For untold millennia, humanity has used plants for healing. The earliest use of plants as medicines may have originated from accidental discoveries of the ability of certain plants to alleviate pain, accelerate the healing of wounds, ease the symptoms of fevers or coughs, induce sleep or wakefulness, or any number of other beneficial properties that became manifest through people’s interactions with plants in the course of daily living. Gradually these accidental discoveries became more formally organized into systems of knowledge. Specialized practitioners such as shamans, herbalists, midwives and other kinds of healers were the holders of the knowledge of medicinal plants and their applications for various purposes, usually beneficial but not always. In the context of traditional societies, such people were recognized, respected and sometimes feared. As cultures evolved from traditional hunter gatherer and foraging economies to agrarian societies, specialized institutions and professions emerged, and knowledge became codified into written systems. The practice of medicine also developed within this context. Medical specialism proliferated, and often practitioners began to focus on specific subdivisions of medicine, becoming specialists for example, in diseases of the heart or nervous system, reproductive health, infections, gastrointestinal ailments, and so forth. In contemporary medicine this increasing specialization has expanded enormously.
The application of scientific methods to the investigation of bodily functions and system sand the causes and cures of diseases and other pathologies drove this trend toward specialization. Science itself did not simply spring full blown at the start of the Age of Enlightenment in the 17th and 18th Centuries, nor did it solely originate as the spawn of Western civilization. Science, like medicine, is rooted in prehistory. Preliterate civilizations in MesoAmerica, for instance developed sophisticated systems of plant domestication, agriculture and animal husbandry, medical practices, and complex astronomical and calendrical systems. Ancient civilizations in Mesopotamia, Egypt, and South Asia and East Asia all had complex sciences of astronomy, mathematics, and medicine. Ancient medical practices bore little resemblance to what we regard as modern medicine. Diagnoses and treatments were likely to be based on empirical observations, but the causes of illnesses were usually attributed to demonic influences or attack by negative energies, treated through prayer, incantation, and ritual. But plant remedies were often included; these were sometimes effective, even if accidentally so.
In the Western tradition many of the foundations of modern science began to emerge in Classical Antiquity between the 8th and 6th Centuries BC. Aristotle and Plato were among the most prominent practitioners of the emerging world view of Natural Philosophy. This system emphasized the understanding of nature and the order of the Cosmos without invoking supernatural causes. Deductive reasoning and empirical observation came to beviewed as the proper approach to the discovery of universal truths. These remain the fundamental pillars of the scientific method to this day. Aristotle applied this methodologyto biology, investigating biological diversity, and animal behavior, describing the morphology of many plants and animals and dissecting more than 50 species of animals. As a result of these investigations Aristotle deserves credit for being one of the first scientific naturalists. During this same period, medicine was also transformed, primarily through the work of the physician, Hippocrates. Hippocrates developed a health care system based on science and clinical protocols. He and his followers developed descriptions of many diseases and medical conditions, and noted the relationship between disease and lifestyle. He is known for having formulated the Hippocratic Oath, one of the earliest codes of medical ethics, still in use today. He is remembered as the ‘father of medicine’ in the Western medical tradition.
In the Middle Ages progress in medicine and science continued but at a slower pace. Many of the advances of the time took place in the Islamic world. In Europe, scientific and medical advances came to an abrupt end due to the Black Death pandemic in 1348, and did not really begin to recover until the Scientific Revolution of the early Renaissance. The Heliocentric model of the cosmos proposed by Nicolas Copernicus in 1543 and later confirmed empirically by Galileo’s observation of the moons of Jupiter in 1609 by means of his new invention, the telescope, overturned the view of the Earth at the center of the Cosmos, with humanity as its supreme ruler. The Scientific Revolution also marked the emergence of a new, more mechanistic version of the scientific method based on rigorous observation and skepticism, subjected to testing by carefully constructed hypotheses. In medicine, the publication of de humani corporus fabrica (On the Workings of the Human Body) the first truly scientific medical anatomy by Andres Vesalius, documented and compared the systems of the body to a complex machine and provided a further blow to the presumed divinity of Man.
