Sitting across from me on the back of the open truck crossing the Andes, an old Indian man reached into his pocket and pulled out a small plastic bag of leaves. He carefully extracted several crumpled leaves and a pinch of dark-brown paste and held them out to me. In the proper Quechua way I cupped my two hands together to receive them and bowed my head in a silent gesture of thanks. The Quechua Indians lack an equivalent of the European phrase “thank you,” since their culture teaches that sharing is a requirement of life and that gratitude can only be shown in deeds and not in words. The old man then took a portion for himself, and the two of us began to chew the dusty-smelling leaves. The coca made my mouth feel as fresh as though I were chewing mint or had just left the dentist’s office after having my teeth cleaned. After I had chewed a little longer my tongue and cheeks felt slightly numb.
The leaves produce no strong effect like drinking a cup of coffee, a glass of iced tea, or even a cola drink. Instead, they merely take the sting out of the cold and blunt the edge of discomfort that one feels on those endlessly long trips up and down the mountains of Bolivia. In the high passes, coca alleviates the discomfort of the reduced air pressure on the body and the thinned oxygen in the lungs. It is one of the few drugs that prevents soroche, or altitude sickness, one of the most common ailments in the Andes. When we descended into the tropical valleys, the coca relieved the discomfort of the sudden change in altitude and the heat that rapidly built in the unshaded back of the truck.
For centuries the lowland natives have grown coca and traded the leaves to the highland natives who chew them. In addition to lessening the discomforts of life, the mildly narcotic coca leaf supplies calcium and vitamins A, C, and D. This offers muchneeded nutrients to a people who otherwise might lack calcium, since the altitude is generally too high to support either cows or many garden vegetables that contain much calcium. The coca strengthens their bones and teeth, and for some yet unclear reason it significantly retards cavities and related dental problems.
As our truck reached a small police shack at the edge of the Amazon jungle in the infamous drug region known as the Chapare, the soldiers motioned us off the road and began their slow search of the truck and people. Since I was a foreigner, they took me inside for further questions. There I saw three teenage boys tied together. The young men’s hands showed large bleeding ulcers and like those of a leper were missing chunks of flesh. The police had tied the boys’ hands in front of them, but even without the ropes, the boys could not have escaped very easily, since their feet were also covered in the same sores, making it difficult for them to stand, let alone walk. When the military police wanted to move them, each boy had to be lifted at the arms by two men to be half carried and half dragged. The police had just captured these young boys, who had been working as pisacocas in the cocaine kitchens of the Chapare. The pisacocas use their hands and feet to mix coca leaves with kerosene, sulfuric acid, and acetone in the first stages of extracting coca paste from the leaves. In the laborious process, the chemicals quickly eat away the flesh. Even in this condition, the boys continue working, rendered oblivious to the pain of their open wounds by the constant supply of cocaine-laced cigarettes that they smoke. Unable to flee, however, they become easy targets when the police or army raid the “coke kitchen” where they work.
In this southwestern edge of the Amazon Basin the Andes meet the tropical jungle, in an environment similar to that around the village of Genaro Herrera on the Ucayali in Peru a thousand miles to the northwest. The coca bush originated here. Half a millennium ago the Inca aristocracy received a steady supply of coca leaves from here and used them in their religious ceremonies.
Archaeological evidence shows that Indians in the area used coca thousands of years ago. The first coca boom, however, was fueled by the European need for silver and by the opening of the mines on Cerro Rico in Potosi.
The mines of upper Bolivia, particularly the mines around Potosi, strain the limits of human endurance. They are so high and the oxygen content inside the labyrinth of small passages drops so low that the work is almost too strenuous even for the Indians already accustomed to hard labor at high altitudes. The conquistadors, however, found that the miners worked much longer and harder if they chewed the coca leaves. Not only could the men work with less oxygen, but they could work longer hours with less food. The workers continued working while chewing the coca and thus did not take breaks. To meet this new demand,. the Spaniards expanded the plantations of coca growing in the humid lowlands and shipped tons of the leaves up to Potosi, which had become the world’s largest consumer of coca.
Even though the mines no longer rely on forced labor, miners such as Rodrigo Cespedes continue the custom, since the coca helps them to survive the inhuman labor conditions, which have changed only a little in half a millennium. Unfortunately for them, however, the price of the coca leaves soared in the last century, forcing them to pay an ever greater percentage of their wages for this leaf that helps them breathe and work.
