Author here: this is an open-access journal article, mostly about the colonial histories of peyote, psilocybin and ayahuasca. If you aren't able to access it and want to, just get in touch (contact info in profile) and I'd be happy to email you a PDF. Same goes with the primary sources I cite, although most should be available via Hathi Trust's emergency temporary access feature.
Great article - it would make sense to me that these substances were, as you said 'in-ward facing', not something you hand out to foreign visitors but something you guard as a sacred secret.
I would imagine these societies would also guard many of these practices locally, regionally.
Thanks! Though I have to say, credit for the open access is entirely due to librarians of the UC system. I just had to click a button saying I wanted it to be made available. The work was already done via this 2019 agreement with Cambridge: https://osc.universityofcalifornia.edu/uc-publisher-relation...
I followed one of the citations to this article "Constructing drug effects: A history of set and setting" [1]. A very interesting read, excerpts below:
> LSD research of the 1950s was dominated by the idea that the drug could be used to induce and study mental illness ... Presupposing that patients become mentally ill under the effects of LSD, they were creating expectancies ... the subjects who participated in research were hospitalized psychiatric patients who had little choice about partaking in experiments. Preparation for sessions was poor, often consisting of the casual suggestion that the patient will experience a few hours of madness following the ingestion of the drug, not a soothing notion, to say the least.
> And yet, as the 1950s progressed a growing number of publications were describing the LSD experience in radically different terms. ... participants in psychotherapeutically oriented LSD research asked to repeat the experience time and again (Abramson, 1960). The striking differences in the description of the effects of LSD can readily be explained by the striking differences in the set and setting which existed between the two schools of research. ...
> Yet by the 1970s, following the abandonment of psychedelic drug research and the classification of psychedelics as Schedule I drugs, the concept of set and setting would all but disappear from the literature. ...
> Numerous experiments conducted under strictly controlled conditions (double-blind, with placebos) on a wide range of subjects and in different cultures have demonstrated that both mood and actions are affected far more by what people think they have drunk than by what they have actually drunk ... people who expect drinking to result in violence become aggressive; those who expect it to make them feel sexy become amorous; those who view it as disinhibiting are demonstrative. ...
> Over the last decades, principles of set and setting have been employed both as drug policy measures as well as by local and community initiatives in order to reduce the drug harms. Prominent examples include the case of Dutch coffee shops, as well as chill out rooms and free availability of water in clubs where MDMA is commonly used.
I agree, that story is fascinating. In fact the shift in the 1950s in how scientists thought about psychedelics is actually what my second book (in progress) is about. The Abramson cited in that study is one of the main people I've been researching: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Alexander_Abramson
So as a follow on, I know this is a long shot but if anyone reading this has family or professional connections to some of the people involved in that first generation of psychedelic research in the 1950s and early 1960s (yes, they are old now, but at least a few are still around) please get in touch with me. I've been conducting oral history interviews for the past year or two and finding out all kinds of interesting things.
It really makes you think of the mental damage that addicts are enduring who live in a constant state of poor set and setting. I can't imagine how you don't slip into psychosis being constantly heavily inebriated on whatever substance, but also chronically paranoid about your personal security living without any safety on the street.
It also gives some context to Ted Kaczynski - when I learned that he was possibly dosed on massive amounts of LSD and screamed at while in college. It's not a huge leap from there to why he broke down and became the unabomber.
I can't really imagine that - and it went on for a long time, I would be surprised if a person experience that didn't have some kind of mental break.
"In his second year at Harvard, Kaczynski participated in a study described by author Alston Chase as a "purposely brutalizing psychological experiment" led by Harvard psychologist Henry Murray. Subjects were told they would debate personal philosophy with a fellow student and were asked to write essays detailing their personal beliefs and aspirations. The essays were turned over to an anonymous individual who would confront and belittle the subject in what Murray himself called "vehement, sweeping, and personally abusive" attacks, using the content of the essays as ammunition.[26] Electrodes monitored the subject's physiological reactions. These encounters were filmed, and subjects' expressions of anger and rage were later played back to them repeatedly.[26] The experiment lasted three years, with someone verbally abusing and humiliating Kaczynski each week.[27][28] Kaczynski spent 200 hours as part of the study.[29]
Kaczynski's lawyers later attributed his hostility towards mind control techniques to his participation in Murray's study.[26] Some sources have suggested that Murray's experiments were part of Project MKUltra, the Central Intelligence Agency's research into mind control.[30][31] Chase and others have also suggested that this experience may have motivated Kaczynski's criminal activities"
> Why did some drugs, like tobacco, move readily across cultural and geographic barriers in the early modern era, while others, such as peyote, ayahuasca, and psilocybin mushrooms, remained confined to specific regions?
