling dough. Florid as it is, a lot of this recipe is pretty straightforward. Mix the barley and flour together, pour in a little water and fold it into dough. Then you stir in honey and stick it in a “big oven.”

The resultant mix looks a little bit like a protein bar, and it actually tastes great—I’ve found that a couple of pieces with coffee makes for a pretty satisfying breakfast. The Sumerians likely didn’t eat their bappir unless times were quite rough indeed, but I’m a fan of the stuff. (It tastes better than the beer.)

Once you’ve got your bread baked and your dates wined, it’s time to turn this whole mess into Sumerian beer. Here’s the hymn again:

You are the one who waters the malt set on the ground,

The noble dogs keep away even the potentates,

Ninkasi, you are the one who waters the malt

set on the ground,

The noble dogs keep away even the potentates.

You are the one who soaks the malt in a jar

The waves rise, the waves fall.

Ninkasi, you are the one who soaks

the malt in a jar

The waves rise, the waves fall.

I’m assuming that bit about the dogs and the potentates refers to some particularly booze-starved politicians who couldn’t calm the hell down and wait for the brewers to do their job. Hence the need for dogs, to keep the Man off the brewer’s back while he was busy making beer.

Malt is traditionally made from sprouted barley, but this recipe uses the bappir bread instead. Crumble your bappir into about a gallon of water in a pot, and simmer until the bappir is thoroughly soaked. The mix should turn thick and gloopy, and develop a brownish-white color. This is what beer brewers call wort. Next, spread your wort out on “large reed mats,” or, if you prefer, strain it in a colander. Drain it of water and then dunk the wort into your date wine bucket and seal it again.

Let the whole mess sit, fermenting, for two full weeks, longer if you want a stronger brew. Once you’re done letting it ferment, run the whole mess of beer through a filter (maybe that colander again?) to get out the biggest, uh, chunks. The hymn suggests using a “filtering vat,” but any tight mesh screen ought to do the trick. Don’t worry if the final beer is still much chunkier than you’re used to: That’s how it should be.

The last step is to make sure you consume your beer in the appropriate Sumerian fashion: out of a huge multigallon vase, through straws, with a bunch of your friends. I enjoyed my first batch with my fiancée and my roommate, Dave. We poured about two gallons into a large metal pan and cut out several two- to three-foot lengths of plastic tubing to act as straws.

Now: the flavor. It wasn’t great, but it wasn’t bad, either. It had a slightly sweet, slightly sour taste, a bit like a Belgian lambic. And it packed a significant punch, at around 5 to 6 percent ABV. This was likely due to the modern yeast we used. Booze archaeologist Dr. Hayden assured me that ancient beer would’ve averaged 2 to 3 percent ABV. The delivery method had a major impact, too. Something about the whole setup, sitting around with friends, reclining in chairs and just sipping beer from a straw, encouraged excessive consumption. I found myself treating it like a hookah, drinking constantly whenever I wasn’t actively talking.

Drinking Sumerian style is more of a long, slow burn than anything. We got drunk quickly, and stayed drunk all night. In all, we consumed about two gallons over the course of five-ish hours. It was enough that Dave and I (the primary drinkers) were significantly buzzed all night, but not enough that either of us vomited on anything.

My primary takeaway from this experiment had more to do with the Sumerian style of drinking party than the actual beer itself. The beer wasn’t bad (I tried it on four people and only one of them wasn’t willing to drink more than a sip) but it didn’t rise above the level of Bud Light, either. The Sumerian drinking setup is quite genius, though. It facilitates discussion, as well as drinking, but it isn’t conducive to a serious binge.

So here’s my advice: Bake some bappir for party treats, buy a couple gallons of good beer, pour it in a pot, break out the straws, and call some friends over. I think you’ll agree that the people of Sumer had a few ideas about drinking that we could stand to imitate.

The Alcohol Age (or, Drinking Constantly, in Moderation)

In 2013, I spent between four and six days dying in a hotel in Pushkar, India. It’s hard to pin down the time line exactly, because I was shitting and puking myself the entire time. It was the first time in my life I’d ever felt like a part of my body was actively angry: I could feel my intestines writhing inside me like an epileptic anaconda. My friends sleeping on the next floor could hear me screaming through the night.

The culprit was a cup of lukewarm instant coffee I’d ordered the day before, in Jaipur. Coffee and tea are usually safe bets in India. If you get dirty water hot enough, long enough, it becomes safe water. But as I brought the cup up to my mouth I caught the faint sewage scent of doom. And by the time I realized I was in danger, the first drops were already cascading down my throat. Warm drops. Not hot, and certainly not clean.

Clean, safe tap water for all is probably the single greatest privilege the first world has over the rest of the world. Most of you have instant access to clean water that won’t make you shit your pants to death after drinking it. That’s an unbelievably rare thing, historically. Our ancestors gambled with every cup.

If you’ve never experienced dysentery, count yourself winning-the-goddamn-lottery lucky. I caught it for the first time in Guatemala, gargling with water from the shower like a damned fool. In the seven or eight weeks we were there, I remember three distinct, bathroom-wrecking bouts.

There were eight people in my group in Guatemala. Most of us dealt with dysentery more than once, and there were times when basically all of us were sick simultaneously. From an unthinking cup of local tap water, to a droplet down the throat in a shower, to treacherous, treacherous soup, only one of us proved immune: my friend Josh. He made the novel decision to chase every drink, all day, with swigs from an ever-present bottle of Guatemalan whiskey. Josh ate the same food, drank the same coffee, did everything the same as everyone else in our group. And he never once got sick.

The ancients knew what Josh knew: The microbes that turn our guts into cannons can’t handle their liquor as well as we can. Alcohol makes bad water a whole lot safer.

Like millions of suffering freshmen around the country, our ancestors didn’t always have hard liquor to rely on. But the beer-brewing process tended to kill off the unfriendliest microbes in the water. Wine, much higher in alcohol content, could even be mixed directly with water. This made the water much safer, and ensured all of ancient society wasn’t one perpetual poopy hangover.

Drinking all day, every day is a lot of fun . . . for about three or four days, once a year or so. Start doing it constantly and those good times turn very quickly into a liver- and life-crippling problem. The ancients knew this just as well as you and I. We wouldn’t be here if they hadn’t kept enough of a handle on their habits to build cities, invent philosophies, and also sex generation after generation of new people into existence.

Drinking became culturally ubiquitous as a self-defense measure; our booze protected us from the untrustworthy water we needed to survive. But the ancients also needed self-defense methods to protect them from alcohol’s powerfully addictive potential. The ancient Greeks watered their wine down heavily, and they drank with food to avoid the dreaded empty-liquor belly. These social mores worked sometimes. But when they didn’t, there was the Pythagorean cup.

You probably know Pythagoras of Samos best from the Pythagorean theorem all high school graduates either remember, or remember they used to remember. But when he wasn’t trying to figure out the length of various sides of a triangle, Pythagoras was busy dreaming up ways to stop his contemporaries from prematurely destroying their livers. The Pythagorean cup was the apex of his studies in Wet Blanketude. If a greedy drinker filled the cup too high, its contents would instantly rain down onto his lap, or the host’s floor.

Tavia Morra

Also called the “Cup of Justice,” which sounds like something you’d shout while hammered, the Pythagorean cup was the most elaborate weapon in sobriety’s ancient arsenal. But it wasn’t the only one. The homebrewed nature of most historical booze provided a natural limitation to consumption: You could drink only as much as you could make. The ancient Egyptians even considered taverns and bars, places where beer and wine were available in endless quantity, given the right amount of money, as inherently immoral places.

Hippocrates, the Greek philosopher who basically invented Western medicine, considered alcohol incredibly useful for treating everything from fever to gas. But he railed against men who prescribed booze for every ailment, and who drank it straight and unwatered. Hippocrates was well in line with mainstream Greek attitudes when he said:

Undiluted wine drunk in large quantity renders a man feeble; and everybody seeing this knows that such is the power of wine.

Alcoholism wasn’t unknown in ancient Greece, of course. Socrates famously dedicated many hours of his life to putting his heartthrob Alcibiades back together after drunken ragers. But it wasn’t until the age of the Romans, with their vast slave-run vineyards, that alcoholism became possible on a large scale. Before that time only the wealthy and powerful could afford to be problem drinkers.

That went about as well as you’d expect.

The Drunks Who Changed History

Alexander the Great had a backstory most of you will find fairly sympathetic: He was born to a distant, workaholic father who drank constantly and in public. The fact that his father, Philip II of Macedon, was the mightiest warlord of the era didn’t make young Alexander any less embarrassed at his dad’s drunken shenanigans.

The ancient Macedonians didn’t use Pythagorean cups, nor did they water down their wine. They were a nation of nomadic horse-based warriors and they frequently rode shitfaced into battle, or at least with two full sheets to the wind. Drinking to excess was a common if not ubiquitous thing in their warrior culture. And Philip, their king, drank as hard as any of his soldiers.

Young Alexander had been tutored (and partly raised) by the famous philosopher Aristotle. Since Aristotle was a Greek, it’s not a stretch to assume he passed along some judgment of barbarous Macedonian drinking traditions to his pupil. This famously came to a head at a feast Philip threw to celebrate his second wedding, to a woman named Cleopatra who was very much not Alexander’s mom.

The feast quickly turned into a drunken feast, as was the Macedonian way, and one of Cleopatra’s relatives made a snide comment to Philip about him getting a “real” heir now. Alexander took offense at this and threw his wineglass at the man, sparking a drunken brawl. At one point during the fight, Philip drew his sword and lunged at Alexander, but drunkenly fell over a couch and busted ass on the floor. At the time, Philip had been planning an invasion of Asia. Alexander couldn’t resist using this to needle him:

Look, men, he’s about to cross from Europe to Asia, and he falls crossing from couch to couch.

Alexander and Philip never fully reconciled. And by “never reconciled,” I mean “Alexander and his bio mom probably had Philip assassinated.” We’ll never know the historical truth, because drunken warlords accumulate enemies like horses’ asses accumulate flies, but we do know that Philip’s drunken ways eventually passed from father to son.

Over the course of his short life, Alexander went from being the closest thing to a teetotaler in his booze-soaked society to being one of history’s greatest raging drunks. Alcohol became more and more of a problem for him as the stresses of running a great empire piled up, along with the pain of a multitude of war wounds. Alexander hosted epic drinking parties on a near-daily basis, and it’s unlikely he was sober while planning (or fighting) the majority of his campaigns.

But the clearest impact drinking had on Alexander’s life achievements came during the occupation of Persepolis, the former capitol of the Persian Empire and one of the greatest cities on earth at the time. Alexander initially wanted to leave the royal palace intact. But during the victory feast, he and his men got rip-roaring drunk. Drunk enough that when one of the partygoers suggested lighting the whole damn thing on fire, Alexander’s first instinct was to start handing out torches.

By his early thirties, Alexander ruled over the largest empire on earth. He died before his forces could conquer all of India, an invasion with the potential to change the entire history of curry, and also the world. The Macedonian king fell sick at a feast; after chugging a glass of wine he clutched his side in agony, and claimed his liver felt like it had taken an arrow.

Most historians suspect that typhoid is what finally did Alexander in, days later. But his years of drinking and his shitty alcoholic’s immune system certainly helped typhoid do the job.

History is full of drunken conquerors: Attila the Hun and Genghis Khan were both Don Draper–level alcoholics. But the exact influence of alcohol on the decision-making process of any given drunken world leader isn’t always easy to parse out, especially if he was drunk throughout his reign.

One of the few clear examples of alcohol changing the course of world history comes from Russia. According to the Primary Chronicle (literally the only written history of the Kievan Rus, a.k.a. proto-Russians, in this period), Prince Vladimir of Kiev, a pagan, started shopping for a new religion around 988 CE. Bulgarian Muslims made a strong case, promising him “women and indulgence,” but also admitting that the Russians would have to quit drinking alcohol if they were going to convert to Islam.

Prince Vladimir didn’t even consider the possibility.

“Drinking,” said he, “is the joy of the Russes. We cannot exist without that pleasure.”

Prince Vladimir opted to join the Christian rather than the Muslim world. There’s no way to know just how different human history would’ve been with an Islamic Russia. But we can pretty safely assume the global popularity of vodka would’ve taken a hit.

That’s not the last time alcoholism and Russia collided to change history. Joseph Stalin was a famous alcoholic, particularly during World War II. The only thing he and British prime minister Winston Churchill had in common was a desperately unhealthy habit. Both men drank basically all day, every day, while piloting their ships of state through the bloodiest, most violent conflict in human history.

They didn’t get along at all, due in part to Stalin’s status as a power-hungry mass murderer, and to the fact that fucking nobody got along with Winston Churchill. In 1942, the pair met in Moscow to try and iron out some of their disagreements and thus facilitate the important work of killing Nazis.

It didn’t go well.

Not at first, that is. Both men met for two days of negotiations, with Stalin backpedaling and arguing every step of the way. By the last night of the mission, things seemed hopeless. An awful dinner party passed, and it looked as if the two would part at worse odds than ever before.

Then Churchill and Stalin started drinking. They kept it up for hours, and around one A.M. the prime minister sent for his secretary, Sir Alexander Cadogan, who arrived at the party in medias res and later wrote about what he saw:

There I found Winston and Stalin, and Molotov who had joined them, sitting with a heavily laden board between them: food of all kinds crowned by a sucking pig, and innumerable bottles.

The two world leaders managed to drink their way to some sort of common ground. The party didn’t end until three in the morning, by which time the mood was “merry as a marriage-bell.” It’s hard to tie the meeting to a specific policy or plan, but Stalin and Churchill seem to have valued it as an allied “team-building” exercise—like a ropes course, but with all of human civilization riding on whether or not they did the trust fall.

Alcohol brought Churchill and Stalin together, and in doing so it may have played a small role in saving Western civilization from Nazism. But alcohol has also played its role in the end of civilizations, including the great Wari Empire of South America.

Wari: The Empire That Ended with a Drinking Binge

The Wari Empire controlled a large chunk of South America’s western coast, located mainly in what’s now Peru, from about 600 to 1100 CE. In a lot of ways it was your traditional empire, conquering any nation that wouldn’t bend a knee to it, brutally suppressing local traditions—basically, all the different reasons no “empire” in any movie is ever the good guys.

But the Wari were different from most empires in one critical way: They threw the absolute best parties.

I’m talking about a level of drinking that would make Saint Patrick crap his festive shamrock-embroidered drawers. The Wari gathered en masse to dance and to drink boggling quantities of their traditional beer, chicha. They’d often consume more than three gallons of beer in a single sitting. Even if we’re talking about the ancient equivalent of Miller High Life, that’s a heroic amount of alcohol. The Wari drank like frat boys, right down to their boozing accoutrements: bizarre, half-gallon cups called keros, some of which were shaped like human feet.

Tavia Morra

Yes, those Las Vegas kiosks selling giant plastic boots full of liquor are actually part of an ancient tradition.

The Wari built large, orderly cities, giant defensive citadels, and mountains of exquisite art in honor of their gods. But every great empire did that. What made the Wari special, at least in the red-rimmed eyes of this author, were their breweries. These enormous wooden structures contained twenty or more ceramic brew vats, each twenty-five to thirty-five gallons in size. In a day, one of these titanic beer shrines could serve up to five hundred gallons of chicha.

We don’t know much about gender relations in the ancient Wari Empire. Most of their records were kept on khipu, an early Mesoamerican form of recording information with elaborate rope knots. Sadly, most khipu rotted away long before the first archaeologist was born. But what evidence we have from their ruins suggests that the vast Wari beer industry was operated entirely by women.

The Wari drank for a lot of the regular reasons: religious celebration, the changing of the seasons, a crippling street-vomit shortage. But they also used beer as a diplomatic tool, inviting their rivals, including the neighboring Tiwanaku, over for epic drinking binges. These international celebrations must’ve forged a few friendships, but they also gave the Wari an opportunity to show off their wealth and organization. The intended message was, “We’re happy brewing beer right now, but if you piss us off we’ll start focusing on wrecking your day.”

The Wari started dying out somewhere around the year 1100. We know the Tiwanaku collapsed around 1000, possibly setting off a chain reaction that doomed the Wari. It’s also possible they fell victim first to whatever eventually broke the Wari. We don’t know why the Wari Empire fell. But thanks to scientists from the University of Florida and the Field Museum in Chicago, we do know how it fell: in a giant drunken party.

Excavations in the Wari city of Baúl have shown that the great city brewery, and much of the city itself, was destroyed in a gigantic ritual fire at the end of the very last Wari drinking party. As the brewery and the surrounding feasting house crumbled, the Wari nobles dropped their boot-shaped half-gallon beer steins in the fire, symbolically ending their empire with the closest thing any historical record has to a mic drop.

Bidding farewell to your entire civilization with an epic drinking binge is one of those things that sounds impossibly badass on the surface. But it also doesn’t make much sense. Why would a people on their last legs, forced to abandon their home, waste critical resources on one last awesome party? History will never have the full answer to that question. But this Song of Booze and Fire makes a lot more sense when you understand . . .

Chicha: The Beer That Held Mesoamerica Together

Various types of chicha were, and still are, popular across South and Central America. The Wari made theirs with pink peppercorn, the berry of the Schinus molle plant. Their rivals the Tiwanaku used corn. Most ancient Mesoamericans used corn, or some other starchy plant like yucca. The Wari probably used molle for a few reasons, not the least of which is that it made a stronger beer. But choosing a unique beer also made a major political statement.

See, chicha isn’t like regular beer. In ancient Mesoamerica it was made both in government breweries and in households by citizens—mostly women—chewing up and spitting out the key ingredient. Amylase, an enzyme in human spit, converts unfermentable plant starches into fermentable sugars. Introduce yeast and water to wads of spit-up plant matter, and within a couple of days you’ll have beer. There are many, many different chicha recipes in the world, but the basics are the same for all of them. (You can read more about chicha in Justin Jennings’s 2004 paper, “La Chichera y El Patron.”)

Chicha was a beer by the people, and quite literally of the people. And no great empire rose to power in Mesoamerica without a great beer behind it. Empires like the Wari and the Inca spread their culture and word of their power by hosting feasts and drinking parties for rivals and subject peoples alike.

In Andean society, drunken feasts took on an even more critical role: They were the foundation of the entire economy. In an era before money was really relevant to most of the subsistence-farming populace, workers were often paid for their hard labor with elaborate feasts. Chicha was a critical part of this system of reciprocity, and so an empire like the Inca could build great cities and monuments only if it kept the beer flowing.

You can’t really age chicha; once it’s made, you’ve got a few days before it starts to go bad. This meant brewing was a full-time, year-round occupation. And in most of Mesoamerica, the beer industry was dominated by women. Ladyspit was renowned for making the very best chicha. The Incans even had a special class of brewers, called aqllas, or “chosen women.” The chosen women were basically beer-brewing royal nuns. Most of them were related to the Incan ruler, and they all swore vows of chastity.

It takes a very specific type of person to give up sex for the privilege of having hundreds of people drink her spit. But the central role chicha played in public life meant these women would’ve been very highly regarded. Their chicha represented the Incan state at public holidays and state functions. Visiting emperors and kings got drunk off the aqllas’ spit.

You’ve got to admit, that’s pretty cool.

Experiment: Does Ladyspit Make Better Beer?

I’m sure you’re all taken with the same burning question that hit me as soon as I started reading about chicha: Why make it a girls-only affair?

I asked that question of Dr. Brian Hayden, beer archaeologist and professor at Simon Fraser University. He offered one fairly tame explanation for the girls-only brewclub:

In a lot of feasts it’s men who do the butchering, and often the cooking of meat. It could be that preparation for brewing was just so labor intensive they wanted to offload it on women.

But he also offered a much more exciting hypothesis, that there might be “some sort of difference in the enzymes in women’s saliva, as opposed to men’s.” So probably sexism, but maybe because women’s spit makes the best beer? That maybe was all I needed to justify another experiment. You can re-create my work if you grab male and female friends and . . .

Ingredients

2 one-gallon glass jugs, either from a brew store or because you drink that much Carlo Rossi wine

2 airlocks

About ½ pound corn flour, ground corn, cornmeal, etc.

2 packets yeast

2 spit bowls

Directions

Split into groups of girls and boys. Each gender gets a spit bowl and a quarter pound of corn flour, ideally.

This will not be easy. Pop a generous spoonful of corn flour in your mouth and start chewing. Try to keep each corn wad at the front of your mouth, to avoid swallowing any and to assure maximum saturation. It should come out as a thick gooey puck, but a sludgy paste will probably be more common for novice masticators.

WARNING: Chewing this much corn flower suuucks, and two out of four experimenters actually wound up bleeding. Since the girl and boy spit jugs wound up with roughly equal amounts of blood, I decided the experiment was still valid.

Once each side has chewed up a quarter pound (or more, if you’re crazy), pour or funnel the cornspit into its respective gallon jugs. Make sure to label which one contains the boy spit, and which contains the girl spit! Fill each jug about halfway up with water.

Last, drop in the yeast, seal the airlock, shake it up and let your budding chicha sit for at least forty-eight hours.

We went about our lives for the next forty-eight hours, every now and again glancing at the slightly fizzy jugs of yellow bloodcornspit sitting in our kitchen.

Two days later I warily decanted the first two glasses of our chicha. A sour, yeasty smell was immediately obvious. The beer itself was better: sour, a little fizzy. There did seem to be a gender difference: The male chicha was noticeably more sour and yeasty tasting. The girlspit version was considerably milder. If I had to drink gallons of one or the other, I’d choose the smoother flavor of ladyspit beer. Perhaps it was as simple as that for the ancient Mesoamericans.

Those results were intriguing, but I decided it was important to follow up and see if I could taste differences in girlspit beer made with Schinus molle, not corn, as the active ingredient. I ordered a pound of dried red peppercorns off sweet lady Internet and gathered a larger group of volunteers: six men, and three women. The gender disparity meant the females wound up chewing many more peppercorns per person than the men. (Major props to K for chewing the very most.)

Once the chicha was ready, three days later, a smaller group convened to actually drink the resulting beverage. Six people, four men and two women, were subjected to a blind taste test and quizzed on which beer they preferred. Four out of six participants (three male, one female) preferred the girlspit, noting it was “more effervescent” and had an altogether milder taste than the boys’ variety.

These tests should be far from the last word on the subject; if some beer archaeologists want to put together a larger study using more traditional methods, I wish them the best of luck in finding funding. I think we can all agree this is exactly the sort of question federal science grants exist to help us answer.

Until that happens, I’m a firm backer of the “girlspit just tastes better” theory.

Let’s talk about dicks for a moment. Not the crude colloquialism for a man’s reproductive organ, but the crude colloquialism for people who behave poorly, and who generally lack fucks-given for the feelings of others. These are the people who pick drunken fights for the sheer joy of being an aggressive asshole in public, or who take pictures of their abs in the mirror and post them on Facebook because, obviously, everyone wants to see that. They are the Internet trolls who spend every free moment of their time insulting people they’ll never meet. They are people for whom sarcasm is a reflex, and the rest of the world is just a target.

These dicks, and legions of their kin, are a plague on the modern age. When the promise of the Internet as a global communication tool first became clear, many of us thought it might herald the dawning of a new era of human discourse. People would be able to spread their ideas, to connect and understand one another on a level never before possible. That’s all been true, but we utterly failed to anticipate the vast rainbow of ugliness the Internet would bring into being. The Internet’s early proponents dreamed of things like YouTube, but not in their darkest, Adderall-crash nightmares did they imagine the racism and misogyny of a YouTube comments section.

Usenet is the great-grandfather of modern social media. It was established in 1980 as a series of “newsgroups” in which people across the world could discuss whatever they wanted with whoever happened to have Internet access. For the nerds of the eighties and early nineties, Usenet was a mixture of Reddit, Facebook, and Gmail. It was the very first open way for people to talk about whatever they wanted with strangers from around the world.

“Open” might be too strong a term. Internet access didn’t start to become common until the mid-nineties. For more than a decade, the vast majority of people on Usenet had Internet access either through their jobs or through the computer labs at their universities. Personal home connections were uncommon, and limited to only the wealthy geeks of Silicon Valley or the most bearded and dedicated of programmers. New users came to Usenet in a trickle, not the gushing spigot that floods our Internet today. In 1985 there were 1,300 newsgroups on Usenet. In 2014, that many webpages were created every two and a half minutes.

In Usenet’s heyday the infusion of newbies was much more manageable, and it came in predictable waves. The largest came every year in September when new classes’ worth of freshmen came to college and logged on for the first time. Each September was a grueling period of rude newbies treating Usenet’s discussion threads as their own personal bathroom walls, before being reprimanded and gradually beaten into compliance by the hammer of public shame. It was a predictable cycle that led to a relatively well-behaved digital culture.

And then came AOL.

In 1993, the floodgates opened to a whole new generation of Internet users. Now anyone with a few bucks to spare and no pressing need to make phone calls could get online and start posting to Usenet. A vast swarm of uncultured techno-barbarians spilled over the walls of Usenet, too numerous for the core of veteran users to tame and educate. Trolls, now camouflaged by the anonymity of the horde, became impossible to exile or shun into submission.

Usenet, and the Internet entire, would never be the same. The veteran users referred to this new era as “Eternal September.” And when you lay it all out that way, it sounds like the story of some great sunken Atlantean empire, tragically lost to time in the throes of a terrific cataclysm.

But if the Internet’s early architects and advocates had studied their history and anthropology better, they wouldn’t have been so surprised. Eternal September was inevitable. The bad behaviors that have turned so much of the modern Internet into a cesspool aren’t just a product of upbringing and education. Narcissism, aggression, casual sexism, reflexive sarcasm—the panoply of douchebaggery—are quite literally written into our DNA.

Some of us were born to be dicks, because there have been times in the deep past of our species when those douchebag behaviors saved us.

How Evolution Rewards Narcissism

Social media is like a perpetual motion machine for fueling human egos. Sure, plenty of artists and creators use the Internet to share their work. But the legitimate contributions to human culture are buried under an avalanche of selfies. Go to any article on the Internet about a mass shooting, a natural disaster, or some other sort of calamity that kills a bunch of innocent people. You’ll find user after user giving some variation of the “If I’d been there . . .” post. For illustration, here’s one comment from a 2015 Cracked article about a survivor of the Utoya massacre in Norway. The article posed a rhetorical question, to illustrate how difficult it is to react effectively to sudden violence: “What will you do if a guy with a knife suddenly bursts into the room as you’re reading this? Did you have a plan before you finished reading the last sentence? Of course you didn’t.”

And here’s how a commenter named Jackmeioff chose to respond to that rhetorical question:

Plan?

I guess I’d just grab the 357 magnum from the handgun safe that’s within my reach without even leaving my chair, put six hollow points into his chest, and try to keep myself from getting stabbed until he loses consciousness. Then reload in case there are two guys.

That would pretty much cover the first 15–20 seconds.

I read a post like that, and I picture a very specific sort of person: dangerously unfit, pale from a lack of sunlight, and hiding in a man cave with at least one Scarface poster and several decorative swords on the walls. Somewhere on his home is a sign that shows the profile of a revolver and states BEWARE OF OWNER. Yes, this is a stereotype, but one that describes an unfortunate number of people who both

1. wildly overestimate their own abilities; and

2. just cannot wait to tell everyone how awesome they are.

You don’t imagine these folks lasting very long in a rougher time and place. Overconfidence is a flaw in our cushy modern world, with its antibiotics and relatively infrequent bear attacks. It must have been even deadlier in a less settled age. But this strain of delusional narcissism has been with us for a while, and there’s a reason it persists: Sometimes, the overconfident assholes are right.

Most people who take big, dumb chances based on an unrealistic appraisal of their abilities die. But some of them get lucky, rise to the occasion, and change the world. Christopher Columbus was a cocky asshole who failed at finding India, got lucky, and found Europe two whole continents to plunder. Columbus was rewarded for taking stupid risks with fortune and fame. He had two sons, who had children of their own and passed their reckless genes down through the ages.

Scientists can actually trace the genetic legacy of history’s luckiest risk takers. There’s a gene, called DRD4, that helps your body decide when and how to give you dopamine. About 20 percent of us have a variant of DRD4 called DRD4-7R. Some studies have shown that people with the variant are more open to taking risks. That one gene isn’t the only thing separating the guy who’ll drunkenly hop a fence to help his friends break into a hot tub from the friends who mostly just hope he doesn’t get them arrested. But it does suggest that overconfidence and risk taking have paid off with alarming regularity down through the ages.

As best as science can tell, the DRD4-7R gene first showed up in a big way about forty to fifty thousand years ago, when the first humans decided to leave the safety of their homes and see if there might be better stuff across the sea.

The Ancient Wisdom of Overconfidence

Dr. David Dunning, of Cornell University, apparently had many run-ins with Jackmeioffs of his own. In 1999, he paired up with a graduate student named Justin Kruger to study the baffling phenomenon of human overconfidence. He explained to me:

I was fascinated by the number of people I saw in . . . everyday life who were making mistakes, and I wondered, how could they have not foreseen making these mistakes?

Dr. Dunning’s work was motivated by many of the same irritants we’ve all faced. He saw overconfidence lead to disaster in “faculty meetings, on C-SPAN, reading dumb criminal stories and the Darwin Awards and so forth.” He and Kruger tested students in a variety of ways and quizzed each on how well they thought they’d done. They found that the students who’d done worst on a given test were, invariably, the ones who had “grossly overestimated” their performance on the quiz. The people who’d done well had a much more accurate idea of their performance. This study wound up being one of those landmark findings that gives scientists something to put their names on. The Dunning-Kruger effect posits that the least competent people tend to assume they’re much better at a given task than they really are.

Dunning and Kruger’s work suggests that Jackmeioff behavior is something endemic to human beings. Dr. Dunning agreed that the behavior he observed was exacerbated by the anonymity of the Internet. “I think people are much more likely to be circumspect among their friends and families than they are in an anonymous Internet comments section.”

But just why is this kind of behavior so prevalent in humankind? Narcissism and overconfidence have blighted us with war and stock market crashes and the last twenty years of reality TV. When has it helped us?

Back in 2011, two scientists, Dominic Johnson and James Fowler, from the universities of Oxford and California, had this same question. Being huge nerds, they decided to try and answer it by creating a mathematical model. In a letter to the journal Nature in 2011, “The Evolution of Overconfidence,” they proposed a situational model involving two individuals, of uncertain strength, competing for the same resource. Because it’s a good situational model, the actual details of the conflict could vary from two people staring each other down over a lone apple to two nations deciding whether or not to go to war over an island full of gold.

If those parties fight, whichever one winds up being stronger takes the resource. But if only one of them makes a move for the resource, he/she/it winds up winning everything without a fight.

Neither side can know for sure if it’ll win or lose in the event of a struggle. But the side that assumes it’ll win any fight because look at these biceps, bro has the best odds of winning the unclaimed resource. That side also has the highest odds of getting into a fight, but hey, statistically it’ll win some of those, too. As the study’s authors put it:

Overconfidence is advantageous because it encourages individuals to claim resources they could not otherwise win if it came to a conflict . . . it keeps them from walking away from conflicts they would surely win.