The rising price began when European scientists learned to extract cocaine from the coca leaves in the mid-1800s. The Europeans and Americans began buying the coca leaves to make cocaine; which they used as a medicine and as flavoring for wine and cola drinks. By the time. the United States government outlawed the use of cocaine through the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 and the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914, a small but loyal market of users had been created. Use of the drug grew slowly but steadily until the 1970s and 1980s, when it exploded in the United States and Europe as the drug of choice among the urban affluent and the poor alike. Soon the fad spread even to Rio de Janeiro, Mexico City, Bogota, and the other cities of Latin America.
The Indians of South America never acquired an interest in using the cocaine itself, but with the attempted imposition of European culture, law, and religion on the people of the Andes over the past five hundred years, they rallied around the coca leaf as a focal point of cultural identity. It offers them physiological refuge from the demands of the white world, but it also offers a psychological relief. Indians offer coca leaves in sacrifice by burying them or burning them whenever they plow a new field, build a home, or want to offer thanks. They also offer coca leaves along with chicho, the fermented corn beer, to the Virgin Mary, who has been Indianized virtually beyond recognition to outsiders.
As one of the most valued substances on earth, coca is the gift most frequently sacrificed to the gods. The only higher gift is to offer the leaves together with the fetus of a llama, which, having never been born into the corruption and sin of the world, is the purest offering an Indian can give.
The spirit of the coca, known as Cocamama, along with the earth mother, Pachamama, plays a major role in the pantheon of Indian gods, demigods, and spirits.
Cocamama has power to foretell the future through native seers skilled in the reading of the coca leaves, and Cocamama supplies curanderos, Indian healers, with the power to cure a sick body of almost any ailment by washing it with the dry leaves.
As a symbol of resistance to the whites and to European culture, coca plays a role in the Andes analogous to that of peyote among North American Indians of northern Mexico and the southwestern United States. Unlike peyote, ’ebene’ of the Orinoco, and similar drugs throughout the Americas, coca produces no ecstatic conditions. It does not make the soul leave the body, put the user in trance, invoke visions, provoke dancing, or produce other dramatic effects. To the contrary, coca plays a quiet and calm role in Quechua society somewhat as tea plays a focal role in British society or ritual baths play in Scandinavian, Japanese, and traditional Jewish society. Coca use creates a communal act to separate “us” from “them.”
Today the Indians can afford only a small supply of coca leaves, because most coca leaves go directly into making cocaine. Particularly in the Chapare, the leaves grow too big and bitter for the connoisseur of coca chewing, but these leaves concentrate the active ingredient for cocaine and therefore yield more money to the drug manufacturers. The cocaine fad greatly increased the demand for Chapare leaves from Bolivia when coca bushes transplanted to California, Colombia, and Indonesia proved much too weak to produce a high grade of cocaine.
During the 1980s, coca paste and cocaine emerged as the primary exports of Bolivia, surpassing the tin and zinc which themselves had long since surpassed the colonial export of silver. By the late 1980s as much as 40 percent of the gross national product of Bolivia came from cocaine. Grandchildren of the Indians who walked the ore and mercury mixture to make the pasta from which silver was extracted now walked the kerosene and coca pasta from which cocaine is extracted. Whole villages of miners left their homes and families in the villages around Potosi to move into the lucrative Chapare, where they could earn up to $3 a day, far more than Rodrigo earns working on Cerro Rico.
In the 1980s, Roberto Suarez exercised a loose but extensive control over the cocaine trade in an area of eastern Bolivia larger than France. Roberto Suarez was the nephew of Nicolas Suarez, who had controlled the rubber trade in the same part of Bolivia around the turn of the century [Kendall, p .281]. Suarez supposedly sold some refined cocaine but dealt mostly in the pasta, which Colombians bought to perform the final steps of processing before smuggling the drug into the United States or Europe. The cocaine industrialists had to fight off occasional harassment by the U. S. drug agents, and from time to time they repulse another U. S. funded invasion by Bolivia’s crack army unit of Leopardes.
Invariably, the Leopardes lose and withdraw in humiliation. When the government of Bolivia seems about to cause major problems for the cocaine business, Suarez and his associates have been known to overthrow it and substitute their own, as they did in the coup that installed Garcia Meza Tejada as president on July 17, 1980.
As we drove into the drug area, our truck was stopped at another blockade, but this one was not manned by police or soldiers. Angry Indian men and women sat and stood in the road to stop our passage. As the bystanders shouted insults at us, several young men with pistols and machetes climbed up on the sides of the truck. The old man stared silently ahead, chewing his coca and ignoring the crowd; I tried to follow his example.
Some of the young men hanging on to the side of the truck climbed aboard and started poking into everything on the truck.
One of the young men accused the Indians on the truck with us of working as pisacocas, and contemptuously called the rest of us narcotraficantes, drug smugglers.
