Natural or artificial substances, obtained legally or illegally, to treat a disease, reduce pain, or alter one’s behavior or perception.
The production, use, and trade of drugs have been around since ancient times. From alcohol in Egypt, to opium in Sumer, and coca in the Inca empire, people have long used drugs for religious ceremonies as well as medicinal and recreational purposes. The international trade of drugs also has a long history, often riding on the back of, or causing, conquest. European crusaders brought hashish back from the Middle East while the colonization of the Americas led to the rapid spread of tobacco throughout Europe. The opium trade later sustained the British empire. While individual governments have long sought to control drugs, the international community did not begin to address the issue until the twentieth century. Despite billions of dollars spent on education and law enforcement programs, the drug industry is still booming.
It is important to be precise when discussing drugs for several reasons. First, drugs have historically been substances that were derived from plants and then processed into a consumable form. This means that some plants have been cultivated by certain societies for food and fiber, rather than for the plant’s narcotic or psychoactive properties. For example, Chinese were consuming hemp seeds as food by 4000 B.C.E., using it for medicinal purposes by 2700 B.C.E., and were cultivating it for food and fiber by 1500 B.C.E., but have never used the drug recreationally. Finally, what is an acceptable medicine at one place and time is a threat to society and morality at another.
This entry focuses on substances used by human beings for narcotic, intoxicating, stimulating, and psychoactive purposes. Also, it is only possible to address those drugs that have had the largest impact in terms of cultivation, use, and trade, especially drugs derived from the poppy seedpod (opium and heroin), coca leaf (cocaine), and hemp plant (marijuana and hashish) and synthetic drugs.
It is impossible to know when the first human being, searching for food, ate a substance that had significant psychological and physical effects. Indeed, from coca leaves to mushrooms human beings have knowingly used naturally occurring drugs for thousands of years. While some drugs were eaten to help people survive in harsh conditions such as the Andes, others were included in medicines and used in religious ceremonies.
The cultivation of plants for their psychological and physical effects goes back as far as civilization itself. Sumerians developed the world’s first irrigation system, which led to the first city-states around 3500 B.C.E. The Sumerians domesticated a number of plants, including what they referred to as their “joy plant,” opium poppy. Soon, Sumerians and Egyptians were both brewing beer, while people in China and the Andes were cultivating tea and coca, respectively, for their stimulating effects.
The Sumerians traded and fought with groups across the region, exchanging knowledge of agricultural production and processing techniques. The special significance of the opium poppy plant to the peoples of Mesopotamia is shown by the fact that “joy plant” was one of the first pictograms created and that this pictogram along with other images of the poppy flower can be found on the jewelry, coins, vases, and tombstones of various groups. The Sumerians passed on their knowledge of the poppy plant to the Assyrians, who in turn passed it on to the Babylonians as successive groups took control of Mesopotamia.
By 1300 B.C.E., trade and conflict had spread the poppy plant to Egypt, which quickly established poppy plantations along the Nile River. The Egyptian capital of Thebes was the central production, processing, and distribution point for the white poppy that would become its namesake, opium thebaicum. Thebes’s white poppy fields became famous as its cultivators traded throughout the Mediterranean Sea area, including Greece, Carthage, and Europe.
Hesiod (eighth century B.C.E.) provided the first written record of opium in Greece, discussing a city near Corinth known as Mekone, literally “Poppy-town.” The Greek deity Demeter discovered the poppy’s fruit at Mekone, which gave rise to an extensive cultivation by the time of Hesiod’s writing. The importance of opium to Greek religious beliefs is shown by the extensive use of poppy flowers when representing gods and goddesses, especially the gods Hypnos (sleep), Nyx (night), and Thanatos (death).
Opium was also used extensively in Greek medicine. Hippocrates, the “father of medicine,” distinguished among the red, black, and white poppy, noting the respective therapeutic qualities of using unripe, ripe, and baked poppy. He believed that opium was especially useful in treating internal and women’s diseases. He also mentioned the use of poppy juice as a hypnotic and narcotic drug, while dismissing the plant’s supposed magical powers. Aristotle also wrote and taught about opium. His student, Alexander the Great, then gave opium to his soldiers to sustain them as they conquered everything on their way to Persia and India during the fourth century B.C.E.
Greeks, Arabs, and Romans continued using opium as a sedative until the end of the Roman empire. Opium use in the Mediterranean declined throughout the Dark and Middle Ages as regional trade collapsed. Arab traders continued eastward, introducing opium to China in 400 C.E. Opium did not become prevalent in either India or China, however, until 1000, and then primarily for medicinal purposes.
While opium had been cultivated, processed, and traded since the beginning of civilization, the use of the coca leaf remained relatively unchanged for thousands of years. People living in the Andes used coca leaves for medicinal and religious purposes since 3000 B.C.E. Chewing coca leaves relieves hunger and offers some nutritional value as well as protection against the debilitating effects of living at high altitudes. Nonetheless, it was not until the emergence of the Inca empire around 1200 that coca was cultivated on a large-scale basis. Incan priests used coca in their religious rituals as well as in their medicines, but restricted the general population’s use of the drug.