It’s worth noting that this is true only up to a point. Dr. Dunning cautioned me against assuming overconfidence was always a positive:

Let’s say after a while you’re overconfident, you come out with injuries, disabilities, and sooner or later you wind up in a conflict that ends your life. The problem with risk is that you lose.

Johnson and Fowler also noted that overconfidence gets less and less valuable in riskier situations. When the risks are small, you don’t suffer much from your failures, and the windfalls of success are well worth it. This is why Jackmeioffs will brag about their fighting prowess all day long on the Internet, without ever actually winding up in a fight in their entire lives.

It’s easy to make fun of that endlessly confident, reckless, ab-sharing young bro type, but in more primitive times the people who grabbed at what they wanted and just assumed they could take it won a lot of easy victories. Those easy victories kept them well fed, and their overconfidence synergized with another asshole behavior that also served our primitive, infuriating ancestors well in ancient conflicts:

The Wisdom of Shit Talking and Lying

The birth of the Internet led to a renaissance in talking smack. There’s a risk in doing that kind of thing face-to-face, faces being notoriously vulnerable to face punches. Online, though, distance and anonymity are our shields, and the insults can flow as freely as the amateur pornography and pirated films. It’s easy to hear some thirteen-year-old screaming death threats to you over XBox Live, or scroll through the river of hate that is a YouTube comments section, and lay all the blame on anonymity. The truth is more complex. We’ve been hardwired to talk shit for thousands of years—and there’s a damn good reason why.

Human beings are coded for aggression. It’s one of the “human universals,” to shamelessly steal a term coined by anthropologist Donald Brown in his 1991 book of the same name. Human universals are behaviors we engage in so regularly that, if aliens exist, they’ll be the basis for their stereotypes of our species.

But aggression doesn’t have to end with violence. In fact, as Johnson and Fowler pointed out, the best result in any confrontation is that the other side backs down without a fight, leaving you to reap the spoils without bleeding for the privilege.

So how can you be aggressive without necessarily being violent? The answer is bluster, shit talking, braggadocio, or one of dozens of other names for word-based aggression. Obviously, impugning someone’s honor, courage, and/or parentage is the kind of thing that can end in a fight, but more often than not it happens instead of one. Shit talking is the human equivalent of a dog baring its teeth at another dog. He’s not trying to start a fight; he’s trying to avoid one by letting the other dog know he’ll open up a mouthful of murder if pushed too far.

That’s where overconfidence enters into it again: Boasting about what a dangerous badass you are and how everyone else had better step off works best if you believe you can back it up. The Jackmeioffs of the world might be full of shit (read: They are ABSOLUTELY full of shit), but many of them believe everything they say and type. Johnson and Fowler suspect that one reason we’ve evolved to be so good at lying to ourselves is because it makes those lies more believable to others.

Let’s not understate the evolutionary value of lying, though. Evolutionary biologist Peter Caryl noted in “Escalated Fighting and the War of Nerves: Game Theory and Animal Combat” that, unlike overconfidence, straight-up bluffing works better the higher the stakes get. (Maynard Smith & Parker made similar observations in a 1976 paper for Animal Behaviour.) In a life-and-death situation, calling someone’s bluff might cost you your life. It’s the same basic idea behind the “mutually assured destruction” of the Cold War. Both the United States and Russia claimed to be able to wipe each other (and everyone else on the planet) out. Maybe one side was lying about the effectiveness of its missiles or the readiness of its armed forces, but no one was willing to risk finding out.

Conflicts between humans are more dangerous than conflicts between members of any other species. As a result, we value elaborate bluffs more than any other species. We’ve created whole art forms for just that purpose. The most public modern example would have to be the ongoing conflicts between different gangster rap artists. Those rivalries do end in bloodshed sometimes (this would be an appropriate time to pause and pour one out to Biggie), but that’s the exception, not the rule.

A staggering amount of human creativity has been wasted on bluffing about just how badass we are. Flyting, a form of vocal dueling in which combatants insult, deride, and assert their superiority over an opponent, was the medieval European equivalent of gangster rap. We find evidence of flyting as far back as Beowulf (between 800 and 1100 CE). I think the writer Alta Cools Halama (“Flytes of Fancy,” in Essays in Medieval Studies 13, 1996) was the first to draw a direct connection between gangster rap and the flyting between Beowulf and Unferth.

During the banquet that takes place at the poem’s beginning, a Thane named Unferth, envious of Beowulf, makes the loud claim that Beowulf lost a swimming competition to a guy named Breca, who was willing to swim for seven straight nights. Unferth intimates that, if Beowulf’s afraid of a little night swimming, he’s sure to get his ass kicked in a fight with the chief badass of the book, Grendel.

“So ween I for thee a worse adventure—though in buffet of battle thou brave hast been, in struggle grim—if Grendel’s approach thou darst await through the watch of night!”

Beowulf counters by admitting that, sure, he lost a swimming contest. But only because he provoked the “wrath of the sea-fish.” Yes, the ol’ “I only lost that swimming contest because I had to murder nine sea monsters” excuse. There’s a weird similarity between the way boasts are made in flyting and gangster rap, priding signs of physical dominance and power above all else. Here’s how Beowulf starts his boast of whale murder:

Now the wrath of the sea-fish rose apace; yet me ’gainst the monsters my mail coat, hard and hand-linked, help afforded—battle-sark braided my breast to ward, garnished with gold.

Whereas Body Count’s controversial 1992 hit “Cop Killer” starts with the singer bragging about his shirt, gloves, and ski mask. Both the flyting in this millennium-old epic poem and the rap hit started with protagonists bragging about their gear, and then moving on to brag about how they do their killing. In Beowulf’s case he pierced the monsters “with point of sword, with blade of battle,” “whelming” the sea beast “by the hurly through hand of mine.” In Body Count’s case, it was a “twelve gauge sawed-off” and a car with its “lights turned off.”

The most famous literary example of flyting is probably “The Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedy,” from the early 1500s. Dunbar and Kennedy were two Scottish poets and nobles who got into a disagreement in front of the king and decided to settle it by literally shit talking each other. Here’s my favorite line:

Thou callst thee rhetor with thy golden lips. Nay, glowering gaping fool, thou art beguiled. Thou art but gluntoch, with thy giltin hips.

That all sounds like old-timey nonsense, so you should probably know that gluntoch means “dirty knees” and gilten hips means “shitty ass.” That line was Dunbar’s way of claiming his flyting was so good, Kennedy was literally going to shit himself.

A lot’s changed in five hundred years. But overconfidence, bragging, and shit talking, both literal and figurative, seem to be eternal. In fact:

Filthy Insults and Mass Sarcasm Built Society

I don’t want you to walk away from this thinking that flyting and rap battles are particularly novel developments in the history of human language. Ritual insults go back further than medieval Scotsmen, or even Beowulf. The very evolution of human language owes a debt to shit talking, according to the linguists Ljiljana Progovac and John L. Locke. In their 2009 paper, “The Urge to Merge: Ritual Insult and the Evolution of Syntax,” they point out that the ability to form compound words is one of the earliest stages of language development in children. It’s also very often used to craft insults. Words like “dare-devil, kill-joy, pick-pocket, scatter-brain, turn-coat” and, I’ll add because they didn’t, mother-fucker, are what’s known as “exogenic VN compounds.”

These exogenic compounds are found all across human language, and that tendency to combine two words (the “merge”) is one of the basic pillars of all human syntax, from ssum-sitan (“suck-cow”) in Tashelhit Berber, to my favorite, jebi-vitar, or “fuck-wind,” in Serbian. The sheer frequency of such compounds in human language suggests that insulting rivals in an elaborate, humorous, profane, but non-violent way is enough of an adaptive benefit that the guys (this kind of behavior is much more common among men) who were good at it left permanent marks in the foundations of human language.

While young men were busy forming the basis of human language out of boasts about their penises/insults about the penises of others, another type of ritual insult was helping kick off the genesis of all civil order. The “shaming of the meat” is a ritual most famously observed among the !Kung people by the anthropologist Richard Lee. In his 1969 essay “Eating Christmas in the Kalahari,” he recalled trying to reward a tribe who’d helped him by buying “the largest, meatiest ox” he could find as a gift. When he proudly presented the animal, the !Kung responded by mocking his gift for being insultingly shitty. The quality of the animal had nothing to do with it. The shaming of the meat was an old tradition among the !Kung, and other hunter-gatherers, designed to keep the egos of young male hunters in check.

The !Kung knew just as well as we do that young adult males are by far the most dangerous section of society. The male ego can do disastrous things, left to its own devices, and hunter-gatherers live on thin margins. They can’t afford many fights and violent displays of dominance. There’s food to be gathered. So whenever they notice a young hunter putting on airs because of all the meat he managed to bag, the !Kung respond with sarcasm: “Is that all you caught? You think there’s even enough for anyone else?”

Mass public displays of sarcasm are how the !Kung choose to “cool” the hearts of their prideful young hunters. The !Kung kept up their meat shaming with Lee until the day of the slaughter. When the ox was cut open and the mass of fat and meat was immediately apparent to all, Lee cried:

What’s this about the ox being too thin to bother eating? Are you out of your mind?

And the !Kung responded with gales and gales of laughter. Lee was baffled, until one of his friends among the !Kung explained that they were simply responding to the pride he took in the size of his gift. “When a young man kills much meat he comes to think of himself as a chief, or a big man.” The !Kung worry about any proud young man, “for someday his pride will make him kill somebody.”

Pride and arrogance are still big problems today, but there are enough of us now that they threaten the existence of the species only every few decades. The “shaming of the meat” is what anthropologists call a leveling mechanism. That’s just what it sounds like: a way for societies to gently pull down individuals who rise too high above their fellows. The !Kung use sarcasm as a way to keep their best and brightest humble. Sarcasm translates poorly into the written word, and today it’s become one of the many banes of online communication. Like everything else in this chapter, sarcasm really reached Peak Irritating with the advent of the World Wide Web.

Narcissism, sarcasm, and shit talking have always been irritating, but once upon a time our species needed them to ensure its survival. Overconfidence pushed many of our ancestors to take the sort of dangerous chances that helped Homo sapiens spread across the globe. Filthy insults and aggressive boasts let generations of young men avoid physical altercations and get laid. Sarcasm reined in millennia’s worth of dangerous egos at a time when there weren’t enough of us to risk that kind of bullshit. The modern era has allowed millions of us to take these behaviors to their most irritating extent. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t acknowledge the impact they’ve had on our development.

A douchebag lives in all of us, coded into our very genes. And we all owe that fuck-wind a great debt.

Most people who refer to prostitution as the “oldest profession” probably do so with their tongue firmly in cheek. But you might be shocked to learn just how plausible that moniker truly is. There’s a fair chance that sex was one of the very first things human beings did in exchange for money. The evidence for this starts in the usual place: a bunch of scientists messing around with monkeys.

In 2005, a behavioral economist at Yale named Keith Chen embarked on a unique experiment: He taught a bunch of capuchin monkeys how to use money. He and his fellow researchers began by handing out small silver disks with holes in the middle and repeatedly demonstrating that the coins could be exchanged for fruit or Jell-O cubes. Once the capuchins got the basic concept, Chen started dispensing a dozen coins per day to each monkey.

Over time, the capuchins came to understand some of the basics of economic life. When the price of Jell-O cubes dropped, the monkeys loaded up on Jell-O. When Chen introduced them to a form of gambling that gave the capuchins an opportunity to double their wealth or lose it all, some of the monkeys took to gambling. Their behavior was so eerily reminiscent of our own that it didn’t take long before the first monkey planned the first monkey heist.

All of Chen’s testing with money was done in a small subcage closed off from the larger monkey chamber. One day, before the door separating that subcage from the larger enclosure could be closed, the first capuchin outlaw grabbed a tray of coins and tossed them into the chamber for his cage-mates to grab up. In the resulting chaos Dr. Chen observed one capuchin handing over his ill-gotten gains to a female. They fucked, and then the simian sex worker proceeded to buy herself some fruit.

Now, capuchins aren’t prehistoric humans. But Dr. Chen’s research does suggest that the concept of exchanging money for sex is one that might have cropped up very early in the history of economics. And there’s some hard archaeological evidence to support that theory.

One of, if not the oldest piece of currency still in existence is a Sumerian shekel, minted in bronze around 3000 BCE. One side of this shekel is stamped with the image of a piece of wheat, and the other side carries the likeness of Ishtar, the goddess of love. According to Bernard Lietaer’s “Beyond Scarcity and Toward a Sustainable Capitalism,” the coin was originally meant to pay for state-sanctioned prostitutes. See, Ishtar was also the goddess of paying for love. In one Babylonian religious text she proudly says, “A prostitute compassionate, am I!”

Ishtar was a divine courtesan; she took many celestial lovers and acted as sort of an escort to the gods. Consequently, some of her followers are believed to have raised funds for the church by acting as holy hookers. Some of these women were high-ranking priestesses, devout and eager to serve their goddess via boning. The divine sex work of ancient Sumer wasn’t always carried out by willing participants, though. One 3,300-year-old document outlines the arrangement between a father seeking a loan and the church of Ishtar. He gave up his daughter as collateral.

The Greek historian Herodotus (484–425 BCE) provides us with our first written history of Ishtar’s divine sex workers. According to him, the female citizens of Babylon were required to let the church pimp them out exactly one time:

Every woman born in the country must once in her life go and sit down in the precinct of Venus, and there consort with a stranger.

Women volunteering their time and genitals would sit on display in the temple precinct and wait for a customer. They weren’t allowed to return home until “one of the strangers [threw] a silver coin into her lap, and [took] her with him beyond the holy ground.” According to Herodotus, any payment offered to the women had to be accepted: “The woman goes with the first man who throws her money, and rejects no one.”

Some modern researchers dispute Herodotus’s claim, and it isn’t exactly out of character for the “father of history” to tell florid lies about a people he considered foreign and weird. Whether or not that particular story is true, the preponderance of evidence suggests that the church of Ishtar did use prostitution as one method of raising funds. It’s unlikely the actual deed ever happened on church property, though. Ishtar herself claimed to be the sort of sex worker who preferred to ply her trade at the local bar:

When I sit in the entrance of a tavern, I, Ishtar, am a loving harimtu.

Harimtu is often translated to mean “prostitute.”

She wasn’t allowed inside. Her talons would’ve ruined the floor.

Ishtar worship eventually spread west, to Greece, where she took up the name Aphrodite, and to Rome, where she became Venus. There are references to so-called temple prostitution across the ancient world for thousands of years. And if the early Christian historian Eusebius can be trusted, it kept right on going until the reign of Constantine in 300 CE.

That’s more than three thousand years of faith-approved sex work! And if that seems strange to you, it’s because of our current legal prohibitions against prostitution. They are actually the exception, rather than the rule, in most of human history.

The Strange History of State-Sponsored Hooking

Ancient Greece and Rome aren’t particularly well known for their enlightened attitudes toward women. Many in the Greek upper class considered the “fairer sex” fit for nothing besides baby making. Rome was a bit better; it wasn’t unheard of for women to own businesses, and some ladies managed to achieve significant financial success. But in both civilizations, prostitution was a single woman’s fastest road to wealth and power.

The Greeks divided their sex workers into three categories: slave prostitutes (an incredibly sad job with a hilarious name, pornai), free but poor street prostitutes (I could not find the ancient Greek name for these ladies), and hetaera, essentially high-class courtesans for the wealthy. The story of one of these women, Aspasia, illustrates the best-case scenario of ancient Greek whoredom.

Aspasia wasn’t a native of Athens, and, as a foreigner, she was considered by most Athenians about as welcome as an elevator fart. But she’d come from wealth and privilege in her homeland, and she had the education and aristocratic bearing necessary to make it as a hetaera. She developed a sterling reputation in the party scene in Athens, eventually hooking up with the head of state, Pericles.

According to Socrates himself, Aspasia was a lot more than just a politician’s eye candy. He claims that Aspasia wrote the great funeral oration that Pericles delivered at the onset of the Peloponnesian War. Socrates, often considered the father of philosophy, even credited Aspasia with teaching him the “art of eloquence.” When Pericles died, Aspasia went out and found herself another man, Lysicles, and turned him into a respected politician.

Aspasia was a controversial figure in her own time (Plutarch later blamed her for inciting the Peloponnesian War). But prostitution itself wasn’t controversial or illegal in the world’s first democracy. Athenian law allowed for both male and female sex workers, although boys were allowed to work only until they reached adolescence, which is, admittedly, super fucked-up.

Solon was the first Athenian leader to officially recognize prostitution, in 594 BCE. It was a backhanded kind of recognition at first, stating that men caught using prostitutes couldn’t be considered guilty of adultery. But Solon went on to create a series of state-run brothels aimed at giving the common man an opportunity to get his rocks off for a reasonable price. Here’s how the ancient writer Philemon described it in his book Adelphoi (“Brothers”):

[Solon], seeing Athens full of young men, with both an instinctual compulsion and a habit of straying in an inappropriate direction, bought women and established them in various places, equipped and common to all.

“The women stand naked that you not be deceived.

“Look at everything.

“Maybe you are not feeling well. You have some sort of pain. Why? The door is open. One obol. Hop in. There is no coyness, no idle talk, nor does she snatch herself away. But straight away, as you wish, in whatever way you wish.

“You come out. Tell her to go to hell. She is a stranger to you.”

State-sponsored prostitution continued on well past the days of old Athens. In the fifth century CE, a former sex worker even succeeded in working her way up to the title of empress. Her name was Theodora, and before her marriage to the Roman emperor Justinian she worked the streets of Constantinople and, apparently, really, really enjoyed her job. The historian Procopius provides us with this lurid account:

Often she would go picnicking with 10 young men or more, in the flower of their strength and virility, and dallied with them all, the whole night through. When they wearied of the sport, she would approach their servants, perhaps 30 in number, and fight a duel with each of these; and even thus found no allayment of her craving.

Once, visiting the house of an illustrious gentleman, they say she mounted the projecting corner of her dining couch, pulled up the front of her dress, without a blush, and thus carelessly showed her wantonness.

In other words, she regularly fucked dozens of men under the table and sometimes finished herself off with furniture. That’s either evidence of severe sexual addiction . . . or a damning indictment of the lovemaking abilities of Byzantine nobility. (Probably a little of both.)

Now, in fairness to Theodora, Procopius had a bit of a chip on his shoulder about the empress and shouldn’t be relied on for his absolute honesty. What we know for sure is that Theodora worked as a whore and felt no shame in that. Once she gained power, one of her first acts was to do a major solid for her former coworkers. Theodora introduced some of the first legal protections for sex workers in history. She also made rape punishable by death, cracked down on forced prostitution, and expanded property rights for all women across the empire.

During Theodora’s time, the hookers of Byzantium were quite lucky. But the history of state-endorsed prostitution doesn’t begin and end with the Western world. Some states in ancient India held competitions in which all the local women vied for the title of “most beautiful.” The winner was declared nagarvadhu. Winning this honor meant a life of wealth and respect, and also sex with any nobles wealthy enough to pay for it. In an era in which the average person was usually either starving, infected with rickets, or both, it wasn’t a terrible deal.

Not all state-sponsored sex work involved women. According to David Greenberg’s The Construction of Homosexuality, the Yauyo people of the Inca Empire had “public houses filled with men who dressed as women and painted their faces.” And, on a much darker note, some Incan religious orders would “adopt” young boys, dress them as girls, and put them to a very specific kind of work. Their priests weren’t allowed to have sex with women, but apparently the gods were cool with child rape.

Prostitution’s history as an illegal enterprise is much shorter. In Europe, we can trace the first laws against whorin’ back to Reccared I of Spain. He officially converted to Christianity in 589 CE, and attempted to curry favor with the Catholic Church by clamping down on the brothels his people had enjoyed in their carefree pagan days. (Female) sex workers caught plying their trade would be punished with three hundred lashes and exile.

It’s unclear how strictly Reccared’s new law was followed among his recently Christianized people. What is clear is that, up to that point, prostitution had a very long history of working in support of the state, and the state’s religion. And, like any institution that’s existed in human society for thousands and thousands of years, it served a valuable purpose.

The Safety Valve Theory

In 1358, the Great Council of the city-state of Venice declared sex work “absolutely indispensable to the world.” Over the next century, government-run brothels sprouted up in cities all across Italy, France, and Britain. Almost seven hundred years ago, the government of Venice knew what sociologists have only recently elucidated: prostitution, legal or otherwise, plays a critical role in civilized society.

Medieval Europeans operated under what Ruth Karras of Temple University calls a “hydraulic model” of masculinity, according to her 1996 book Common Women:

People believed that pressure builds up, and has to be released through a “safety valve” . . . or eventually the dam will burst and men will commit seduction, rape, adultery and sodomy.

Saint Augustine embodied this mind-set perfectly when he said, “If you do away with harlots, the world will be convulsed with lust.” The idea that men go crazy if they can’t blow off some steam via orgasm is a simultaneously offensive and unnervingly plausible theory. The Hydraulic Model of male sexuality IS bullshit, but it’s convincing bullshit.

But you can believe prostitution acts as a sort of safety valve without believing that men turn into rape monsters if they go too long without orgasm. Émile Durkheim, one of the founding thinkers of sociology, proposed what we know today as the safety valve theory of deviance. In the book Deviance, Nancy Herman summed up the two purposes Durkheim felt illicit behavior served in society: defining the difference between right and wrong for a culture, and “acting as a safety valve to drain off excess energy generated by the pressures of institutional routines.”

Prostitution doesn’t necessarily need to save us from the unchecked build-up of raw sexual frustration to fulfill a purpose. It provides a literal and figurative release, giving generations of stressed-out people something a little (or a lot) naughty to help distract them from the fact that life is nasty, brutish, and short. Prostitution is woven into the very fabric of society; wherever there are people working their butts off and chafing under the yoke of a repressive culture, there’ll be sex workers to help take the edge off. A huge amount of human culture has been forged in the crucible where vice and stress collide. Or, as this drinking song from Gold Rush–era California puts it:

The miners came in forty-nine,

The whores in fifty-one;

And when they got together

They produced the native son.

In my day job for Cracked I’ve interviewed several dozen sex workers from across the world: legal brothel workers in Nevada and Australia as well as illegal streetwalkers and high-priced escorts from across the United States and Canada. They’ve all led different lives, served different clientele, and charged very different prices for their time. But one thing all of my sources had in common was that they had had Johns (and Janes) who paid them for sessions that included no sex whatsoever.

Sometimes people need companionship. Not just someone to fuck, but someone to talk to and be held by. Physical connection is a powerful thing, critical to our mental health. There are lonely people all around this world, lacking a romantic partner, trapped by societal convention or a demanding job, or who are just painfully awkward. For folks in these situations, sex work provides a kind of therapy.

Stanley Siegel, an author and practicing psychotherapist for nearly forty years, interviewed a number of his clients on their use of prostitutes and came to that same conclusion. In his article “Sex Worker or Therapist?” (Psychology Today censored it in 2012, but you can still find it on Stanley’s website) he relates the story of a sixty-two-year-old gay man from southern Vietnam. This man had worked his entire life as a rural doctor, sacrificing his sexuality on the altar of career. When he retired, his friends decided enough was enough, and hired him an escort. It was a transformative experience:

Since then, I’ve seen Peter weekly. It’s been the most amazing experience. I am learning to appreciate my body as old as it is and I’m also learning the mechanics of sex which I had only occasionally seen in porn movies. My whole attitude has changed. I feel much more confident about myself and I’ve started to date.

Of course, we’re talking about a very good sex worker here. Most transactions in the sex trade are less about healing and more about blowing off . . . steam. But there is a distinct, legal, and growing branch of therapy that also includes boning. It’s called sexual surrogacy or, as I prefer to call it:

The Medicinal Sex-Work Industry

Our friend Durkheim, the sociologist who first elucidated the safety valve theory of deviance, actually posited a third societal function for illicit behavior: It helps instigate social change.

Where crime exists, collective sentiments are sufficiently flexible to take on a new form, and crime sometimes helps to determine the form they will take. How many times, indeed, it is only an anticipation of future morality—a step toward what will be.

This is most clearly demonstrated by marijuana’s recent history. For decades it was—and in many places remains—a thing that can send you to prison for years of your life. But people kept doing it, and once its use spread across a wide enough underground, the users started agitating to change the laws. Now state after state, and a few whole countries, have decriminalized or legalized pot’s sale and use. Medical marijuana is now one of the fastest-growing industries in the United States.

Oddly enough, prostitution may be on a similar path. In 1970, the famed sexologists William H. Masters and Virginia E. Johnson introduced the practice of sexual surrogacy in their depressingly named book Human Sexual Inadequacy. Sex surrogacy became the therapy method du jour among the hip and hurting throughout the seventies and eighties, but it died down significantly in the nineties.

It was legalized nationwide in 2003, and over the last decade and change, surrogacy has slowly grown in both professional and social acceptability. But while “medical marijuana” in many states is just a sly excuse for people to get a recreational high, medicinal sex work is a different legal matter altogether. Surrogates don’t work alone; they provide treatment in tandem with a licensed therapist. Sexual surrogates spend only, on average, 13 percent of their time having sex with a patient.

And therein lies the key-est of differences between sexual surrogacy and prostitution. Clients don’t always wind up having sex, but if that’s what they want to pay for, that’s what they get. With a surrogate, you’re paying for therapy that may—or may not—include sex and certainly won’t start with it. The sex itself is actually the “climax” of a long process of therapy. Shai Rotem, a male sexual surrogate, gave me a broad outline of the process:

Basically the heart of the work is the mini relationship that has been created between the surrogate partner and the client. Every client has different difficulties, and by creating a mini relationship with a surrogate partner we’re able to see where she’s struggling.

So basically, the patient-surrogate relationship mimics an actual romantic relationship, allowing the surrogate and therapist to pinpoint the patient’s problems and work on building solutions.

It’s about having an experience with a person [that the client] is comfortable and safe with, and by doing that, she has a model now in her mind and heart of how to create a relationship.

I also spoke with Shemena Johnson, a Los Angeles–based therapist who has worked with Shai Rotem for the last two years. Sometimes Shemena refers patients to Shai, but, more frequently, women reach out to him directly and he then refers them to Shemena. Both Shai and Shemena conduct sessions with their patients separately, and then confer together over their notes and plans for treatment. As Shemena says:

The client is fully aware of our engagement; we update each other on the progress; and there may be issues that come up with the surrogate-partner therapy process [such] that [Shai] may reach out to me and say, “We might need to work this through.”

The most common issue that crops up is that patients take their “mini relationship” a little too seriously and start developing feelings for Shai.

Usually it’s a fantasy. “I want a friend, I’m lonely, I wish I had someone in my life who was similar to Shai.”

In those cases, Shemena’s job is to help her patients “grieve for the loss of that relationship” while still moving forward in their search for a healthier romantic life. And for many clients, dealing with the issue of growing too close to their surrogate is actually a valuable part of the therapy. As Shai explained to me:

Most of the clients that I see were referred because of either late virginity or an inability to create relationships.

Many of the people who require sexual surrogate therapy have never really had a healthy sexual relationship in their life. Learning how to make a clean break with a “lover” without losing their self-worth or -confidence is a skill they desperately need to cultivate. Shai describes this breakup process, at its best, as a sort of graduation:

All relationships will end at some point. Either the other person will die, or there will be a breakup or divorce, and most relationships end with pain and anger, people fighting. In surrogate relationships we give our client the ability to end the relationship with a form of graduation. I like to think of my clients as little birds. . . . When they’re ready, I want to help them take off and fly on their own.

One issue that frequently leads clients to surrogates is vaginismus, an involuntary spasming of the vagina that can render any form of penetration—even just a finger—painful or impossible. The best scientific evidence for the efficacy of sexual surrogate therapy actually comes from a 2007 study on vaginismus treatment. In the article “Surrogate Versus Couple Therapy in Vaginismus,” the researchers Itzhak Ben-Zion, Shelly Rothschild, Bella Chudakov, and Ronit Aloni studied sixteen patients receiving therapy for their vaginismus with a trained surrogate, versus sixteen patients undergoing the same therapy with their actual romantic partner instead.

The results were quite conclusive: 100 percent of the women undergoing surrogate therapy successfully treated their vaginismus. Only 69 percent of the women who underwent couples therapy were “fully successful” in the same time frame.

Becoming a trained surrogate isn’t a quick and easy process. The International Professional Surrogates Association (IPSA) offers a “100-hour didactic and experiential course of study in human sexuality” as the first stage of training to become a certified professional surrogate. The second stage is a two-year internship, in which, according to Shai:

[Students] work with actual clients in a very close internship with their mentor. So let’s compare a working practicing surrogate to an intern: a practicing surrogate reports to the therapist after every session. When it comes to interns, they report to the therapist as well as reporting to their mentor and having a once-a-week meeting with their mentor or supervisor.

Of course, not all people who call themselves sexual surrogates become certified through the IPSA. While I was working on this book I also interviewed an anonymous woman in the Saint Louis area who has worked as a surrogate for the last five years without an IPSA certification. She’s open about her career, and doesn’t hide from the law, but “Sarah” acknowledges that the legality of what she does is something of a gray area. While the legitimacy of her practice is certainly questionable, Sarah’s work with disabled patients struck me as incredibly valid, and valuable.

She told me about one of her regular patients, a man with muscular dystrophy who was initially told he wouldn’t live past the age of twenty. At age twenty-one the doctors realized his case was less severe than they’d feared, and suddenly this young man realized he might have a chance to enjoy some of the experiences he’d assumed were closed to him forever. As Sarah told me:

So when he was twenty-five he decided he wanted to know what sex was like. His therapist connected us. I’ve been seeing him for months—I started by helping him explore how to finger me. He’s got limited mobility but we’ve had intercourse, and he’s able to ask me really intimate questions. We’ve experimented with different toys. He asks me questions about female ejaculation, etc.; every time we get together it’s a different topic. He’s not gone off and gotten married, but it’s expanded his horizons.

Sarah’s not the only sex worker in the world helping physically disabled people experience the wonders of intercourse. Over in Australia, where prostitution is decriminalized or outright legal in every state, a woman named Rachel Wotton has made a name for herself working with disabled clients. The 2011 documentary Scarlet Road tells her story.

Rachel doesn’t bill herself as a sexual surrogate, though. And while Shai was very adamant about stating that surrogates aren’t prostitutes, the line between those two jobs is not always so clear. While researching an article in 2015, I spoke with a young male prostitute in Australia. He reported having several clients with vaginismus sent to him by therapists who felt some “hands-in” experience would benefit their patients.

Sexual surrogates find themselves in much the same conundrum as the legitimate medical professionals studying and working with marijuana today. Their treatments have proven value, but the potential future legality of their recreational cousin risks delegitimizing the medical side of things. Sexual surrogacy is currently legal, but it’s still considered a rather fringe treatment. As Shemena told me:

Shai has been doing this for two decades—I consider him very legitimate, but he doesn’t have the paper behind it that I do.

It’s hard to say if a change in “paper” is really what’s needed here. Perhaps what we need is a change in attitude. Shai Rotem and his colleagues are certainly pushing the boundaries of what sex work can be. But you can make a strong argument that they’re simply pursuing in an organized, clinical fashion the kind of goals sex workers have been achieving (often by accident) for centuries.