The Indians made this impromptu strike on the road in order to disrupt the drug traffic. The week before, their village had been flooded by the rising river and their freshly planted fields of corn and potatoes had been washed away. Because the government of La Paz was too distast either to offer them help or to offer a convenient target against which they might protest, the Indians directed their protest at the only thing around them the drug traffic passing on the dirt road through their village.
They demanded financial assistance or, they threatened, they would disrupt the drug trade. The subtle distinction between the whites who ran the government and the whites who ran the drug trade escaped the Indians’ understanding. They searched our truck for chemicals used in making cocaine, but they found nothing on board but a couple of car batteries on which someone had apparently vomited.
Not until we reached our final destination did I realize that indeed we were carrying sulfuric acid concealed inside the hollowed car batteries. Someone had vomited chicho on the batteries as an effective deterrent to anyone wanting to inspect them too carefully. The driver of the truck used the same batteries to smuggle the cocaine paste out of the area on the return trip to the city.
Several weeks later, back in the city of Cochabamba, I heard that the Indians ended their strike when they ran out of fobd.
Having received no help from the government, and not having been able to outsmart the drug traffickers, most of the displaced farmers went to work in the coca fields and in the cocaine kitchens as pisococos.
Cocaine is merely the most recent in an extended wave of native American drugs and mind-altering substances to sweep the world as a fad. The boom in coca cultivation in the Chapare and the luring of colonists from the mountains down to clear the lowlands to satisfy this drug need clearly echoes the founding of the United States. The first colony of the United States was settled by profiteering colonists, convicts, and indentured servants who arrived in Virginia to cultivate tobacco leaves for sale to Europeans, who ground it and snorted it up their noses in the form of snuff. Tobacco was the first of the New World drugs to be widely accepted in the Old World, and the European zest for it played a major role in opening North America to colonization.
Contemporary civic mythology of the United States overlooks this role of America as drug supplier to the world. The 1607 settling of Virginia receives short mention compared to the much later settlement at Plymouth in 1620 by the Pilgrims, who thought they were landing somewhere much farther south. This cash crop of tobacco played so important a role in the United States that when the Founding Fathers built the original Capitol in Washington, D. C., they decorated the Greek columns with tobacco leaves. Some of these remain visible today under the small dome between the old Senate chamber and the main dome of the building, but most of them disappeared in the subsequent campaigns to make the Capitol appear Greek and to obliterate native American influences.
Just as the United States fights cocaine smugglers in the twentieth century, world governments of the seventeenth century ardently fought against the use of tobacco.
Even the English under the rule of James I banned its use until they realized how much money they could make from the trade of their American colonies.
Over the next fifty years, tobacco was outlawed by the Ottoman Empire, the Mogul Empire, Sweden, Denmark, Russia, Naples, Sicily, China, the Papal States, and the Electorate of Cologne.
Regardless of the law, tobacco use increased in popularity and spread to new parts of the world, and people found ever more ingenious ways to use it.
Despite anti-tobacco campaigns around the world, Maryland and Virginia exported thirty thousand kegs of tobacco a year by 1723, a trade requiring the services of two hundred ships [Braudel, Vol. I, p .264]. In the succeeding decades this trade increased astronomically as the Carolinas, Georgia, Delaware, and even parts of New England joined the tobacco boom. Even though the colonists amassed fortunes from their drug trade and managed to build large slave estates in the middle of the forest, they greatly resented the British government and merchants for taking a share of the profits. American colonists also resented the increasing attention British merchants gave to the rival crop of tea, which they transported from India and Ceylon to all parts of the world.
Eventually, the colonists declared and fought for their independence, thereby seizing full control of the increasingly lucrative American drug trade.
Like cocaine, tobacco proved versatile. Woodland Indians of North America smoked dried tobacco in pipes, and the Indians of Mexico and the southwestern United States rolled it into corn-husk cigarettes to smoke. Indians of the northern Pacific coast chewed tobacco with lime much as the Indians of the Andes chew coca leaves. Some Indians, such as the Aztecs, ate the leaves straight. The Creek Indians mixed it with the leaves of Ilex cassine and other ingredients to make their Black Drink for use in their rituals.
Eighteenth-century gentlemen enthusiastically snorted it, finely ground into snuff, in the belief that the nose was the shortest route to the brain. This followed nearly two centuries of pipe smoking, in which the nicotine had been vigorously inhaled directly to the bloodstream through the lungs, a technique as efficient as taking it through the nose. When adopted by westerners, tobacco had no culturally prescribed place as it did among the Indians. Its use grew indiscriminately and soon became pervasive, with people smoking, chewing, spitting, and snorting tobacco in the streets, at the dinner table, in bed, and in classrooms.
