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Opium
- Article written in 1997, during “war on drugs”— targeting esp heroin users; less known that at the same time, Purdue Pharma was pushing its opiate OxyContin through legal means
- 4/5 heroin users first started on prescription painkillers
Much better than we do, the Greeks understood the two-faced nature of drugs, an understanding reflected in the ambiguity of their term for them: pharmakon. A pharmakon can a be either a medicine or a poison; it all depends-on use, dose, intention, and set and setting.’ (The word has a third meaning as well, one often relied on during the drug war: a pharmakon is also a scapegoat, something for a group to blame its problems on.)
p. 6
According to Hogshire’s book, it is possible to grow opium from legally available seeds (he provided detailed horticultural instructions) or, to make matters even easier, to obtain it from poppy seedpods, which happen to be one of the more popular types of dried flowers sold in florist and crafts shops. Whether grown or purchased, fresh or dried, these seedpods contain significant quantities of morphine, codeine, and thebaine, the principal alkaloids found in opium.
p. 28
Caffeine
- Coffee → rise of Enlightenment, rationalism in Europe?
- Caffeine = antagonist for adenosine (blocks/binds to its receptor)
- Adenosine: depressive, sleep-inducing effect on brain, diminishes rate of neurons firing, levels rise over the course of the day → sleep pressure
- When caffeine is blocking receptors, adenosine levels still continue to rise, but you don’t feel its effects
- Indirect effects of caffeine: increases in serotonin, adrenaline, dopamine
- Both the cause and remedy for sleep deprivation
- Adenosine: depressive, sleep-inducing effect on brain, diminishes rate of neurons firing, levels rise over the course of the day → sleep pressure
…bees will remember and return more reliably to flowers that offer them caffeinated nectar. What’s more, the power of this effect is so great that bees will continue to return to those flowers even when there is no nectar left.
p. 101
Tom Standage, author of A History of the World in 6 Glasses (three of which happen to contain caffeine: coffee, tea, and cola), writes that coffeehouses “provided an entirely new environment for social, intellectual, commercial, and political exchange,”…
p. 107 #Music // Book
Continues Michelet: “Coffee, the sober drink, the mighty nourishment of the brain, which unlike other spirits, heightens purity and lucidity; coffee, which clears the clouds of the imagination and their gloomy weight; which illumines the reality of things suddenly with the flash of truth.”
p. 111 #Familiar, #Quotable
(Think of T. S. Eliot’s Prufrock, measuring out his life in coffee spoons.)
p. 122 #Music // Book
In the East, tea was less about labor and commerce than it was an instrument of the spiritual life, beginning in Taoism and Confucianism and culminating in Zen Buddhism.
p. 124
The introduction of tea to the West was all about exploitation–the extraction of surplus value from labor, not only in its production in India but in its consumption in England as well.
p. 126
Much depends on where you stand on the trade-offs of modern life and, especially, those of capitalism. Philosopher Michel Foucult’s concept of “body discipline” could profitably be used to describe the effects of caffeine, since it helped bend humans to the wheel of the Machine and the requirements of a new economic and mental order. Looked at that way, caffeine is a curse, addicting us a to a regime that makes us more tractable and productive workers, speeding us up so that we may better keep pace with the manmade machinery of modern life.
p. 127 #Music // Book , #Wisdom // Time // Connection
Almost from the start, the blessings of coffee and tea in the West were inextricably bound up with the sins of slavery and imperialism, in a global system of production organized with such brutal rationality that it could only have been fueled bywhat else?-caffeine itself. Coffee and tea, as commodities produced in the global South to be consumed in the North, entangled all who drank them in an intricate new web of international economic relations-specifically colonialism and imperialism.
p. 138
So here was another moral cost of caffeine: in order for the English mind to be sharpened with tea, the Chinese mind had to be clouded with opium.
p. 140
Whatever the reason, the differences are striking. In The World of Caffeine, Bennett Alan Weinberg and Bonnie K. Bealer neatly contrast the rival cultures by proposing a series of sharp dualities. These are SO obvious that don’t need to tell you which term applies to which beverage:
male/female boisterous/decorous bohemian/conventional obvious/subtle indulgence/temperance vice/virtue passion/spirituality casual/ceremonial down-to-earth/elevated American/English the frontier/the drawing room excitement/tranquility demimonde/society extroverted/introverted full-blooded/effete Occidental/Oriental work/contemplation tension/relaxation spontaneity/deliberation Beethoven/Mozart Balzac/Proust
p. 142 #Music // Book
Mescaline
- From peyote cactus… San Pedro cactus also produces mescaline, at much lower levels
- Some Native Americans don’t support decriminalization of peyote, because that would drive demand → even more of a shortage of peyote than there already is; very important to their spiritual practices (others think it it could help conserve the cacti?)
- Pollan’s experience with mescaline → “haiku consciousness,” “the immensity of existing things”
- Objects didn’t come alive in the way they do with LSD, psilocybin— just “total absorption with the material world”
- Very long lasting (12 hours+)
“It’s hard to talk about how important and sacred this medicine is, especially to people who see the plant as a thing. To me, peyote is sentient. The plant is not a thing but a relative, an elder. I have witnessed the healing power of peyote and I want to respect that in every way I can.”
p. 206
Some people call it the flesh of our ancestors, because that’s what it is, you know, and at the same time it’s a spirit. Different people have different experiences with the medicine. It talks to you at different levels: about what it is you need to see, what it is that you need to feel, or experience. The medicine knows you before you even know yourself. It is like a mirror. When people get up and look in the mirror, they can fix themselves, brush their teeth and see if they look okay, you know, presentable for society. But this medicine is a mirror that allows you to see inside yourself, into the core of your heart and spirit. The peyote knows you.
Note: The words of Teton Lakota, Sandor Iron Rope p. 209
Sometimes the best way to show your respect for something is to just leave it alone.
Note: Sandor Iron Rope p. 210 #Quotable, #Wisdom // Time // Connection
The use of peyote in the Native American Church gives us a moral model of drug use. That such a model exists (and it exists in other traditional cultures as well) requires us to reconsider the whole concept of “drugs” and the moral failings we associate with them.
p. 212
When I asked him how he discovered his vocation, he began by warning me that “when we ask one question it automatically has nine answers, and when we want to know what is the answer that will help us, then nine more answers show up.
Note: Don Victor p. 234 #Quotable, #Wisdom // Time // Connection