Other scientific advances too numerous to mention here took place during this period and on into the Age of Enlightenment that followed. Major discoveries and innovations were made in astronomy, physics, mathematics, philosophy, engineering, geology, and biology. These were led by a veritable pantheon of men (unfortunately they were all men!) such as Galileo, Kepler, William Harvey, Francis Bacon, Rene Descartes. Spinoza, Isaac Newton, Robert Hooke (who invented the first microscope), and Robert Boyle.
In these centuries scientific progress continued its trend toward reductionism. Alchemy, widely practiced as a psycho-spiritual discipline projected onto the external world, became more experimental. Yet the preoccupation with spirit persisted. Crude distillation techniques employed by alchemists, for example, were originally attempts to isolate the spiritual essence from medicinal plants. The vaporous condensates recovered from distillation are still termed ‘spirits’ to this day. But while alchemists continued to chase vapors and formulate the Philosopher’s Stone, real chemists were focusing the new chemical technologies on the constituents of medicinal plants, conceived to be a more tangible goal of the chemical quest. Robert Boyle deserves credit for the first real separation of alchemy from chemistry. Although he was an alchemist, his publication, in 1661, of The Sceptical Chymist, or Chymo-physical Doubts and Paradoxes, laid out his corpuscular theory of matter, postulating that all matter consisted of corpuscles or clusters of corpuscles in motion. He also rejected Aristotle’s notion of the four elements (earth, air, water, and fire) and Paracelsus’ concept of the Three Principles (salt, sulfer, and mercury). Boyle’s theories opened the door to the forerunners of experimental chemistry and medicinal chemistry in the 19th century.
John Dalton, an Englishman, with a nod to his 5th century BC proteges Democritus and Leucippus, formulated the contemporary version of atomic theory in 1804. Building on his work, the Russian chemist, Dimitri Mendeleev, constructed the periodic table of the elements. A decade or so later, the German chemist Frederich Wöhler achieved the synthesis of urea, a simple amide of carbonic acid, in 1828. The compound is important in the cellular metabolism of nitrogen-containing compounds in animals and is the main nitrogen containing substance in urine. It was the first time that an organic substance had been made from inorganic precursors, and this discovery had huge implications. Up to that time, it was believed that organic compounds could only be produced by living organisms due to a ‘life force’. This discovery contradicted the doctrine of ‘vitalism’, the belief that‘ living organisms are fundamentally different from non-living entities because they contain some non-physical element or are governed by different principles than are non-livingthings.’ The concept of ‘vitalism’ was sometimes referred to as the ‘vital spark’, ‘energy’ or in a term coined by philosopher Henri Bergson ‘elan vital’ a ‘vital force’ which some equate with the soul.
Wöhler’s discovery seeded the founding of the modern science of organic chemistry. By the end of the 19th century, chemists were able synthesize hundreds of organic compounds. The simple organic molecules in petroleum were seen as an endless source of precursors that could be developed into synthetic fibers, dyes, medicines, and any number of easily made and easily disposed products for eager consumers.
But it had far more profound implications than that. Wöhler’s simple urea was a stake driven into the vitalist world view. It put to rest, supposedly, the notion that there was anything ‘special’ about living things, a debate that had raged for more than two centuries. On one hand, the vitalists argued that life processes could not be reduced to a mechanistic process; the physicalists argued that the known mechanics of physics and chemistry would eventually explain the differences between life and non-life. Organisms were simply complex biochemical machines. The soul, the spirit, was banished from the worldview of scientific biology.
Never mind that this view existed, and persists, in traditional medicine, not only shamanic medicine but sophisticated and highly documented medical systems such as Chinese medicine and Ayurveda. in this understanding of the dynamics of health and disease inliving systems, disease often results from imbalances in the interactions of these vital internal energies. As far as reductionist science is concerned, it’s all poppy cock. Superstition. Even so, medical procedures carried out under these alternative paradigms were often as effective, and sometimes more effective, than those of the emerging reductionist medicine.