Tobacco use spread around the world more thoroughly than coffee, tea, betel, kola nut, cocaine, or any other drug, with the possible exception of chocolate. Apparently every culture in the world today has been introduced to some form of tobacco use, and very few cultures have rejected it. Even in Tibet, where I found the lowest penetration of American Indian foods and other crops, tobacco use was nevertheless widespread. Unlike the people of Nepal, who have gladly adopted the American potato, and unlike their neighbors in Sichuan, who eat a variety of chilies, corn, and American Indian garden vegetables, the Tibetans adhere tenaciously to their diet of barley, yak butter, tea, and meat seasoned primarily with salt and sugar.
Even on a remote Tibetan pass called Karo La at an elevation of 16,548 feet, I came upon two herders about fourteen years old who pleaded more desperately for tobacco than the monks in the monastery pleaded for pictures of the Dalai Lama. The two young boys were sitting in the dirt beneath a stone cairn decorated with colorful prayer flags that snapped in the breeze, while in the background we could see the sun reflected from a glacier creeping down the high peaks toward Yamdrok Yamatso, a lake of Caribbean blue water. I did not have any tobacco, but my Chinese guide tossed two cigarettes into the dirt, and the boys scrambled for them. Despite the high altitude and the reduction of oxygen by a third of its concentration at sea level, the boys smoked one cigarette with great relish while saving the other.
The Englishman George Bogle in 1774 had followed the same ancient trail I was on into Tibet from India in an unsuccessful attempt to open Tibetan markets for the British East India Company. He spent time with the Pachen Lama at Shigatse and introduced the American potato to unimpressed farmers, but he never reached the court of the Dalai Lama in Lhasa. Bogle arrived at a time when the British trade network included all of North America and strongholds around the world, but it was on the eve of a big change in British trade the American Revolution, and the loss of tobacco revenues.
When the British merchants lost control of the American tobacco market after 1776, they searched for a substitute crop to sell.
They found the substitute in the opium poppy grown in their newly acquired lands in India and Burma. For the British merchants, opium promised a special advantage, because new customers could smoke it in pipes like tobacco, and therefore they did not need any new equipment or skills to learn to use opium.
But opium had an additional advantage for British merchants in that it quickly addicted the user much more thoroughly than tobacco. In this way the British captured a market of millions of Chinese even though the Chinese government outlawed its use.
The British opium trade eventually caused two wars that ended in bitter defeat for the Chinese, and it allowed the British to acquire the port colony of Hong Kong. Since the discovery of America, silver from Mexico and the Andes had poured into China in exchange for the luxury goods produced there. China had much to offer but desired nothing from the west except the steady supply of American silver and gold, which had accumulated in great quantities since the opening of America. Finally, with the opium trade the British had found the key to unlock this vast storehouse of silver. As peasants and aristocrats alike sold off their silver coins, ingots, and jewelry to supply their opium addictions, Britain extracted a fortune from China while still taking out Chinese silks and porcelains to the west. Not since Francis Drake and the other English pirates raided the Spanish caravels had so much of the silver from Potosi flowed into British hands.
While the British made fortunes selling opium to the Asians, and while the newly formed United States peddled tobacco to the world, the Spaniards pushed a seemingly much more innocuous drug found in America. This became known throughout the world as chocolate, the active ingredient in the beans of the cacao pod. Despite the similarity in names, the coca bush, from whose leaves cocaine is extracted, is different from the cacao bush, which produces the golden-green pods of chocolate. Neither the cacao bush nor the coca bush bears any relation to the tropical coco tree, also called the coconut palm, which bears the large coconut. This confusion of plants, like the dual use of such terms as “pepper” and “Indian,” further illustrates the cultural complexities and errors arising from the coming together of America and the Old World.
Europeans encountered chocolate when Hernando Carte’s conquered the Mayas and Aztecs, who cultivated it extensively. The cacao bean served as the primary form of currency among Aztecs, who also consumed it in various delightful ways. Aztec cooks commonly whipped the chocolate with water and sometimes with honey to make a frothy, refreshing drink that they called chocoatl in the Nahuatl language. What excited the Spanish most about this plant was its narcotic properties. Like the coca leaves in South America, the cacao bean lessened the pains of hunger, gave a shot of energy, and let the user continue marching or fighting for hours. Because of these properties, the conquistadors immediately adopted it as an indispensable aid during their long military campaigns across mountains and through jungles.
The people back in Europe proved far less eager to accept chocolate, which to them looked far too much like rabbit feces.
