Sex, Drugs and Chocolate: The Science of Pleasure. Paul Martin

keeps them quiet and cures their ague.

      Cannabis was used recreationally in many parts of the world during the nineteenth century, including Muslim countries. It was smoked, dissolved in drinks or eaten in combination with other substances. Hashish, the term then used in the Middle East for any cannabis-derived drug, was consumed throughout Syria and in parts of Turkey.⁴ Cooke describes an unusual method used by the Bechuana people of southern Africa for smoking theirs. They would make two small holes in the ground, about a foot apart, place a stick between these holes and mould clay over it, then withdraw the stick to leave a channel connecting the two holes. The cannabis was placed in one hole and lit. Smokers would then take it in turn to lie with their face on the ground, inhaling deeply from the other hole. Cannabis was similarly popular in the USA, where it was often combined with betel nut to form a lump, or ‘quid’, for chewing, in the same manner as tobacco. In India, cannabis resin was collected by men wearing leather aprons. They would run through the hemp fields, brushing violently against the plants. The resin would stick to the leather, from where it was later scraped. It was said that in Nepal the collectors dispensed with the leather gear and ran naked through the cannabis plants, collecting the resin on their skin.

      The two other great narcotics of the nineteenth century were the betel (or areca) nut and coca.⁵ The betel nut contains a mild stimulant and chewing it produces a feeling of well-being. It was the principal recreational drug in Southeast Asia. For the people of Malaya, Cooke tells us, betel was as important as meat and drink, while in the Philippines it was used as a form of currency. Habitual betel-chewing left the mouth and lips stained a deep red colour and turned the teeth black. In Siam, young women were considered more beautiful if their teeth were especially black and their gums especially red. Many Muslims chewed betel nut continuously, except during the fast of Ramadan. In old age, when their lack of teeth made it impossible for them to chew, they would take the drug in the form of a paste that dissolved easily in the mouth.

      Coca, from which cocaine is extracted, was the principal narcotic in South America. It was consumed by mixing dried coca leaves with lime and chewing them. As native coca-users had discovered, the alkalinity of the lime helps to release the small amounts of cocaine in the leaves. Chewing coca leaves in this way provides the chewer with a modest and inherently limited dose of cocaine – in stark contrast to pure cocaine, which is one of the most highly addictive of all recreational drugs.

      In addition to providing pleasure, coca had the big practical attraction of alleviating pain, hunger, thirst, cold and fatigue. Coca enabled its users to climb the steep passes of the Andes while carrying heavy loads. According to a South American legend, the children of the sun presented humans with the coca leaf ‘to satisfy the hungry, provide the weary and fainting with new vigour, and cause the unhappy to forget their miseries’. Alexander von Humboldt, a Prussian scientist who explored the Andes at the beginning of the nineteenth century, was struck by the amazing powers of endurance his native guides derived from chewing coca.

      Coca famously formed part of the original recipe for Coca-Cola. The world’s best-known soft drink was patented in 1886 by George Pemberton, an American pharmacist. Pemberton wanted to create a beverage that was stimulating and energising. The growing power of the temperance movement deflected him away from using alcohol as the active ingredient. He decided instead to base his drink around cocaine from the coca leaf and caffeine-rich extracts of cola nut – hence Coca-Cola.⁶ One of the early marketing campaigns for Coca-Cola advertised it as a cure for ‘slowness of thought’. Nowadays, of course, Coca-Cola and many other carbonated soft drinks use caffeine rather than cocaine to deliver the slight buzz and thereby hook the user. We shall take a closer look at caffeine in chapter 11.

      At the end of his global tour of recreational drugs, Mordecai Cooke concluded that an appetite for chemically induced pleasure was a universal characteristic of humans. This appetite could be satisfied in many different ways, ranging from the poisonous toadstools of arctic Siberia to the coca leaves of the Andes, but the underlying motivation was the same. Cooke was in no doubt that if the British had not become so used to their tobacco and gin, they would be using some other drug instead. He therefore felt it was narrow-minded and hypocritical of them to condemn the Chinese for indulging in opium, or the Hindus and Arabs for using cannabis.

The playful mind?

      Humanity’s relationship with recreational drugs started long before the brief span of recent history that we have just skated over. People were inhaling, drinking and chewing mind-altering substances long before they invented how to write about them. Archaeological evidence suggests that betel nuts were being chewed in Asia nine thousand years ago, tobacco was being used in South America eight thousand years ago and the inhabitants of modern-day Ecuador were taking coca at least five thousand years ago. Opium consumption in Spain has been traced back to around 4200 BC.

      Alcohol has an impressively long pedigree. A tavern is mentioned in the world’s oldest recorded story. The Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh, written more than three thousand years ago, contains references to a tavern presided over by a wise old goddess. The story also features a prostitute, reminding us that commercial sex is indeed the oldest profession. The Egyptians were drinking wine and beer six thousand years ago, and there is evidence that wine was being made in the region of modern-day Armenia eight thousand years ago, long before the wheel was invented. Some historians contend that opium has been around even longer than alcohol. Either way, alcohol has been the most pervasive recreational drug, possibly because it can be made from such a wide variety of naturally occurring ingredients.

      We humans have probably been using recreational drugs for almost as long as our species has lived on the planet. And the simple reason is that they make us feel better. Early humans used recreational drugs because they produced pleasure and eased pain. But might there be some additional factors in play, over and above pleasure and the alleviation of pain, which reinforced this ancient relationship?

      According to one theory, the near-universal consumption of alcohol in northern Europe over the past few thousand years owes something to the scarcity of clean drinking water until relatively recently in history. Most urban-dwellers have had ready access to supplies of clean drinking water only since the nineteenth century. Before then, water was often filthy, sewage-polluted stuff. Alcoholic beverages were usually safer to drink. On top of that, they offered pleasurable intoxication and were a useful source of calories and nutrients. It is no wonder, then, that men, women and children drank alcohol morning, noon and night. Many of the people who built European civilisation were permanently tipsy. The advent of public supplies of clean drinking water in the nineteenth century removed this rationale and coincided with a moral backlash against alcohol. In the Orient, the problem of dirty drinking water had an alternative solution in the form of tea and other herbal infusions. Boiling rather than fermentation rendered their water safe to drink.

      Alcohol may not be the only recreational drug that offers potential benefits in addition to pleasure. According to a theory proposed by the anthropologists Roger Sullivan and Edward Hagen, we are naturally predisposed to take psychoactive drugs because doing so helped our ancestors to survive and reproduce in a harsh world. Stimulants such as nicotine, coca and betel nut helped early humans to endure pain, discomfort and hunger, as they still do in some parts of the world. Sullivan and Hagen further argued that drugs were valuable sources of scarce nutrients. Coca leaves, for example, are rich in vitamins and minerals; chewing them may have made a real difference to people living permanently on the edge of malnutrition. A hundred grams of coca leaves can supply the daily recommended dietary allowance (RDA) of calcium, iron, phosphorus, riboflavin, vitamin A and vitamin E, as well as significant quantities of protein and carbohydrate. That said, there seems little prospect of coca becoming the new health snack.

      Whatever practical benefits alcohol, coca and other drugs might bring, their big attraction is, and always has been, their psychoactive effects. Self-evidently, we humans enjoy getting out of it from time to time, with the help of whatever psychoactive substance is to hand. That substance might be opium, coca,