As the new science of chemistry developed in the 19th century, various subspecialties emerged. One of these was Phytochemistry, the study of the chemical constituents of plants. Phytochemistry fueled the nascent science of molecular pharmacology, providing valuable tools for pharmacologists to understand the mechanisms and action of medicinal plants, as well as basic mechanisms underlying fundamental physiologic processes.
In this respect, one class of compounds in particular was particularly useful: Alkaloids. The alkaloids comprise an enormous and chemically diverse category of natural products, widespread in plants but also found in fungi, bacteria, and animals. Their structural diversity is vast, but all contain nitrogen, usually one or more in heterocyclic rings. Alkaloids also typically have pharmacological activities and are the ’active principles’ of many of the most important medicinal plants used in traditional or modern medicine; aswell, alkaloids provide important structural leads for drug discovery. Their pharmacological properties are as diverse as their chemical diversity. Some are antibacterial, cardioactive, antiparasitic, analgesic, anticancer, to name but a few. Many are psychoactive; e.g. stimulants such as caffeine, the bromine, nicotine, and cocaine. Others may be sedative or hallucinogenic, such as morphine, mescaline, psilocybin. Some are highly toxic such asatropine and tubocurarine. Almost all have applications in medicine.
As the name implies, most alkaloids are basic, and can be relatively easily isolated in a pure form using a simple process of acid/base partitioning. The alkaloid can form a water-soluble salt with an organic or inorganic acid and separated from insoluble compounds by partitioning into the aqueous layer. In the salt form it can be crystallized as a pure compound.
In 1804, the German pharmacist Frederich Sertürner applied this simple methodology and succeeded in isolating the first pure alkaloid, morphine, from crude extracts of the opium poppy. Sertürner’s morphium, as he called it, had most of the properties of opium but was six times stronger. In subsequent experiments, he administered it to himself, two young boys, two dogs, and a mouse. All four people nearly died. He hypothesized that because lower doses of the drug were needed, it would be less addictive than opium. However, he became addicted to morphine, writing subsequently, ‘I consider it my duty to attract attention to the terrible effects of this new substance I called morphium in order that calamity may be averted.’ Nevertheless, Sertüner formed a company in 1817 that marketed the drug as pain medication, and as a treatment for alcohol and opium addiction! The pharmaceutical company, Merck, got its start in 1827 in Darmstadt, with morphine as its primary product. In combination with another new invention, the hypodermic needle, morphine became both blessing and curse for American soldiers during the Civil War. Morphine injections using the Syrette, an ampoule of morphine withan injection needle attached for administration in the field, provided immediate relief from the horrific injuries suffered by soldiers exposed to the terrible weapons of the newly mechanized war. On the other hand, more than 400,000 troops returned from battle afflicted with the ‘soldier’s disease’ of morphine addiction. In 1898, a simple derivative of morphine, diacetylmorphine, otherwise known as heroin, was brought to market by the pharmaceutical company Bayer. Heroin was stronger than morphine, more fast-acting, and far more addicting.
