Why do drugs exist in the first place?

by Gabriel Chance

“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.” 

– John Ehrlichman, Domestic Policy Advisor for President Nixon, quoted from Dan Baum’s, “Legalize It All: How to End the War on Drugs.” (1).

Wait… WHAT? 

Wow.

As of this writing, the US has endured 54 years of Nixon’s War on Drugs. That is fifty-four years of gang violence, violent police confrontations, escalating incarceration rates, scientific and medical censorship, community erosion, civil distrust, racial profiling, and widespread cartel violence in countries and communities south of U.S. borders. All this, and addiction continues to destructively permeate communities all over the U.S., a mere fifty-four years after the enactment and enforcement of Nixon’s 1970 Controlled Substances Act. America fought a War on Drugs and the drugs won, with fentanyl now the reigning causality champ. 

Turns out, America fought a War on People, namely, America’s own citizens. This is the gift of dehumanization that keeps on giving. And yet! Amidst all the turmoil and trauma of negligent political humanity, who has stopped to ask, if only for one inconclusive moment… 

“Why do these drugs exist in the first place!!?”

According to the 1970 US Controlled Substances Act, drugs like Cannabis (THC), Peyote (Mescalin), Chacruna (DMT), Coca (Cocaine), Poppies (Morphine, Heroine), Magic Mushrooms (Psilocybin), to name a few, are dangerous Schedule 1 substances with no accepted medical use and a propensity for abuse.

Also in recent human history, science discovered: 

• – endorphins in the human body by studying Opium sap (4, 5).
• – endocannabinoids in the human body by studying the resin in Cannabis flowers (2, 5, 6).
• – serotonin/ dopamine pathways in the human body by studying the alkaloids in Coca, Opium, Peyote, Ephedra (4, 5, 6, 8).
• – tryptamine/ DMT metabolism in the human body by studying DMT from Psychotria viridis (Chacruna) (7). 

The politically conflicted thought-disparity between having, “no accepted medical use,” and “these drugs inspired science to learn about the human body and invent new medicines,” is mind-boggling. This disparity of drug definitions is clearly a politically-propagandized chasm between dogmatic rhetoric (at best), and peer-reviewed epistemology. If only the American public could actually have a peer-reviewed psychedelic drug policy. Voters, are you paying attention yet? 

“Why do these drugs exist in the first place?”

To Nixon, and Congress in ‘69, “drugs” came from “hippies,” “Negroes,” “Indians,” “Mexicans,” “Chinese,” never mind that Cannabis tinctures had been in American medicine cabinets since the 19th century (2, 5, 6). Hemp was a major industrial crop for American farmers, grown to help win WWII a mere 30 years prior (2). Cocaine was in Coca Cola (along with the Kola nut) (8), and opium dens were the coolest jazz bar down the street (9). But, in 1969, under the Nixon Administration, Nixon and Congress decided to lie to the American people as a way to weaponize the U.S. justice system against marginalized citizens (1, 9).

To “Hippies,” civil rights activists, and marginalized citizens, the drugs ultimately came from indigenous communities around the world. Chewing Coca was a tradition of Andean people (3, 5, 6). Opium (Papaver somniferous) came from a deep-time traditional pharmacopeia maintained by the people of mainland China (4, 5, 6). Cannabis came from Mexico, “Marihuana,” (the gringo spelling), while the Mexicans got it from the colonial Spanish, and the Spanish got it from the people of central Asia (Afghanistan and India) (2, 5, 6). These became the indigenous landscapes that yielded, “the best high quality bud” (2, 9).

The “Psychedelic Revolution,” of the 1960’s benefitted from decades of ethnobotanical research among pioneering field scientists like Richard Evans Schultes, the “father” of modern pharmacology (6), and R. Gordon Wasson, mycologist and researcher whose writing introduced “magic mushrooms” into Hippie lore (3, 5, 6). These researchers spent years of work among remote communities, gaining the trust of, and learning from, indigenous healers that applied these substances in their community healing practices.

Essentially, in this historical and scientific context, psychedelic drugs came from indigenous healing practices, no doubt, “none-white,” non-Judea-Christian, medicinal practices that Nixon and U.S. Congress couldn’t not, or would not, recognize in law in 1969… let’s say, for obvious, discriminatory, reasons (it’s either that, or raw destructive ignorance, even more likely, both).

In this way, the 1970 Controlled Substances Act became a political hit list for humanity’s oldest, most important, and most sacred, medicinal/ healing plants and fungi, and the people that grew them. And yet, this still doesn’t answer of the question of why these drugs exist in the first place!

Why do plants and mushrooms produce illegal drugs?

Let’s be educated grown-ups about this, and ask, more specifically, why do plants and mushrooms produce chemical metabolites that mimic the action of endogenous animal neurotransmitters?

Plants and fungi create, in their metabolic life-ways, some of the very molecular building blocks that drive cognition and nervous function in the animal nervous system (3, 5, 6, 7). And hundreds of generations of human beings around the world have developed cultural traditions of expertise around the medicinal and spiritual applications of these substances (2, 3, 5, 6). This, in its behavioral depth and complexity, makes humanity unique in the animal kingdom. While many animals exhibit intoxication-seeking behaviors, and while many animals exhibit self-medication habits, humans have taken this natural relationship between plants and animal minds to the pharmacological, post-industrial, late-stage capitalist extreme. 

