Drug Use, History of

Certainly one, among many things, at which humans consistently excel is the willingness and desire to alter our consciousness and augment our sensory experiences. The vehicle for humans from prehistoric time to current day is the use of drugs to quickly accomplish this goal (although there are a host of nondrug practices to equally alter consciousness, such as meditation). The large majority of humanity does not suffer from drug addiction; yet, members of every human culture (from Aboriginal to Indian, Chinese, Egyptian, South American, Aleuts, Chukchi, and Eskimo) use psychoactive drugs on a daily basis for a variety of reasons (i.e., pain relief, religious, vision seeking, consciousness expansion, entertainment, as a food source, healing disease, and even seeking immortality).

Historically, the vast majority of drugs used by humans were hallucinogens, and few were central nervous system stimulants or depressants. A mere 300 years ago, plants and fungi were the major sources of psychoactive chemicals, as humans had not yet become clever enough to reproduce complex synthesis routes that plants accomplish with only water, earth, and sunlight. There are over 800,000 species of plants living today; a small fraction of these species (about 4,000) are the best producers of psychoactive substances on the planet, and they were most convenient for human discovery and use.