On Good Friday 1962, twenty divinity students of Boston University gathered at Marsh Chapel to celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ . . . and also to trip their preordained balls off. Those young students were all subjects of one of the most infamous studies in the history of science. The experiment had been designed by a graduate student named Walter Pahnke, and was conducted with the help of the academic world’s leading acid guru, Timothy Leary.

The goal of the Good Friday experiment was to settle a debate that’s been going on between recreational drug users and mainstream religious figures since . . . well, the late fifties: Is a spiritual revelation received with the help of psychedelic drugs somehow less real than one brought about without the use of drugs?

I talked to one of the study’s participants, then divinity student, now Reverend Mike Young, about what he and the other participants were told before they started ’shrooming for science:

The way Richard Alpert [then a Harvard professor, now a pan-religious mystic named Ram Dass] and Tim Leary explained it to us was that your brain normally has a kind of “volume control”; basically, they thought the brain had evolutionary blinders built in, blotting out a lot of excess stimuli that isn’t directly useful to keeping us alive. They thought . . . that psilocybin was simply going to turn the volume up, and all of our experiences would come flowing in and the stuff most active in our lives at the time would be at the center of what went on.

Mike and his fellow test subjects were all confused young kids, full of self-doubt and questioning whether a career as a holy man was right for them. It was an ideal group of people on which to test the spiritual potency of psilocybin.

Pahnke split the twenty students in half: Ten of them would be given 30 milligram doses of psilocybin, and ten of them would be given large doses of niacin instead. None of them would know which group they were a part of until well after the drugs kicked in. The niacin was chosen because its short-term side effects include elevated body temperature, sweating, and a flushed, red face. Those are both somewhat common reactions in people coming up on mushrooms. Pahnke’s goal with this trickery was to

potentiate suggestion in the control subjects, all of whom knew that psilocybin produced various somatic effects, but none of whom had ever had psilocybin or any related substance before the experiment.

In other words, he wanted his subjects, both tripping and sober alike, not to know which of them had gotten genuine capital-D Drugs. Mike recalled:

I think what Pahnke was up to in giving us the slightly active placebo is that those who got the placebo would think they’d gotten the drug, and those of us who had gotten the drug would relax and gently slide into the experience, and that’s exactly what happened.

The experiment was a success, at least for the people on team “drugs can cause genuine religious epiphanies.” Nearly every student dosed with mushrooms that Friday marked the experience as one of if not the most intense religious experience of his life. Mike Young was profoundly affected. He entered the experiment unsure of his future and full of doubt:

I was in theological school without a denomination, recently married, and I didn’t know what I was going to do.

Mike recalls being presented with a vision of many colored bands, each representing one of the paths his life might take. He knew he had to choose one of those bands but, “I couldn’t. And that’s when I died.”

These sorts of death visions are an extremely common psychedelic experience. Mike told me, “It felt like somebody had taken a very large rake and raked my innards out.” And remember, Mike was having his first trip in a church full of his classmates, all having similarly gruesome experiences. “In most ways, mine was comparatively mild compared to some of the stuff those guys were going through.”

It sounds like Mike and his friends had the quintessential bad trip. But when they were polled immediately afterward, the vast majority of the experimental group considered their trip an extremely valuable experience. Pahnke questioned all the dosed students six months later and got the same responses: The intensity of that Good Friday trip hadn’t faded in the sober light of day. Further follow-ups were planned, but Pahnke died in a scuba-diving accident not long after the study and the bulk of his research was lost.

But twenty-five years after the original studies, a scientist named Rick Doblin succeeded in rounding up most of the original participants. He wanted to see if the power of that Good Friday trip still held up for them a quarter of a century later. The results of his follow-up study seem to vindicate the idea that drug-induced spiritual revelations are no less real than ones brought on by sober meditation and contemplation. Here’s how Dr. Doblin summed things up in his “Long-Term Follow-Up and Methodological Critique” to the Good Friday experiment:

The experimental subjects unanimously described their Good Friday psilocybin experience as having had elements of a genuinely mystical nature and characterized it as one of the highpoints of their spiritual life.

That’s even more incredible when you consider that five of the eight mushroom-dosed subjects he was able to track down (including Mike) were still working as ministers. After a lifetime of devotion to their faith, they still considered that drug-induced mystic experience to be one of the realest moments of their spiritual lives.

The evidence suggests that magic mushrooms, and perhaps other types of hallucinogens, can be powerful tools for religious worship. And all this leads to a much bigger question: Could mushroom use among our early ancestors have helped give birth to religion itself?

Monkeys, Mushrooms, and the Birth of God(s)

Mushrooms are one of the oldest drugs in human history. It’s impossible to say exactly when the first humans embarked on the first mushroom trip, but cave paintings from seven to nine thousand years ago depict what are believed to be psilocybin-packing mushrooms. Other cave paintings from Spain, from roughly six thousand years ago, seem to portray another species of hallucinogenic mushroom.

Now, nine thousand years ago, human beings had a lot less standing between them and wild animals. It’s easy to see why people up against wolf-fighting odds might have wanted a drink; alcohol numbs pain and increases belligerence. But a high enough dose of mushrooms makes standing up a dicey proposition, let alone fighting off deadly lions or horse-eating birds or whatever other nightmares stalked the land nine thousand years ago.

Prehistoric tripping was too much of a risk to do purely for recreation. The ancients used hallucinogens as a way to commune with their gods, taking the visions they received at face(-melting) value. And if one theory is correct, people have been tripping on mushrooms before we were even technically people. The ethnomycologist (fungus historian) Gordon Wasson was the first academic to suggest that hallucinogenic mushrooms played a key role in the birth of human religion.

Wasson’s theory sounds like something a dreadlocked suburban kid nicknamed “Shaman” would insist on telling you before selling you a bag of ’shrooms. But Gordon Wasson wasn’t some long-haired patchouli-scented weirdo. He was a former vice president of J. P. Morgan bank, and nearly ninety by the time he wrote Persephone’s Quest: Entheogens and the Origins of Religion and gave magic mushrooms credit for the birth of human spirituality. In Wasson’s view, pre-but-close-to-human people would’ve taken their hallucinogenic visions as the word of the Divine:

At that point religion was born, religion pure and simple, free of Theology, free of Dogmatics, expressing itself in awe and reverence and in lowered voices, mostly at night, when people would gather to consume the Sacred Element.

Weird capitalization choices aside, it’s an interesting theory. But it’s not like there’s any hard science to back up the idea that mushrooms first inspired belief in the divine. Mushroom-filled cave paintings around the world support the fact that many ancient peoples valued ’shrooms highly. But there’s a long damn gap between that and proving our simian predecessors took to mushrooms like a basement full of divinity students.

However, there is some evidence behind Wasson’s wild-eyed theory. Sigmund Freud, originator of the idea that we’re all eager to have sex with our mothers, also came up with the more widely accepted idea that human thought can be divided between primary- and secondary-process thinking. Secondary-process thinking is what your brain is doing right now: analyzing words and concepts and comparing them with your practical understanding of the world.

Primary-process thinking is much . . . weirder. It’s the kind of state your brain lapses into during a dream, a psychotic break, or a childhood fantasy. From the Couch to the Lab (Oxford University Press, 2008) gives my favorite description: “[Primary-process thinking is] . . . characterized by a relative feeling of uncertainty; in this state, confidence about ‘what is what’ is compromised and magical explanations seem more plausible.” (Emphasis mine.)

Primary-process thinking is the state of mind in which you’re more likely to accept miraculous, fantastic, and downright religious explanations for phenomena. And drugs like psilocybin have been shown to act as a superhighway to that kind of thinking. Yes, you can actually measure the presence of primary-process thinking in the human brain. It’s just insanely dangerous to do so.

See, primary-process thinking occurs partly in the limbic regions of the brain, which are located in the subcortical area and buried too deep for noninvasive measures (like fMRI) to register what goes on in any kind of detail. To record what happens in the moonshine-soaked boonies of the brain, scientists have to cut through the skull of their subjects and stick electrodes directly on the brain itself.

Cutting into brains isn’t seen as ethical, so scientists haven’t really been able to spend much time measuring primary-process thinking since the fifties and sixties. But the studies they conducted back in those wild, do-whatever-you-want-to-brains days suggested Wasson might’ve been on to something. In 2010 Robin Carhart-Harris and Karl Friston analyzed those old studies and found that the same “phasic bursting” believed to signal primary-process thinking was present in the brains of people suffering from psychotic breaks, people dreaming in REM states, and people tripping on hallucinogenic drugs.

It’s one thing to say “mind-altering drugs may have had an impact on the development of religious thought.” It’s another thing to track that impact. One historical place where that impact is evident is the Hindu drug, soma.

The Search for Soma

That word, soma, means one of two things for most of you:

1. The popular muscle relaxer carisoprodol, frequently sold under the brand name Soma and also consumed recreationally by some people with wine when they’ve been like, super stressed-out all day.

2. The fictional drug from Aldous Huxley’s 1932 novel Brave New World, used to lull citizens of the dystopian World State into a false sense of pleasantly hallucinatory narcotic bliss. It’s described by Huxley (via the character Mustapha) as “Christianity without the tears.”

But the truth about soma goes back much further than Huxley’s novel, or that time you and your friends popped a bunch of muscle relaxers and watched the whole Lord of the Rings trilogy. Soma’s first reference was as a literal god in some of the world’s earliest existent religious texts, the Hindu Vedas, composed between 1700 and 1100 BCE.

Soma is referred to, often simultaneously, as both a god worshipped even by other gods, and an intoxicating plant indulged in by mortals and immortals alike. Debates over what, exactly, soma might be or have been rage to this day. Marijuana, ephedra, and even the fresh water of the Ganges have all been suggested. But the Vedic hymns make it clear that soma the drug was something rather more intoxicating than simple fresh water:

The faint with martial ardour fires,

With lofty thoughts the bard inspires;

The soul from earth to heaven he lifts;

So great and wondrous are his gifts,

Men feel the god within their veins,

And cry in loud exulting strains:

While the word soma in Hindu culture grew into a broad term to refer to a variety of intoxicating plants, scholars (including Gordon Wasson) have suggested that the soma of the Vedic hymns was likely the hallucinogenic Amanita muscaria mushroom, a.k.a. Fly Agaric.

The main thing going against Fly Agaric, both as a possible soma and as a way to generally get high, are its occasionally nightmarish side effects. First off, the Amanita genus of mushrooms is populated both by the hallucinogenic ’shroom Amanita muscaria and a platoon of murderous poison mushrooms including the dreaded Destroying Angel, all of which look super similar and all of which are fully capable of killing the shit out of a healthy grown man.

But even the nonmurdering, hallucination-causing Amanita isn’t entirely benign. You can expect prolific vomiting, sweating, and twitching during a trip. And intense urges to self-harm have been reported by a variety of users, according to the trustworthy folks at online drug encyclopedia Erowid. This rather suggests against Amanita muscaria as a possible source of soma, since the Vedas tend to refer to it as a purely positive experience.

That isn’t the end of the story, though. The Vedas give us some details on the preparations of soma, which mainly mention it needing to be filtered extensively. Filtering isn’t a necessary step to making Amanita muscaria work; you can eat it raw and you’ll vomit trip as hard as you’ve ever vomit tripped in your life. But over the years, different groups of people have found ways to filter the Fly Agaric in order to avoid its more nightmarish side effects.

Siberian tribesmen have been known to take Amanita muscaria for religious purposes since at least 1658, when a Polish prisoner of war noted, “They eat certain fungi in the shape of fly-agarics, and thus they become drunk worse than on vodka, and for them that’s the very best banquet.”

The tribesmen didn’t just passively accept that their ’shroom-based rituals meant everyone in the tribe needed to get super sick. Specially appointed individuals, their shamans, would take one for the team by eating their Amanita muscaria straight, suffering the side effects and then peeing out a still-hallucinogenic but safer filtered version of the drug for the other members of the tribe to drink. The Lapp people of the Arctic have a urine-based solution of their own: They feed Amanita muscaria to their reindeer and then drink the reindeers’ pee to get high.

Look, I’m not averse to drinking pee—mine or a reindeer’s—in the name of science. I drink my own pee for an experiment later in this book, and if I believed the ancient Vedas suggested it, I’d ’shroom myself, suffer through the violent sick of an Amanita muscaria trip, collect my pee, and try it again. But the Vedas have a lot to say on how soma ought to be prepared, and they don’t mention pee drinking.

The process outlined in the Vedas seems to have involved drying the mushrooms in the sun, swelling them with water, and then filtering the solids out of that water through wool into a cup and mixing it with milk. Wasson theorized that this filtering process might reduce the painful (and, very occasionally, deadly) side effects of Amanita muscaria, making soma use the joyful experience described in the Vedas, rather than the bathroom-ruining experience most modern users will find more familiar.

Analyzing the science behind this is difficult. Despite the fact that humans have been using these mushrooms for thousands of years, we still don’t really know exactly how the damn things work. Modern science has pretty well narrowed it down to a pair of chemicals found in Amanita muscaria: ibotenic acid and muscimol. Both are psychoactive, but ibotenic acid seems to be responsible for turning the GI tract of an unwary user into a crude catapult.

So could the preparations for soma suggested by the Vedas actually make for a less painful trip? Thankfully, a researcher named Kevin Feeney already answered that question for us, in a 2010 article for the Journal of Psychoactive Drugs. (Yes, there’s a Journal of Psychoactive Drugs and no, it isn’t just a front for the DEA to catch budding drug chemists. Probably.) Kevin analyzed more than six hundred recorded cases of Amanita muscaria use, dividing them based on how the mushrooms were prepared and whether the users had a good trip or painted the linoleum with their breakfast.

His findings seem to vindicate Wasson’s theory: Amanita muscaria prepared as a tea is 53 percent less likely to cause nausea and vomiting than when eaten raw. And mushrooms eaten dried are 64 percent less likely to twist up your insides than the fresh variety. Some of this has to do with the fact that dehydration converts a lot of the nasty ibotenic acid to muscimol, but we don’t know exactly why making a tea turns this mushroom from a bad bout of food poisoning to a pleasant afternoon.

Feeney’s findings make it seem more likely than ever that Gordon Wasson was right: The ancient soma favored by the Hindu gods—one of the earliest drugs for which we have any written record of use—was a special preparation of Amanita muscaria.

Obviously, I had to try it. Even at great risk to my own fragile guts.

HOW TO: Trip Like a Hindu Deity

In the interest of staying out of prison myself, and keeping Plume from being raided by the DEA, I’ve obeyed exactly one strict rule in the writing of this book: no illegal drugs. (In much of the West Coast, pot is as legal as anything.) It was to my extremely good fortune, and surprise, to learn that the powerfully hallucinogenic Amanita muscaria mushroom is actually 100 percent legal in the US of A.

Not only are you free to buy, possess, and use it nationwide, but the only state that restricts it in any way is Louisiana . . . and they ban only your ability to cultivate more than forty at a time. That’s pretty fair, considering the nightmarish reputation this particular fungi has earned among psychonauts. A. muscaria is one of those rare cases of a hallucinogenic drug being too unpleasant for the government to consider it worth restricting.

You can buy your Amanita muscaria online, from a dizzying variety of websites. Depending on your location you’ll also be able to buy dried specimens right from your friendly neighborhood head shop. It’s not hard to tell if you’ve got the right mushroom:

Tavia Morra

Whoever edited the Wikipedia entry describes A. muscaria as the “quintessential toadstool.” And it does look like something you’d see in a cartoon. Whatever you do, don’t attempt to pick wild Amanita muscaria. This particular ’shroom has a lot of cousins, many of which will kill you in ways so creatively horrible it makes you wonder if the devil might be more fungus than snake.

Anyway, for a soma-class mushroom experience, you’ll need:

Ingredients

5–10 grams Amanita muscaria (or about three medium-size mushroom caps according to the drug encyclopedia Erowid)

2 cups room-temperature water

100 percent wool shirt, towel, etc. (The wool is for historical authenticity, but any kind of strainer will work.)

1 cup milk (Dairy for authenticity, but almond milk, soy milk, etc. should all be fine.)

Directions

Soma envelopes himself all around with the rays of the sun . . . (Rig Veda, chapter 4, hymn 86)

A couple of Vedic passages quoted by Wasson mention the first step in soma preparation being exposure to sunlight. Modern scholars/drug users have interpreted this to mean letting the mushroom dry out. If yours didn’t already come this way, you should go ahead and let it sit in a window for a couple of days. Let that sucker desiccate real good. It should be quite wrinkly, and not at all juicy.

Clarifying soma, when you are sated with waters your juice runs through the sieve made of wool . . . (Rig Veda, chapter 9, hymn 74)

Once it’s plenty dry, submerge your mushroom in water and let it swell up. Then wrap it in the wool and squeeze the mushroom dry, letting the liquid fall into a pot or glass. For best results, let it soak for twenty-four hours. Science tells us this step will have a significant impact on whether or not you wind up vomiting your guts out. The Vedas are clear about its importance, too:

Soma unpressed ne’er gladdened liberal Indra, no juices pressed without a prayer have pleased him. (Rig Veda, chapter 7, hymn 26)

I assume you want to be as gladdened as liberal Indra, so you’ll want to press your juices out and figure out a prayer to say while you take it. I won’t suggest a Hindu prayer, unless you happen to be Hindu, but work out some kind of prayer. It could be the Lord’s Prayer, but it could just as easily be a meditative chant or a passage from some book or poem you find particularly meaningful.

The importance here isn’t the specific content of whatever prayer you choose to give. It’s that you focus your mind on something with emotional and spiritual import to you before you embark on your hallucinogenic adventure. Your state of mind, and your surroundings at the time of dosing, can have a huge impact on your trip. Keeping that in mind, I chose this passage from Kurt Vonnegut’s God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater for my own prayer:

Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies—:

God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.

Once you’ve picked a prayer and pressed your mushroom juice, mix what you’ve got with a cup of milk and drink. In my research for this book I mixed up (and took) two preparations of soma myself, and gave another two to a pair of volunteers.

The Verdict?

Amanita muscaria may well have been soma. I tried two pressings myself: the first after letting the mushrooms soak in water for an hour before pressing, and the second after letting them soak for twenty-four hours.

My first trip was extremely mild—more of a light, buzzing body high than anything else. No active hallucinations, just a pleasant tingling all along my body and a sense of elation for around three hours. I went on a lovely walk around the neighborhood like a barefoot weirdo and found myself staring at trees and closing my eyes to let the wind wash over me way more often than a sober person would do.

It made for a nice afternoon, and I felt as though I sobered up around four hours after dosing.

My second trip was much more intense. Soaking the Amanita longer made for a vastly more potent soma. Within about forty-five minutes I felt extremely intoxicated. The experience was similar to that weird sorta-queasy, sorta-pleasant-and-tingly body high one gets during a psilocybin mushroom trip, but devoid of any hallucinations. It was fun, and I didn’t start to really come down for five or six hours.

Two days after my second test, two of my friends in Los Angeles volunteered to try out my soma. My friend Starline had only ever tried marijuana. My friend Josh had experimented with several psychedelics, including mushrooms. They both started feeling the effects after around an hour. Starline seemed to peak around two and a half hours in, and reported enjoying the body high very much.

(One interesting note: Star was raised in the Caribbean for her early childhood. She doesn’t have any kind of accent, normally. But during the trip she would periodically lapse back into her accent. It seemed to happen unconsciously, at the ends of words and with certain phrases.)

Josh didn’t get much out of the trip but a mild stomachache. He didn’t report any of the intoxication Starline and I experienced. That’s not unusual with any kind of hallucinogen, though. Different people can have very different experiences with the same dose of the same substance; hence why some people can smoke weed all day, every day and remain productive, while others just watch Family Guy and eat Doritos.

On the whole, my experience with this Amanita recipe seems entirely in line with what the Vedic hymns said about ancient soma. My second trip was extremely pleasant, and it felt almost as if I could feel pulsing waves of sensation tingling beneath my skin. At the peak of my trip, I didn’t “cry loud in exulting strains,” but I absolutely “felt the god beneath my veins.”

Science hasn’t always been science.

Thomas Jefferson, one of the Founding Fathers who contributed the most intellectual sperm to the fetus of our nascent country, considered himself a scientist—and not just a political scientist. In the year 1800 Jefferson listed in a letter the sciences that interested him:

Botany, chemistry, zoology, anatomy, surgery, medicine, natural philosophy, agriculture, mathematics, astronomy, geography, politics, commerce, history, ethics, laws, arts, fine arts.

A lot of those things are still “sciences” in our conception of the word. But you wouldn’t consider an expert on “ethics,” “law,” “arts,” or “fine arts” to be a scientist today. Modern scientists deal in beakers and algorithms and blackboards filled with complicated equations. We’ve narrowed the meaning of “science” down as we’ve gotten more and more advanced as a society. René Descartes didn’t even define the scientific method until 1637.

Yet for thousands of years before that point, humankind had steadily (sometimes unsteadily, often drunkenly) made advances in technology and its understanding of the natural world. There have been periods of significant backsliding, but long before we settled on the importance of viewing the world rationally, and testing our theories via experiment, smart people were trying to piece together the rules that govern our universe.

For a very long time, we called these people philosophers. Today “philosophy” is what you major in if you don’t particularly care what you do for a living. But back in, say, ancient Greece, philosophers were the folks who tried to puzzle out the laws of reality. And they had a little help from a drug called kykeon.

Kykeon was a special sort of drugged beverage administered at the end of the Eleusinian Mysteries in ancient Greece. Participants were threatened with death if they ever gave an exact accounting of the ceremonies, but we do know a few things: The rites came at the end of a nine-day fast in which the powerfully hallucinogenic kykeon was taken, and participants reportedly walked away convinced in the existence of life after death.

This wasn’t a super common belief at the time. It wasn’t until Plato wrote The Phaedo that the idea of an afterlife in which the good are rewarded and the evil punished really came into vogue. Plato was a regular attendee and enthusiast of the Eleusinian Mysteries. As I researched this book I read an article by Joshua Mark of Marist College, which quoted this bit from Plato’s Phaedo:

The founders of the mysteries had a real meaning and were not mere triflers when they intimated in a figure long ago that he who passes unsanctified and uninitiated into the world below will live in a slough, but that he who arrives there after initiation and purification will dwell with the gods.

The speaker of that line is Socrates, as written by Plato, basically claiming that being initiated into the mysteries was the polytheistic Greek equivalent of a baptism. Socrates is better known today as the “Father of Western Philosophy.” Aristotle, the Father of Science, was also an initiate of the rites and an experienced kykeon user. In Pagan Regeneration (1929) Harold Willoughby claims the tripping initiates “learned nothing precisely, but . . . they received impressions and were put into a certain frame of mind.”

In other words, the mysteries weren’t the kind of religious ritual in which adherents memorized elaborate lists of rules and dogmas. Kykeon trips were more of a “tripping too hard to use words” experience. And it left a profound impact on the Greek thinkers who first elucidated many of our modern concepts of science and philosophy.

So, what the hell was kykeon?

We know that three of the ingredients were wine, barley, and mint. Our friend Gordon Wasson, the mushroom man, wrote a book trying to track down the exact properties of kykeon. In The Road to Eleusis he and several other scholars argued that kykeon must have been some sort of psychedelic drug, likely introduced by ergot-infected grains in the wine.

In the long term, ergot poisoning can cause your limbs to rot off and die. In the short term, it can cause you to vomit and (for the ladies!) spontaneously miscarry babies. That’s thanks to the chemical ergotine. Another chemical in ergot is lysergic acid amide (LSA). If that name sounds familiar, it’s because LSA turns into lysergic diethyl acid with a few years’ experience in chemistry and the right equipment. It’s possible the Fathers of Science and Philosophy spent a goodly portion of their life tripping on primitive acid.

If you’re skeptical about the idea of an acid(ish) trip having a particularly significant impact on the birth of science, you should know that hallucinogens have a well-documented history of helping brilliant people become the “fathers” of whole disciplines. Francis Crick, a Nobel Prize winner known today as the Father of Modern Genetics, apparently first conceived of the double-helix structure of DNA while dropping acid to help focus his mental powers.

On a more concrete note, Kary Mullis, another Nobel Prize winner, credits LSD for his discovery of a very specific technology: the polymerase chain reaction (PCR). In (criminally) brief, the PCR is how we’re able to do things like match DNA with individual people. So the key ingredient in every CSI episode and much of our current justice system owes a huge debt to acid. Today, scientists also use the PCR to identify hereditary diseases in our genes. It’s opened the door to cloning human beings and, less dystopian-y, cloning human organs.

It’s likely that Crick’s team (or another team) would’ve eventually settled on the exact structure of DNA without the aid of an acid trip. But Mullis doesn’t think his discovery would’ve been possible without acid. In 1997, during a BBC documentary, he asked himself if he would ever have discovered the PCR without the help of Lucy and her Sky Diamonds:

I don’t know. I doubt it. I seriously doubt it.

At this point, some of you are probably chomping at the bit to try acid. And I can’t help you with that, because I really like not being in prison. But what about re-creating the ancient Greek answer to acid, kykeon? How feasible is that?

HOW TO: Trip Like a Greek Philosopher

As a general rule, if people have the opportunity to do a fun drug without starving themselves for nine days, they absolutely will. So it makes sense that the priests conducting the Eleusinian Mysteries wanted to keep the exact nature of what they were dosing folks with a secret. The closest we have to an ingredient list for kykeon comes from the “Hymn to Demeter,” one of the longest and oldest of the thirty-three surviving Homeric Hymns.

Not that Homer had anything to do with writing the “Hymn to Demeter,” or any of the other hymns. The old Greeks had a tendency to just attribute anything old, wise, and of unclear origin to Homer. It was the classical equivalent of crediting Alan Smithee as a film’s director, only done decades afterward and meant as a compliment.

The “Hymn to Demeter” dates back about as far as the seventh or eighth century BCE. The recipe to kykeon is given when Metaneira, an ancient queen and apparent bartender to the heavens, mixes a drink to calm the nerves of the goddess Demeter:

Then Metaneira offered her [Demeter] a cup, having filled it with honey-sweet wine.

But she refused, saying that it was divinely ordained that she not

drink red wine. Then she [Demeter] ordered her [Metaneira] to mix some barley and water

with delicate pennyroyal, and to give her [Demeter] that potion to drink.

So she [Metaneira] made the kukeôn and offered it to the goddess, just as she had ordered. (trans. Gregory Nagy)

In the hymn, Metaneira immediately follows that drink up with an offer to let Demeter (who’d just lost a kid) raise one of her own children instead. Demeter, tripping on kykeon, repays this kindness by lighting the child on fire in order to make it immortal. All of this further reinforces kykeon’s reputation as one hell of a drug.

Two things about that recipe stand out to me: the presence of pennyroyal, which sounds like the last name of a woman James Bond would sleep with, and the utter lack of wine. While Demeter seemed to prefer her kykeon sans alcohol, it was apparently an option for others. Heraclitus, one of the pre-Socratic philosophers, claimed kykeon was made of wine mixed with cheese, stirred constantly until being drunk.

“The kykeon,” he said, “falls apart if it is not being stirred.”

Neither of these recipes sounds wildly hallucinogenic (or appetizing) to our jaded, modern eyes. Wasson and his contemporaries suggest that the Eleusinian priests hid a key ingredient from their celebrants: ergot. The only arrow in that theory is that ergot poisoning is horribly unpleasant and sometimes fatal, while the Eleusinian Mysteries seemed to be a rip-roaring good time. Fortunately for the theory, it’s relatively simple to distill LSA from ergot using water and ash. Unfortunately for this book, testing that would be a federal crime.

Ergot is legal to possess, but LSA is illegal to synthesize, possess, or consume. So in lieu of committing a felony, I’d like to test an alternate hypothesis: What if kykeon was more about the starvation than the substance? Remember, the Eleusinian Mysteries were conducted at the end of a nine-day fast.

I can still remember the first meal I had at the end of my Indian dysentery adventure, after days without keeping any calories inside my body: I ate a huge bowl of macaroni and cheese with crumbled falafel inside it. It wasn’t cooked particularly well, and the cheese was fake, but that first bite I took of a spoonful of salt and fat was a revelation. Swallowing it was almost more than I could handle. The sheer rush of flavor was, quite literally, blinding.

Peter Webster deserves the first credit for the theory that kykeon trips might have been starvation induced. In his essay “Mixing the Kykeon” (2000), he relates the story of attending a religious retreat, somewhat inadvertently fasting for four days, and then receiving a psychedelically powerful burst of spiritual revelation with his first sip of coffee on an empty, starving stomach.

This gave me an idea: I would go on a long fast myself, walk to the top of a nearby mountain, and take a dose of both mixtures of kykeon. This would include:

Tea 1

Ingredients

2 tablespoons pennyroyal

1 cup water

1 ounce sprouted barley

Tea 2

Ingredients

1 cup wine (red or white)

1 ounce sprouted barley

2 grams goat cheese, shredded

A word to the wise (and recklessly dumb) on pennyroyal: In addition to being a delicious species of mint, pennyroyal can kill your ass when extremely concentrated. You’d need to actually eat concentrated pennyroyal oil, the equivalent of gallons of tea, in order to be at risk, but be warned: This shit is mildly toxic and not super great for your liver. I’m trying it so you don’t have to.

Method

We don’t have much information about the fast that preceded the mysteries. It may have been like the Muslim fasts at Ramadan, in which the adherents avoid all food and drink from sunup to sundown, or it may have been a total fast, in which zero calories were consumed. Greek Orthodox Christians can go as many as two hundred days a year on “fasts.” Across modern-day religions, the most commonly observed fast types are caloric restriction (eating less often), alternate-day fasting (feasting followed by zero or low-calorie days), and dietary restriction (going without meat, animal fasts, etc.).

A complete fast, wherein the celebrants go entirely without liquid or solid calories for days at a time, is extremely rare. It’s possible the nine-day fast of the Eleusinian Mysteries was based around caloric or dietary restriction—but it may have been a total fast. I decided to hedge my bets by doing a four-day total fast before testing my kykeons. Four days of zero calories shouldn’t be enough to cause permanent damage, but it is about as close to that point as I could safely get.

Going without anything but water and (as a treat!) decaf coffee for four days was the hardest thing I had to do in researching this book. The first two days were the worst; my temper was on a short fuse, and my guts felt like they were being aggressively kneaded by an angry giant. My muscles were sore all over, and I was, in general, poor company.

On day three I suffered less and started to feel the benefits of an extended fast. My sense of smell became much more acute. I could smell the fast food scent wafting from my roommate’s bedroom as if it were right next to me. When the family across the street from me started their Sunday barbecue, it was as if the cooking brisket was right underneath my nose. The pain stopped sometime around the third day.

I expected to feel weak the entire time, but it wasn’t like that! I would periodically get bursts of productive energy, as my body ate fat and muscle, followed by sudden crashes that felt almost like someone pulled the plug out from inside my gut. During the crashes, I’d find myself light-headed and slightly delirious. But on the whole my energy level increased as the experiment went on.

By the evening of the fourth day I could feel a constant, hollow gnawing in the pit of my stomach. But, somehow, I felt strong enough to hike. In ancient Greece, the kykeon was consumed at the end of a hike with the other celebrants. My modern-day answer was to hike to the top of a nearby mountain with some friends (who were not fasting) whom I could trust to carry me back to the car if I passed out. It was around a five-mile hike, straight uphill. I tried the first mixture, the pennyroyal and barley tea, two miles into it.