The pure chocolate tasted too bitter, and by tradition Europeans preferred black pepper, horseradish, and mustard for seasoning their vegetables and meats. The Europeans tried mixing chocolate with various spices such as mint and cinnamon to make it more palatable, but reputedly some experimenting nuns first mixed it with hot milk and added sugar to create the chocolate rage that continues today. Hot chocolate became particularly popular in the Catholic countries of the Mediterranean, where it stimulated the faithful on the numerous fast days when the church forbade food but permitted drink [Schivelbusch, pp.96-107]. The Protestants in the north of Europe preferred coffee until England took over the tea plantations of India and Ceylon, and then they substituted tea for coffee.
The jagged, almost nervous stimulation produced by coffee and tea contrasted sharply with the smooth, sensuous high of chocolate. Consequently, chocolate acquired a strong reputation as an aphrodisiac that invigorated men and stripped women of their inhibitions. Something of this reputation lingers even today in American and European culture; chocolates still serve as the traditional gift of Valentine’s Day or of a suitor at any time.
Chocolate serves as the gift of love and the appropriate dessert after a candlelight dinner.
Chocolate provoked such a strong response in Europe because it seemed so unlike any known food. Carolus Linnaeus classified it as Theobroma cacao, taking the genus name from the Greek phrase for “food of the gods.” Scientists have since applied the word “theobromine” to designate the active ingredient in chocolate, the counterpart of caffeine in coffee or cocaine in coca.
Chocolate spread not merely because of its unusual qualities or because of its religious or sexual roles. Behind both types of propaganda, an efficient Spanish monarchy held a monopoly over cacao production in its Mexican and Caribbean colonies and worked diligently to increase sales. Wherever the Spanish monarchy could, it suppressed coffee and tea trade in favor of chocolate.
The Spanish monarchy pushed chocolate into the Spanish Netherlands, and the Dutch quickly created an array of foods that mixed chocolate with various combinations of sugar and spices.
All types of chocolate candies, cakes and tortes, puddings and pies soon became a permanent part of the European diet. Up to this point chocolate had been sold in large bars, which were rich in the cacao oil or butter as well as in the chocolate taste. The Dutch developed a new way of processing the chocolate so that the oil was removed and only the dry chocolate remained. This new product, cocoa, was easier to transport and store, and it became a very popular drink for children, since in this more refined condition it lacked the aphrodisiac qualities thought to lurk in pure chocolate.
Once chocolate was mixed with sugar it became very difficult for the consumer to tell how much stimulation came from the chocolate and how much from the sugar.
Consequently, bakers and candy makers frequently reduced the amount of real chocolate in favor of greater use of less expensive vanilla and artificial chocolate flavorings. Today the taste that most people associate with chocolate springs primarily from the vanilla and other spices mixed with the chocolate. Cocoa butter has yielded to flavored forms of vegetable shortening, and now people ingest real chocolate in such minute quantities that most of the narcotic effect has been sacrificed to the sugar rush that substitutes for it.
Not all the substances chewed by Indians could be made into stronger stimulants. Indians in different parts of the Americas chewed the saps of various trees.
New England Indians chewed spruce gum, and the Indians of Mexico chewed the rubbery sap of the sapodilla tree, which they called chicle. Although tasty, it lacked the narcotic high that might have led the Europeans to refine it or distill it into a more potent drug. Still the whites were not satisfied merely to chew this substance without some type of extra stimulation from it, so they added massive amounts of sugar. New Yorker Thomas Adams managed to make it into a commercial product after the Civil War and built the first successful chewing-gum factory in the 1880s. In its new sweetened form, chewing gum joined tobacco and cola drinks as American products that spread around the world.
In Mexico and part of Texas, the peyote or mescal cactus grows wild. This spineless cactus, Lophophora williamsii, produces nine alkaloids, the most powerful of which is the mescaline that creates hallucinations when ingested by humans. Like many American drugs, peyote may be eaten raw or brewed into a tea. Most of the plant grows beneath the ground, but the usable part, called the button, protrudes above the surface. To preserve and transport it, the Indians usually dried the plant, but Indians in the areas where it grows prefer to eat it while it is fresh and green.