In many cases, such as with Cannabis, Opium, Coffee, Chocolate, and Salvia divinorum, the drug-producing plant is the result of generations of plant breeding and trait selection, by ancient people, toward the domestication of the species. In other words, such “drugs,” were, very practically, bred into existence by patient, and studious, gardeners thousands of years ago. Put simply, Humanity made Cannabis, Opium, Chocolate, and Salvia divinorum. This should be no surprise, because the same processes for plant domestication in antiquity hold for beans, corn, rice, wheat, and lettuce too. 

In other cases, such as with Iboga, Chacruna, Acacia, Tobacco, Datura, Caapi, Peyote, Ipomoea, Camilla, Ephedra, Psilocybe, and Amanita, natural “drugs” were discovered by people in pre-historic antiquity, and adopted into cultural tradition (3, 6). These socio-medicinal traditions made use of locally-growing plants and their secondary metabolites, expressions of ethnobotanical knowledge reiterated among human communities around the world. Herein is a profound commentary on the nature of plant chemistry, that plants the world over are chemical laboratories, that people learn practices that utilize diverse plant chemistries, as fundamental subsistence behaviors of humanity on Earth.

Take a moment, and consider the beauty of a field of wild flowers, with displays of pink, yellow, white, purple, dancing in a slow breeze on a sunny day. Perhaps one stops to admire the intricacies of each blossom, and to smell for pleasing fragrances from the flowers or leaves. Take note of the flying insects, bees, moths, flies, butterflies, that hover about a blossom, land on open petals, and enjoy the complex nectars of flower sex organs. Such a beautiful complexity of relationships, that remain fundamental to the food chain of humanity’s existence.

Now, consider how the flower is the plant’s method of manipulating animal cognition toward the plant’s own reproductive success. The same can be said of plant chemistry, concerning secondary metabolites, that ethnobotanical “drugs” are a plant’s method of manipulating animal cognition.

As a professional landscaper, I learned that herbivores like deer, rabbits, do not typically graze on Tobacco (Nicotiana), Datura, Sophora secundiflora (the Red Bean), or Salvias in general. Presumably, and reasonably, herbivores can minimally smell and taste the alkaloids and terpenes of these plants to avoid consumption, a cognitive-behavioral skill that avoids the paralyzing consequences of consumption. In other cases, such as with Cannabis, and Nepeta (Catnip), plants express rich terpene profiles that attract predators, a latent benefit toward minimizing herbivore consumption (and if you can attract the attention of a human, you’ve got a top predator on your side).

Plants and fungi express a wide diversity of secondary metabolites toward an evolutionary manipulation of animal cognition, and to influence animal behaviors. This is a deep-time co-evolutionary relationship that has influenced the diverse expressions of both natural botanical/ fungal chemistry, and animal cognition, into the modern era. This deep-time co-evolutionary relationship is where the natural “illegal drugs” come from. This is why “drugs” exist in the first place, and why modern drug prohibition is a force of existential dehumanization, environmental colonization, and cognitive/ epistemological censorship.

Finally, in parsing the morality of psychedelic drug prohibition laws, what gets overlooked is the expertise required in the cultural application of natural psychedelic compounds. Psychedelic drugs exist in modern American culture as an extension of broader, deep-time human behaviors, with such behaviors guided by generationally-transmitted expertise. Prohibition criminalizes the plants, the people associated with the plant compounds, and the expertise of cultural application, while driving environments and landscapes that host “illicit plants,” into violent criminal activity. In this manner, learning about “where drugs come from,” necessities a recognition that human psychedelic expertise must be allowed to inform and guide psychedelic healing practices, because this is where the personal/ social healing benefits of these substances comes from.

Sequential papers in this series, “Where Do Drugs Come From,” will explore the archaeological antiquity of human drug use, drug use in modernity and before prohibition, the cultural and epistemological consequences of political drug prohibition, how to end the War on Drugs, and the future of psychedelic medicine.

References:

1) Baum, Dan. Legalize It All, How to End the War on Drugs. Harper’s Magazine. https://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/
2) Booth, Martin. Cannabis: A History.Macmillan, 2005

3) Furst, Peter T. Hallucinogens and Culture. Chandler &Sharp Publishers, Inc.1997.

4) Moraes, Francis, and Debra Moraes. Opium. Ronin Publishing. 2003.

5) Ratsch, Christian. The Encyclopedia of Psychoactive Plants, Ethnopharmacology and Its Applications. Park Street Press. 2005.

6) Schultes, Richard E., Albert Hoffman, Christian Ratsch. Plants of the God: the Sacred Healing and Hallucinogenic Powers. Healing Arts Press. 1998.

7) Strassman, Rick. DMT: The Spirit Molecule. Park Street Press. 2001.

8) Streatfeild, Dominic. Cocaine: A Definitive History. Virgin Books Ltd. Thames Wharf Studios. London. 2005.

9) Walton, Stuart. Out of It, a Cultural History of Intoxication. Harmony Books. 2001.