Status Updates From High Society - Mind-Alterin...

Rat experiment mentioned !!!

"The French colonization of Indochina was partly financed by its monopoly trade in Chinese opium, and by 1918 the government was operating over 1,500 opium dens across Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. By this point ex-colonials and merchant sailors returning to France had set up similar establishments, particularly in ports such as Marseilles and Toulon."

"In 1874 this opposition was focused by the formation of the Anglo-Oriental Society for the Suppression of the Opium Trade, a coalition of Quakers and missionaries campaigning to force Britain out of the Chinese opium market, who painted a devastating picture of a nation enslaved by the ‘opium evil’."

I have to go deeper in this subject.

"Rodrigo de Jerez, one of Columbus’s crew who had witnessed the Taíno use of tabaco, had himself become a regular smoker, and on his return to Spain was imprisoned by the Inquisition for the devilish practice of exhaling smoke through his mouth and nose."

"In a future where drugs evolve to stimulate the brain with ever more precision, perhaps the most enduring distinction will remain the one formulated by Dioscorides 2,000 years ago: whether a drug is medicine or poison is a question of dosage."

"Intrigued by Mantegazza’s account, the University of Göttingen requested a sample, and in 1860 the young chemist Alfred Niemann was presented with 25 kilos of coca leaf shipped from Lima, from which he produced a white crystalline alkaloid that he christened ‘cocaïne’."

Interesting, because when we usualy think about cocaine, we visualize Pablo Escobar, parties, parents worried about their sons, not Universities...

"As the nitrous oxide researches had shown, this was a form of experiment that demanded more than the usual scientific skills. Literary and creative gifts could be at least as valuable, and the inward turn of pharmacology was being paralleled in the arts by what would later become known as the Romantic movement."

This book is really revealing.

"The drug habits of one culture often disgust another, at least until the new drug is socialized and normalized: drugs may be universal, but they are also an acquired taste."

Interesting perspective.

"The ability to alter consciousness in dramatic but controllable ways has many uses, and there is much evidence to suggest that humans have long used such drugs instrumentally: even, in some cases, elaborating their entire social systems around the heightened states of consciousness such substances produce."