Aside from tobacco and chocolate, peyote probably remains the most used of the native American drugs in North America. Over the past few centuries, the use of peyote spread steadily from its original Mexican base. When the Spanish arrived in Mexico they found peyote in use by Aztec priests as a sacred substance and as a part of the sacred ball games. In the campaign to eradicate Aztec religion and power, the Spanish forbade use of peyote. The Spanish effectively ended the trade in peyote, and the Inquisition treated drug use as an act of heresy, but the Indians continued to use it over the next three centuries in northern Mexico, where the cactus grew wild, beyond the reach of Spanish priests and soldiers. In addition to peyote, the Indians used the milder cactus Dofia Ana, Coryphantha macromeris, as well as pipintzintli, the leaves of Salvia divinorum, and ololiuqui, the seeds of the Rivea corymbosa vine, and mescal beans of Sophoro secundiflora, known as Texas mountain laurel.
In the nineteenth century when the Mexican Indians achieved independence from Spain, the use of peyote increased. It spread across the southwestern part of the United States, reaching the Caddo Indians of Texas by the time of the American Civil War, and by the mid-1880s it reached north to the Comanche and Kiowa of the western Indian Territory (later Oklahoma), from which it spread to the Cheyenne, Osage, Arapaho, and other Plains Indians. By the twentieth century, Indians adopted it around the Great Lakes and the Canadian border. Having witnessed the destruction of their own social and cultural systems while being denied access to those of the whites, the lost reservation Indians turned to the religious use of peyote as a refuge from an increasingly hostile social environment. The use continued to spread, and despite the efforts of Christian missionaries, peyote became the focal sacrament of a new church, which was officially incorporated and recognized in 1918 and eventually became known as the Native American Church.
One of the primary beliefs of the church is that while Christ came to the whites, peyote came to the Indians. Peyote offered them the same escape from the strictures of white civilization that coca leaves offered the Quechua Indians. In their church, peyote heals and brings enlightenment within the context of a communal and spiritual ritual, but the peyote has too sacred a function to be used recreationally or to be abused through excessive or inappropriate use.
To separate themselves clearly from movements such as that of the Ghost Dance or the Red Sticks, the Native American Church inserted into its charter a clause of loyalty to the United States, pledging their lives for the defense of the United States Constitution and government. This certainly surpassed in loyalty the commitment of any Christian sect in America [Spicer, p.288], but even so it did not prevent attacks on the church from the white legal and religious establishment.
Peyote found limited use among another alienated group, the American blacks, but they adapted poorly to the Native American Church, since they lacked the American Indian history of drug use and vision quest in their religious worship. The use of peyote in religion quickly died among the few blacks who tried it. Within another half century from the founding of the Native American Church, however, peyote use had spread into the white population via an alienated generation of American youth. As a drug with mystical associations, it first became popular in a burst of enthusiasm within the youth movement of the 1960s when it achieved acclaim as a psychedelic. This popularity grew with the publication of a number of books on the philosophical and mystical properties of the drugs as used by Indian shamans. In order to achieve the desired effect from the peyote, the user needed to chew a handful of the very bitter and unappetizing buttons. To ease this process during the late 1960s the active ingredient, mescaline, was made available in synthetic form in capsules that were both easier to consume and easier to hide, since the law forbade possession of the drug outside its use in officially recognized churches. Usage in both organic and capsule form continued to be popular among young people, in part because of its reputed lack of health risks and because it did not addict the user as would cocaine and some other mood-altering drugs. After a few years, peyote gradually lost the mysticism that had accompanied its first foray into urban America, and it became just one more drug used solely for secular purposes by whites.
Another common drug in America derived from the psychedelic mushrooms that grow in animal droppings. The mushrooms Psilocybe mexicapa and P. cubensis produce psychoactive ingredients known as psilocybin or psilocin. Like peyote, the approximately twenty varieties of psilocybin mushrooms require virtually no processing to activate the hallucinogenic ingredients. A strong psychological reaction follows eating the mushroom, drinking it in tea, smoking it, or sniffing it in powdered form. The arrival of the Europeans in America greatly expanded the range of the mushroom, because it grows so well in the dung of the cow that the Europeans introduced to America.
Three and a half millennia ago, the Mayas used the mushrooms in their ceremonies. The Aztecs also used them, as in the coronation ceremonies for Moctezuma in 1502. The mushrooms, Paneolus corn panulatus, were known as teonanacatl, “food of the gods,” a name very close in meaning to what the Europeans later chose for the other Aztec drug, chocolate. The Spaniards quickly acted to suppress psilocybin mushrooms, but Indians continued to eat them until modern times, when they also spread into United States urban areas. Because of the similarity of psilocybin mushrooms to the toxic Arnanita genus of mushrooms, poisoning sometimes occurs. In some cases, however, these other mushrooms may be prepared in a special way and taken in the right dosage to produce a different type of emotional and cognitive reaction.