A few minutes after drinking the pennyroyal-barley kykeon, I indicated in my notes that I felt “radiating waves of warmth, and a rush of almost ticklish sensations spreading outwards from my heart.” It was not the overwhelming experience kykeon was reported to be, but it was significant. I’m not sure how much of that was the pennyroyal and how much was owed to the barley being the first solid food I’d had in days, but my body tingled all over for several minutes, and I felt a “definite sense of euphoria.”

The end of that five-mile hike found us on the peak of a small mountain overlooking the city of Los Angeles. I prepared the second kykeon by shaking up and pouring a mixture of wine and barley into my cup. I added an ounce of shredded goat cheese to the mix, stirred it up into a swirling mixture, and then gulped it down as quickly as I could. The phrase “wine and cheese slurry” doesn’t sound appetizing, but as starving as I was, it tasted awesome.

Here I am, savoring it.     Jeremy Connors

The wine was a red I normally find quite mild. But taken at the end of a fast, its flavor was almost uncomfortably intense. The sourness gave me a head rush that was a little bit like doing a whippet . . . but I wouldn’t describe it as hallucinogenic. Having tried both written kykeon recipes, I think it’s likely that neither is “complete.” I suspect the full recipe involves some sort of LSA synthesis.

But I wouldn’t want to discount the value of the fast in the whole experience. The most connected I felt to the Eleusinian Mysteries during my own re-creation wasn’t while drinking either potential kykeon. It came during the “feast” at the end of the four-day fast. The few descriptions we have of the mysteries emphasize the belief in a “paradisical” afterlife for the initiated.

After the hell that is a long, complete fast, eating was itself a kind of paradise. Even winelogged chèvre tasted delicious. And while drinking wine mixed with cheese and barley atop a mountain wasn’t exactly a religious experience, the first bite of hamburger I had after hiking five miles back to my car very nearly was.

Tobacco and marijuana are viewed in very different lights, even by the most open-minded substance users (and abusers). These drugs seem so different, in part because we have enough science to know that tobacco kills us and marijuana, generally, doesn’t. You might be surprised to learn that back before we knew about things like cancer and emphysema, tobacco was seen and used in ways similar to today’s marijuana. Read this quote from a bewildered European observing some of the native people of Hispaniola smoke for the first time in his life: “In order to produce a state of stupor, they imbibe the smoke until they become unconscious and lie sprawling on the ground like men in a drunken stupor.”

Now, that sounds like our friend Mary Jane, but the substance being described is tobacco. Not modern tobacco, grown in a vast field of its brothers and sisters and destined for a series of plastic-wrapped boxes, but tobacco nonetheless. So what gives?

If you’ve ever had a cigarette habit, you almost certainly didn’t smoke so you could pass out in a drunken stupor. Most heavy smokers light up first thing in the morning, to clear their head and wake them up. They smoke after lunch, before getting back to work. They smoke . . . pretty much all the damn time, but especially right before settling into a productive task.

So why does that old-timey tobacco sound so much more like pot? Well, for one thing, the tobacco most often used back then was Nicotiana rustica, “wild tobacco.” It tops out at around 9 percent nicotine, compared with 1 to 3 percent nicotine for the Nicotiana tabacum used to make your average pack of Marlboros or Camels or whatever. Modern tobacco is bred to grow fast, big, and without dying from all the pesticides sprayed on it. Today, we sacrifice fuck-you-up strength for the ability to produce enough cigarettes to make chain-smokers possible.

The furthest back scientists can prove people were using tobacco was around 700 CE, and the science behind that discovery is actually super cool. Archaeologists found a tiny bowl in some Mayan ruins, small enough to fit comfortably in your palm, with “the home of his/her tobacco” (roughly translated) written on the side. It’s sorta like how today, most head shops sell little airtight jars for potheads to store their weed. The owner of this little jar apparently used enough tobacco that, thirteen hundred years later, scientists from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and the University at Albany were able to run a chemical analysis and find actual tobacco residue in his or her stash bottle.

Don’t think of that tobacco jar as just more evidence of nicotine’s soul-reaping influence on human history. It’s entirely possible the owner didn’t even smoke. The ancient Mayan attitude toward tobaccy of the nonwhacky variety was similar to how certain state governments view marijuana today: It was medicine. The Tzotzil people of southern Mexico (modern descendants of the Aztecs) still consider tobacco the foundation of their traditional medicine.

Tobacco: The Duct Tape of Ancient Medicine

Tobacco has actually been used to treat disorders of the mind. Chuvaj, an “aggressive madness” probably better described as “being a violent asshole,” has a traditional Mayan cure that probably made a superior deterrent to prison time. They believed such bad behavior was caused by bol ch’ich, literally “stupid blood.” You treated a bad case of stupid blood first by slicing open the forehead to let some of it out. Presumably, the dumbest blood escaped first. Tobacco leaves would then be applied to the wound, where they’d hopefully help smarten up the rest of the blood.

Tobacco was truly the duct tape of ancient Mesoamerican medicine. Have a bug bite? Rub some powdered tobacco on that sucker. Stomach pains? Mash some tobacco with garlic and rub it on your belly. Farting too much? Some snuff will help with that! One common cure for constipation among the Zinacantan people and their Mayan ancestors is a concoction of tobacco leaf, garlic, and the recipient’s own urine. (Garlic came with Europeans to the New World, but it was quickly adopted by the Mayans.)

That last, horrifying treatment isn’t something I can just drop at the end of a paragraph and then move on from, not in a book like this. The second my research brought me to medicinal urine/tobacco/garlic drinks, I knew I would have to try one myself.

Step One was to be in a situation in which I could evaluate this drink’s merit as a medication. That meant inducing constipation, which is normally something we experience at inopportune times thanks to the cruel sphincter-throttling hands of Mother Nature and Father Time. I wasn’t about to wait for that, though, so I downed a huge dose of kratom and ate a dinner consisting entirely of various cheeses.

Kratom is an Indonesian plant that, when ground and brewed as a tea, feels almost identical to an opiate. Strangely enough it’s one of the most legal drugs on earth (you can even buy it in Japan, and you can’t buy nothin’ fun, legally, in Japan). It’s a wonderful thing to keep in your medicine kit when traveling. And, as with opium, taking a lot of kratom is a surefire way to block off your body’s exit ramp. Eating all that cheese only caused further congestion. It was a wonderful night. But then . . .

Step Two was waking up with a bowel full of regret. My plan had worked painfully well, and now if this ancient Mayan remedy proved to be as bullshit as the culture’s theories on the end of the world, I was in for an unpleasant day. I got right to the mixing.

HOW TO: Take a Urinebaccolic Shot

Ingredients

1 cigarette’s worth wild tobacco

2 cloves garlic

1 shot glass of your own pee (one shot glass being the traditional serving size of awful-tasting liquids)

Directions

I ground the tobacco and garlic into a fine, mushy paste with a coffee grinder, and dumped them into the urine.

(NOTE: Scientists still debate over exactly what is a reliably fatal dose of tobacco. Some research indicates two to three cigarettes’ worth, but there have been documented cases of people surviving much higher doses. Another estimate is 1,000 milligrams, or about fifty cigarettes. A young woman at a Peruvian nature retreat died in February 2015 after drinking a tobacco tea. Maybe don’t try this one yourself.)

I stirred, although that proved unnecessary—the garlic sank and the tobacco mostly stuck to the top. Now there was nothing to do but drink this unholy concoction.

The pee was actually the best part. And I don’t say that because I enjoyed it. I say that because, when mixed together, tobacco and garlic form a taste wholly unique in the annals of things that taste like anus. It was like shooting a warm, liquid Slim Jim. My throat burned, and I could feel the gooey tobacco strands as they slithered down my esophagus. They felt like the snakes of hell devouring my very soul.

Results

It worked! After about twenty minutes my constipation was gone, and for the next hour my body purged everything it could, as fast as it could. I vomited three times, likely thanks to mild tobacco poisoning. I personally think the garlic deserves just as much blame.

Final Verdict

The Mayans were spot-on with their constipation cures. If you ever need to poop, and don’t care about anything else but making yourself regular again, this will do the trick. Personally, I’d stick with constipation.

Tobacco’s Strange Evolution

Christopher Columbus and his merry band of walking chemical weapons were the first Europeans to encounter tobacco. They brought it back to Europe, and it was far from an instant hit. The earliest Spanish colonizers seemed thoroughly disgusted by the whole habit. Waking up every morning with the booze shits was a fine Christian tradition. But smoking? That idea obviously came straight from the devil.

In the modern world there are basically three ways you’ll see people consuming tobacco: They smoke it, chew it, or vaporize it. The Mayans weren’t so limited. They had:

1. Jaxbil (“rubbed on body”): generally in powdered form. This was seen as an excellent way to ward off snakes and demons, which are functionally the same thing when you’ve yet to invent ambulances or emergency rooms;

2. Lo’bil (“eaten”): just straight-up chewed and swallowed. I don’t recommend this for real stomach pain . . . or for flavor;

3. Atinbil (“bathed in”): because the Mayans believed bathing in tobacco made you glow with a light that frightens off evil spirits/the devil. If this really worked, I can guarantee tobacco would be a lot more popular at raves;

4. Uch’bil (“drank”): in a tea or with alcohol;

5. Tub’tabil (“sprayed from the mouth” or “spit out”): My favorite, this is clearly the same thing as modern snuff, although I like to imagine that just spraying sodden tobacco powder in the faces of all and sundry was the norm back then; and

6. Pak’bil (“applied as bandage”): particularly for snakebites.

As more and more Europeans came to the New World, tobacco started to pick up a following. It spread through parlors and bars and quickly became a fashionable habit for any gentleman to acquire. Unlike the Mayans, Europe’s first nicotine addicts stuck almost exclusively to smoking the substance via pipes. Even their tobacco-based medicine focused on smoke. Have an earache and happen to be in fifteenth-century England? Your treatment might be an earful of tobacco smoke.

The War on Tobacco

Five hundred years ago, tobacco was far more respected by mainstream Western medicine than marijuana is even today. But that respect wasn’t universal, and, at one point, tobacco even went through its own War on Drugs era of persecution.

Many early Spanish colonists to the New World considered tobacco unChristian, partly because anything that made a person breathe smoke was surely the work of Satan, and partly because of racism. In 1604 King James I of England issued A Counterblaste to Tobacco, outlining all the reasons he hated his country’s latest addiction. Many of them boiled down to “Indians smoke and they’re gross!”

And now good Countrey men let us (I pray you) consider, what honour or policie can moove us to imitate the barbarous and beastly maners of the wilde, godlesse, and slavish Indians, especially in so vile and stinking a custome?

But while King James didn’t go on to ban tobacco, other monarchs weren’t as understanding. For example:

Murad IV: Fought Smoking by Decapitating Smokers

Behold Amurath IV (Murad IV to his friends), ruler of Persia from 1623 to 1640. A.k.a. this guy:

As you might have picked up from the fact that he’s clearly about to whip out a sword and stab the guy who’s painting his portrait, Murad was not a friendly dude. He’d heard rumors that tobacco was an antiphrodisiac and might be putting the Persian people off their sex. This would mean fewer taxpaying citizens, fewer soldiers, and fewer portrait artists to replace the ones he murdered. He also hated smoke of any kind, thanks to a botched fireworks display that burned down half his capital during a birthday party. Rather than institute some sort of royal “Keep Fucking” campaign or regulate fireworks a little better, he banned tobacco.

Murad instituted harsh penalties for anyone caught with so much as a spliff (the weed in that spliff would’ve been perfectly legal, by the way—and yes, people did smoke weed back then). If the Janissaries found a hookah or a pouch of snuff in your house they would drag you out into the street and strangle you to death. It’s horrifying, but horrifying laws were also the only laws back then. What made Murad so noteworthy was his dedication to going the extra murderous mile.

You know how today, cops in America will sometimes pose as addicts to try and catch drug dealers? Well, Murad IV pioneered narcotics-based entrapment. He wandered the streets of Constantinople at night, begging for a smoke from anyone who might be holding. When some kind smoker offered the king a hit, Murad would have the man beheaded. According to the king’s records, more than twenty-five thousand “suspected smokers” were put to death during just fourteen years.

It didn’t always work out for Murad. At least one of his victims got away, according to Moses Edrehi’s fascinating History of the Capital of Asia and the Turks (1855). A possibly apocryphal story exists that once, Murad happened on one of his soldiers enjoying a smoke on a lonely night. The sultan approached, pretending to be a random beggar in need of nicotine, and cautiously asked the soldier why he was willing to risk breaking the law for his habit. The soldier’s alleged reply is pretty wonderful:

“If the Sultan neglects to pay his soldiers, or to furnish them with more substantial food, they must needs sustain themselves by other means”—and he then went on to offer his liege a hit.

Murad took the hit, and then tried to entrap the soldier into revealing some of his tobacco-smoking buddies. This nameless trooper’s narc sense started tingling just then, and he beat Murad within an inch of his life with a cudgel. Since Murad owned the whole army, he was technically wailed on with his own property. The sultan was obviously pissed about this, but as far as the story goes that nameless soldier escaped into obscurity. Good for him.

Persia and Murad weren’t alone in their persecution of tobacco. The Japanese banned it on five separate occasions, the last time in 1616. While they didn’t decapitate suspected smokers, being caught with tobacco did come with a fine, and the government taking literally everything you owned. So . . . really, the fine was just a formality.

The Chinese banned tobacco in 1640, and also punished smokers via cutting their damn heads off. Looking at the global attitudes toward tobacco at the time, we might find it kind of surprising King James didn’t use his powers to ban the plant he hated so deeply. Keeping it legal paid off in the end, though. Two years after writing the Counterblaste, King James granted the Virginia Company of London a charter. By 1640 the colony was exporting 1.5 million pounds of tobacco a year.

Tobacco quickly spread to other colonies, and nothing grown in the Americas in the 1600s was even close to as valuable. Five hundred years later the same would be true of marijuana. (Seriously—corn is worth around $30 billion a year in the United States. The marijuana market might be worth more than $100 billion.) But let’s go back, for a moment, to tobacco as its first users would have known it . . .

HOW TO: Re-create the Ancient Nose Pipes of Central America

Today, almost any head shop in the world will have some form of gas mask/bong for the adventurous smokers in the neighborhood. The natives of Hispaniola didn’t have gas masks per se, but they built a pipe that worked the same basic way—shooting smoke right up their noses rather than waiting for it to take its sweet-ass time being absorbed through the lungs. Here’s a description from Governor Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, a noted wet blanket probably later reincarnated as a high school principal:

Their chiefs employ a tube shaped like a Y, filled with the lighted weed, inserting the forked extremities into their nostrils. . . . In this way they imbibe the smoke until they become unconscious and lie sprawling on the ground like men in a drunken slumber.

I know from hard-won experience that taking your weed through a gas mask is a much harsher and much more intoxicating experience than slowly puffing a pipe. I wanted to know if these bizarre Native American nose pipes (called tabacos) worked the same way. I’d been able to find one drawing of the device:

Tavia Morra

A little research made it obvious how something like the tabaco might hit harder than a cigarette. Nicotine is absorbed by your mucous membranes, and nothing says mucus like the inside of a nose. There was only one way to know for sure, though. I’d have to design my own tabaco and try it out.

My plan hit an immediate roadblock: I am an incompetent craftsman. Fortunately my fiancée, Magenta, was a small-scale medical marijuana farmer. She pointed out that the stems of pot plants look an awful lot like that drawing, if sliced properly.

I opted to go with the closest thing to natural tobacco that I could find in Los Angeles: American Spirit cigarettes. It seemed somehow safer, too, to snort “additive-free” tobacco than whatever comes in a Marlboro red. I stuffed the end of each nose pipe with a wee bullet. It was time to huff tobacco through marijuana stems directly into my sinuses. Nicotine has never been a friend—I tend to hate it, actually. But for the sake of Lady Science and you, dear reader, I sacrificed my nasal security.

You’re Welcome.

My first huff was less than successful. I had the pipe in my nose, sure, but there was still airflow open around either spout inside my nasal cavity. I shoved it farther back, resisting the urge to sneeze as my sinuses stockpiled snot like they were waging some sort of cold war on my general comfort with the world. Finally I hit the sweet spot, and smoke flowed.

It wasn’t a pleasant experience, but seconds after my first hit came the sort of head rush normally reserved for a long hookah session, or pulling much too deeply from a cigar. I leaned back in the chair, not exactly “in a drunken stupor” but pretty mellow.

The head rush was nice, but not nearly “pass out” intense. Squeezing the bridge of the nose made for a stronger hit, if you didn’t mind spraying the contents of your nose across your face occasionally. The constant coughing and hacking really increased oxygen intake, which added to the high. On the whole, though, my first nose-pipe experience was terribly unpleasant and not much more intense than puffing vigorously on a hookah.

Señor Oviedo’s writing didn’t make it clear if those natives had been packing a bowl, or packing the whole stem like an unusually rigid blunt. The latter would mean smoking much more tobacco, and thus a stronger high. The pipes I’d made wouldn’t be easy to stuff. The openings were narrow and I’d had to carve a bowl in the end of each to make them usable. But one nose pipe had a deep enough bowl that, if you cut off the filter, you could wedge a cigarette in the end. I did, and Quetzalcoatl help me, I smoked it.

Digression: Years ago I threw a can of spray paint into a campfire for several complex reasons, chief among them “wanting to see what happened.” It exploded. The smoke that came out of that blast stuck in my nose and mouth for days, flavoring every meal with a tinge of the various cancers I’m sure I’d sucked down. That’s the closest thing in my memory to snorting an endless cone of nose tobacco. For eight minutes I huffed, kneeling down about three minutes in when I realized the head rush and dizziness made standing an untenable proposition.

I sniffed it down to the stem. After eight long minutes I was the highest I’ve ever been on pure tobacco. I felt a little like passing out in a drunken stupor, but more like taking a hot shower and coughing up all the poison I’d just ingested into my sinuses.

I wanted that to be the end. But as I mentioned earlier in this chapter, wild tobacco is a very different beast from its modern, tamed descendant. If I wanted the true nose-pipe experience, I was going to have to use the right tobacco. It turns out several companies sell Nicotiana rustica for the enjoyment of Native Americans and drug nerds alike. I ordered some.

The tobacco came in several-feet-long coils, and it smelled like all the best cigars in the world had convened a conference and voted on the ideal odor of tobacco. I ground it up into a fine powder and rolled two cigarettes. (One for a friend, who couldn’t quite finish it.)

My eyes watered, my nose and throat burned, and by the time I was done I could barely stand. To say I was light-headed would be a vast understatement. It felt like someone had pulled the core out of my body, and left me a hollow and weightless shell in its place. I was nicotine drunk—there was no other word for it.

Modern tobacco is one of the most thoroughly modified and comprehensively marketed plants in the world. A cigarette is an almost sterile thing, sold in a clean, sealed package in a uniform dose. The tobacco that won our ancestors’ hearts was wild and unpredictable, and less prone to abuse. The cigarette is one case in which understanding and control has made a substance much more dangerous. It’s also a striking example of the impact culture can have on the very nature of a drug.

I’d like to make the end of this chapter my official breakup letter with tobacco. I’ll never see another cigarette without thinking about the way those strands of tobacco and pee slithered down my throat. And if that mental image helps break just one person’s habit, my suffering was all worthwhile.

We don’t give culture enough credit when we talk about how drugs affect human beings. Culture doesn’t seem like it should matter much. We’re talking about chemicals and brains here. Where those brains grew up shouldn’t make a difference in how a hit of acid affects them.

But it does. It matters so much.

Remember the tobacco in the last chapter that was so very strong that young native tribesmen passed out like drunken sailors after a few solid nose pulls? Maybe there was something more to that reaction than just the stronger tobacco of yore and the twisted genius of the nose pipe. To the people of Central and South America, tobacco was equally capable of warding off bugs and holding back demons. It was smoked most often in rituals, as part of religious rites.

Tobacco was sacred. And people are a little less likely to abuse something sacred. The phrase “drug culture” is often used as a negative term—even if you’re in favor of the responsible use of illegal intoxicants, you probably don’t support the people who glamorize smoking weed, dropping tabs at the club, taking scrotal huffs, whatever it is the kids do these days. At the least, modern drug culture leads to jobs for the talentless shills who design the marijuana leaf flags, shirts, and bumper stickers that infest head shops from Barcelona to Bombay.

But drug culture, historically, hasn’t been about reckless consumption. It’s been about control—and enforced moderation. When you make something sacred as part of a ritual, you de facto limit its use. Tobacco for the ancient Mayans wasn’t something to fill the empty minutes of the day, it was a way of communing with . . . whatever old god favored the nose pipe. (I’m picturing Joe Camel here.) Across history, religious rituals have existed in part to curb and control the impact of various drugs on society. Drug culture may be exactly what we need to fight drug addiction.

During my research I came across a paper published in 1977 by Wayne Harding and Norman E. Zinberg, a pair of researchers from Cambridge and Harvard. You can dig it up yourself by Googling its not-at-all-cumbersome name, “The Effectiveness of the Subculture in Developing Rituals and Social Sanctions for Controlled Drug Use.” In brief, the study covered 105 “controlled” drug users. These were people who held down jobs, had active social lives, etc., while still using marijuana, opium, or psychedelics on a semiregular basis. The researchers found that one thing all these controlled users had in common was that they’d developed a set of rituals and even a sort of “mythology” around their drug(s) of choice based on things they’d learned and discussed with other users.

A great deal of marijuana’s mythology has to do with how relatively healthy it is for the user. As a result, smoking all day, every day is portrayed positively (or at least, not negatively) in a huge amount of popular culture. And the more marijuana’s benign nature is emphasized, the more often people start smoking. That’s the trend we’ve seen in Colorado’s first year of legal weed, at least.

Mythology isn’t the only cultural factor that can affect consumption. Ritual has a huge role in how we consume intoxicating substances. Anywhere you find people passing around a joint you’ll find a specific convention for how many puffs each person should take before passing it. In the United States, it’s puff-puff-pass. In the United Kingdom, they take three puffs, but they also more frequently mix their marijuana with tobacco than users in the States. In India, I was told I should take as many hits as possible from any joint handed to me, because there was no chance it’d ever come back to me again.

Clearly, both ritual and myth can have a huge impact on a drug user’s pace of consumption. The researchers behind that Cambridge study on drug subcultures came to the same conclusion scientifically:

Virtually all subjects . . . required the assistance of other users to construct appropriate rituals and social sanctions out of the folklore and practices of the diverse subculture of drug takers.

Today, at the ass end of the War on Drugs, your safety and enjoyment of an illegal drug relies heavily on the people who introduce you to that drug. You might be ushered into your first mushroom experience by some kindly, well-informed drug nerds in a safe, controlled setting. Or you might take a palmful of mystery powder at a rave from a dude named Shadow. Either way, you probably didn’t go to your mom and dad for advice on how to structure your first acid trip, or to learn how to roll a joint.

Many of our ancestors viewed getting high, or even face-melting Grateful Dead–class drug trips, as a communal activity and a rite of passage. If you were, say, an ancient Scythian, your dad was more likely to teach you how to get stoned than ground you for coming home with bloodshot eyes and a whiff of skunk about you. Although if you were getting high at all, it probably meant someone you loved had just died.

Communal Intoxication; or, Why the First Bong Was a Tent

Marijuana is firm property of the counterculture today. It’s been illegal longer than (probably) everyone reading this has been alive. A good number of you either:

1. know someone who was arrested for possession of the Devil’s Lettuce;

2. were arrested for pot yourself at some point; or

3. are actively reading this from a prison library.

If you’re in that third group, I’d like to assure you that Plume uses only the highest-grade papers and yes, if you soak several dozen of these pages in water and let them dry together, you can sharpen the resulting mass into a fairly serviceable shank. Anyway.

Pot’s still technically an illicit substance in the United States, but it’s closer to being licit than ever. I wrote much of this book from Los Angeles, and by the time I left, there were a dozen legal dispensaries who would deliver weed to my door within an hour. We’re on the verge of a strange new era in American culture, one in which pot won’t be a symbol of resistance to authority or damning the Man, but something you can grab at the 7-Eleven on a Friday night along with your six-pack and Cheetos.

America is at an awkward point where millions of people are suddenly able to buy all the incredibly strong weed they want but, unlike with alcohol, no authority makes it its job to teach young people how to use pot responsibly. Thankfully, weed’s weed. Compared with alcohol or . . . basically every other intoxicant on the planet, it’s extremely unlikely to cause long-term harm. But some people do succeed in hurting themselves with pot: The United Nations reported a 59 percent increase in US marijuana-related hospital visits between 2006 and 2010.

I’m not trying to make pot out to be the bad guy here, hell-bent on putting America’s children in an early grave flecked with Doritos crumbs. But many weed advocates have spent the better part of a century defending their drug of choice from people who unfairly demonize it. Marijuana advocates overcorrected by pushing the drug’s safety. Pot is super safe compared with every other way people can get high. But that doesn’t mean wake-and-bake behavior is healthy, or that taking far too much pot can’t harm you.

The culture of excess surrounding pot is only going to grow as legality spreads. It’s a problem that would never have existed if weed hadn’t been banned in the first place. While marijuana has a long, long history of human use, the rituals surrounding it kept problematic use to a minimum. In fact, if you were an ancient Scythian it was impossible to get high without having your whole family present.

Marijuana in Western history goes back only as far as Herodotus. He was the first European to write about the use of cannabis, among a group of Eurasian horse warriors known as the Scythians.

What with the difficulties of carrying large amounts of water on horseback, and the general prevalence of desert in their part of the world, the Scythians never developed a habit of washing themselves with water. They preferred to handle their basic hygiene tasks by rubbing a muddy mixture of ground incense and wood all over their bodies. That served on a daily basis, but for funerals a more thorough purification ritual was called for. Here’s how Herodotus described it:

The Scythians put the Seeds of this hemp under the bags, upon the burning stones; and immediately a more agreeable vapor is emitted than from the incense burnt in Greece. The Company extremely transported with the scent, howl aloud; and this Manner of purification serves instead of washing.

Now, two things jump out about that. The first is that “bathing” in smoke doesn’t seem like it would clean you in any way. And the second is that Herodotus claims they burned hemp seeds, which will get you high about as successfully as smoking coffee grounds. But I’ve seen wild-growing marijuana, and it’s a pretty seedy plant. It’s likely the Scythians just piled the whole plant, seeds, stems, and all, onto the fire. The hemp smoke was specifically said to “transport” people and make them “howl aloud.” We’re talking about people who are getting screaming stoned, here.

And just what would “smoking” that way feel like?

HOW TO: Get Stoned Like a Scythian

Herodotus left pretty simple instructions: Get some stones a’burning, set hemp in a burning bag, and inhale the resulting vapors. That didn’t seem too hard.

Ingredients

1 ounce marijuana shake

½ to 1 ounce marijuana stems, leaves, etc.

1 unbleached, undyed paper bag

1 cast-iron skillet

Enough large stones to cover the bottom of a cast-iron skillet

1 tent

Directions

This was a pretty straightforward experiment. My fiancée, Magenta, and I picked a yurt-style tent, because that seemed fitting for nomadic horse warriors. Our particular tent was SoulPad brand, but really anything large enough to house a group of people and not made out of artificial, melt-y fibers ought to work.

Once you’ve set up the tent, the next step is to get a fire going. I wanted the smoke to be as “pure” as possible, so I used a cast-iron skillet. The marijuana stems and leaves, discarded after the harvest, were loaded into an unbleached paper bag. The idea was that the bag would act as kindling, heating up the stones in the skillet and ensuring a fast, efficient burn for the marijuana itself.

We waited for several minutes. I tried this out with a group of five. Four of us were users of varying regularity, and one person in the group (Magenta, who actually grew the weed) didn’t smoke often. It wasn’t enough for a statistically significant sample of the population, but it was about the maximum number of people we could comfortably fit in the tent.

The bag started to smoke at once. Smoke slowly filled the tent. We kept the entrance wide open at this point, so we wouldn’t asphyxiate ourselves, but that couldn’t stop the top of the tent from filling with the stormcloud swirl. There was some coughing, but no intoxication yet. Not surprising, considering the stems and leaves hold very little THC.

Will Meier

It took a couple of minutes (and a few more handfuls of castaway pot parts) before the rocks really heated up. When everything looked ready, I took out my bag of “shake,” the marijuana crumbles that fall off the buds during the drying and trimming process. The resultant powder is generally turned into hash or prerolled joints by weed dispensaries. It doesn’t fetch a high market price, but it can actually wind up quite a bit stronger than the buds most people buy.

Critically, shake is a powder. That means it can be sprinkled, like incense, onto a fire, and it’ll burn much faster than a bunch of pot branches will. I dumped about a half ounce of the shake on at first, and the tent instantly filled with much more fragrant smoke. We closed the tent door, leaving but a sliver and the bottom sides open. It provided enough airflow that we didn’t suffocate, but also ensured that pot smoke would cover us all. After a minute or so, I couldn’t see my friends on the other side of the tent, three or four feet away.

Will Meier

There was so, so much coughing. I can’t overemphasize that; it was like gargling the ground-up shards of an expired dorm room air filter. We stayed in there a good twenty minutes, until the whole ounce of pot had turned to smoke and we couldn’t bear to punish our lungs any longer. We staggered out of the tent, one by one, and sat by it as smoke billowed out into the winter sky.

I’ve got a medical permit, and I’ve been using weed to treat my various, uh, ailments for years now. I felt moderately high, as if I’d taken on a fat joint by myself. The other daily smokers I’d brought along were all “super” high. Magenta, who had the lowest tolerance of us all, reported being “very high.” She reported this about a dozen more times over the course of the next hour, I think because she kept forgetting she’d informed me in the first place.

The ancient Scythians knew what they were doing. Their pot wouldn’t have been as strong, but they would’ve had a much lower tolerance. And most significantly, they would’ve been consuming it during the emotional climax of a loved one’s funeral, surrounded by their wailing families.

The Birth of Brainwashing

Hallucinogens, even mild ones like pot, have a reputation within the counterculture for freeing the mind, opening the doors of perception to new ideas and new ways of thinking. This is a distinctly new way of looking at psychedelic drugs. As we learned in our exploration of Scythian funeral rites, marijuana was a tool of social order and cohesion thousands of years before it was a way to stick a thumb in the Man’s eye.

One of the earliest stories of brainwashing in history actually involves marijuana. Hassan-i Sabbah, a twelfth-century Muslim religious leader/warlord, supposedly gained the everlasting loyalty of his vaunted “Assassins” by dosing young recruits with hashish until they passed out. According to legend, those young men would wake up, still stoned, in a “paradise” secretly built by Hassan in his fortress of Alamut. Paradise contained everything a young man could desire: scantily clad women, piles of decadent food, probably hot tubs—all the best things in life.

After a few days of bliss, the young men would wake up back in the shitty real world of the twelfth century and be informed that the only thing standing between them and a return to paradise was one measly little death in the name of their leader. It’s a famous story, but the fact that it was first told by known bullshitter Marco Polo a century after Hassan’s death means “fun story” is probably all it is.