Europe rediscovered medicinal opium just as its explorers were navigating the globe looking for new territory. “Stones of Immortality,” laudanum painkillers made with opium thebaicum and citrus juice, were introduced in 1525, starting an industry of opium-based medicines. Portuguese traders began shipping opium from India to China through the newly established colony of Macao by the middle of that century. Concerned about the domestic supply, Queen Elizabeth I chartered ships in 1606 with the orders to bring the highest quality opium from India to England. Colonization also introduced two New World drugs, tobacco and coca leaves, to the Europeans. While tobacco spread rapidly, coca did not. The Dutch took over the Portuguese opium trade around the turn of the seventeenth century, and were then overtaken by the British.
The British East India Company took over political power of the Kingdom of Bengal in 1757 to gain control of the region’s opium production. Colonizing South Asia thus gave Great Britain an effective monopoly on trade in South and East Asia. Opium addiction became such a problem in China that emperors passed several edicts against the trade and consumption of opium. They later appealed to the British to curb the opium trade. Nonetheless, opium trade and addiction continued to rise. Before taking over the opium trade, the British had a large trade deficit with China because of skyrocketing tea consumption. The opium trade quickly swung the balance of trade in the other direction, with China losing huge amounts of money annually to the addiction. When the Chinese finally confiscated and destroyed a large shipment of opium in 1838, the British responded with military force, starting the First Opium War (1839–1842). The British forced the Chinese to capitulate to a number of trade demands in the Treaty of Nanjing, but did nothing to reduce the trade of opium.
The founding of the American Pharmaceutical Association in 1852 represented the almost constant discoveries made in biology and chemistry from the eighteenth century onward. A German scientist isolated the morphine alkaloid from opium in 1803, sparking a wave of research into plant alkaloids. Scientists soon isolated many alkaloids, including quinine, caffeine, and cocaine. These discoveries provided humanity with treatments for some of the most troubling and widespread illnesses while establishing powerful companies such as Merck and Bayer, which began distributing morphine in 1827 and heroin in 1897, respectively.
Profits from drug sales fueled even more research, enabling scientists to make another scientific leap by the end of the nineteenth century with the creation of completely synthetic drugs. Amphetamine was first synthesized in 1887, Methylenedioxy Methamphetamine (MDMA; Ecstasy) in 1912, and Lysergic Acid Diethylamide (LSD) in 1938, but none of them became widespread until decades after their respective discoveries. Military scientists in Japan, the United States, Germany, and other European nations carried out most of the controlled experimentation of these drugs.
People have been against drug use since at least 2000 B.C.E., when an Egyptian priest admonished his students to avoid the taverns. While drugs have been used in religious rituals throughout history, particular religions often prohibit certain drugs while encouraging others. Drugs have most often been prohibited, though, when their use becomes a social problem. For example, tobacco was soon seen as a grave threat in seventeenth-century Europe, while coca leaves were not. The tsars of Russia and sultans of the Ottoman empire responded by torturing and executing anyone caught smoking tobacco.
Rather than prohibit drug use, many governments have sought to simultaneously control and profit from the trade by regulating and taxing drug production, processing, trade, and/or consumption. Taxes collected from its monopolistic drug trade were the lifeblood of the British empire. Likewise, liquor taxes provided between one-half to two-thirds of the internal revenue of the United States during the forty-five years leading up to the creation of the federal income tax in 1913.
The United States, long home to a powerful domestic prohibitionist movement, took the lead in the international campaign against drugs after taking over a Philippines ravaged by opium addiction. American insistence led to the International Opium Convention in Shanghai (1909) and the League of Nations Committee (1919) and Convention (1924). Unfortunately, these institutions were not effective in halting the drug trade, in part because the nations controlling them were also the major drug traffickers (e.g., Great Britain). The formation of the United Nations signaled a new chapter in efforts to control drug production and trade, with UN Conventions making policing efforts a global concern.
By the beginning of the twenty-first century, around 4 percent of the world’s 6 billion people regularly used illicit drugs. Marijuana is by far the most heavily used and trafficked drug, with over 140 million regular users worldwide. There are an estimated 21 million cocaine and heroin users, while another 30 million people use amphetamine-type stimulants, such as Ecstasy and Speed. The annual profit from the drug trade reached $400 billion in the 1990s, around 8 percent of international trade. The international trade in illicit drugs is larger than that of cars and steel and is about the same size in trade in textiles, oil and gas, and tourism. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development estimates that illegal drugs cost its member states over $120 billion annually in medical treatment, policing, and lost production.
There are four major tyrpes of drug being traded internationally. Three grow naturally—heroin, marijuana, and cocaine—while the fourth—amphetamine-type stimulants—are synthetically produced. Heroin is mainly produced in two regions: the Golden Triangle (Burma, Thailand, and Laos) and the Golden Crescent (Afghanistan, Iran, and Pakistan). Cocaine is still predominantly produced in Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia, while marijuana is produced throughout North America. Amphetamine-type stimulants are produced in labs, with the Netherlands supplying a large portion of the Ecstasy traded internationally. Heroin and cocaine, beyond their deleterious effects on their users, often fund radical separatist groups such as in Colombia, and military regimes such as in Burma and Afghanistan.
W. Chad Futrell
See also: Hemp; Opium.
Davenport-Hines, R.P.T. The Pursuit of Oblivion: A Global History of Narcotics. New York: Norton, 2002.
Escohotado, Antonio. A Brief History of Drugs: From the Stone Age to the Stoned Age, trans. Kenneth A. Symington. Rochester, VT: Park Street, 1999.
McKenna, Terence K. Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge: A Radical History of Plants, Drugs, and Human Evolution. New York: Bantam, 1992.