Since the Indians were punished by the church and state for using these drugs, they often kept them secret. Only now do scientists know enough about some of these drugs to initiate systematic studies of them. The Indians of the Amazon Basin learned to strip the bark from the vine Banisteriopsis coapi, boil it, and make a hallucinogenic tea with reputed aphrodisiac value.
The active ingredient, harmine, can also be extracted and snorted much as cocaine is used. The drug is called yage in the Andes or caapi in the jungle zones.
Probably the most common of Amazonian drugs outside of coca is ebene or epena, made from assorted jungle plants. The Yanomamo Indians of Venezuela use it by placing it in the end of a bamboo tube that may be up to a meter and a half in length.
One Indian puts the tube to his nostrils, while another one blows hard on the other end. The drugs then force their way through the nasal membranes and into the bloodstream. Soon the recipient begins hallucinating and vomiting while a thick green mucus begins draining from his nose. In this way the Yanomamo commune with their hekura or forest spirits [Chagnon, pp.50-51].
Several thousand miles north of the Amazon in the middle of the Canadian plains, the Indians developed a similar drug from the root of the marsh plant called cakanus, Acorus culamus.
Jimsonweed was widely used in North America in much the same way. When settlers and soldiers in Jamestown, Virginia, cooked and ate this weed of the genus Datura in 1676, the hallucinogenic results gave rise to the name “Jamestown weed,” since shortened to “jimsonweed” in English.
The people of the Old World were not satisfied with the drugs that the American Indians made, and so they quickly found ways to make drugs out of American plants that lacked narcotic properties.
The Europeans took the common plants of maize corn from central America and the Andean potato and distilled them into alcoholic drinks that were moodand sensation-altering. This process required massive amounts of corn and potatoes, but the new plants grew easily, offered high yields per acre, and could be easily produced in quantities large enough to support a corn liquor and vodka industry.
The Indians knew how to ferment various plants to make wines or beers, but they had no knowledge of distilling stronger spirits containing more than 3 or 4 percent alcohol.
The ancient Mexicans fermented Aguve and Dasylirion plants to make pulque, which was a vitamin-rich drink. The Pima and Papago Indians made a cactus wine, while other Indians in the same area made beer from mesquite, screwbeans, maize, and even the cornstalk.
Tribes along the Atlantic coast of North America made persimmon wine, which later attracted a strong following among the colonists.
Indians made at least forty alcoholic drinks from various fruits and plants, including palm, plum, pineapple, mamey, and sar-saparilla wines (Driver, p.110). The most exotic of all was a type of Mayan mead called balche made from the fermented honey of a stingless bee.
Despite all these alcoholic beverages, intoxication remained rare among Indians.
They used alcohol as they did other drugs, in a primarily religious context. As an indication of just how seriously the Indian cultures took the religious use of such substances, the Aztecs executed any noble, student, or priest found to be publicly drunk. A commoner would be beaten for the first offense and then executed for the second (Driver, p.111].
The origin of the distilling process is not known, but it began somewhere in the Old World. European alchemists used it to make medicines well before the discovery of America. In addition to distilling various herbs and plants, they distilled wine as well; this produced the first brandy. From this the whole gamut of distilled alcoholic drinks evolved.
Brandy soon escaped the confines of medicinal purposes and became a source of intoxication much faster, stronger, and more efficient than wine or beer.
Brandy, however, remained a somewhat expensive luxury because of the limited amount of wine available for distilling. In its early years only aristocratic circles and the rising merchant class could afford the luxury drink; it remained well beyond the grasp of the common peasant or the emerging class of factory workers. Alcohol, however, could be distilled from many more substances than just wine. Enterprising apothecaries and monks soon applied the same technique to even the most humble and common of plants.
The first extensive liquor distillation took place in the Caribbean, where the Spanish and later the British made rum from the large quantities of sugar produced in the islands. Colonists in the United States sought to duplicate this grand success, but their land lacked suitable conditions for the cultivation of sugar cane. Instead they applied the same distillation process to what would grow on their land corn. Corn grew so luxuriantly in American fields that the settlers harvested much more than either humans or animals could consume. They turned it into corn liquor. The process of distilling is technologically so simple that to this day the government has problems collecting its liquor taxes from many of the small-time producers who set up shop in remote areas. Corn liquor, however, did not find the world popularity of rum, because the British crown, which derived great revenues from its well established rum trade, vigorously fought any competition from corn.
Resourceful colonists readily found new markets for their corn whiskey the native Indians. The English, Dutch, French, and Spanish colonists all realized that distilled alcohol was a potent tool for subduing the Indians while making money from them.
