The high life: our love affair with narcotics

Jesus was a giant red mushroom, or so I vaguely remember the message from the 1970s. It was suggested in John Marco Allegro's The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross , a volume published deep in the age of pop messages about drugs and altered consciousness. Answering many of the anti-drug messages of the 1960s, Allegro was on the nightstands of innumerable college students, being read through a haze of various mind-altering drugs, including the Jesus mushroom, Amanita muscaria , the magic mushroom of the day. Was indeed every religious experience, including that of the early Christians, the product of mind-altering substances, which we could even today re-create? Revelation in our day could come from the mushroom cap, or so at least some believed.

Richard J Miller's Drugged: The Science and Culture Behind Psychotropic Drugs is an engaging history of the pursuit and enjoyment of mind-altering substances from the Jesus mushroom to cocaine to coffee. It is also a first-rate historical account of the meanings attached to such experiences and, more importantly, the science, biochemistry, neurology and psychology that discovered, perpetuated and critiqued such substances.

Miller begins his account with a discussion of whether religious experience had (or has) its roots in the mind-altering substances found across the world, including hallucinogens from mushrooms. His account is historical and as such shows our modern fascination with such finds, whether we subcribe to them or not.

Hallucinogenic mushrooms of all sorts were used from pre-Columbian America to the Russian tundra to create altered mental states. Miller recounts that in 1736 Philip Johan von Strahlenberg, a Swedish prisoner of war in Siberia during the Great Northern War between Sweden and Russia, described the use of such mushrooms by the local elites. As the mushrooms were rare and expensive, the poor waited for the rich to relieve themselves, so they could drink the urine and share some of the psychotropic effect. (Is this an early example of our concerns about income inequality?)

Pleasures and dangers
Miller does not just comment on the practice but also notes that such accounts when published in western Europe were a media sensation. There is an often-breached line between religious uses, popular enjoyment and mass fascination with mind-altering drugs, drug culture and the pleasures and dangers of both.

Indeed, what Miller collects in this book is the fine web that connects popular fascination with the means of acquiring altered states of perception to how this fascination was paralleled (often even heralded by) the hard science that made such substances available. Science is never neutral, and in pursuing such substances it was less than neutral. Whether the substances were of secondary interest (and became a primary source of wealth), such as cocaine, or whether they were the focus of the sciences itself is of little importance.

What is engrossing about Miller’s account of the use, discovery and manufacture of such drugs is that his tales always take an odd bounce. For example, he begins by telling us about the discovery of coal-tar dyes and how they originated in the making of coke (for smelting) during the industrial revolution.

Not only could chemists now artificially make colours such as mauve, which became the great fad of the Victorians, but the German chemist Adolf von Baeyer (a Nobel laureate in 1905) even manufactured an artificial version of indigo, to dye Levi Strauss’s jeans. But from coal dyes also came the staining of cells to better see them under the microscope. Then Paul Ehrlich (a Nobel laureate of 1908) found that some of the dyes actually had medicinal effects to reduce malarial fever; indeed they came to be used when quinine was unavailable during the first World War.

From this accidental discovery of the physiological impact of ingesting coal-tar derivatives came the move to the first anti-psychotic drugs, such as chloramine, and, eventually, our comprehension of the mechanisms by which paranoia was created in the brain through analogous pathways to those of our magic mushrooms and designer club drugs.

Sadly this came, via the Nazi use of the German drug industry during the second World War, to focus on mass production of chemicals for the war effort, even at Auschwitz, where the chemist-survivor-author Primo Levi worked in one of IG Farben’s factories.

From Victorian dyes to modern understanding of the mechanisms of mental illness, Miller comes to the basis of our neurological processing that is affected by mushrooms, opiates and other mind-altering drugs. From Victoria’s skirts, multiple Nobel prizes and the first widely read account of surviving the Holocaust to an understanding of deviant and, therefore, normal mental processes – and it all makes sense when Miller spins his tale.

Popular science is often reductive, the popular science of drugs, drug use and intoxication even more so. But Miller is a real scientist, who holds a chair of pharmacology at Northwestern University, in Chicago. He is literate in a way that we hope all scientists to be, and his account is not only engaging (like James May’s television programmes on popular science on the BBC) but also scientifically rigorous.

His model is Thomas Browne's Urn Burial , from 1658 – that classic study of science and culture that is spun around stories well told and connections rarely seen. I would not suggest Urn Burial today for a seaside read, but Richard Miller's Drugged would not be a bad companion. But not after ingesting any red-capped mushrooms.