One thing that's interesting to me is that psilocybin mushrooms were already widely distributed. Hallucinogenic mushrooms grow everywhere, including in Europe:
The mushrooms you might pick or buy in Europe today are, AFAIK, those European varieties, not imported American ones.
But we don't have a widespread tradition of using these mushrooms in Western Europe, do we? If you read Aristophanes, Chaucer, or Shakespeare, there are people getting drunk all over the place, but nobody ever shrooms.
The Sami famously use fly agaric in rituals (concentrating it in human or reindeer urine). Apparently, so do other Siberian peoples. The people we now think of as the indigenous inhabitants of the Americas are descended from Siberians who crossed the Bering Strait tens of thousands of years ago. Perhaps they took the tradition with them?
Europeans have known about the Sami use of mushrooms for a long time. Finns protected the Sami from Christian missionaries, because they valued their shamanic powers. Lithuanians exported mushrooms to the Sami:
It’s been said—by Terence McKenna, Paul Stamets, and others in the psychedelic scene who you can trust to play fast and loose with history—that the before the beer purity laws of the 1500s, people brewed beer with various mindbending and toxic ingredients, including magic mushrooms.
They also say that the church played a big role in creating the laws that stamped out the practice. I don’t know what their sources are for this, so I don’t really believe it about the mushrooms. But given that the printing press was still pretty new and for elites only, I can imagine how a possibly-widespread practice died out largely without comment in the historical record.
I've often wondered about why psilocybin-bearing mushrooms are so widely distributed but had such localized cultural impacts. I don't have a good answer to that one and am still thinking it through.
I will note though that terms like "magic mushroom" can be confusing in that they lump together Amanita mascaria with psilocybin mushrooms. The effects are totally different on a pharmacological level. I don't see any reason to posit a direct link between cultures using amanita and those using psilocybin. That said, there are some interesting clues about shamanistic practices being shared across Central Asia and indigenous cultures of the Americas, especially if the Dené-Yeniseian hypothesis is true: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dené–Yeniseian_languages
A fun book that touches, speculatively, on the legacy of Central Asian shamanism as a common thread even in medieval and early modern Europe is Carlo Ginzburg's The Night Battles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Night_Battles
There are many psilocybin-containing species in the old world. P. semilanceata is a very common one for example, it grows all over the place in Europe.
Why there isn't more of a tradition in Europe in recent history I have no idea, but there is archaeological evidence pointing towards at least some use in Europe in prehistoric times.
Your paper compares psychedelic drugs with tobacco. While yes, tobacco is addictive, it's hardly in any way comparable to peyote or psilocybin mushrooms. The reason psychedelic drugs from the new world didn't catch on was the same reason they weren't eaten back home in the first place: Cultural reasons and political suppression. The church was opposed to it. These European cultures were quite repressive when you look at it from the lens of many native American cultures. Not a conductive environment for smooth trips, anyone who has experience with psychedelics will know this. The Mexican and Peruvian Inquisition were a thing. They burned most Maya texts and killed many of the native people. They tried to eradicate the cultures. It was a genocide, and experimenting with psychedelic drugs for spiritual enlightenment wasn't very useful at the time for the same reason it wasn't very popular among people in Nazi Germany. Smoking is different. If anything it takes the edge off while you're out looting and raping. Had they promoted psilocybin and mescaline usage, many of the conquistadors would have soon questioned their life choices and why they were being such massive dicks. They would have laid down their weapons.
>Had they promoted psilocybin and mescaline usage, many of the conquistadors would have soon questioned their life choices and why they were being such massive dicks. They would have laid down their weapons.
Is there any evidence for psychedelics making people nicer?
Sure, if you want research papers claiming so, there are plenty. This one finds a negative correlation with partner violence: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29807492
It's social science though, of course it's easy to find papers making all sorts of claim. And it also very much depends on our definition of "nice", which is a completely subjective term. My intention wasn't to claim that psychedelics make people nice anyway. Rather at high enough doses they make people reflect deeply about themselves, the universe and everything. And they look at it from a different perspective than they usually do, because the drug changes how we perceive everything.