The Mexican viceroy Bernardo de Calvez, for example, in 1786 noted that alcohol had been so effective in taming the Indians and in bringing money to the state that perhaps it could be used to conquer the unruly Apaches in the north. He claimed that this would make “a new need which forces them to recognize very clearly their obligatory dependence with regard to ourselves”
[Braudel, Vol. I, p.249].
Today Andean Indians use coca leaves very moderately even when surrounded by the cocaine trade; yet this moderation disappears when it comes to alcohol. The same Indian who would not consider snorting cocaine drinks himself into a coma on the village streets during the fiesta honoring the Virgin of Urkupina.
Similarly, the North American Indian who uses tobacco moderately and with respect has no such cultural moderation when it comes to whiskey.
Indians have not been the only ones unable to handle their liquor. The Europeans themselves had a long history of using fermented drinks such as wine, mead, ale, and beer, which they consumed in great quantities, but until the last few centuries they had no tradition of using the much more potent distilled spirits of rum, whiskey, gin, and vodka that were quickly developed. As American plantations and American crops transplanted to Europe made alcohol cheap, the peasants substituted hard liquors for their traditional fermented drinks. The Russians learned to wash down their food with tall glasses of vodka in place of beer, while the Irish and Scotch drank more whiskey in place of their ale. This created a wholly new disease, alcoholism, which has spread steadily over the past few centuries. This rise closely parallels the development of industrialism; alcohol provided a psychic break from the monotonous and long work associated with industrial production.
When the Spaniards found that the Indians would work longer and harder if mildly drugged, they made a major discovery of extensive consequences for workers around the world that factory workers want drugs to help them withstand the drudgery and monotony of their work. Just as the money factory of Potosi served as prototype for factories of all kinds, the use of coca by the workers in Potosi served as a prototype of the use of drugs of all types as a way to alleviate the painful and unnatural conditions of work.
The industrial revolution could just as easily have been called the alcohol and drug revolution.
Henry Fielding and other writers chronicled the evils of the new alcohol epidemic caused by the more efficient distillation of gin in the eighteenth century. The engraver William Hogarth hammered home the same message, as did generations of pamphleteers, ministers, and reformers.
In the nineteenth century, the movement for women’s rights fought hand in hand with the anti-alcohol movements, as the early feminists saw alcohol as often the greatest oppressor of women. In the home the abuse of women and children usually came at the hands of drunken men. Similarly, increased rape, seduction, and prostitution seemed closely tied to increased alcohol use by males and females. Many women became addicted to alcohol and thus damaged their own and their children’s health as well as their personal finances. The changes brought to urban areas in the twentieth century by the spread of drugs was merely a small reflection of the extensive social, economic, familial, cultural, and sexual changes precipitated by the far more widespread use of alcohol in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Not content to use only the native products of the New World, the European colonists and companies realized very early that the fertile land of America was good for growing a number of Old World stimulants. Coffee, which could not be grown in Europe and therefore cost the Europeans dearly, took readily to the soils of the Caribbean and Brazil.
The Europeans also found that the Americas provided excellent growing land for marijuana, another Old World drug. Moist and mild zones along the California coast and in the Caribbean proved particularly hospitable to this plant. By the 1980s, marijuana apparently had become the primary cash crop of California as well as some smaller countries such as Belize. Through selective breeding, the American farmers strengthened the production of the active ingredient in the plant and thereby cultivated an ever stronger drug.
Because the crop remained illegal, farmers learned to grow it in heavily wooded areas where the plots were difficult to find and were camouflaged from air reconnaissance.
Because of this the jungle areas of Belize and the redwood forest areas of northern California became primary production areas that were still relatively close to markets in urban areas of North America. The total land under cultivation for marijuana within the United States alone probably exceeded the most extensive coca cultivation ever in Bolivia.
The United States government, with its tremendous financial and technological resources, found it impossible to control the cultivation of marijuana even within its government-owned and operated park system, but still pressured Bolivia for not being able to control coca cultivation in its extensive and scarcely populated jungles.
Over the past five hundred years, the world has ransacked American pharmacology looking for ever higher highs, ever more complete forms of intoxication, and ever more altered states of consciousness. The quest for drugs continued from chocolate through a variety of tobacco forms, root beers, tonic water, peyote, cola drinks laced with cocaine, and finally to pure cocaine. Along the way, drugs such as marijuana and the poppy were introduced from the remote parts of the Old World, and when possible these were made into stronger substances such as opium and heroin.
By the twentieth century the quest for ever stronger drugs had replaced the earlier quests for gold and the fountain of youth.
Many of the drugs of the New World have yet to be tried outside of their native settings. Perhaps they too await the appropriate technology to transform them into even stronger substances which might foster sufficient appeal to become the cocaine of a future generation.