Sertüner’s discovery of the methodology for isolating pure morphine in 1804 sparked a revolution in phytochemistry and pharmacology over the subsequent decades of the 19th century that might well be called the Age of Alkaloids. Notable alkaloids discovered in the following decades include:
In 1820, Caffeine was isolated from Coffee
1822, Nicotine from Tobacco
1854, Theobromine from Chocolate
1855, Cocaine from Coca
1881, Hyocyamine from Deadly Nightshade
1896, Mescaline from Peyote
1901, Ibogaine from Iboga
All of these impressive discoveries created a new era in medicine, an era when pharmacotherapies became the defining element in medical interventions. Sertüner’s discovery of morphine in 1804, and his determination that morphine had all the properties of crude opium, was a strong blow to the doctrine of vitalism, and Frederich Wöhler’s later synthesis of urea in 1828 drove the final stake into its heart. Morphine, after all, was a crystal, it was not alive. Urea, an important metabolite in animals, could be made from synthetic chemicals. Though they all had profound influences on biological processes, including those associated with consciousness, none of these shiny new alkaloids were alive. They were inert, dead crystals. They had no souls or spirit, what need was there for that? There was no longer any need to invoke vitalism, life force, or spirit. Organisms were nothing more than complex machines, machines made of bone and muscle, tendons and nerves, secretions and hormones, proteins and blood. There was no place, and no need, for spirit. The complex biochemical machine could be fixed by the application of the appropriate molecular monkey wrench. Spirit was exiled from medicine. It did not find its way back for over 120 years.
Reductionism has catalyzed an increasing estrangement of our species from Nature. We no longer view ourselves as partners in a symbiotic relationship with the sentient community of the biosphere. Or indeed as part of Nature at all. Instead, Nature exists forus only as something to be owned, dominated, depleted, and ultimately, to be destroyed.
The environmental consequences of this perspective are appallingly evident in our daily news feeds. We have become like the lunatic crew of a floating mad house, in flames, evenas it floods, while the neo fascist tech Bros of the New Oligarchy party on, screaming drill, baby drill. Conveniently forgetting that the coda to that chant is burn, baby burn.
We have developed soulless technologies that, in the service of greed and the delusion that we can improve on Nature, are capable of inflicting enormous harm; not only onNature, but on ourselves. Because after all, like it or not, we are part of Nature. There is, inherently, no moral quality in the technologies that we develop. They can be used for good, or for evil. The moral quandary that we face, which technologies we choose to use and how we choose to deploy them, originates within the human heart. As a species, humans are very clever; but often, we are not very wise. And therein lies the rub; we often become so enamored of what we can do, what we are capable of doing, that we forget to stop and ponder whether we should do a given thing. This thoughtlessness, this failure to reflect on the potential consequences of our actions, originates in hubris, a cocksure, damn the consequences kind of arrogance. And unfortunately, this kind of hubris is all too often a male trait.
In 1855, Cocaine was isolated from the Coca bush, which has been a benign and sacred medicine at the very heart of Andean culture, religion, medicine, and cosmovision for over 8000 years. If ever a plant had spirit, Coca would be that plant.
The sad story of the Coca bush, and the way that this sacred and beautiful plant has been desecrated and violated by human greed, is a perfect, depressing narrative of what we are doing to Nature, and ultimately to ourselves. As science has advanced, as spirit has been abandoned, we have come to view Nature and all its species not as partners in the evolving odyssey of life on Earth, this symbiotic, vital, living community of sentient species that we call the Biosphere, but as something separate from us. As something to be dominated. As something to be owned. Something to be used up and tossed away, leaving behind only an exhausted husk, much as a rapist might discard the broken and bleeding body of his victim. Because we have become rapists; rapists of our planet.
Consider, again, the Coca bush. In its natural form it is benign and healing. Helpful for a variety of common ailments, helpful for nutrition, helpful for relieving pain, a balm for the exhausted body and mind as it gently lifts the spirit. In its natural form, truly Coca is one of the kindest and most treasured of all the myriad medicines that Nature has bestowed on humanity. It has been so for over 8000 years.
Yet, we have applied our demonic technology to extract Cocaine, Coca’s most harmful and toxic constituent and turn it into a dangerous drug that has contributed to the deaths and enslavement of thousands, corrupted governments on a global scale, spawned wars lasting decades, caused untold environmental destruction, and continues to threaten geopolitical stability.
Instead of regulating cocaine, by prohibiting it we have given it an artificial value that makes all these horrific consequences inevitable. The so-called prohibition of cocaine is a sick political joke. It is obvious to all that continued prohibition will simply perpetuate all of these harms. This is not an accident. This is the plan.
