Join the discussion
Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.
- Hacker News
- I would love to know how many human conceptions were assisted by the more well-known mind-altering drug, alcohol.by pmarreck
- I love Tom Standage’s book, A History of the World in Six Glasses. It talks about: beer (Mesopotamia), wine (Greece/Rome), spirits (Spanish colonization), tea (British colonization), coffee (world wars), and Coca-Cola (American empire).
It’s amazingly coherent.
by GMoromisato - My general gripe with results like this is that it seems to be interpreted in a biased way by the people that already use psychoactive drugs, who want to argue for them in the modern world.
I do agree that drugs were often needed for people to ensure the hardships of civilization (alcohol is not just a disinfectant). My main problem though is that this is too often used as an argument to shove a bunch of drugs in the general population, when we maybe could achieve some better results by just improving society.
The people that take psylocibin/mescalin/whatever always tell other how much it expanded their mind, yet often they seem just as narrow minded to me as they did before, just in a different way
by mihaic - Didn’t mind-altering drugs like alcohol play a key role in the rise of any civilization?by baxtr
- People do drugs in abandoned buildings. In a few hundred years archaeologists will think the purpose of shopping malls was fentanyl.by lisp2240
- It's thought that a lot of the geometric designs in Indigenous pottery and architecture are directly influenced by hallucinogenic plants like datura.
There's a really great YouTube channel called Desert Lore and he covers this topic in depth in this episode. It was really fascinating:
by slowin - Given that many of our current-day subterranean environments are also covered in art and strewn with drug paraphernalia, can we really say that it played a key role in the rise of the civilization?
- > The work also benefits from recent research into the use of hallucinogens in treating mental illness, which has promoted broader acceptance of these substances. “There was long a feeling that drugs made you sick and addicted,” says José Capriles, an archaeologist at Pennsylvania State University (Penn State) who excavates in Bolivia. “Today, there is a new openness,” he adds, which is freeing grant money and attracting graduate students.
I'm really happy to hear things like this. The potential benefits (and drawbacks, of course) been evident to lots of us psychonauts for a long time, and finally the sentiment seems to have turned enough so some money can actually get into the research to see if these things can help us today via treatments. A real joy to see after so many decades of the failed war on drugs that influenced policies across the globe.