The following is my personal view now: I think the majority of people are good and they don't want to intentionally cause great harm. However depending on their upbringing and experiences, they can easily arrive at situations where they do evil things, sometimes because they don't know any better and sometimes because they were lead to believe it's ok, or even the right thing to do. When mass psychology and peer pressure is involved it gets even more complicated, and someone might come to find actions acceptable they otherwise never would. A psychedelic user gets ripped out of this whole dynamic. They view things from an outsider's perspective, if you will. I certainly do not mean to say it makes people nicer in the long term. But, to put it this way, I have a hard time imagining soldiers on LSD running concentration camps, or peyote users burning a whole continent's irretrievable cultural heritage. That's just not the kind of thing people tend to feel like doing during or even after trips. And I want to stress I don't think it's something most people would ever feel like doing if they weren't brainwashed into aggression and hatred, or arrived at such a point through a chain of unfortunate events. Racism, nationalism, religious indoctrination, violent behavior, etc... these are all learned ideas and they can be unlearned. There isn't even a need to take drugs, but psychedelic drugs can be a way to get there.
Datura metel as a common thread between India and N American entheogens is also interesting.
Not to neglect the book Bread of Dreams by Camporesi, which might shed some light on the ergotic hypothesis mentioned elsewhere. It’s at least entertaining.
> Finns protected the Sami from Christian missionaries, because they valued their shamanic powers.
Do you have a citation for that? I would expect the Finnish establishment to have been wary about christianization of the Saami because the missionary Laestadius, in evangelizing the Saami, also inspired them to rise up and assert their rights. There are also some instances in history of colonial powers not converting certain economically-useful populations (the Saami provided furs, hides and meat) because they didn’t want to risk disrupting that people’s traditional economy.
> The mushrooms you might pick or buy in Europe today are, AFAIK, those European varieties, not imported American ones.
As I understand it, pick, yes, buy, no.
Cultivated mushrooms are normally P. cubensis, while "truffles" are grown from sclerotia-forming species such as P. mexicana and P. tampanensis. Cubensis is quite widespread but in warmer, wetter climates than Europe has to offer. I bet you can guess where mexicana and tampanensis come from!
P. semilanceata, the liberty cap, grows throughout Europe, but isn't a great candidate for indoor cultivation, for various reasons.
> The Sami famously use fly agaric in rituals (concentrating it in human or reindeer urine). Apparently, so do other Siberian peoples.
It has been (only half) joked that the reason for this is fermenting alcohol, which requires warmth, is a little difficult at those latitudes..... Hence the society adopted a different drug.
I would suggest that psychedelics saw a mass market breakthrough after LSD for the same reason that smartphones saw a breakthrough after the release of the iPhone.
Sure the product category existed prior to then. But the new version was such a step up in user experience that it turned a niche product into a mass market.
The word "drug" has no successful definition. If you say "a substance that alters how your brain works", then even water is a drug. Sugar and coffee are almost surely drugs under any non-laundry-list definition you can come up with. Cacao is most certainly a drug ;)
I have some ceremonial cacao. A ceremonial portion of 45 grams (made into hot chocolate) produces a light euphoric glow for a while. It's in the same ballpark as tea, peppermint, etc. - a very tame, mild, natural "high". Similar to brewing a few fresh cannabis leaves. Nice but barely noticeable.
People are known to “get high”off of non drug substances through suggestion (their mates either actually getting high or pretending to get high cause subject “to get high” by proxy.
Not the person you're replying to, but I can't say I've ever felt anything noticeably different after drinking tea. The hot water is nice and the tea tastes & smells good, but for me, nothing more.
I know it's used as part of some rituals, usually before taking mushrooms. You take a shot in the nose.
But I don't know what are the effects. Some people just cry or connect with emotions, but this is anecdotal.
That's a good question. I assumed that cocoa existed in Ancient India, but it's native to Mexico, so that doesn't really make sense. The best explanation I could find just from Googling it seems to be that this is actually an interpretation specific to Thailand of a more general rule:
FAQ 9: "In Thailand, it has been observed that Thai Buddhist monks are allowed to drink tea, cocoa, coffee (but without milk) after midday. But in some other Buddhist countries like Burma, monks are not allowed to do this. Is this part of the Vinaya rules or is this just tradition, custom, or local practice? If it is in the Vinaya, how do you explain the differences in interpretation?"