But there is a real historical example of powerful hallucinogens being used to rob people of their free will. The original “zombies” were men and women drugged by voodoo witch doctors in eighteenth-century Haiti. There are centuries’ worth of myths and rumors as to exactly how the witch doctors accomplished this, but the chemical culprit was supposedly a white powder (coupe poudre) that dropped the victim into a deathlike sleep. After burial, the witch doctor would dig up his victim and—if he had survived the poisoning—the coupe poudre would have wiped out his free will and turned him into a mindlessly obedient automaton.

It’s a ridiculous story, just like the idea of Hassan-i Sabbah’s hash-mad assassins. But these voodoo zombies have a basis in hard science. During the 1980s, an anthropologist named Wade Davis analyzed the coupe poudre used by sorcerers to carry out their zombifications. Its active ingredients included bufotenin and tetrodotoxin. The first is a powerful hallucinogen, excreted by the Bufo toad. When you read about people “licking toads” to get high, bufotenin is what they’re tripping on. The second key ingredient to zombie powder, tetrodotoxin, is a chemical found in the deadly puffer fish.

In low doses, tetrodotoxin provokes a coma and significantly reduces the victim’s heart rate, making him or her look just corpse-y enough to bury. Once the zombie-to-be is dug up several days later, likely dehydrated, starving, and still tripping from toad drugs, the voodoo sorcerer starts piling on more drugs. These additional drugs usually include datura, a.k.a. Jimson weed. It’s a leafy green plant you can smoke or brew into a tea for a delirious trip. You can, but you absolutely should not, because datura’s high is often nightmarishly unpleasant and can cause seizures or even death if the dosing is too high.

Datura works well for zombification because it includes a lovely nightmare chemical called scopolamine. Today, scopolamine is used in tiny doses as air sickness medication. But in higher doses it’s basically the great granddaddy of all date-rape drugs. Scopolamine puts the pause button on a brain’s ability to form memories. It’s reportedly still used to drug travelers in Colombia today. Browse around a little online and you’ll read tales of foreign businessmen drugged by prostitutes and chemically convinced to empty their bank accounts, etc. The US State Department’s website even warns tourists about its use. If you’re ever offered burunga in a Colombian hostel, say no.

In the West hallucinogens have a decades-long reputation for freeing minds, but they really are just as adept at controlling—and breaking—them.

Psychochemical Warfare; or, How the Man Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Illegal Drugs

“Psychochemical warfare” is a stupidly awesome name for using chemicals to incapacitate or otherwise gain advantage over a military foe. Hannibal Barca (the guy who marched elephants up through the Alps and into Italy because he wanted to more efficiently shit on the Roman Empire) might have been the first general to make use of this strategy. While fighting in Africa against some local rebels, he hit on the brilliant idea to dose their wine with belladonna, a nasty plant that raises body temperature, causing sweating, dehydration, and, in high doses, blindness.

It worked: He won.

Convincing whole armies to drink poisoned wine is kind of a pain in the ass, though, and “drugging the enemy” has never been a favored tactic among the generals of history. It’s been a big hit, however, with spies and the people tasked with breaking them. Torture, as horrified scientists keep trying to tell the CIA, doesn’t do a great job of extracting information. That’s why the interrogator’s holy grail isn’t some sort of barbed whip, it’s a drug that would render lying impossible. A truth serum.

Our friend scopolamine was actually the first science-endorsed truth serum. An obstetrician and, I have to assume, total asshole named Robert House went to the Dallas police in 1922 and told them he had a chemical method for forcing suspects to tell the truth. He had some scientific backing behind this: Scopolamine was used to ease pregnant women into a calm childbirth, and doctors who wrote about the drug noted that patients seemed weirdly willing to give honest answers to extremely personal questions under its influence.

The Dallas police tried it out on two presumed-guilty suspects in their local jail who, under oath and a shitload of scopolamine, maintained their innocence. A trial later proved both men innocent, and so Dr. House decided his truth serum worked. Scopolamine went on to enjoy many years of terrifying use among police departments until it was decided the “horrifying hallucinations” it caused probably fell under the category of “cruel and unusual punishment.”

Scopolamine remained popular elsewhere in the world, but it was far from the last word in fighting the power of lies with the power of narcotics. The Nazis thought that mescaline might make a perfect truth serum, and they tested it on inmates in what was either the worst or the, uh . . . least worst concentration camp in their evil empire. In 1947, the US Navy tried to see if maybe the Nazis had been on to something and decided that . . . nope, they absolutely were not. Mescaline was a shitty truth serum. Having taken mescaline, I can assure you it doesn’t compel truth-telling behavior, but it might compel you to dance around in the woods for five hours.

During World War II, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS, the precursor to the CIA) tried out marijuana as a truth serum. (It didn’t work.) Pot was used by the OSS more successfully in their fight against the mob: An agent named George White reportedly used it to gain the trust of a prominent mobster and then get the stoned man to reveal operational secrets.

This was all nothing compared with the madness that came during the Cold War. For a variety of confusing reasons, the CIA grew utterly convinced that its Russian opposite was just on the cusp of weaponizing LSD. The fears ranged from somewhat credible (“they might use it to interrogate our guys!”) to the bear-punchingly insane (“they’re going to dose the whole country’s water before they invade us!”). Just like that, the United States found itself lagging behind in an Acid War.

That lag didn’t last long. The CIA took to LSD like a nineteen-year-old raver kid takes to, well, LSD. In April 1953, the MKULTRA project was launched. (The name MKULTRA is a reference to the group within the CIA that sponsored it, and its classification level.) It involved more than a hundred different experiments, but they almost all boiled down to the same thing: drugging unsuspecting people with acid to see what happened. We’ll never know how many hundreds of people were drugged (CIA employees took to dosing each other as a prank), but at least one person died as a result of the tests. Acid was never successfully weaponized, as far as we know. But, oddly enough, that’s not true of marijuana.

Let Slip the Stoners of War

I started this chapter by talking about the massive influence one’s culture has on the way one does drugs. Nowhere is this clearer than looking at the way marijuana is used today in Western culture, and the way it’s been used for thousands of years in Indian culture. Today you’ll find hemp leaves and peace signs flashing at you on dozens of products at your local head shop/hippy boutique. That’s because marijuana really started to come into prominence in American culture during the sixties and seventies, right alongside the first mass antiwar movements.

Weed has a different history in India.

It’s endorsed by the gods, for one thing. A preparation of boiled marijuana and milk called bhang is beloved by Shiva, and is said to cause both religious ecstasy and an inability to feel fear. The former explains why bhang is so popular on Hindu holy days, like Krishna’s birthday and Holi. The latter explains why it was commonly used by centuries’ worth of Hindu warriors before battle.

Alcohol is forbidden in many Indian cities even today, so generations of Indian soldiers had nothing but bhang to give them a little chemical courage as they went off to risk their lives in combat. The founder of the Sikh religion, Guru Gobind Singh, is even said to have issued bhang to warriors fighting on his behalf.

The legend, which I found in an 1893 report by the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission (a British-issued survey of cannabis use in India) states that the guru was busy fighting a war against several rajas in the northern Indian hills. His opponents trained an elephant in swordfighting, and sent it to batter down the gates of his fortress and assassinate him. Gobind Singh’s answer to this elephantine assassin was to drug one of his followers with opium and bhang, and send the now fearlessly doped warrior off to defend him. It worked, and marijuana got its first official endorsement by a military leader. His words have come down to us in the Suraj Parkash, an ancient biography of several Sikh gurus:

Give me a cup . . . of bhang, as it is required by me at the time of battle.

Bhang wasn’t just the preferred performance enhancer of Indian soldiery, though. It’s been a popular choice for hallucinogen-enhanced religious worship in India across the ages. Rather than being the handshake of the counterculture, as it’s often been in the United States, weed has lived most of its life in India with the full-throated endorsement of the government, and the clergy. Even when the rest of the world started clamping down on marijuana throughout the twentieth century, Indian government shops continued to sell bhang, and Hindu worshippers of all ages continued to take it during state-sanctioned religious ceremonies. The most well known of these is probably Holi, a spring holiday celebrated via throwing dyes and water at each other and getting unbelievably stoned on marijuana-and-yogurt fruit shakes, called bhang lassis.

HOW TO: Mix the Indian Soldier’s Favorite Edible

In America, edible marijuana holds two places: It’s the most efficient way to administer marijuana for legitimate medical uses, and it’s also the easiest way for careless stoners to get way, way too high. You can find smokers of marijuana in India, but the use of the drug in that manner is primarily limited to sadhus, who huff their weed in rapid, hyperventilate-y breaths through a horn-shaped pipe called a chillum.

Wikipedia defines a sadhu as “a religious ascetic, or holy person.” That’s accurate enough, but if you spend any time in India, especially in the holy cities of Varanasi or Rishikesh, you know they’re basically the equivalent of that guy shouting Bible verses through a megaphone on your college campus . . . only in packs of dozens, or hundreds. Sadhus live wild, shower-less lives on the road, and as a result many of them sport unbelievable beards and ass-length dreadlocks. Some of them are diligent religious devotees; others will try to sell you hash if you make eye contact for more than three seconds. Both of those groups enjoy smoking weed via chillum, and the law tends to turn a blind eye.

Use of marijuana by the masses, however, is pretty much limited to bhang. Recent years have seen it restricted across more and more of India, but you can still find bhang lassis (an intoxicating yogurt shake) being distributed by many temples during Krishna’s birthday. And if you visit the northern desert state of Rajasthan, most restaurants and hotels will know how to mix up a kick-ass batch of bhang.

I fell in love with bhang lassis during my months in northern India. They are perilously strong, despite the generally crappy quality of the smokeable marijuana you can buy off the streets there. I was in the city of Pushkar, Rajasthan, during Holi in 2013, and the local restaurateurs made a point to mix up huge vats of bhang lassi to hand out for free to the celebrants, local and foreign, so they could throw paint at each other and dance in huge, sweaty, multicolored crowds.

Before we get much into this, I feel like I owe you all a more detailed explanation of what goes down when an entire city’s worth of people ingests an incredibly high dose of marijuana at once. Holi is a goddamn madhouse. Everyone, every building, everything, including the stray dogs, is covered in colored dyes, thrown either in powder form, via water balloons, or squirted from bottles filled with dyed water. In smaller cities like Pushkar, basically every male, from kids to adults, takes the bhang.

They throw paint, dance, and rip clothing off each other and off confused tourists. They light great bonfires at night. Things get a little out of hand: The dance parties involved a lot of unwanted groping for some of the women I traveled with, and the clothes ripping got more violent than festive at some points. Holi isn’t just a holiday; it’s a social safety valve, allowing residents to blow off steam via inebriated escapades in a manner normally proscribed by custom and religion. (It’s worth noting that you cannot legally buy alcohol in Pushkar.)

The hotel I stayed in served bhang drinks, including a mix of bhang and apple juice that had helped me out immensely during another horrific stomach virus. Once I’d recovered, I befriended the chef and asked him for his recipe:

Ingredients

1 fist-size pile of marijuana (a quarter ounce if you’ve got low-quality, seedy weed; one gram per person [or less] if it’s medical grade)

1 cup milk or almond milk

A mortar and pestle

1 spoonful coconut oil

¼ cup yogurt

Various fruits, amount and type to user preference

A blender

Directions

My instructor in bhang-based comestibles didn’t have a scale, or measuring cups. He took a handful of marijuana buds, perhaps a quarter ounce, and dumped them in around two cups of water. He boiled that for a few minutes while I asked him where he’d learned how to make bhang. He told me it was something of a family business: His relatives had attained a high status in town for their bhang-brewing skills, and he was carrying on the tradition.

I have no way of knowing if he was fucking with me, but his recipe worked.

Once he’d boiled the weed for about five minutes, my marijuana mentor started mashing the sodden weed with a rock, across a flat chunk of marble. Once it was all mashed together into a gooey paste, he dumped it into a blender with yogurt and fruit and the water he’d boiled the weed with and served it. His beverage worked well: I got high.

The bhang in India can be perilously strong, but Indian marijuana is mostly wild, and outdoor grown. When I attempted to re-create this drink from the comfort of my Los Angeles home, there were . . . issues. My teacher hadn’t used a scale, but it looked like he’d boiled about a quarter ounce for my bhang. I used about an eighth of an ounce for each person’s drink, assuming my weed was twice as strong as the Indian weed.

I was not wrong! I was not exactly right, either.

I boiled the marijuana in two cups of water for five minutes, strained it, and then poured in a cup of almond milk, a half cup at a time, mashing the milk with the weed each time and then straining it into a glass. Once I’d used up my almond milk, I mashed a quarter cup of liquid coconut oil in with the weed and strained that. I was left with about two cups of liquid, plus my much-abused weed. I mixed four drinks: two with fruit and yogurt and two with cocoa powder and yogurt.

I figured that would be enough to get four people reasonably high. In that, I was disastrously wrong.

California medicinal marijuana is much, much stronger than the weed that grows by the roadsides in Rajasthan. Bhang was not meant to be made even at half concentration with such a substance. One sip per person would’ve been enough. I drank eight ounces (mixed with fruit and yogurt), and equal measures were poured out to two of my coworkers, David Bell and Josh Sargent, and my long-suffering fiancée, Magenta.

I finished mine first. I felt that was my duty. Within ten minutes I wasn’t just high, I was uncomfortably high. Magenta was smart enough to try only a couple of sips of her bhang lassi, and to her credit she warned me against underestimating the bhang. I didn’t listen. I assumed my heavy tolerance from two years in California would protect me.

That was not the case.

When it became clear just how strong this stuff was, I rushed out to warn David and Josh. Both were already almost done with their servings. At that point I thought it might still be fine: Surely, we couldn’t get that much higher.

And yet we did. Over the next hour we escalated from very stoned to frighteningly stoned to outright tripping. The next hours brought horrifying open-eyed hallucinations. I felt, at times, alternatingly paralyzed and unable to breathe. David just assumed he was dying at one point and asked me to call for an ambulance. The firefighters who arrived were less than happy about carting a pot overdose off to the hospital.

I do know how ridiculous it sounds. Marijuana is about the most benign drug on earth. But that benign reputation played a big role in how greatly I underestimated it in this experiment. I’m not an inexperienced psychonaut: I spent most of my time from ages nineteen to twenty-two on or coming off various hallucinogens. But this was the first trip I ever took without meaning to. I’d tried bhang before, and I knew well how strong medical marijuana could be. But, like everyone else with some hand in that 59 percent jump in pot-related hospitalizations I referenced at the beginning of this chapter, I underestimated marijuana.

I took it as just the good-time silly drug it had always been for me. And weed repaid me with hours of horrifying hallucinations. Dave was fine (see? weed can’t kill you), and I eventually stopped seeing eerily detailed visions of my own death every time I closed my eyes. But pot had made its point: “Don’t underestimate me, you silly fucks.”

That study I cited at the beginning of the chapter, “The Effectiveness of the Subculture in Developing Rituals and Social Sanctions for Controlled Drug Use,” quotes a Hungarian psychiatrist named Thomas Szasz:

Perhaps because of all the major modern nations, the United States is the least tradition bound, Americans are most prone to misapprehend and misinterpret ritual as something else: the result is that we mistake magic for medicine, and confuse ceremonial effect with chemical cause.

Oh Tommy, if only I’d listened.

Utah is a tough place for drugs. The state is nearly two-thirds Mormon, and the people of that faith have some notably strict rules for intoxicants of any kind. You won’t find beer above 3.2 percent alcohol (which might as well be zero percent alcohol, unless you shotgun three or four in a row) outside of a specialty store or restaurant. Coffee isn’t banned outright, but (a few) strict Mormons won’t even let it be sold in their stores.

I became acutely aware of this fact when I was twenty-two and driving through Utah for the first time. I pulled into a truck stop to fill my car up with gas, and myself up with coffee. At the time, I was so tired I would’ve happily popped a bag of those “Trucker’s Friend” pep pills. When you’re barreling through hundreds of miles of blank desert in the dead of night, you need whatever stimulant help you can get.

But there was no coffee at this truck stop. No coffee at a truck stop. I had my pick of decaffeinated herbal teas, though. “Sure,” I thought, “those will totally stop me from passing out at the wheel and replacing most of my dashboard with cactus.”

If I’d made my trip a century or so earlier I might have had better luck finding another stimulant-laced beverage. Back in the heady frontier days of the westward-expanding Mormon faith, Utah was filled with tea that shared a common ingredient with crystal meth.

Ephedra viridis is a plant common in the American West above around three hundred feet of elevation. You can find it spread out in great bushes of long green stalks all across the sunny, mountainous wilds of Nevada. As the legends go, early Mormon settlers were introduced to ephedra by the local native peoples, who used it as a medicinal tea to wake them up and treat all manner of ailments.

It earned the name “Mormon tea” for its work keeping hardworking frontier settlers alert and energized without violating their religion’s strict “Nothing Fun” policy.

Note that if you go online and look into the history of Mormon tea, you’ll find a lot of disagreement over whether or not the Mormon Church actually approved of Mormon tea. The Mormon settlers definitely drank a brew called “composition tea.” Ephedra is one probable ingredient in that tea. Scholars debate heavily everything beyond that. But the association between ephedra and Mormons was strong enough that, to this day, you’ll often find Ephedra viridis sold online as “Mormon tea.” It’s probably a stretch to call “composition tea” brewed with ephedra “meth tea,” but screw it, this is my book and we’re calling it Meth Tea.

Another North American variant of ephedra, Ephedra antisyphilitica (yes, that’s its real name—stop laughing) earned the moniker “whorehouse tea” based on the myth that it could cure or alleviate the symptoms of gonorrhea or syphilis. Bad news: Like all other folksy remedies for dangerous STDs, whorehouse tea doesn’t work.

But Mormon tea does give you energy, thanks to a lovely little alkaloid called pseudoephedrine. You may recognize pseudoephedrine from a prescription allergy drug near you. And the reason your Sudafed is prescription-only is because our friend pseudoephedrine is very easy to synthesize into our friend our terrible enemy methamphetamine.

So how well does Mormon Meth Tea work as a drug, before you add in all the chemistry?

HOW TO: Brew Mormon Tea

This is going to be one of the simpler recipes in this book, as long as you’re enough of a drug chemist to brew a successful cup of tea. The ingredients are simple:

2–3 solid pinches ground Ephedra viridis. You can find this all over the Internet, most commonly sold as Mormon tea. Mine came from herbsfirst.com in a big silver bag.

Empty tea bag, a tea infuser, or a French press

Water, obviously

Get your water however hot you like it, and try about half of one tea bag at first. You can add or subtract from there. I found myself preferring more tea to less. Be wary, though: While there’s not a lot of pseudoephedrine in a tea bag’s worth, this stuff adds up quickly. And unlike coffee, you probably don’t have any kind of tolerance built up.

How does it compare with coffee?

Tavia Morra

Experiment: Replacing Morning Coffee with Morning Mormon Tea

I’m basically the opposite of a scientist, but I wanted to conduct some sort of tests to determine just how well this stuff works. My coworkers at Cracked all work long hours, and many of them rely on coffee as much as I do. So I got them to agree to switch their morning coffee with Ephedra viridis. The rules were simple: Mormon tea had to be the first stimulant they took each day. Our director Abe Epperson doesn’t drink coffee, but for some reason he agreed to participate. I went without coffee for a full work week, five days, relying entirely on Mormon tea to provide my necessary buzz. It was awful. The tea itself tasted fine, but it didn’t do shit to clear my morning head fog. Coffee offers immediate relief from that half-conscious haze. Meth Tea didn’t help much.

I found it more effective later in the day, when I sat down to write after a long workout or ninety minutes stuck in Los Angeles traffic. It did offer a nice pickup from that sort of slack-jawed “fuck this afternoon” feeling. I felt like I focused better under its influence.

My coffee-drinking coworkers felt nothing but disdain for Mormon tea. Both reported having the same problem I had: It does nothing to cut that bleary, still-half-asleep feeling. My coworker Abe, who doesn’t drink coffee or tea (like the Mormons of old), had a very different experience: He found it stimulating and energizing.

So as much as I like the term Meth Tea, my experiences were much milder. Ephedra viridis offers a nice pick-me-up or energetic buzz for those of you who avoid caffeine. I can see why ancient Mormon settlers would have appreciated the boost.

Now, the ugly question looming over this little chapter is: How dangerous is ephedra tea? If you were alive and cognizant in the first decade of the twenty-first century, you probably remember stories of people dying from ephedra diet pills. Was I setting my coworkers and friends up for grisly deaths?

Ephedra Has Amazing Health Benefits (When You Don’t Fiddle with It)

Probably not!

Pure, extracted ephedrine raises your blood pressure. The US Forest Service says “green ephedra” (which they also call “Mormon tea”) contains both ephedrine and pseudoephedrine. But the tea seems to lower blood pressure, making the ephedra-to-meth cycle one of those tragic cases in which human experimentation has almost exclusively fucked things up.

When you don’t screw around with the stuff, it’s actually a pretty incredible tool. I’m one of those lucky few people the universe blessed with hundreds and hundreds of allergies. Fortunately, none of them are life-threatening. But in most of the world I spend 98 percent of my time congested. Plants themselves have risen up, across the globe, to fuck with me.

And ephedra tea actually helps me fight back. Not like, a ton, but it helps. Pseudoephedrine is a bronchial dilator, so it opens up the airways and makes spring suck a tad less. Mormon tea is basically super, super weak Sudafed, only you can buy it without a prescription or some pharmacist giving you that “I’m pretty sure you’re turning all this into meth” look. (Everyone gets that look, right? It’s not just me?)

But wait, there’s more! Ephedra also stimulates your metabolism, helping you burn fat. Drinking the tea won’t have a huge effect, but unlike the superconcentrated pill form, it won’t murder your heart.

And as if that all wasn’t enough, ephedra also makes coffee work better. Weight lifters might know this as an EC stack. Ephedra and caffeine together reach a height of productivity neither can alone, increasing your metabolism even further and giving you a stronger stimulant boost. The FDA would probably appreciate it if I pointed out that the diet pills with EC or ECA (ephedra, caffeine, and aspirin) stacks are terribly bad for your health.

Ephedra is a terribly useful plant that we’ve figured out how to turn into the killing edge of the modern drug trade. Viewed in the context of history, ephedra is also something of a tragic hero, cast down into darkness from the lofty heights of its origin . . .

The Tragic History of Ephedra

I opened this chapter by calling ephedra the shrub that “conquered the world,” and I meant it. Ephedra viridis never gained much renown, but its cousin over in China (Ephedra sinica) has birthed empires. The Chinese have used ephedra, or ma huang, as a medicine for more than five thousand years. In traditional medicine, ma huang is used to cause the onset of a woman’s period. Chinese medicine is right on the money there: Ephedrine causes uterine contractions. (Hence why pregnant women should avoid ma huang: It can cause spontaneous abortions.)

Ma huang also has a long history of being combined in different ways than the liver-shanking ECA stacks found in off-brand diet pills. The Shennong Bencao Jing, or Divine Farmer’s Materia Medica, potentially written as far back as 2800 BCE, claims that ma huang, combined with “a Cinnamon twig, Armeniaca [Apricot], and Liquorice” is useful for treating:

Pain and stiffness in the head and back of the neck, fever, generalized joint pain, a floating tight pulse, absence of sweating, chest fullness, and panting. (trans. Shouzhong Yang)

Ephedra was also a common ingredient in traditional Japanese medicine. In fact, it was a Japanese man, Nagai Nagayoshi, who first synthesized pure ephedrine in 1885. And since turning an otherwise harmless plant into one deadly drug was clearly thinking much too small, Nagayoshi followed up his discovery by turning ephedrine into methamphetamine in 1893.

“I’d rather die than live in a world where ephedra can only be turned into one thing that kills people.”

Crystal meth, of Breaking Bad fame, came about a little later, in 1919. And it wasn’t Nagayoshi’s fault. A guy named Akira Ogata takes the blame for turning ephedra from a useful, if potentially dangerous, substance into something bikers form murder gangs to distribute.

Coincidentally, both Ogata and Nagayoshi attended college in Berlin. Germany in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was an . . . ambitious country, with a lot of dreams that required copious chemical energy to see through. It’s not surprising that meth took ahold of Germany like Germany took ahold of most of Europe (twice!).

During World War II, the German army started issuing meth to its soldiers in millions and millions of little tablets called Pervitin. The pills were mainly meant for soldiers in the Blitzkrieg, pilots on night missions, etc. But German soldiers at all ranks and levels fell in love with the honey-sweet promises of Lady Meth. While researching this chapter I came across a Der Spiegel article by Andreas Ulrich that quotes multiple letters sent by the Nobel Prize–winning author Heinrich Böll to his parents while he was deployed with the Wehrmacht.

From Poland in 1939:

It’s tough out here, and I hope you’ll understand if I’m only able to write to you once every two to four days soon. Today I’m writing you mainly to ask for some Pervitin . . . Love, Hein.

In May 1940:

Perhaps you could get me some more Pervitin so that I can have a backup supply?

And then in July 1940:

If at all possible, please send me some more Pervitin.

Heinrich was pretty clearly some level of addict. And he wasn’t alone. In the three months between April and July 1940, the German army issued thirty-five million tablets of Pervitin, and other meth pills, to its troops. Doctor after horrified doctor succeeded in significantly restricting the flow of meth after 1940. But the war in Russia brought on a new need for the pep pills. By the time of Nazi Germany’s defeat, its scientists were experimenting with a “superpill” made with a mix of meth, cocaine, and morphine that I would absolutely test if it wouldn’t constitute multiple felonies.

It’s hard to judge exactly what sort of effect all that meth might have had on Nazi atrocities. German commanders frequently issued alcohol and other substances to their troops as a reward/incentive, so blaming all the evil on meth alone probably isn’t fair. But giving meth to a bunch of heavily armed, jumpy young men didn’t make them any safer to be around.

There’s a much damning-er case against meth than Pervitin: It was also Adolf Hitler’s very favorite drug. And he quickly graduated beyond taking it in pill form. Starting in 1942, the Führer’s personal doctor gave him daily methamphetamine shots, because straight through the damn vein is the only way a dictator gets high. The meth certainly didn’t help Hitler’s stability as the war turned against Germany.

It might’ve helped those soldiers, though. Studies performed in the United States during the forties and fifties with methamphetamine showed a 5 percent improvement on mental tasks in “non-fatigued” subjects. It also improved reaction time and hand-eye coordination, and helped sleep-deprived subjects feel more alert and awake. Meth has a lot of deserved stigma, but it really, really works. That’s sort of the problem.

Ephedra has a few more black marks to its name. (As if helping Nazis Nazi faster wasn’t bad enough.) Decades after Hitler’s last meth shot, ephedra started picking up popularity among athletes (alertness and improved reflexes aren’t valued only by soldiers). A study conducted by the NCAA in 2001 suggested as many as 2.8 million Americans took supplements containing concentrated ephedra from 1999 to 2001 to further their athletic performance.

It didn’t lead to any war crimes, so that’s nice, but a whole lot of people died: at least one hundred of them by the time the Bush Administration banned ephedra supplements in 2003. Obviously, that hasn’t made the drug impossible to acquire, and the kind of body builders who are willing to do the hell out of some illegal steroids don’t think twice about pumping ephedrine into their bodies.

Well, unless they care about their penises. Then they might want to steer clear.

A quick Google of “ephedra dick” will lead you to page after page of men worrying over whether or not ephedrine causes their penises to shrink, or go all floppy and soft. I’m not able to find much science on the interaction between ephedra and wangs, but anecdotal evidence suggests they don’t mix well at all.

The opposite may be true of Mormon tea. Ma huang has long been regarded as an aphrodisiac. A 1998 study by Meston, C. M. and Heiman, J. R., and published in the journal Archives of Sexual Behavior, exposed twenty “sexually functional” women to concentrated ephedrine sulfate in a randomized, double-blind test. The women were dosed and exposed to “erotic films” while their vaginal pulse amplitude was measured. That’s a very fancy way of saying “they stuck a little metal tampon inside each woman and measured how much blood flowed to their vaginas.”

Women given the ephedrine showed “significantly” increased response to the porn. That response was purely physical; the women didn’t report being any more turned on as a result of the ephedrine. But their bodies responded as if they were. I am lucky enough to have a friend, Lily Cade, who works as a lesbian porn star and who was willing to test if Mormon tea did anything to her. My hope was that someone used to looking at sex as a detached professional might better notice any physiological changes.

Lily and her partner both drank the Mormon tea twice:

I noticed that it made me feel aroused, but [my partner] didn’t. She said that it did make colors sharper. The first time we took it, she fell asleep. The second time we had sex and then also fell asleep, so there may be a kind of crash with it, which coffee also has. I personally liked it but she didn’t so much.

That supremely unscientific anecdote is the best data we’ll have on the subject unless some researcher with access to metal vagina-reading tampons feels inspired by this chapter. I know you’re out there somewhere.

Coffee is basically petroleum for people. It makes our double shifts, our overtime, our five A.M. wake-up calls, all possible. No drug in human society is as universally or acceptably used and abused as coffee. We’re so deep into it that we’ve almost forgotten that coffee is a drug.

Coffee is such an utterly ubiquitous part of our daily experience, it’s hard to accept that it isn’t a very old part of world culture: The earliest evidence places man’s first cup of recognizable joe in around the seventeenth century. The first coffee trade probably took place between Ethiopians and Yemenis sometime in the fifteenth or early sixteenth century—it went from bushes in Ethiopia, across the Red Sea, and into the eager, waiting mouths of early Muslim imams who needed that extra caffeine jolt to keep imaming through long nights at the mosque.

But where did coffee—qahweh in Arabic—come from in the first place? How did our ancestors turn a bean on a bush into the most ubiquitous intoxicant of all time? There will always be debate, but here are the two most probable precursors to the drink that starts most of your mornings:

HOW TO: Re-create an Ancient Caffeine High

Combining boiling water and coffee grounds is actually a rather advanced way to get that surge of energy. The first people to enjoy coffee’s energizing effects probably ate their way to a buzz rather than drank it. And if we’re looking for the earliest fans of coffee we’d do best to look to the Oromo people of Ethiopia. And their preferred method of ingestion was to grind the whole coffee cherry bean and the sweet leathern fruit it comes wrapped in with either animal fat or clarified butter into a big, fat ball of flavor. I’ll get more into this at the end of the chapter.

The other likely “first” coffee experience came from Somalia. People in that pirate-laden region of the world are still fans of something called bun. In layman’s terms, it consists of coffee beans fried with clarified butter and oil into a delightful snack. I’ve tested it extensively but first, the . . .

Ingredients

1 cup whole coffee beans

½ cup vegetable oil

2–3 tablespoons clarified butter (a.k.a. ghee for those who truly enjoy pronouncing things)

Bun is fairly easy to make. You wash the coffee, heat the oil up, and then fry the beans for about twenty minutes or so—you’ll smell when they’re on the edge of burning. That’s when you slide in the ghee. If you do it right, your whole house will smell faintly of burning coffee and strongly of the best morning ever.

Ghee has a savory, fatty taste. Traditionally, you’re supposed to rub a bit of the oil onto your face for some extra invigoration. I’ve found that’s mostly a fast route toward awful acne. But as a stimulant, bun is wonderful. Coffee beans are low in calories but quite flavorful, and munching a quarter cup of them leaves you buzzing like you just drank a few shots of espresso without as many of the jitters.

