Human History on Drugs summary

When cocaine was first isolated in 1855 from the leaves of the Coca plant, it quickly became available as an anesthetic and pain reliever throughout Europe. From 1884 to 1887, the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, consumed cocaine daily. He published papers extolling its benefits, and prescribed it liberally to patients and friends. 

His 1884 paper Über Coca evangelized cocaine as a cure for depression, morphine addiction, and sexual impotence. He prescribed to his friend, Ernst von Fleischl-Marxow, to treat morphine addiction, inadvertently creating one of the first documented cases of cocaine psychosis when Fleischl-Marxow began hallucinating snakes crawling under his skin.

Adolf Hitler commanded the German Third Reich while consuming an astounding daily pharmaceutical cocktail prescribed by his personal physician, Doctor Theodor Morell. From 1936 until his suicide in 1945, Hitler relied on daily injections from Morell, which included a mix of methamphetamine, cocaine, oxycodone, and dozens of other substances.

By 1943, Hitler received up to twenty injections per day. His hands trembled uncontrollably, likely from Parkinson's disease accelerated by stimulant abuse. He made increasingly erratic military decisions, like declaring war on the United States while already fighting the Soviet Union and Britain. Before the catastrophic Battle of Stalingrad, Hitler took extra doses of methamphetamine, staying awake for days to micromanage troop movements from over a thousand miles away. His infamous rages often occurred during these amphetamine-fueled episodes.

William Shakespeare transformed the English language between 1590 and 1613, inventing more than 1,700 words still in use today, and writing thirty-seven plays that defined Western literature. His works explored the full range of human experience with unprecedented psychological depth. Four centuries later, researchers analyzing clay pipe fragments from Shakespeare's garden in Stratford-upon-Avon detected cannabis residue in eight samples, along with traces of cocaine from two pipes from the early 1600s.

Shakespeare's most experimental works coincided with cannabis flowing into England through trade with Asia and the Middle East. His later plays show marked changes in style – looser verse structures, wilder imagery, and dream-like sequences. The Tempest, one of his final works, unfolds like a vivid hallucination with spirits, magic, and a reality-bending plot. Sonnet 76 mentions "invention in a noted weed," while Sonnet 27 describes a "journey in my head" that keeps him awake imagining his beloved. The Bard who gave us "to be or not to be" was exploring consciousness in more ways than one.

Biologist Francis Crick was determined to uncover the structure of the DNA molecule at Cambridge University in 1953, racing against Linus Pauling at Caltech to make the discovery of the century. According to multiple colleagues and later confirmed by friends, Crick experimented with LSD during the early 1950s when it was still legal and used in psychiatric research. Crick reportedly confided to colleagues that he visualized the double helix structure during an LSD experience, though he never publicly confirmed this claim during his lifetime.

Whether the LSD story is entirely accurate or embellished, Crick's later work definitely showed psychedelic influence. He spent his final decades studying consciousness itself, proposing that the claustrum region of the brain generated self-awareness. His 1981 book Life Itself argued that life on Earth originated from deliberate panspermia – alien civilizations seeding planets with microorganisms. The scientist who decoded life's blueprint spent his later years on questions that sound like acid trips.