A: The fourth of the Recollections of the Bhikkhu's Requisites is:
"Properly considering medicinal requisites for curing the sick, I use them: simply to ward off any pains of illness that have arisen, and for the maximum freedom from disease." (OP p.47)
There is an allowance in the Paali texts that 'medicinal-tonics' can be taken in the afternoon while 'lifetime-medicines' may be consumed any time they are needed. (See Lifetime Medicines.)
There are different interpretations and practices about how ill a bhikkhu has to be for it to be allowable to take such 'medicines.' Some bhikkhus will not take anything other than pure water, while some will over-stretch the Rule to even drinking 'medicinal' food-drinks (e.g., Ovaltine) in the afternoon. Some bhikkhus will consider tea-leaves allowable (as 'herbs') while some will see it as food or as a 'stimulant' (caffeine) and therefore not appropriate. Also, the ordinary rural villagers of South East Asia (until very recently) would have had no tea or coffee to drink, so such items could be considered quite a luxury. It will depend on local conditions and interpretations, which are allowed for in the Vinaya through the Great Standards. (See also Lifetime Medicines.)
Hmm, lets see. Tobacco is highly addictive, while these mentioned drugs are not. Could it be, that you create lasting demand for addictive drugs very easily?
I think that combined with immediate side effects. It’s probably socially acceptable in just about every culture to be buzzed (caffeine, tobacco, alcohol, coca leaf) but way less tolerable to be walking around doped up or hallucinating, throwing up as part of the experience or generally needing a baby sitter.
To be clear, within a given category, the addictive substance will prevail: there are clove cigarettes and there are tobacco cigarettes, and I’d contend tobacco sells more than cloves simply due to the addictive properties of nicotine. (Keep in mind that whatever mild euphoria caused by nicotine affects only new smokers... after several months of smoking, there are no euphoric effects: you smoke to get rid of the craving.)
As to your point, I’ll go one step further... while it’s an interesting article and all, the embarrassingly obvious alternative that was sort of glossed over is that, frankly, psychedelics aren’t very fun. The reason they didn’t spread, perhaps, is because not many people like them. Could be as simple as that. Why hasn’t escargot spread across the globe like beef has? Why Tuna but not calamari? No deep reason... it’s just that the majority of people don’t like snails or squids or — in this case — zoning out and watching walls melt.
More concisely, psychedelics are in a different category from alcohol and nicotine.
It’s apples and oranges. Or, more accurately, barley and mushrooms.
Alcohol and cocaine don't incapacitate you? Millions of drunks who completely pass out regularly might disagree.
I have heard of people claiming that psychedelics enhance their senses and there are professional surfers who have talked about taking LSD to improve their performance. Never heard of anyone doping with alcohol, though. Your comment made me curious and I did look it up: There are four sports that used to or still do test for alcohol as a banned substance in competitions. They are archery, air sports, motor racing and powerboating. It's easy to guess why.
Public intoxication is illegal in many places. My point is that you can be out in public (comfortably) while drinking whereas that’s less the case with other drugs like LSD. It’s not an absolute claim. I’m just saying the alternative explanation is at least plausible. I think I succeeded.
Can you be out drinking comfortably in Iran or Saudi Arabia? The legal situation and societal perception make a big difference. LSD doesn't exactly animate most to go out and seek large groups of people, but it's perfectly possible to be out and about and you likely wouldn't even know the person is tripping in most cases, unless you know them well or can tell by their pupils. It all depends on the cultural context. Drunks in public cause a ton of problems, hence why you mention yourself it's even illegal in some places to be drunk in public. Yet this is tolerated and hundreds of thousands of deaths caused by drunk people accidentally or even intentionally killing people are shrugged off by many in countries where drinking is accepted as a normal part of life.
Don't want to go all Joe Rogan on you but have you ever taken LSD? Apart from the fear of being on LSD in public, there's nothing stopping you from going out and having a good time while on it.
We seem to agree. LSD is not animating people to seek out groups of sober people. Alcohol is more likely to do that. The drug is incapacitating in a way the other isn’t. Plausibility for the alternative hypothesis is established. Last reply here.
LSD doesn't "animate" people to do anything else either. It's not incapacitating in any way (unlike alcohol), there are people doing extreme sports while on LSD. https://maps.org/news-letters/v21n1/v21n1-25to29.pdf
I understand you seem to think that psychedelics make people stay home and isolate but this is simply not the case.