It isn’t exactly authentic, but if you’re interested in improving your overall bun experience, I’d recommend drizzling some salt over the cooked beans while they cool in a bowl. Salt is just what the sweet, savory flavors of cooked coffee beans really need. Combined with the fatty nature of the ghee, it makes your bun taste like speed-y Cheetos. I highly recommend.

But what about “coffee,” the brewed beverage we know and love today? How’d it get its start? Well, depending on which unreliable narrator you ask (pro tip: In history, all narrators are unreliable), humankind’s love affair with coffee may have started in the scrabbly hills outside the old city of Mocha.

The Three Great Founding Myths of Coffee

There’s a quote, generally misattributed to everyone from Winston Churchill, to Napoleon, to Hitler: “History is written by the victors.” Or, alternatively, “History is a set of lies, agreed upon.” But when you start trying to trace back the history of coffee, there aren’t really any “victors,” and no one agrees on any of the lies. What I have been able to find are three different myths for how that first glorious cup may have come about.

Myth number one says that right around 1258 CE, Sheik Omar, a disciple of the founder of the city of Mocha, was exiled for sleeping around with the wrong sultan’s harem. He and his followers (he had followers, for some reason) wound up scraping out a meager living in a place called Ousab. They were on the brink of starvation when Omar came upon some wild berries and decided that the risk of pooping himself on poisonfruit was better than the certainty of death.

In the wild, coffee beans are delivered to our unworthy civilization wrapped in a greenish-red cherry. I had a lovely morning years ago picking and eating coffee cherries in a town called San Marcos around the deepest lake in Central America, Atitlan. Then I had a less enjoyable afternoon vomiting those cherries up. Your experience may vary.

Sheik Omar and his followers may have had a similar experience. For whatever reason, they decided the nutritious cherries surrounding those beans weren’t the food they needed. According to writings left in Paris’s Bibliothèque Nationale and reported on in William H. Ukers’s All about Coffee (1922), Omar and his cronies decided to try and turn the chewy green beans into something more edible: “Having nothing to eat except coffee, they took of it and boiled it in a saucepan and drank of the decoction.”

It apparently did the trick. The sheik and his followers lived, and they soon became a bit famous for their “medicinal” brew. Once the true glory of coffee became clear to the people of Mocha, Omar was welcomed back as a hero and received his very own monastery, which seems to have been the equivalent of a bitchin’ yacht in the ancient Muslim world.

Another myth gives the credit to a dervish named Hadji Omar. Dervishes have a unique twirling ritual dance that they do for the glory of God, and back in the day they were also a peculiar sort of beggar. Rather than asking for spare change to buy themselves food and/or liquor (which was forbidden anyway by Islam) they begged on behalf of other poor people. Either Hadji Omar’s dancing or his begging pissed off somebody because, like the earlier Omar, he was driven by enemies in Mocha out to the desert.

Rather than starving to death, he came upon some strange berries that saved his life. He didn’t like the bittersweet taste, though, and decided to roast them to try and bring out a more palatable flavor. The fire made his coffee beans too hard, so he tried to boil them with water to soften them up. The water turned brown, and soon the desperate dervish found himself perking up from history’s first black coffee. His discovery brought him back into favor, and into the city of Mocha. Soon Hadji Omar found himself a saint, which is either a much shittier or much better reward than the first Omar’s monastery. It really depends on whether or not saints actually got their own halos.

The last version of this myth involves yet another Omar. Despite the fact that their circumstances differ, all these Omars are guys who solved their problems by adding mystery beans to water and heat. This last Omar was the disciple of a mullah named Schadheli, who predicted his own forthcoming death and, rather than doing anything to stop it, told Omar that after he passed on a “veiled person” would appear and give Omar a command. He was told that he should follow it.

Schadheli died, and, sometime later, Omar was ambushed by a gigantic ghostly version of his teacher wearing a white veil. The monster ghost told Omar to fill a bowl with water and not stop walking until the water became “unmoveable.” Whatever that means, it happened when Omar reached the city of Mocha.

This Mocha was gripped by a horrific plague, and Omar set his water aside for a little while to pray for the sick and dying, and to cure them with the magical powers all holy men have in old stories. It worked out great for a while, until Omar cured the king’s beautiful daughter and then decided that, since he’d saved her life, it was probably God’s will that he bone her. This got him driven from the city, and exiled to a cave where he lived off wild herbs. Eventually he came upon the fruit of the coffee bush, and decided to add some of those weird, chewy beans to his nightly soup. Thus was coffee born.

Now, there’s a fourth legend about the origins of coffee, one that substitutes an exiled man named Omar and near-fatal starvation with adorably drugged-up goats. According to this myth, a goatherd named Kaldi was off, uh . . . goatherding when some of his furry charges got into a patch of coffee bushes. The goats proceeded to speed their little goat balls off and, if legend can be believed, started dancing and pirouetting around. Kaldi was the kind of young man who was only too happy to try new drugs on the advice of goats and started chewing the fruit and beans himself. Eventually some monks happened by and, being as bored as monks pretty much always are, boiled the beans and realized the resulting brew could keep them awake through long nights of worshipping the beard off their god.

Each of these stories is about as likely (and unlikely) as the other, but regardless of how that first cup came about, worship and coffee have been inextricably linked since the beginning. While the “wakeful monastery” is a popular story, it’s almost guaranteed that the first holy men to cultivate a caffeine addiction were Sufi. The first historical evidence of coffee use dates back to the late fifteenth century, as a “devotional aid” in Sufi dhikr ceremonies.

These rituals were performed at night, and the longer one could keep up the worshipping, the better God liked it. Coffee did for those Sufis what it’s done for generations of college students. By the early seventeenth century, coffee use had evolved into an actual part of the worship itself. Followers of Sheikh Ikhlas Khalwati would go on a khalwa, or retreat, every winter, and spend three days fasting and drinking nothing but coffee. Aside from the ulcers they all surely earned, the coffee allowed them to dhikr all night and pray well into the mornings.

HOW TO: Re-create the Grandfather of All Coffee

While the three stories in the previous section are all fun bits of myth, it’s unlikely any of them accurately depicts the first beverage made with coffee beans. In truth, it was very probably a beverage called quishir: tea made with dried coffee cherries and husks. It’s still used in Ethiopia and Yemen today, and that should tell you most of what you need to know about coffee’s journey into the Arab world.

Ethiopia, the birthplace of coffee, is separated from Yemen only by the narrow Gulf of Aden. Coffee almost certainly made its way to the Middle East over this tiny gulf, and the first real cup of qahwa al-arabiya (Arabic coffee) was almost certainly quishir.

Ingredients

2–3 tablespoons dried coffee cherries and husks

2 cups boiling water

Directions

The good people at Counter Culture Coffee used to sell a product, “Cascara,” that was made from dried coffee cherries and husks and meant to be brewed as tea. (They stopped selling it in December 2015 and currently note that it is “impossible” to find.) You can find a few recipes online, but they all generally advise between two to three tablespoons of the grounds per eight- to ten-ounce cup. It wasn’t an exact science back in ancient Ethiopia, and I recommend eyeballing it rather than measuring too carefully.

Start by filling your cup about one-fifth of the way with the dried cherries/husks, and then pour boiling (or simmering) water over the whole mixture. Let it steep for a few minutes until it turns a rich, burnt amber shade. Then you can either filter out the grounds or, if you’re a real drug historian, drink it dirty. (The boiled coffee cherries actually taste quite good.) The tea itself is a slightly sweet, slightly sour brew, with a very mildly unpleasant aftertaste and a nice little caffeine buzz.

Tracing Back the Ur-Coffee

The city of Mocha, where all our apocryphal Omars invented their first mythic cups of coffee, is located in coastal Yemen. It would’ve been one of the first places in the Arabian Peninsula whose residents enjoyed quishir. And it’s as likely a birthplace as any for the first cup of recognizable coffee.

Quishir’s first descendant was another Ethiopian brew, bounya, made with raw crushed and boiled coffee beans. You drink all the liquid—it tasted faintly of pea soup when I made it—and then eat the beans, which will be chewy by the time you’re done boiling them. I don’t recommend either the beverage or the boiled beans. But bounya got me to thinking about how the First Coffee might have tasted. The tale of the second Omar from earlier in the chapter—the dervish who roasted and then boiled his coffee beans—sounded like it could be the missing link between bounya and coffee.

I decided to try it.

HOW TO: Make the First Coffee

Ingredients

1 cup green coffee beans

Cast-iron skillet, clean

Saucepan, filled with water

Directions

First, I set my green coffee beans on a skillet and fried them slowly on medium heat, until they were a rich golden brown, tending toward black on some edges. Once I’d been at it for ten minutes or so, which seemed like as long as a starving, mountain-dwelling dervish would be willing to wait, I tried to eat one of the beans. It was hard, partly crunchy, and partly chewy. Then I took a mortar and pestle and ground the beans up as best I could; only about half of them crumbled well.

I dumped the lot of it into the saucepan and boiled it for another ten minutes, until the water reached a light caramel color. I drank the First Coffee with my friend Brandon, who agreed that it was “not the best coffee I’ve ever had, but also not the worst.” It didn’t have the inky black thickness of espresso, and there was a burnt tinge to the taste that wasn’t exactly delightful, but it worked: I felt the jolt I crave when I brew a cup of coffee, and the partly cooked, boiled beans in the bottom tasted . . . well, not good. But I imagine they’d have been downright delicious if I were a starving, exiled, lonely hermit in a cave.

And the caffeine high—that would’ve been a revelation. It’s easy to understand the ecstatic reaction to coffee by its early drinkers when you assume they were all (A) total lightweights and (B) probably starving when they had their first cup. Caffeine is a mild drug, but it’s still a drug. There’s a reason every myth specifies that its inventor was malnourished and dying at the time. Someone in that state would’ve been hit a lot harder by a dose of caffeine.

Understanding early coffee’s effect on its first generation of drinkers is key to understanding what came next . . .

The Bloody Persecution of Coffee

Muslims are forbidden from drinking alcohol. Coffee, on the other hand, isn’t explicitly forbidden in the Quran, and in lieu of any other drugs it apparently hit the spot. As a result, java came to be known as “the Wine of Islam.” Since wine itself was even more forbidden in the Muslim world than it is in Salt Lake City, it’s not terribly surprising that coffee soon ran afoul of the religious authorities.

The first explicit condemnation of coffee via holy men came in 1511 CE, less than a century after coffee first percolated its way into the Muslim world. Religious scholars in Mecca hated that people were *gasp* consuming coffee for pleasure, rather than just to keep themselves awake during wild late-night worship sessions. Coffee’s delicious flavor had stabbed it right in the cup. In 1511 a Mamluk pasha named Khair Beg or Kha’ir Bey (no one in the past could agree on how to spell names) became the first world leader to officially ban coffee.

Beg/Bey was the governor of Mecca at the time, and he has to come down as one of the wettest blankets on the damp bathroom floor of history. Depending on which account you read, he either saw a bunch of folks hanging around outside a coffeehouse and just assumed they were plotting violent rebellion, or he came across a dirty limerick about himself on the ancient equivalent of a bathroom wall* (*also a bathroom wall). Whatever it was, Khair Beg was convinced of coffee’s evil and immediately set to having his goons burn all the beans they could find.

This first ban didn’t last long. The sultan, Khair’s boss, loved coffee, and he quickly vetoed Mecca’s coffeehouses back open. He did request that patrons “behave decorously,” in the fragile hope that doing so would keep coffee off the radar of his empire’s fun-hatingest clerics. It didn’t work for long: Despite the sultan’s love for it, and the fact that the Turkish word for breakfast was now kahvalti (literally: “before coffee”), the baby version of intoxication offered by coffee was just too much for the fundamentalists of the day.

By 1535 the coffee hate in Mecca had reached such a fever pitch that mobs of anticoffee protestors, amped up by an angry preacher, ran wild through the city streets burning down coffeehouses. I can only presume the resulting fires smelled absolutely delicious. In fact, all the coffee burnings of the sixteenth century were probably a welcome respite from the normal smells of a city in the days before people figured out how to do things like “dispose of sewage” and “bury corpses promptly” on a macro level.

The coffee-loving people of Mecca were drawn out onto the streets by this delicious-smelling act of vandalism, and they quickly set to protecting their fix. Soon there was straight-up warfare in the streets of Islam’s holiest city. The conflict didn’t stop until the government issued a proclamation reconfirming the legality of coffee. Peace (and the sanctity of many Muslims’ morning routine) was restored . . . for a while. But the forces of coffee prohibition weren’t done yet.

Coffee’s legality and social acceptability ebbed and flowed over the next century. The last truly serious banning of the beverage came in the early seventeenth century, during the reign of our old friend Murad IV. While Murad was busy pretending to be a cigarette smoker so he could chop people’s damn heads off, one of his subordinates decided that coffee shops were also a dire threat to public morals.

Back in those days, sultans, like Murad, had grand viziers who handled a lot of the critical dictatoring and war-winning work that the sultan just didn’t have time for. It turns out dedicating thousands of hours to entrapping and murdering smokers doesn’t leave a lot of time for basic governance. Late in Murad’s reign a guy named Kuprili was the grand vizier, and so it fell on him to fight a war while his boss was busy fighting secondhand smoke.

The war wasn’t popular, in the way wars so often aren’t, and Grand Vizier Kuprili started to worry that his enemies might use the empire’s coffee shops against him. At that time coffeehouses were places where members of the intelligentsia would gather to discuss pertinent issues of the day and, maybe, come to some very negative conclusions about their government. Rather than risk any sedition, Kuprili decided to straight-up ban the consumption of coffee within the empire. I’ll let our (century-)old friend All about Coffee describe his punishment for violations of the new ordinance:

For a first violation of the order, cudgeling was the punishment; for a second offense, the victim was sewn in a leather bag and thrown into the Bosporus.

You’ll have to decide for yourself whether or not the “beheading” risked by Ottoman tobacco smokers was a worse punishment than being sewn into a goddamn bag and drowned. But I think everyone reading this book can agree that a life apart from sweet, sweet coffee is a worse fate than either. Wherever you land, Kuprili’s prohibition was short-lived, and most of the major coffee bans in the Muslim world were over by the middle of the sixteenth century. But that didn’t mean it was a free and clear world for the inky black Meth Lite we all know and love today.

The Christian world (a.k.a. “Europe”) was enticed by the idea of a delicious black tea that keeps you awake all night. But they knew just enough about coffee’s origins to realize that it was a Muslim brew. And Muslim was basically a synonym for soul-reaving evil for the good Christian folk of the time. Booze, and falling asleep to the sound of your own vomit, was acceptable to the Lord. But the Wine of Islam? That shit was straightaway sketchy, and it was going to take a lot for the average European to get over coffee’s uncomfortably foreign origins.

Luckily for all manner of early waking Christians, coffee gained a God-friendly fan in Pope Clement VIII (1536–1605). While other European leaders like Frederick the Great flirted with temporary bans of coffee on the grounds (HAHAHA!) that it might hurt beer sales/public morality, Clement took to the brew like a pope takes to . . . I don’t know how to finish that joke. The point is, he loved it. And he was heartbroken that so many of his fellow Christians considered it a heathen beverage.

What was a pope to do? The early origins of coffee were very clearly tied not just to Muslim people, but to Islamic clergy. A lesser pope would’ve thrown up his hands, banned coffee, and kept right on imbibing in private. But Clement was cunning; his skill with popery knew no bounds. According to legend, he took his first sip and declared that “coffee should be baptized to make it a true Christian drink.”

It’s possible he’d secretly developed a taste for coffee before that moment. There are suspicions that the drink first made its inroads into Europe in 1529, when the Ottoman Empire laid siege to Vienna. According to legend, coffee pots were found among the abandoned Ottoman camps when the army retreated, and the Austrian defenders immediately realized a good thing when they boiled and drank it.

The history books are clear on one thing: Clement VIII loved him some coffee, and he rebelled against the notion that it might be a Muslim drink by straight-up baptizing it into the Christian faith, thus rendering coffee available to Christians on earth and—if I’m remembering the basics of my confirmation class correctly—in heaven.

Coffee at War

The militaries of history have a long, loving relationship with coffee. “Hot drink that keeps you awake” is a direct answer to the prayers of thousands of luckless soldiers standing guard on freezing cold nights across the precoffee battlefields of history. One of the first military units to adopt coffee, in the early sixteenth century, was the elite bodyguard of the Ottoman sultan. While the drug fell in and out of favor (often violently) over the next few decades, it spread quickly through the armies of history.

By the mid-nineteenth century it had made its way to America. William McKinley, the twenty-fifth president, earned renown in the Civil War for braving a hail of gunfire to bring his Union comrades hot coffee. The stresses of war cultivated a deep appreciation for/addiction to coffee among American soldiers. And it’s one they’ve never given up—every Meal, Ready to Eat (MRE) issued in the US armed forces today contains a packet of instant coffee.

But coffee’s first use in the annals of human conflict came long before the Ottoman Empire, or even before the idea that coffee beans and hot water belonged together. It started in Oromia, the tiny corner of our planet where coffee’s epic journey of global domination first began. The Oromo people are humanity’s first caffeine addicts. Their hunters and warriors fell in love with the bean and cherry, not as a drink but as a staple food for long journeys and dangerous situations.

Ancient Oromo warriors on their way to a raid would have ground their cherries and beans together with ghee into a mash, and then rolled that mash into a ball. This coffee-butter ball would then be carried in a small leather bag and eaten on the go. We’ve left coffee cherries behind in the modern world, but they’re an impressive food: rich in protein, sugar, and flavor. Add in the fat of all that butter and you’ve got a Neolithic power bar. Ball.

So how would this earliest coffee-based edible actually taste? I had to know.

HOW TO: Make Power Balls

Ingredients

½ cup coffee cherries and husks

½ cup dried coffee beans, preferably roasted

½ cup ghee (clarified butter)

Mortar and pestle

Small leather bag

Directions

Pour your cherries and husks in the mortar with the coffee beans. Using roasted beans is cheating slightly—you can just use dried coffee beans if you want extra authenticity, but the roasted variety tastes much better. Whatever you go with, grind the whole mess together with the pestle until the beans are as close to ground as you can get them, and thoroughly mixed with the cherries and husks. Finding ripe cherries is nearly impossible if you don’t actually grow your own coffee, but the dried variety works quite well, too.

Mix in your ghee in chunks, mashing it all up as thoroughly as possible. The resultant ball should be large enough to fit comfortably in your palm. When I made mine I wasn’t the least bit appetized. By looks, it should’ve tasted like a heart attack.

But I knew it wouldn’t be enough to just eat the concoction. I’d need to test it. Since this was a food made for a people who traveled, by foot, huge distances, I decided moving a long distance on foot was the only proper test.

I decided to run a half marathon on an empty stomach, with the leather bag containing my coffee ball swinging around my neck. Once my strength started to flag and fail, I’d eat the Power Ball and see if it could give me enough energy to finish the run.

Again, I fully expected this thing to be disgusting, and anticipated vomiting as soon as I bit into that sphere o’ butter. But this weird little Ethiopian trick for staying awake to execute deadly raids worked. The leather bag—which was specified in my sources but not, I imagined, critical—wound up being the key to “cooking” this thing properly. On a hunch, I wore the bag around my neck. The heat from my body over the first five-ish miles of my run caused the ghee to melt, and the coffee cherries, husks, and grounds to swell.

The resultant mash was like an oily bag of trail mix, but it tasted fucking incredible. It was rich and chocolatey, with the delectable chewiness of the cherries and the oat-like shells and beans providing an enticing texture and mouthfeel. Each mouthful stuck to my ribs, and after two or three big pinches my hunger pangs were quelled and I felt a second wind grip me.

This stuff doesn’t just work: I actively prefer it to Clif Bars, PowerBars, and most of the granola trail mixes I’ve used over the last few years. Try it yourself, please. The world needs to know about this. The only downside I found is that carrying a big lumpy sack over my chest made it look a little like an Alien chestburster was perpetually about to break free from my sternum’s imprisoning walls.

I’m not a huge fan of quishir, or the ur-coffee I brewed up, but both bun and the Ethiopian butterball are delicious. When it comes to drugs, the old ways are often better. It’s not all urine-and-tobacco shots. And I suspect the sheer variety of historic coffee-based innovation has a lot to do with caffeine’s status as a universally appreciated drug.

Coffee had a brief, terrible period of repression. But since then it’s flown to every non-Mormon corner of the globe. No one gets sewn into bags and drowned for drinking it today. Coffee has won hearts and minds across the world, and it’s not hard to see why. Whether you’re a revolutionary, a king, a godless intellectual, a cleric, or a soldier, you can appreciate the value of staying awake and tasting something delicious at the same time.

Quiz time! Name one object or activity that human beings haven’t found a way to sexualize. Take your time now. Think real hard—I’ll wait right here.

...

OK, so I’m going to assume most of you are Internet-savvy enough to know that there is no answer to this question. If it exists, some human beings somewhere have found a way to masturbate to it. In the early days of online pornography this fact was christened “Rule 34”: If you can think of it, someone’s made porn about it. Back in 2015 I interviewed a man who made his living writing mind-control incest erotica. There’s an entire website devoted to “sensual” stories of singer-songwriter Roy Orbison being trapped in cling-wrap.

Why do we do this?

That’s a question I’ve asked myself many, many times over years of interviewing dominatrices, pornographers, and other sex workers. I’m sure it’s a question you’ve asked yourself on at least one late, lonely night plumbing the Web’s dark depths. It makes total sense that people are turned on by the asses, hips, breasts, thighs, biceps, etc., of their preferred gender(s). Why do we sexualize so very many things that have nothing to do with the human body, or copulation?

The answer to that question may lie in the history of podophilia, known to its friends as the foot fetish. One 2007 study by researchers from the universities of Bologna, L’Aquila, and Stockholm, “Relative Prevalence of Different Fetishes,” found that feet are the most commonly fetishized nongenital part of the human body. As many as half of all paraphilias related to the human body involve the feet.

The word paraphilia is an important one to understand. You may like your girlfriend’s feet, but that “like” doesn’t raise to the level of a paraphilia unless you’re somewhat dependent on interacting with, or fantasizing about, her feet in order to achieve orgasm. The “dependency” that comes with a paraphilia can be fairly mild, or it can be all-consuming; some people find that being tied up adds to their sexual experience . . . and a few can’t get off without ropes around their body.

There are a variety of theories for why the foot fetish seems to be the most common paraphilia in the whole sticky encyclopedia of human eroticism. In Phantoms in the Brain (1998) the neurologist V. S. Ramachandran proposed, “The reason is quite simply that in the brain the foot lies right next to the genitalia.”

See, the parietal lobe of your brain holds what’s known as the “body image map.” This is essentially where your brain stores all the information about how each part of your body moves and feels. It’s part of why phantom limb syndrome exists—even if you lose a leg, that leg still exists in your brain’s body image map. And for whatever reason, feet are adjacent to the genitals on the body image map. Dr. Ramachandran suspects that “cross-wiring” between the two might be responsible for the foot fetish’s bizarre ubiquity. (He also reports that some patients with missing limbs report achieving orgasm via their phantom feet.)

Dr. Ramachandran’s theory may explain why the foot fetish is so common. But it doesn’t help us understand why our species sexualizes such a dizzying array of nonsexual things. There’s no “being punched by an obese eunuch dressed as Batman” region of our body image map, but you can be damn sure someone in the world has masturbated to that exact fantasy. Sexual paraphilias play too large a role in human life to not confer some sort of evolutionary benefit.

In 1998, Dr. James Giannini gave us the first look at what that benefit might be. His landmark paper, “Sexualization of the Female Foot as a Response to Sexually Transmitted Epidemics,” collated centuries’ worth of references to sexual fetishes in literature and art. Giannini and his colleagues noticed that the foot fetish in particular seemed to peak right alongside the great STD outbreaks in history. In the thirteenth century, gonorrhea leapt into prominence thanks to armies of horny, condomless Crusaders. At the same time, medieval writers and poets started writing long, detailed love letters to the human foot. In the sixteenth century, when syphilis reared its ugly head, the foot fetish found itself in the limelight once more.

Giannini and his team noticed that the references to the foot fetish declined in frequency from thirty to sixty years after the end of each STD outbreak, and that “during all other periods, eroticism was attached to breasts, buttocks and thighs.”

While that’s all compelling data, our records of medieval-era erotica are tragically incomplete. So Giannini and his intrepid colleagues collected thirty years’ worth of smut from eight of the United States’ most popular pornographic magazines. They counted an average of between five and ten foot-focused photographs per magazine from 1960 to the mid-1980s. Starting in 1986—right as the AIDS epidemic went “viral”—that number shot off like a rocket. Researchers counted more than forty foot pictures per magazine published in 1998.

The basic data can be interpreted in a lot of ways. One hypothesis is that our brains have become better and better at eroticizing nonsense because it acts as a safety mechanism, a way to let people satisfy their urges without infecting themselves with cockplague. And while the foot fetish may be the most common of its kin, and the easiest to track in literature, it’s neither the only nor the oldest tool in our species’ erotic toolbox . . .

The Surprisingly Ancient History of Sex Toys

It’s very possible that we’ve been getting off with the aid of tools since before “we” were Homo sapiens. In fact, if the example of our chimpanzee cousins is anything to go on, the first sex toy in history was probably a leaf.

The practice of leaf clipping was first observed in 1987, among chimpanzees in Tanzania’s Mahale Mountains. Leaf clipping boils down to “male chimps biting down on dried leaves to make girls look at them.” Here’s how it was first described by a chimp researcher, Toshisada Nishida (quoted by Christopher Boesch in “Innovation in Wild Chimpanzees”):

A chimpanzee picks one to five stiff leaves, grasps the petiole between the thumb and the index finger, repeatedly pulls it from side to side while removing the leaf blade with the incisors, and thus bites the leaf to pieces. In removing the leaf blades, a ripping sound is conspicuously and distinctly produced. When only the midrib with tiny pieces of the leaf blade remains, it is dropped and another sequence of ripping a new leaf is often repeated.

The leaf being bitten is never eaten, and the sole purpose of the behavior appears to be that it makes lady chimps pay attention, allowing the male to, hopefully, seal the deal with his personality (chimpsonality?). Now, leaf clipping doesn’t seem to bear much resemblance to, say, a basement full of bondage gear or a drawer full of vibrators. But it’s very much related to both of those things: Leaf clipping is the first evidence we’ve ever found of nonhuman primates using a “tool” for the sole purpose of getting laid.

We’ll never know the exact form of the first sex tool that our prehistoric, possibly prehuman ancestors developed. The oldest example of a sex toy archaeologists have yet discovered is a life-size siltstone penis from Hohle Fels cave in Germany’s Swabian Alps. Hohle Fels contains some of the oldest known artifacts of human history; that Paleolithic dildo is believed to be at least twenty-eight thousand years old.

Archaeologists have found evidence of dildos all across recorded human history. The double-ended dildo dates back at least as far as the ancient Greeks; the use of dildos was frequently depicted on vases and in popular comedies. Aristophanes’s play Lysistrata, which focuses on the women of Athens going on a sex strike to force an end to the Peloponnesian War, contains one of the first references to a sex toy in the history of literature:

Not even the spark of an adulterer has left. For since the Milesians betrayed us, I have not even seen a dildo eight fingers long.

According to Marguerite Johnson and Terry Ryan’s book Sexuality in Greek and Roman Society and Literature, “eight fingers” is about five or six inches long. In that line, the character Lysistrata is complaining that the war’s privations have left Athenian women without even tiny dildos to satisfy themselves. The “marital aids” she’s speaking about in that passage were likely made out of leather. But the Greeks didn’t limit themselves to just one material: They also made disposable, edible dildos out of breadsticks.

The olisbo-kollix (literally: “dildo-baguette”) likely served a number of purposes. We have artistic depictions of women carrying unusably large penises made of bread for, presumably, ritual religious purposes. But there are also multiple depictions of much smaller olisbo-kollixi that seem to have been meant for more . . . practical uses (at least, according to ancient sex expert Vicki León, in The Joy of Sexus). Leather and smooth stone dildos would’ve been limited to the wealthier echelons of Greek society. But bread wangs gave peasant women a cheap, discreet way to service themselves, which—bonus!—doubled as a snack when they were done. Presumably, the occasional yeast infections were seen as an acceptable trade-off.

Historical dildos haven’t always been fun, either. In Ming dynasty China (1368–1644), a woman convicted of adultery might be forced to mount a ceramic dildo attached to a saddle and ride that fake dick until she died. It’s worth noting that old China also had its share of less murder-y sex toys, including metal dildos constructed to release liquid in order to simulate ejaculation.

The history of sex toys doesn’t begin and end with fake cocks. We’ve been indulging our less obvious fetishes via elaborate tools for thousands of years, too. If you’re into being whipped or flogged, you might be interested to know that your particular kink dates back at least as far as 490 BCE.

The “Tomb of the Whipping” is an Etruscan noblewoman’s tomb in Tarquinia, Italy. The inside walls are decorated with a variety of depictions of wine, dancing, music . . . and a lady getting whipped on the ass by two men. Let me clarify: She’s being whipped by exceedingly erect men. She appears to be taking it up the back door with one of them, and performing oral sex on the other. Spend ten minutes on Google and you’ll find thousands of modern-day depictions of this exact act.

The passing centuries have brought our species only more and more erotic options. Erotic asphyxiation actually started in the seventeenth century as a pre-Viagra cure for erectile dysfunction. The rubber/latex fetish likely kicked off with the first rubber mackintosh raincoats, released in the mid-nineteenth century to an ad campaign filled with attractive young ladies in rubber rain gear. The early twentieth century brought pulp “detective” comics and movies filled with images of beautiful women bound in rope and fitted with gags, inspiring a new generation of sex toys—and on and on the cycle goes.

Our species owes a debt to kink, but it’s not a debt many people are willing to acknowledge. You won’t find any high school textbooks detailing how the foot fetish or the breadstick dildo helped ancient humans avoid the plague. But fetishes have played their role in human development, even though some cultures have been pretty aggressively against the whole concept of “pleasuring” yourself.

The War on Masturbation

Our understanding of the human sexual record is warped by the fact that virtually all of that record comes from men. The Kama Sutra (400–200ish BCE) provides a wonderful historical record of sex life in ancient India, including some of the earliest writing on BDSM in history:

There are no keener means of inflicting passion than acts of tooth or nail.

But the Kama Sutra was also written by a wealthy man, and it contains many attitudes that are distressingly in line with the worst parts of modern pickup culture. The Kama Sutra deserves credit for emphasizing the importance of a woman’s pleasure in sex, but it also includes a downright horrifying passage that advises rendering a virgin unconscious with booze in order to take her “maidenhead.”

Sex history gets a little more democratic when we look at the ruins of Pompeii, buried in ash by the 79 CE eruption of Mount Vesuvius. Pompeii was basically ancient Rome’s Las Vegas, and the whole city’s sudden burial preserved a library’s worth of ancient Roman sexual mores. Frescos on the walls of Roman bedrooms and bathhouses depict many sex acts in which the woman takes a position of power, such as cunnilingus (which the Kama Sutra advises against) . . .

. . . two-boy, one-girl threesomes:

. . . and the cowgirl position (which probably went by a different name at the time):

The eruption of Vesuvius was a shitty last day for thousands of ancient Romans, but it’s been a huge boon to our understanding of the evolution of human sexuality. All those frescos would’ve been lost to time if the city had survived another few centuries. Several hundred years after Pompeii’s destruction, the Roman world found itself at the center of a war on masturbation.

In 342 CE the first Christian emperors of Rome, Constans and Constantine, passed the empire’s first laws against homosexual behavior. In 538 CE the emperor Justinian broadened this proscription to all sex acts not made for the express purpose of procreation. In his Novella 77, he urges good Christians to “abstain from suchlike diabolical and unlawful lusts, so that they may not be visited by the just wrath of God on account of these impious acts, with the result that cities perish with all their inhabitants.”

The Catholic Church has had a big problem with masturbation from the very beginning. It all seems to have come from the same origin. As the church father Clement of Alexandria explained, semen was a “divine instrument for the propagation of man,” and shooting a load of that divine instrument into a sock or another man was an affront to god himself.

European sexual mores didn’t exactly open up over the next twelve hundred years of Christianity. When the kinkier ruins of the pagan Romans and Etruscans started turning up at archaeological digs in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the nobility of Italy locked everything “questionable” away from the public in a hidden museum of now-forbidden art. We’re lucky they didn’t just burn it all: Many considered the destruction of Pompeii to have been a fitting punishment for ancient Roman debauchery. In 1800, the Pope officially excommunicated all the city’s long-dead inhabitants.

This museum of hidden erotic history wasn’t opened up to the public until the 1960s, when the Western world collectively decided it was time to loosen up a bit about the whole “orgasm” thing. And, oddly enough, that process kicked off with some enterprising doctors and their medicinal sex toys.

“Hysteria” is the oldest mental illness attributed purely to women. It’s a broadly defined disorder that includes everything from symptoms that sound very much like a panic attack to incredibly vague things like “excess emotion” and “erotic fantasies.” Today, we know that the symptoms of “hysteria” are caused in women and men by a variety of things. But for millennia, hysteria was the “woman’s disease,” and an incredibly common disease at that. According to some sources, such as Rachel Maines’s The Technology of Orgasm (1999) hysteria in the seventeenth century was the second most common diagnosis for women, beaten only by fever.

Old-timey doctors concluded that orgasm was the best prescription for this problem. The woman couldn’t be encouraged to masturbate, of course, because that’d be lettin’ the devil into her nethers. But such ladies were advised to swing and ride horses, and, when that didn’t work, the doctor himself would jill off for her. Physicians at the time weren’t fans of inducing “hysterical paroxysm” in every woman who walked through the door. The first vibrators were created in France, in the 1730s, to help make the medical process of getting ladies off mechanically efficient.

The vibrators that 50 percent (or more!) of the people reading this know and enjoy today are descendants of this medical tool. It’s a story with a happy ending, but it’s also a jarring example of how deeply our attitudes on masturbation have changed. Once upon a time the human capacity for sexual fantasy kept us safe from plague. People developed dildos, some of the first tools in history, to help women masturbate . . . and thirty thousand years later, we started building tools to help doctors do the job for them.

The history you learned in school probably minimized the impact of kinky sex and pornography on human development, with one weird exception . . .

The Venus of Willendorf: 3-D Porn, or the Birth of Medical Science?

The Venus of Willendorf dates back to 25,000-ish BCE, making her the oldest depiction of a naked woman known to archaeology. We can’t know exactly why people nearly three-recorded-histories ago built any piece of art. But right now the popular consensus boils down to “it’s porn.”

Tavia Morra

The theory that the Venus was basically prehistoric smut has led researchers to make some pretty bold assumptions about ancient eroticism. Here’s how PBS describes the Venus on its “How Art Made the World” website (circa 2015):

The people who made this statue lived in a harsh ice-age environment where features of fatness and fertility would have been highly desirable. In neurological terms, these features amounted to hyper-normal stimuli that activate neuron responses in the brain. So in Paleolithic people terms, the parts that mattered most had to do with successful reproduction—the breasts and pelvic girdle.

Note that “Paleolithic people” means exclusively “male Paleolithic people” here. PBS—and mainstream archaeology—defines “the parts that mattered” from the perspective of ancient men.

According to Christopher L. C. E. Witcombe, an art historian, the Venus = porn conclusion has been almost universally accepted since 1908. Her lack of a face shows that she’s an “anonymous sex object”; her lack of feet suggests that she has no agency of her own. Calling her “Venus” in the first place was actually a sexist joke on behalf of early twentieth century (male) archaeologists: The Greek goddess Venus was considered the epitome and physical ideal of a “civilized” Western woman. The potbellied, pendulum-boob’d Willendorf statue was mockingly assumed to have been the “Venus” of a less-refined, “primitive” people.

Very few Victorian-era scientific assumptions have survived intact to the twenty-first century. But the idea that the Venus, one of the foundations of all human art, was made by a man to aid in masturbation is still widely accepted today. But in 1996 LeRoy McDermott, a professor at Central Missouri State University, turned conventional wisdom on its head: The Venus wasn’t porn at all. It was a woman’s self-portrait.

In their 1996 article, “Toward Decolonizing Gender,” McDermott and Catherine McCoid suggest that the Venus lacks a face because a prehistoric woman couldn’t see her own face. McCoid and McDermott point out that the Venus’s proportions look remarkably like how a pregnant woman would’ve seen herself, looking down: mounds of breast and belly.

Permission given by LeRoy McDermott

And here’s a shot of a pregnant woman looking back at her own butt, compared with the statuette’s backside:

Permission given by LeRoy McDermott

It makes a lot of sense that many of the first human artists would’ve been women, and specifically, pregnant women. They would’ve spent a lot of time stationary, not out hunting or gathering, giving them ample time to hone their skills. And as Dr. McDermott told me:

If males were actively involved with the carving of female and animal images, then why is the male body almost completely absent?

Dr. McDermott suspects the Venus of Willendorf, and all the other Venuses archaeologists have found scattered across Stone Age dig sites, were actually crafted as obstetric aids. They were a way for women to track and better understand the process of pregnancy, providing “factual and potentially useful visual” information for women. Rather than man-made erotic art, the Venus may represent the birth of medical science, courtesy of women.

Women alone faced the inevitable life-threatening and painful event of giving birth and it is very likely that the thought of preparing for it had crossed the mind of woman long before the process became of intellectual interest to men.

Dr. McDermott published his theory in the journal Current Anthropology in 1996. His article was peer reviewed, and no one then—or now—was able to poke any holes in it. Dr. McDermott noted ruefully that “nobody challenged it. But nobody accepted it, either. It seemed to be ignored, quite frankly. There’s nothing anyone can say to challenge it so they just call it ‘bizarre.’”

Dr. McDermott’s a polite guy, and all he would say is that he was “miffed.” I asked why he thought there was so much resistance within academia to the idea that women crafted the Venus, and much of early art.

I honestly can’t tell you. I just wish I understood that better.

The dominant competing theory seems especially absurd when you realize it revolves around ancient people fetishizing an obese woman. “Explain to me how we can have obese women in the Ice Age?” He added:

They’re nude women. But women have other concerns besides male interest.

The Venus follows the opposite pattern of everything else in this book. History as taught by schools has whitewashed the drunkenness out of the past. It’s minimized the influence of drugs on history’s great thinkers, and covered up the impact of prostitution and insults on human development. Wherever possible, mainstream history likes to present the most sanitized, least risqué version of events.

With one exception: the Venus of Willendorf. For some reason, we’d prefer to teach kids it’s ancient porn, rather than a sophisticated medical device crafted by women, for women.

Let’s say you’re a hunter living in the Amazon basin, so long ago the word American hasn’t been invented yet and the word native won’t be necessary until boats advance beyond the floating-coffin stage. You’re tromping through the jungle one day on the ancient equivalent of a Walmart run when you stumble upon a jaguar. And since that jaguar is two hundred pounds of muscle terminating in four dagger feet that could easily terminate you, your first reaction is probably to poop your loin cloth.

By the way, the jaguar is also something of a god to you. You’ve grown up seeing his image carved into temples and embroidered on the garments of holy men, and now that he’s sitting right there you find yourself too frozen to move. Luckily for you, this big cat doesn’t have a hankering for sweet and sour manflesh. In fact, he’s too busy getting high as balls to give the first third of a fuck what you’re doing.

That becomes increasingly clear the longer you watch. Mr. Jaguar’s not sleeping or picking the howler monkey out of his teeth, he’s sucking on a tree vine. This vine doesn’t have a name yet, because plants and jaguars have remarkably little need for names. But people in the area will eventually take to calling it ayahuasca. Centuries later, people wearing lab coats will classify this vine as a powerful monoamine oxidase inhibitor (MAOI). Today, we know MAOIs as a class of drug mostly prescribed to combat depression.

But all you know is that the jaguar rolled around in kitty-cat bliss for a long time. It was so adorable you almost didn’t run like shit when he started to sober up. You make it back home without losing anything more than a bladder of fear pee, and immediately share the good news:

Guys, the jungle is holding!

That little vignette represents one likely scenario for the birth of the now-famous drug ayahuasca. And while the MAOI in ayahuasca is a potent drug in and of itself, it reaches its full potential only when mixed with the leaves of a yopo bush. Yopo just happens to contain the drug dimethyltryptamine, or DMT. The resulting mixture, generally just called ayahuasca, is one of the most powerful hallucinogens on earth.

Today any Westerner with a MacBook’s worth of spare cash can afford to fly down to Guatemala, Costa Rica, Brazil, or whichever Latin American nation she pleases and pay a shaman to walk her through an ayahuasca ceremony. It’s certainly an intense experience—and you can find dozens of contemporary trip reports with a second’s worth of Googling—but the trip itself is actually the least interesting thing about ayahuasca.

MAOIs like ayahuasca/Banisteriopsis caapi are an effective medication, but they don’t cause eight-hour bouts of life-changing hallucinations unless combined with DMT. DMT itself is completely inactive when taken orally . . . unless it’s taken with an MAOI, which prevents the stomach from breaking it down.

It’s likely that the discovery of the ayahuasca mixture so famous today came at the end of many years’ worth of trial and error. Tribal legends claim that humankind first became aware of Banisteriopsis caapi when people saw jaguars chewing on the vine and adopted the habit for themselves. MAOIs clearly alter the user’s reactions to a number of drugs and food. Early users noticed this, and, eventually, the more creative/reckless among them decided to try mixing the vine with other plants they’d taken a liking to. Some of these intrepid people got sick—some of them may have died—but the smartest and luckiest among them found mixes that worked. And then they told their friends.

The designer drug industry, worth billions of dollars today, works under the same basic model. And it all started with . . .

The War on Pain

Most of the people reading this right now don’t live with chronic pain every hour of every day of their lives. Let’s all give a big collective kudos to medical science for that one. But back before antibiotics and nutritional science, in the days when goiters and gout roamed the land and amputation was conventional medicine’s default answer to a serious wound, pain was humankind’s most constant foe.

Alcohol, marijuana, and opium are among the first drugs our species ever came to use. But the first two only take the edge off; they aren’t enough to deal with the most serious agonies. Opium, smoked or taken in tea, does a better job of dulling pain. But it’s still not enough to get a patient through, say, surgery.

Chemistry and science met officially for the first time in an alchemist named Paracelsus (1493–1541). He was a pioneer in using mercury, arsenic, lead, and a variety of other deadly poisons as medicine. But when he wasn’t busy seeding entire generations of patients with deadly poison, he spent some time creating a tincture of alcohol and opium called laudanum.

Laudanum was the drug du jour of the American frontier. If you were prescribed an addictive over-the-counter drug in the Old West, odds are it was laudanum. The next scientist to screw around with opium was Friedrich Sertumer, an apprentice apothecary in early nineteenth-century Germany who noticed that most opium products of the time varied widely in quality, and often didn’t work at all.

He wasn’t a trained chemist, or a doctor. But this was the nineteenth century, and anyone with a test tube and some moxie had a hope of making medical breakthroughs. Sertumer got to work and spent years of trial and error trying to distill the active ingredient in opium into a concentrated form. He knew he’d finally succeeded when, suffering from a toothache, he took a shot from his latest concoction and felt his pain disappear completely.

Sertumer’s toothache cure was what we know today as morphine. He quickly became an advocate, testing his new drug on children because—again—this was the early nineteenth century and there were just no fucking rules at all. Modern medicine eventually took notice of his achievement, though, and by the time the American Civil War rolled around, morphine was the dominant painkiller of the age.

Heroin was next, developed in the 1890s by a Bayer chemist named Heinrich Dreser. The name heroin comes from the German word for heroic, and was meant to signify the drug’s terrifying power. Heroin does pass into the brain much faster than morphine, and generally does a more competent job of the whole killing-pain thing. But it still wasn’t enough. Shooting up an armful of horse can do a lot of things for a fellow, but it won’t entirely block out the pain of having a limb chopped off or an organ chopped out.

For a very long time no surgery could be carried out without a set of “surgeon’s mates,” men strong enough to hold the patient relatively still while the doctor cut into him or her. The only reason this job doesn’t exist now is because we developed proper anesthetics that actually block the brain’s perception of pain entirely, long enough for the surgeons to do their work.

Ironically, this atom bomb in the war on pain was invented back in the 1770s, well before the Revolutionary War, the Napoleonic Wars, or the Civil War, all conflicts that could’ve sorely used the presence of a functional anesthetic. Nitrous oxide was discovered in 1772 by Joseph Priestley. He published his findings in 1776, the year the United States decided to stick a thumb in the motherland’s eye.

Nitrous was coined “laughing gas” in 1799, but that term really doesn’t go far enough in describing just how this remarkable substance affects the human body. Nitrous takes you out of yourself, and in high enough doses it renders you unable to perceive the outside world. While opium and its derivatives are painkillers, nitrous is a dissociative, like PCP. It doesn’t deaden the pain. It lifts your consciousness out of the realm where pain exists.

If you’ve ever had dental surgery you know just how well laughing gas can work. One minute you’re sitting uncomfortably with the dreadful knowledge that a drill is about to make the lower part of your skull its bitch . . . and the next you’re floating free, utterly unaware of the fact that someone is chopping bones out of your body. Nitrous oxide works, but it didn’t have a chance to work as an anesthetic until nearly a century after its discovery.

Nitrous oxide quickly became a novelty drug of the upper class. Wealthy fops and dandies would gather in huge tents, which would then be flooded with nitrous oxide to produce a spectacular high for all and sundry. Yes, the ads for these Victorian-era drug parties were as hilarious as you’d expect:

This flyer, from an 1845 party in New York, warns that gas will be dispensed only to “gentlemen of the first respectability,” although the flyer seems to show a man rather forcefully dosing a lady with a massive bag of the stuff. Nitrous use appeared to be a spectacle at that point; it’s possible that more bystanders watched their fellows get high than actually partook themselves. Men from the audience were invited up to protect users from injuring themselves—a wise precaution, considering how badly nitrous tends to disrupt motor skills. This flier also makes the somewhat troubling statement that “probably no one will attempt to fight.”

Joseph Priestley noted immediately that nitrous had a numbing effect on pain. Other chemists reported similar findings over the years, but no one hit on the idea of using the drug as an anesthetic until the mid-nineteenth century.

The history of ether carries some strange similarities to that of nitrous: It, too, is a drug that, once huffed, dissociates the body from all sense of pain. Both drugs cause powerful, sometimes manic short-term addiction . . . and both were used for shits and giggles for generations before anyone thought to turn their talents to medicine. Ether actually dates back to the sixteenth century (and possibly much further), but it wasn’t until 1846 that a dentist named William Morton used it on a surgical patient.

At the time Morton embarked on his experiment, ether, like nitrous oxide, was best known as a luxury drug of the upper class. Specifically, Harvard students (and faculty) were rather renowned for their ether-rag parties. But Morton knew ether could do so much more, and he proved it in front of a live audience on October 16, 1846, by rendering a patient insensate with an ether-soaked sponge and removing a tumor from the side of his neck. When the man awoke, he reported feeling only that his neck had been “scratched.”

The field of anesthesiology was born that day. Nitrous oxide saw its first use as an anesthetic shortly thereafter. And while it would be decades before the practice of anesthetizing patients grew more common than that of just holding them down so the surgeon could start cuttin’, Morton’s triumph was a major victory in the war on pain.

The story of nitrous oxide and ether has now been repeated over and over again by a parade of narcotics. It’s the pattern of the modern designer drug: A remarkable new chemical is discovered and synthesized and immediately takes off as a party drug, well before scientists figure out the best way to use it safely and responsibly.

How a Designer Drug Lives, Kills, and Dies

According to the Drug Enforcement Administration and countless concerned politicians, a designer drug is any narcotic made to mimic the effects of an already illegal drug. The “bath salts” that hit the news a few years back were a drug designed to imitate stimulants like methamphetamine. There are designer drug knock-offs of illegal substances like MDMA, LSD, and even marijuana. Some of them feel just like their real and illegal counterparts. Others bear only the vaguest resemblance.

The first of these designer drugs were analogues (nearly identical versions) of fentanyl, a family of painkillers developed in the 1970s to provide a nonopiate alternative to morphine and heroin. One popular fentanyl derivative today, butyrfentanyl, is purported to be twenty times stronger than morphine.

The first fentanyl to hit the street went by the nickname “China white.” It rose to popularity in 1979, and immediately started killing people by accidental overdose. In less than a decade, more than a hundred deaths had been attributed to various fentanyls.

During the course of my research I was lucky enough to come into contact with a source who works inside one of the online drug bazaars that distribute these “research chemicals” to users across the United States. He was terrified of fentanyl:

If you get this stuff, and you don’t have a very accurate milligram scale to measure it with, it is stupendously easy to take too much. . . . Several teenagers and an old man alike have died from a mere 5 mg dose. (For reference, 5 mg is about the size of a mustard seed.)

My source didn’t work for a company that sold very many fentanyl derivatives. But he considered the drug a major risk for the future safety of his business. “I don’t think that the research chemical market is ever going to go down, but I do see it taking a drastic hit.”

Most recreational chemicals are legal only in the loosest sense of the word. The Federal Analog Act, passed in 1986, allows the government to treat any chemical “substantially similar” to a schedule 1 or 2 drug as one of those drugs if it is meant for human consumption—meaning my source could be prosecuted and thrown in prison for his hand in marketing a variety of research chemicals.

There’s a very blurry line between research chemicals and designer drugs, and the difference is primarily one of intent. If the creator(s) of a substance made it intending to mimic the effects of an illegal narcotic, like the fentanyl derivatives and the various species of “legal weed” you’ll find in head shops across the world, it’s a designer drug. If a drug was created with some other purpose in mind, or made not knowing much more than “this’ll probably do something!” it’s a research chemical.

Both are sold side by side in online markets like the one my source helps maintain. Some substances fall into both categories. For example, 4-Methylthioamphetamine (MTA) is a designer drug developed in the 1990s. For a while, it was sold as an alternative to MDMA, or ecstasy. I say alternative, but the reality of the illegal drug market is that MTA was often pressed into pills and sold as ecstasy. Dealers assumed the effects would be similar enough that no one would notice.

MTA is a designer drug, in that its creator, Dr. David Nichols, designed it specifically to function like MDMA. But Dr. Nichols never intended for MTA to be used as a street drug. He synthesized it to test it as an antidepressant on rats.

His early research with MTA was promising. He published a paper on his findings, and noted that the chemical seemed to function “like MDMA.” My source with the online drug market spoke of Dr. Nichols reverently. In fact, Dr. Nichols is sort of famous in the designer drug industry. Chemists in Denmark were paying close attention to the work that came out of Nichols’s lab. They read about MTA, replicated it, and started selling it in large quantities. Dr. Nichols told me:

What we didn’t know at the time is that MTA is a serotonin releaser but it inhibits the enzyme that breaks serotonin down. So after MTA serotonin levels can build over time.

Serotonin is a natural brain transmitter that signifies happiness. But your brain can handle only so much of it at once. Too much serotonin building up in the body can cause the deadly serotonin syndrome. At least five people have died after taking MTA. As Dr. Nichols explained to me:

My understanding is they’d take one, and not much happened because it doesn’t cause euphoria like MDMA. So they’d take a couple more to get an effect and all of a sudden they’d get this massive release of serotonin.

Dr. Nichols got into medicinal chemistry to help advance the frontiers of human knowledge and improve the state of medicine. It’s a terribly unfair irony that some of his work led to the loss of human lives. As the fallout from MTA, known as “flatliners” on the street, grew larger and larger, he became aware, for the first time, that he was being watched by other, less ethical chemists. When I spoke with him he told me:

There was one site I saw called Honest Chemical Company . . . they have all sorts of illegal chemicals on their site that say “not for human consumption.” There was an interview with a chemist in Belgium years ago, he was one of these distributors, he was asked, “Where do you get your ideas?” . . . and he said, “Dave Nichols’s lab is particularly interesting.”

Dr. Nichols was “pretty annoyed” at that. He has a major problem with the unethical chemists who shotgun potentially dangerous, completely untested drugs out to a largely ignorant consumer base. But Dr. Nichols lays the lion’s share of the blame on the ongoing state of drug prohibition. If safer, more heavily studied drugs like MDMA weren’t so illegal, there wouldn’t be a market for all of the weird little research chemicals he and his colleagues meant for legitimate scientific study.

Speaking of his colleagues, no chapter on designer drugs would be complete without mention of Alexander “Sasha” Shulgin, a former Dow chemist who helped popularize MDMA. He also invented more than 230 new designer drugs, and tested their effects on himself, his wife, and their friends. Shulgin’s experiences—and guides to re-creating his work—are published in the books PiHKAL and TiHKAL.

Shulgin and Nichols were/are both advocates for the responsible use of hallucinogens in legitimate research. That research has been stymied for years as a result of the recreational drug industry and the DEA. But, recently, things have started to open up, and a bright new future may be on the horizon for the wayward chemical children of these scientists.

The Therapeutic Future of Designer Drugs

MDMA, 3,4-methylenedioxy-methamphetamine, known as ecstasy, molly, and whatever dumb name people have started calling it this week, has one of the most tragic backstories of all drug-kind. It was first synthesized in 1912 by scientists at Merck looking to develop a chemical intermediary that might act as an anticoagulant. It’s unclear when, exactly, MDMA was first tested on humans. But by 1970, it had made its way into pills seized in US drug busts.

Alexander Shulgin was the first human officially to test MDMA and report on its effects in a scientific manner. He cooked up a batch and tried it in 1976, describing ecstasy’s effects for the first time and inadvertently kick-starting the drug’s popularity. His inaugural trip report is restrained and rather tame.

I felt that I could talk about deep or personal subjects with special clarity, and I experienced some of the feeling one has after the second martini, that one is discoursing brilliantly and with particularly acute analytical powers.

This is just one of 179 different drug experiences Dr. Shulgin and his wife describe in their book PiHKAL, or Phenethylamines i Have Known And Loved. It doesn’t particularly stand out from the others. But, for whatever reason, MDMA took off like a damn rocket, growing popular enough to earn the government’s wrath and becoming permanently banned in 1985, at the height of the “Just Say No” era of drug legislation. If all the world had lost was a party drug, this wouldn’t be such a sad story. But a growing body of evidence suggests that MDMA is much, much more than that.

The first clinical trials involving MDMA started coming out in the early 2000s; by 2002, nearly three hundred subjects had been administered MDMA in a variety of studies on MDMA’s efficacy in several areas. The studies were conducted in locations from San Francisco to Switzerland and established MDMA as a remarkably safe drug to administer in a clinical setting. Yet resistance to larger-scale testing of the drug was fierce. Dr. Michael Mithoefer received FDA approval to conduct the first study on the efficacy of MDMA as a PTSD treatment in 2001 at the Medical University of South Carolina. But Dr. Mithoefer also needed the approval of an institutional review board, or IRB, to conduct the research at his university. That proved more difficult.

It became clear . . . [that] there were too many political obstacles to them even reviewing it. It was too controversial for them to want to have it at the university.

So Dr. Mithoefer and his team waited three months to get a new FDA approval to conduct the study in the private office he and his wife, a psychiatric nurse, shared. Then they got another approval from a freestanding IRB:

And then the next thing was to go to the DEA.

And then, just as the Mithoefers seemed to have jumped every hurdle, the IRB rescinded its approval.

At first they didn’t give a reason. As it turned out it was because of an article by George Ricuarte.

Dr. Ricuarte’s super-fun-titled article “Severe Dopaminergic Neurotoxicity in Primates after a Common Recreational Dose Regimen of MDMA” was published in 2002. The article suggested that based on studies using spider monkeys, ecstasy might cause severe damage to the brain’s dopamine receptors, potentially culminating in an onset of early Parkinson’s disease for countless hapless ravers. Dr. Ricuarte’s study was a critical factor in the proposal of the 2003 RAVE (Reducing American’s Vulnerability to Ecstasy) Act, which would have allowed law enforcement agencies to hold club owners responsible for drugs done on their premises. Some people, including this author, might argue that naming a law after raves should disqualify one from naming or making laws, but whatever.

George Ricuarte’s article was formally retracted in 2003, when it was found that the actual neurotoxic damage done in his study was thanks to methamphetamine. Michael Mithoefer found this rather frustrating; he’d brought up concerns about the study being “screwy” more than a year earlier. But they were casually dismissed, because Dr. Ricuarte was a highly funded drug abuse researcher, until Science printed the retraction. Mithoefer’s study regained its IRB approval, but it was a total of two and a half years before the DEA gave the final sign-off on his research. As Dr. Mithoefer recalled during an interview I conducted:

There were a couple delays because they “lost” the application and that kind of thing through bureaucratic problems, concern about getting an “outside panel” to review it to see if they thought it was a good idea. We always had cordial communications with them . . . so there was no sense of hostility, but there was a sense of inertia and, perhaps, maybe hoping we would go away.

Dr. Mithoefer and his wife didn’t go away. Their initial study, involving twenty patients split between an active (MDMA-receiving) twelve and a placebo-receiving eight, was finally published in 2010. Both groups received psychotherapy before, after, and during their placebo and real-drug sessions. All the patients were PTSD sufferers who previously had been administered drugs and therapy for their disorder but had received little to no relief of their symptoms. The results of that first study were astonishing: 83 percent of patients who received MDMA showed a significant reduction in symptoms. Only 25 percent of the control group saw the same. A follow-up study showed that the vast majority of patients continued to see benefits from their therapy more than three years later.

MDMA’s phase-one clinical trial was a wild success, so the Mithoefers were able to gain funding and approval for a second phase of study. Although the PTSD sufferers in the phase-one study were mostly victims of crimes and sexual violence, the subjects in the phase-two study were primarily veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It had been hard to find volunteers for the phase-one studies, but the second study had the opposite problem.

Over six hundred veterans called us from around the country without us having to advertise. We . . . were flooded with so many requests and calls. It was very sad, because we could only take a few of them.

Two of those few were Tony Macie and Nicholas Blackston, veterans of the Iraq War who both walked away from their combat experience with life-crippling levels of PTSD. I spoke to both men, and Mr. Blackston was able to point to a single incident that was responsible for the lion’s share of his suffering:

They shot an RPG at my Humvee. It hit right in front of me. The driver . . . a piece of metal hit his femoral artery. I was the machine gunner . . . my ammo cans got hit and they blew up, so I took pieces of shrapnel from my own ammo . . . we were all laughing before, then all of a sudden I’m in this black void.

Nicholas’s driver, a very close friend as well as a comrade, died in the attack. Both Nicholas and Tony saw soul-crushing things during their time in Iraq and developed PTSD bad enough that it precluded them from living anything close to a normal life. MDMA, combined with therapeutic sessions with the Mithoefers, helped both veterans heal, where conventional medication and therapy had failed. Tony Macie described his first dose of MDMA as “profound,” and recalled the moment he realized it was kicking in:

[Dr. Mithoefer] was like, “How are you feeling?” And [he] kept asking about my anxiety level, what was it on a scale of one to five.

“Zero?”

“No, between one and five.”

[I] was adamant. “No, it’s a zero.”

The great benefit Nicholas Blackston reported with MDMA is that it made him feel comfortable talking about his combat experiences to professional therapists for the first time.

You’re so unbelievably comfortable with them and you just want to talk about things. With PTSD . . . you feel like you can’t relate to anybody. Once you just let it all out . . . there’s a lot of therapy in that. Within four hours you’re getting like four years of therapy.

If you’ve had any experience with MDMA you can probably see why it works so well. Ecstasy floods your brain with oxytocin, the same chemical your brain starts mass producing the instant you have a baby. Huge doses of ecstasy can induce incapacitating hallucinations, but therapeutic doses leave you feeling almost sober. The MDMA doesn’t fuck you up as much as it makes you unable to feel anxious. Paranoia is replaced with trust and empathy. And recent imaging studies have shown that MDMA calms a brain area called the amygdala that is activated by fear. Of course this stuff helps with PTSD.

Before undergoing MDMA therapy, Mr. Blackston felt dissociated from his emotions. And now, “I got my emotions back,” he says. He described dealing with his PTSD before as “like trying to clean your room with the light off and getting frustrated whenever you bump your head.” Blackston added, “MDMA turned on this light inside of my head.”

Mr. Macie explained to me that

for me MDMA dissolved my ego, it made me feel like, “Holy fuck, all these things I experienced were not good or bad, either way.” I just accepted it. . . . It dissolved my whole ego . . . my whole train of thought, and I realized what happened was what happened. I didn’t deny what happened. I accepted what happened.

For his part, Dr. Mithoefer says that MDMA

tends to make people much more aware and able and willing to express what their deeper unconscious processes are. It gives you a view of what’s going on in a much deeper way, and it allows people to face those things directly and has the potential to be very therapeutic, beyond what many people have been able to do without it. It doesn’t mean people can’t do deep healing without it. But for a lot of people it does catalyze a therapeutic process.

He adds that ecstasy was not a “magic bullet.” The subjects of his studies didn’t benefit from dropping a few tabs and rolling their balls off alone. And it wasn’t a fun process. “We had three people say, ‘I don’t know why they call this ecstasy.’ MDMA didn’t make it a cakewalk. It was still painful therapy.”

Painful, but almost unbelievably effective, and Dr. Mithoefer’s research has helped open a door to . . .

The Exciting Future of Psychedelic Medicine

If the Mithoefers’ research—now in its third phase—continues to bear fruit, Dr. Mithoefer expects MDMA could get its FDA approval as early as 2017. This means a future in which medical professionals can harness the extraordinary potential of MDMA. A lot of very smart people are working hard to make that happen. The Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) funded Mithoefer’s groundbreaking research, and they continue to push for a future in which we don’t throw out promising medicine just because a lot of nineteen-year-olds like taking too much of it and chewing on glowsticks.

Dr. David Nichols, creator of the troubled drug MTA, continues to devote his life to improving our understanding of psychedelics. He’s on the board of the Heffter Research Institute, which promotes “research of the highest quality” with drugs most Americans know only from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Nichols actually synthesized the MDMA used in Mithoefer’s research, decades before Mithoefer started it—before MDMA was even illegal.

Today he’s one of the few people in the world who has a legal pass to cook up chemicals like LSD, DMT, MDMA, and even psilocybin. Getting the legal pass to manufacture schedule 1 drugs is a purposefully pain-in-the-ass process. First, you have to submit your research proposal to the DEA. But the guys in the DEA are cops; they don’t know shit about science. So they send your proposal off to an FDA advisory committee, a step Dr. Nichols described as “completely unnecessary. It’s just done to slow the process up.”

The FDA committee gets to decide if the research is “legitimate science,” something researchers dealing with other, legal mind-altering chemicals don’t have to do.

Not too many people do it, because it’s such a hassle.

Any scientist working with illegal drugs is going to be treated with suspicion by the DEA. Dr. Nichols has published more scientific research than most people have ever read. But the DEA still treats him as though they suspect this whole science thing he’s dedicated most of his life to pursuing is an elaborate cover for his life as an acid dealer.

I don’t know if the DEA liked me much.

Dr. Nichol’s research involved dosing rats with LSD on a daily basis, “to keep them trained.” He wasn’t just drugging rats for fun, of course. He was doing it in order to investigate how psychosis starts in the brain. This research was published in 2005 by the journal Psychopharmacology and sported the most unreasonably cumbersome study name to appear in this book: “Distinct Temporal Phases in the Behavioral Pharmacology of LSD: Dopamine D2 Receptor-Mediated Effects in the Rat and Implications for Psychosis.” The study provided evidence that the brain’s dopamine receptors play a role in the onset of psychosis.

Note how “dosing people with LSD” had nothing to do with the research Dr. Nichols and his team conducted. The acid was just being used because it stimulated brain pathways in rats they wanted to observe.

But, to the DEA, the fact that the research involved LSD was cause enough to make Dr. Nichols look shady. He recalled that the agents responsible for inspecting his laboratory had little to no real understanding of what he was allowed to do.

They asked, “Where’d all this LSD come from?”

I said, “We made it.”

“Are you allowed to make it?”

I said, “Yes I am, if you check the law I am allowed to make it under my research license.”

“Does the main office in DC know you’re making this?”

Obviously they did, because his research had been approved by the DEA, and the FDA, before he even started. But the hoops he’d jumped through to get approval to start his research barely mattered once the DEA officers showed up at his door. Agents combed through the fifteen controlled substances stored under his license and asked him to explain why he needed each one.

“I had to rejustify my protocol.”

Dr. Nichols found himself explaining complicated science to a group of men with no training or experience in the matter. Essentially, he—and any researchers who want to learn something from LSD, MDMA, etc.—have to

1. justify their research to a bunch of nonscientists to get it approved; and

2. randomly rejustify that same research to more nonscientists whenever they happen to drop by to check on things.

The war on drugs has been a material failure—visit any EDM show for a verification of that fact—but the war on drug research has been remarkably successful. LSD’s banning in 1965 didn’t stop Woodstock from turning into a mud-daubed acid fest, but it did lead to a virtual shutdown in research on the drug. It also led to a tragic suppression of the research that had already been done.

In 2012, a study in the Journal of Psychopharmacology finally evaluated the results of six studies, involving more than five hundred subjects, conducted in Norway from 1966 to 1970. The research involved providing therapy for alcoholics via LSD, and suggested that just a single dose of acid could reduce a patient’s alcohol consumption for up to six months. Of folks dosed with LSD, 59 percent reduced their problem drinking. Only 38 percent of the control group did the same.

Despite those promising results, further research into the effects of LSD on addictive behavior ground to a halt for decades due to its illegality. Recently, it’s begun to pick up steam again. Scientists with the Imperial College London began another study, with just twenty volunteers, in 2015. Scientists in Berlin published research in 2011 suggesting an LSD analog might provide an effective treatment for cluster headaches. A pilot study in Switzerland has shown that LSD can help patients with terminal illness deal with their death anxiety.

There will always be a place for research chemicals, designer drugs, or whatever else you want to call them on the party scene. And it’s quite possible that government employees with badges and guns will keep busting those parties from here to kingdom come. But thanks to a few brave scientists, we might yet live to see the day when we let these chemicals help us, rather than lock them away from the world. During our interview Dr. Mithoefer read me a quote from Dr. Stanislav Grof, a pioneer in LSD research, that he found particularly relevant to the future medical use of psychedelics:

It does not seem to be an exaggeration to say that psychedelics, used responsibly and with proper caution, would be for psychiatry what the microscope is for biology and medicine or the telescope is for astronomy.

And now, after years of prohibition, it seems like psychiatrists might finally be on the cusp of getting their own telescope.

Slovenia is a small European nation bordered by Italy, Austria, Hungary, and Croatia. It was born in 1918, at the end of World War I, and then born again in 1991, when Yugoslavia broke apart. Slovenia numbers a little more than two million people. That’s less than one-fourth of the population of Los Angeles. Slovenia isn’t a major power in world politics. You can drive from one end of the country to the other in an hour or two. But if the rumors are true, it has one thing that no other nation on earth can lay claim to:

Salamander brandy.

Purportedly a powerful hallucinogen, salamander brandy is made by drowning poisonous salamanders in brandy. As the luckless amphibians drown, they secrete poison from their skin that mingles with the alcohol in the brandy and grants it a rather lurid psychoactive effect. As the legends go, a salamander brandy trip often includes spontaneous sexual attraction to inanimate objects.

During my research for this chapter I came across several posts in online communities by adventurous psychonauts looking to find a hookup for this truly bizarre narcotic. What I never found was anyone actually offering to sell salamander brandy. I did find a handful of trip reports and one alleged picture of a bottle, but it doesn’t appear as if the drug has ever been exported outside Slovenia.

Salamander brandy is believed to be produced primarily in the Slovenian hinterlands, among older farmers and small-scale distillers in the hills around towns like Skofja Loka. Over the last couple of decades, the supposed properties of salamander brandy have grown mythic within the Slovenian drug culture. It’s become the cause for a peculiar sort of patriotic pride ever since a man named Blaz Ogorevc wrote about tripping on it in 1995, for the magazine Mladina.

Mladina is a publication that trades in both journalism and satire. It published exposés of corruption in Yugoslavia right along with comics meant to translate issues of the day into a language young people gave any fucks about. Blaz Ogorevc, Mladina’s best-known writer, is respected both for his investigative journalism and his doing lots of drugs in the sixties. In other words, the origins of salamander brandy lie in a source both generally trusted and known for fucking around and trying to make people laugh.

I work for Cracked, a website that targets the same audience as Mladina’s (but in English-speaking countries) and also seeks to attract readers by delivering hard facts and important concepts through the warm, gooey medium of comedy. It’s appropriate, then, that Cracked is the website that brought the news about salamander brandy to the eyes of the wider world when it published the article “6 Animals That Can Get You High” on August 18, 2009.

Ever since I read that article, I’ve wondered if the myths about salamander brandy might possibly be real, right down to their amphibian-torturing, inanimate-object-humping core. When I started writing this book, I knew I had to use the opportunity to answer this question for myself, once and for all. My research started with one simple question:

Can drinking dead poisonous animals get you high?

A Brief History of Drugifying Dead Animals

We kill a lot of animals today, for every reason from eating steaks to making softer gloves. But if there’s one way you probably won’t see someone in the Western world use a dead animal, it’s to get wicked high. That’s not an ethical issue. If frog blood made a convenient, fun narcotic, there’d be frog farms dotting the Midwest or illegal frog hatcheries hidden in New Mexico’s trailer parks.

Travel to Saigon, or any part of Vietnam with a sizable tourist population, and you’ll see bottle after bottle of cobra liquor. The bottles often include lizards, insects, frogs, turtles, and whatever other animals happened to be wandering by when the beverage tchotchke was assembled. The sellers hawk them to tourists as potent aphrodisiacs, but unless you’re a necro-herpetophile that’s very much a lie.

In fact, the bottles sold to tourists are nothing more than dead animals preserved in hard liquor or straight rubbing alcohol. The locals know better than to drink them. But traditional medicine across Southeast Asia, and also in China, has viewed snake wine as a valuable remedy for thousands of years. It’s believed to be an effective salve for ailments as varied as rheumatism, poor circulation, and even cancer.

I have to think part of the appeal of snake wine is throwing a middle finger to the deadly, deadly snakes themselves. Alcohol breaks down the proteins in snake venom, rendering it harmless, and as a result the most poisonous snakes tend to be popular ingredients. It’s not hard to imagine that the ancient Chinese farmers who started drowning cobras to death in rice wine did it partly out of spite for the animals they’d feared their whole lives.

Over in Okinawa they make habushu, a type of snake wine produced by drowning a habu. Before you feel too much sympathy for the snakes you should know that habus are the rottenest sons of bitches of the reptile kingdom. In addition to being deadly poisonous, they frequently grow larger than five feet in length and actively hunt human beings (they drop down from the goddamn trees). Habushu purportedly grants the drinker increased energy and a mighty libido, since habu snakes can mate for more than a day without stopping. I’ve been to Okinawa and sampled habushu. It didn’t fill me with energy or a mighty snake-fueled erection. But your results may vary.

For whatever reason, drowning snakes in booze never caught on in the United States. The only animal-based high you’re likely to hear about people engaging in here is toad licking. And the “licking” part is a major misnomer. No toad known to the annals of science will get you high with a simple lick. But if you manage to track down Bufo alvarius, a.k.a. the Colorado River toad or the Bufo toad, you can milk the poison out of its body, dry it, and then smoke the dried venom for an otherworldly trip.

Mind you, that entire process is now 100 percent illegal in the US of A, and in most of the rest of the world. Bufo alvarius venom contains a chemical known as 5-MeO-DMT, one of the most potent hallucinogens on earth. If the name DMT sounds familiar, it’s because that same chemical is found in various plants around the world and is frequently mixed with the ayahuasca vine by South and Central American shamans and “shamans” alike.

That vine contains a monoamine oxidase inhibitor, or MAOI, which, you’ll remember from our previous chapter, activates DMT orally. If you just take the DMT-containing toad venom straight, say by licking the poor creature, nothing will happen. Nothing hallucinogenic, at least. The other parts of the Bufo toad’s venom are very much active orally, and perfectly capable of hospitalizing or even killing any human dumb enough to eat them.

Bufo alvarius isn’t the only animal with its own store of DMT, either. Giraffe livers and marrow also contain the drug. In Sudan, the Humr people have figured out how to render these giraffe bits into a powerful hallucinogen known as Umm Nyolokh. This particular preparation of DMT is said to cause vivid hallucinations of giraffes. It sounds like the recipe to a guilt-ridden and deeply unsettling trip. But it also sounds more than a bit like the few trip reports you’ll find of salamander brandy. Here’s Ogorevc’s recollection:

But damn, a few salamanders walked near by. And they said with their mysterious voices: look, look, who’s there . . .

Hallucinating an animal that died for the cause of fuckin’ you up makes a certain sort of sense. Drug trips tend to amplify whatever feelings and thoughts are already flying through one’s head. But Ogorevc also described another symptom, wholly unlike anything I’d heard of before:

And absolutely everything seemed new and strange, and I wished to fuck something, anything. And in this almost full absence from this world . . . I chose the beech tree. Their trunks . . . seemed horribly erotic to me.

As I mentioned before, salamander brandy’s great claim to psychedelic fame is the tendency to induce spontaneous sexual attraction to inanimate objects. That’s not a characteristic of DMT or any other drug on earth. Alas, modern science has devoted shockingly little effort to discerning just how salamander poison might fuck people up. A psychedelics researcher named Ivan Valencic broke down what little information exists and offered up the chemical samandarin, which occurs naturally in the mucus of the European fire salamander, as a possible culprit.

Samandarin is absorbed through the skin or a mucous membrane, and it can cause elevated blood pressure and cramps, as well as numbness. The fire salamander is actually the only species with samandarin mucus. Other species of salamander live in Slovenia, too, and it’s not clear exactly what species of the amphibian makes for the most powerful brandy. This means another potential hallucinogenic culprit is the poison enjoyed by every other species of salamander: deadly tetrodotoxin. You might know it as the paralytic agent that makes Japanese puffer fish such a risky lunch. It’s worth noting that local legends of salamander brandy note its ability to “take the legs off” of users.

Whatever the precise culprit, it is conceivable that salamander brandy has some psychoactive effect. The science doesn’t rule it out . . . but it doesn’t exactly offer full-throated support, either. In the absence of a clear scientific answer, I’m forced to go with the anecdotal evidence of the few narco-anthropologists who’ve gone before me.

Unraveling the Truth About Salamander Brandy

Other researchers have attempted to suss out the reality of Blaz Ogorevc’s salamander brandy experience. The first seems to have been Ivan Valencic in 1998. He identified the fire salamander as the key ingredient, and also noted that locals often mixed their drinks with wormwood. (As far as I can tell, he’s the only scholar to suggest this, and he does so without outside evidence.) Ivan claimed that August is the traditional start of the salamander-hunting season, and that salamander brandy brewing is thought to be centuries old.

This is all exciting stuff, if true. But Ivan’s article seems to rely heavily on his own ethnographic research and experiences in Slovenia. His only source for explicit facts on the brandy is Ogorevc’s article from 1995. Valencic isn’t a chemist or a biologist, but he takes his salamander brandy much more seriously than Ogorevc. According to him, it averages 45 percent alcohol by volume, and five to six 20-centimeter-long salamanders make an imposing 30 liters of brandy.

Y’know, in case you want to kick off Arbor Day with a mass woodland orgy.

That all sounds extremely specific, but Ivan seems to have less of a handle on the dosing: he suggests anywhere between 50 milliliters (about one shot glass) and 200 milliliters. It’s terrifying to imagine a drug with that kind of variance in dosage, but it makes sense for a folk drug. There’s probably not a lot of standardization among the sort of people who drown animals to get wasted.

Ivan also asserts that the brandy is completely clear. That runs counter to the one purported picture of the brew you can actually find on the Internet. Posted by John Morris in 2000, it shows a fire salamander suspended in a light blue bottle of liquor. John was a writer for the Daily Telegraph, and he wrote the column Grail Trail. He traveled to Slovenia and apparently came upon a bottle of brandy himself:

I had to go through a chain of whispered contacts and endless hours in smoke-filled taverns in Skofja Loka before finding the stuff. It is best enjoyed as a local experience, drunk fresh in the forest where there are plenty of trees to fall in love with. Direct requests for the magic brew will not yield results, but a disapproving local farmer might “happen to find” some of the evil stuff if the price is right.

Morris gave the price for a bottle at around twenty-five to thirty US dollars, and mentions that autumn—“just before the salamander goes into hibernation”—is the best time to buy a bottle. He also reiterates Ogorevc’s famous claim that the brandy makes users uncontrollably randy:

The erotic charge of the drink is powerful, but tends to be indiscriminate in its target, so that anything in the natural world can become sexually attractive—trees, plants, animals or even humans.

That said, Morris gives little that can be called a personal account of the drug’s effects, and he also gives thanks to Ogorevc for help in his article. So we can count Morris’s account as another feather in the cap of hallucinogenic amphibian liquor, but very far from a smoking gun. If this drink’s psychedelic, tree-fucking reputation is all just a practical joke by Blaz Ogorevc, it’s entirely possible Mr. Morris might just be helping him keep it alive.

I’ve found at least one animal rights website that takes the possibility of salamander brandy seriously. Save the Salamanders includes salamander brandy under its “threats” tab of serious issues facing the salamander species. The site uses a picture from Morris’s article, and contains information it seems to have gathered purely from reading that account and doing no other research.

Salamanders are also captured and killed for Salamander Brandy, a beverage that actually contains a corpse of a deceased salamander in it. One of the methods in which the drink is cruelly made is to have two live salamanders tossed into a barrel of fermenting fruits and then leaving them for a month’s time. After this point the mixture is then distilled.

The case against salamander brandy’s existence comes almost entirely from one man: Miha Kozorog, a professor at the University of Ljubljana. He’s authored two papers, one in 2003, published by his school, and one in 2014, published in the book Edible Identities: Food as Cultural Heritage. He noted that salamander brandy was quite famous within his local drug culture, and set off into the countryside to try and find some.

While his findings did suggest that salamander brandy is a real brew with a long and storied tradition in Slovenia, it has no great hallucinogenic reputation. Instead, the name has become a shorthand for the beverage made by disreputable brandy makers trying to stretch their output by adding disreputable ingredients. When he asked local distillers about the brew, they said things like, “We have always been honest brandy makers” and, “Making salamander brandy is a shameful act.”

Kozorog summarized, “No one mentions salamander brandy in connection to altered states of consciousness, but exclusively in connection to fraudulent brandy making. The term was used when after drinking brandy very negative effects were felt, such as partial paralysis [not a symptom of alcohol use] and sickness.”

In other words, there’s a very real possibility that drinking the poisonous mucus of a salamander causes some sort of paralytic effect, which would certainly alter the nature of any bender you got into on the stuff. But Kozorog’s research doesn’t make Ogorevc’s mythically erotic trip seem likely.

But if Blaz Ogorevc and John Morris are lying, why? The only explanation that occurs to me is one of national pride. Slovenia is a small, oft-overlooked chunk of the European continent. A homegrown hallucinogen of unique effect is a matter of pride in certain circles of society. Kozorog himself observed that the drug is seen as a piece of “national heritage” by some of his peers.

Salamander brandy was attractive because it was fresh, exotic and “Ours.”

The matter of salamander brandy’s existence has been seriously questioned, but not quite solved. To do that, I had to travel to Slovenia myself and see if I could bring an end, one way or the other, to this debate . . .

Tracking Down the Truth About Salamander Brandy

I traveled to Slovenia in August 2015, starting in the capital city of Ljubljana. I spent several days there, hanging out around the city’s squatter artist enclaves and asking the young, narcotics-inclined folks I met if they’d ever heard of salamander brandy. The answer to that question was always yes, either from reading Blaz Ogorevc’s article or from hearing it discussed by friends at a party. I met only one man who claimed to have tried it: A young stylist at a barbershop who told us that a little bit was passed around at a party he attended once. He claimed it got him high, but he wouldn’t go into more detail.

He may have been lying. No one else in Ljubljana claimed to have taken salamander brandy themselves; here and there I ran into someone who said a friend had tried it at a party, or been given some by a sketchy uncle. I attempted to track down each of these leads but they came to nothing. After four fruitless days of searching, I decided I’d have to venture deeper into Slovenia if I was going to unravel the mystery of salamander brandy.

According to Ogorevc, the center of salamander brandy production lies in the tiny villages and hamlets surrounding the town of Skofja Loka. (Luckily for Ogorevc, Skofja Loka also happens to be his hometown.) Skofja Loka is about as idyllic a place as I’ve ever been. It’s a small, medieval village surrounded by mighty rolling hills and great green forests. There are many little taverns and restaurants where locals gather at the end of the day to drink the local beer (Lasko) and shoot the proverbial shit.

I spent most of my time in Skofja Loka trawling these little bars with the help of my translator, Neza. The younger folks we talked to had little to say about it. Their knowledge seemed to come solely from the Ogorevc article; many of them had read it, and the rest had at least heard people talking about it. But the older locals had a lot more to say. First off, they clarified that it was not salamander brandy, but salamander schnapps. Brandy is not a popular drink among those from the mountains and hills of Slovenia. But the people in the hinterlands do have a long and abiding tradition of schnapps brewing. Home-distilled schnapps is to rural Slovenia what white lightning is to Appalachia.

One man we spoke with, Ystok, told us he used to own a restaurant in the nearby Poljanska Valley. He claimed that a town in the valley, nicknamed “Clusterfuck” by everyone who didn’t live there, had been the center of production for salamander schnapps. According to him, Clusterfuck had earned its reputation by virtue of being filled with the sort of hillbillies you’d expect to try and drown salamanders for a cheap high. Ystok also told us that we would have trouble finding any salamander schnapps these days: Thanks to government taxes and regulations on the large stills used to make schnapps, it was basically illegal.

Ystok told us the production method he’d heard of involved putting a live salamander in the little closed box (called the “hat”) above the still. The hapless amphibian would be slowly steamed to death, and his poisons would trickle down into the schnapps. One salamander apparently contained enough poison to brew four to five liters of schnapps. He described the resultant brew as “very poisonous.” He told us a (possibly but not certainly apocryphal) tale of one town drunk, a man who could easily drink a bottle of normal schnapps on his own, who was “DONE!” after two glasses of salamander schnapps. Ystok added, “Some people call it a delicacy, but it is not.”

Neza and I had been speaking with Ystok for maybe twenty minutes when several of his friends, all hanging out around the same tavern, realized what we were talking about. They were quick to offer their own opinions on salamander schnapps. One person told us that while normal schnapps is often taken as a digestive (for “stomach issues”) or used as an aperitif before meals, salamander schnapps was primarily used to get “really fucked up.”

A few of the first people in Ljubljana and Skofja Loka I’d asked about salamander schnapps had been adamant that it was just another type of alcoholic beverage. This was consistent with the conclusions Miha Kozorog had drawn: Salamanders were added to the brew by disreputable bootleggers looking to add a little kick, not a hallucinogen. But Ystok and his comrades were adamant that salamander schnapps was a drug, and a potent one at that. I was warned several times that it was “poisonous” and should be diluted with water.

In general, the older people I spoke with were sure it existed and split on whether or not it possessed hallucinogenic qualities. The younger residents I talked to simply knew it existed, and more or less parroted what they’d read in Blaz Ogorevc’s article if they had anything to say at all. Later in the night, at another tiny bar in Skofja Loka, I came across several middle-aged men drinking together. One of them claimed to have tried salamander schnapps himself. He remarked, “You feel dizzy when you drink it.” This was consistent with Ivan Valencic’s hypothesis that salamander schnapps includes some paralytic agent that “takes the legs” out from under a drinker.

I sat drinking with these men for a couple of hours (one of them was the bar owner, and thus the beers were free) and, after a while, the man who claimed to have tried salamander schnapps admitted that he wasn’t sure if what he’d had was the real deal. But he had some relatives nearby, on a farm in the mountains on the way to the village of Clusterfuck, and he told us they might know more.

So the next day we set off in Neza’s car for Clusterfuck and environs, and stopped along the way at this farm. After one of the greatest meals of my life (words cannot do the sausage justice), I interviewed the old farmer. He didn’t know where I could find salamander schnapps, but he did give me some of the most enlightening information of the entire trip. According to him, salamander schnapps was much more common immediately after World War II, when times were tough and a good high was rather hard to find.

He claimed that salamander-infused schnapps simply got you really drunk, and left you with a terrible headache afterward. He confirmed that it had a reputation for “taking the legs” out from under you, and told us of one local drunk who “drank so much . . . that he was petrified.” It was a bitter drink, not at all like normal schnapps. The old farmer also told us of another brewing method: The salamander would be decapitated and hot schnapps would be poured over the severed head. This does make some biological sense: The fire salamander keeps its poison glands on the back of its head.

After lunch and an interview, we drove off into the valley toward the town of Clusterfuck. It started to rain heavily during our drive, and our progress was slow in the winding mountain roads. At one point we passed a grizzled old man rebuilding a scythe, and I had Neza stop the car so we could talk to him. He wound up having a lot to say; he was a fan of Blaz Ogorevc and familiar with the original article on salamander schnapps. But he’d also lived in the region his entire life and had heard another theory about the beverage, which I found fascinating.

Apparently, after World War II local distillers started using a new Italian yeast that fermented faster. The yeast’s name was very similar to the Slovenian word for salamander, and that might be where the myth of salamander schnapps first began. He added that he’d heard quite a few people talk about the drink’s “bad reputation” as a hallucinogenic substance. Like us, he didn’t seem to know the truth.

After another half hour of driving we made it to Clusterfuck at last. It was a surprisingly nice town, given what the name had led us to expect, but we found no traces of salamander schnapps. One man we spoke with told us that “people used to talk about it a lot, but not anymore.” We stopped for consolation beers at a local bar, where a muscular man with a pronounced unibrow told us of a schnapps distiller in the next town who might know something more about the increasingly mythic brew.

We drove to the distillery and, after drinking a delicious glass of honey schnapps and a terrible glass of cumin schnapps, started talking with the owners about schnapps of the salamandered variety. They didn’t make any, of course, but they did posit a new theory for how the beverage had come to be. From what they’d heard, salamanders were attracted to the heat of the still and started crowding around until the brewers “just started putting them in.” They reiterated that salamander schnapps was a drug from an earlier generation, and “probably all the people who tried it are already dead.”

And so my trip to Slovenia came to an end. I’d gathered a lot of fascinating theories and conflicting stories about salamander brandy/schnapps. But I hadn’t actually found any examples of the brew itself. The saga of the salamander-based hallucinogen remains unfinished, perhaps for some bold narceologist of the future. I don’t like to end on this note, presenting another chapter in the long mystery rather than its definitive conclusion.

But the book’s got to end somewhere; here seems as good as any place. Bye!

...

Hah! Just kidding. That bye was a test, and everyone still reading this passed. The fact that I couldn’t find any salamander schnapps in Slovenia just meant that I was going to need to brew a batch myself and try it out. That’s right, I’m about to teach you . . .

HOW TO: Make Cruelty-Free Salamander Schnapps

Obviously, the “traditional” method of brewing salamander schnapps wasn’t something I was willing to re-create. No book would be worth torturing a small animal to death. But, after mulling it over a bit, I hit on a way to brew my own salamander schnapps without becoming a monster in the attempt. First I’d need:

Ingredients

1 European fire salamander

1 bottle liquor (schnapps, brandy, vodka— it’s all good; during my trip to Slovenia I heard about everything from plums to potatoes being used in “schnapps” making)

1 box vinyl gloves

1 mason jar

Directions

In short, my plan was to buy a fire salamander of my own and milk the poison out of his glands without killing him. I found a place online that would ship a fire salamander directly to my door, and promptly ordered one. I set him up with a name (Mitchfordson II, in honor of a sick hummingbird I’d tried and failed to save earlier that year) and a cage, and gave him three weeks to adjust to his new digs.

Once he was fully settled in, it was time for the milking. I bought vinyl gloves to protect my hands, and in case he had a latex allergy. I conducted ten milking sessions over the course of thirty days. First, I’d rinse the gloves with distilled water to minimize the chances of hurting my little salamander friend, then I’d pick him up from his cage and massage the poison glands on the back of his head until he secreted a little bit.

As soon as there was poison on my gloves, I’d wash them off with vodka into a mason jar.

Magenta Vaughn

I’m not about to claim Mitchfordson II enjoyed being milked for his poison, but he also didn’t seem overly stressed by it: His appetite stayed healthy, and, as of the writing of this book, he lives contentedly in my office terrarium. After thirty days of collection I found myself with about 150 milliliters of salamander schnapps—perhaps the first salamander schnapps outside Slovenia. I simmered it on the stove for a few minutes and then poured it back into the jar.

Magenta Vaughn

Now there was nothing left to do but try it.

Results

I drank all 150 milliliters over the course of twenty minutes. Initially, I didn’t feel any different from being slightly drunk. I finished the jar and, solidly tipsy, decided it was time for bed. It was not a triumphant drunken pass out; I felt as if I’d failed to create anything beyond a glass of dirty vodka.

And then, about an hour later, I woke up to pee. This isn’t an uncommon experience for drunk me, and I hopped up out of bed just sorta expecting my legs to do their normal leg work.

I almost fell flat on my ass.

Now, a shot glass is about 42 milliliters. So I’d drank a bit less than four shots in quick succession: enough to get me drunk, sure, but probably not enough to make me that clumsy an hour or so later. I went to the bathroom, wobbled to the kitchen, drank some water, and headed back to sleep. Maybe it was the salamander vodka, maybe I was just drunker than I expected to be.

But when I woke up the next morning, I still felt a little weird. My stomach hurt, and I felt slightly queasy after breakfast. About an hour after waking up I was at a gas station, filling my car up, when I realized I felt strangely light-headed and fuzzy. A cup of coffee didn’t banish the feeling; my body felt strange, and my coordination was definitely off, for several hours. I didn’t have any kind of profound erotic drug trip, as the legends suggested. But I did feel as if my legs were less steady.

Based on my experiences, I feel as though I can conclusively state that salamander schnapps is not a powerful hallucinogen, as Blaz Ogorevc claimed it to be. However, I will say that the drink seemed to “give more,” as Miha Kozorog put it. It did not create a wildly different experience from drunkenness, but I certainly felt the aftereffects of my drinking much longer than I otherwise would’ve.

In conclusion: Mixing salamander poison with liquor might fuck you up more than liquor alone. But it won’t make you fuck trees.

Conclusion

So, my trip to Slovenia didn’t end with salamander schnapps. I had to make that stuff on my own. But I did wind up stumbling on another prize: glass after glass of homemade liquor. Once people heard I was looking for salamander schnapps, they couldn’t wait to offer me the schnapps they’d brewed themselves.

Most of the homebrewed Slovenian schnapps I had was not . . . great. But it was all different, and the people I met were endearingly passionate about the liquor their grandfathers, etc., had brewed up in the spare bathtub and distilled in the kitchen. Slovenian schnapps, as well as salamander schnapps, is what people who use needlessly smart words call an “autochthonous drug.” Autochthonous just means it’s a local invention; not imported from some other country and culture.

I encountered a lot of autochthonous liquor traditions as I passed through the Baltic states. In Serbia and Bosnia they drink a fruit brandy known as rachiya. People make rachiya out of pears, plums, apples, and basically everything else that ferments. You sip it out of fat-bottomed, long-necked shot glasses. My first introduction to rachiya was in the apartment of a friend’s cousin. It was the cousin’s own plum rachiya; it tasted hot, like burnt sugar and smoke. After several glasses, he pulled out a goat head that was just chilling in his freezer and started eating its brains with a spoon. I got the feeling that this was not an abnormal Friday night for anyone else in the room.

The United States doesn’t have many autochthonous drugs. We’re certainly the country that made substances like LSD and MDMA famous, and we’ve become the world’s number one producer of marijuana, but none of that originates from here. All across the Balkan states, people toast with rachiya, and drink it before meals as an aperitif or over long nights with their friends. You can look back centuries in time and find Balkan people making and drinking rachiya in much the same way, and for the exact same reasons.

We’re awash in craft beer and craft liquors and boutique marijuana today, but these are all the spearheads of new traditions. Prohibition disrupted America’s drinking traditions in the 1920s, so much that breweries are now producing “pre-prohibition” ales in imitation of old recipes. The criminalization of most other narcotics has limited their ability to gain much cultural weight. And that’s a problem.

In chapter 10, I talked about the ability of ritual behavior to limit and moderate drug use. Every vice I’ve written about in this book started out as some sort of ritualized behavior. Sarcasm and trolling offered our ancestors a way to moderate the violent impulses of young men. Prostitution was once a sacred religious duty, the purview of priests rather than pimps.

Behind every vice is an impulse. We can sate those impulses in ways that are healthy, that improve our ability to deal with the world, and that help us grow as people. Or we can sate those impulses in ways that numb us to the world and drive us deeper and deeper away from it. My hope for this book is that it makes you look at the next cigarette you smoke, the next beer you drink, the next hit of whatever you drop at a party as more than just a product to consume. Think of the history behind it. Think of the weight of human ingenuity and invention that had to build up before you could enjoy it as easily and safely as you do.

Enjoy your vices, but respect them, too.

Acknowledgments

Special thanks to my partner, Magenta; to my agent, Byrd Leavell; and to all my wonderful friends (particularly Josh Sargent, David Bell, and Brandon Rainboldt) who let me test experimental re-creations of historical drugs on their bodies. Sorry about the hospital visit, Dave.

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