Cocaine is not the demon here. Cocaine is simply an alkaloid, with the properties that it has. The demon of avariciousness and greed dwells within us. The men who traffic in cocaine (and it is mostly men) see it as the path to riches, dominance and glamour. They care little how much harm this creates, how many people die, how much it destroys an already wounded and bleeding earth. Our Mother.
Cocaine is only an alkaloid. But it happens to be an alkaloid that brings out the beast in men. It stimulates those dopamine driven circuits that we know characterize the traits of what is sometimes termed toxic masculinity: Aggression. Cruelty. Brutality. Arrogance. Misogyny. Sexual dominance. Hubris. Hatred. Lack of compassion. Violence. Bullying. All those traits currently and shockingly being admired in certain cultural conversations. Yeah, cocaine is just the drug for these guys.
The World is beset with problems. We are approaching a tipping point. Is it too late to save it? Perhaps. In this larger context, does correcting the scourge of cocaine even matter? I believe that it could. I believe that it could be an important step toward rediscovering the spirit in nature, in medicine, and in ourselves.
I believe this could be done in four ways.
First, the Coca Bush should be developed and recognized for the gift that it is. Legal markets for Coca products must be created and developed. Potentially it may fuel a global market, comparable to coffee in revenues and far more beneficial for human health.
Second, cocaine must be decriminalized and made available through regulated channels. This must be done to collapse the global criminal networks that profit from cocaine solely because it is illegal.
Third, those who are addicted to cocaine, who wish to quit, must have access to treatment. Research has shown that mambé or similar preparations can effectively satisfy addiction cravings in a maintenance regimen.
Fourth, psychedelic medicines, such as ibogaine, ayahuasca or psilocybin can be offered as alternative therapies to enable addicts to finally confront and resolve the spiritual crises that led them into addiction in the first place.
Psychedelics like these are now being recognized for their tremendous potential for healing, not just for addictions, but for a spectrum of mental health issues that range from addiction to trauma to major depression to existential anxiety in fear of dying.
In fact, psychedelics are medicines for the soul. There’s that word again. Psychedelics have brought spirit back into medicine at a time when it’s most sorely needed. Psychedelics may just be able to help us re-discover our connection to nature, and to heal not only our own soul, but the soul of our species, and the soul of our planet. Even as we acknowledge that for indigenous peoples who have been the stewards of these medicines for centuries, the soul never left.
When I first wrote this talk, I was going to end it here. But after reflecting on the many excellent presentations over the last few days, I feel compelled to add an addendum. In the conversations on drug policy that we’ve heard exploring ways forward to develop Coca in legitimate and beneficial ways, and the complex challenges of regulating Cocaine and other controlled substances, we’ve often heard the arguments framed in terms of human rights. For example, it’s a basic human right for indigenous people to have unrestricted and legal access to their sacred medicines.
But there is another aspect to this that I have not heard discussed, and I think it may bring an important and novel perspective to this conversation. What about plant rights? In fact, what about organismic rights in the broadest sense? Do not all organisms on this planet, animals, plants, fungi, even bacteria, have a right to their existence as components of the biospheric community of species? By what authority does one species, humans, assert the right to declare any species unworthy of existing? By what right do humans declare that Coca, or opium poppies, or any other plant, animal or fungus that we happen not to like, should be eradicated from the earth? There is no justification for this beyond human arrogance and hubris, originating in the notion that we own Nature.
Humanity has formed close, mutually beneficial relationships with plants, animals, fungi and other organisms for as long as our species has existed. From them, we obtain food and medicines, clothing and construction materials, dyes and colorants, and esthetic satisfaction. In these relationships we return the favor, often by cultivating the plant, domesticating herds or otherwise ensuring that the beneficial organisms are able to thrive.
In biology this is called symbiosis, a close relationship between different species for mutual benefit. Humanity has co-evolved in symbiotic relationships with food and medicinal plants over vast spans of time, long before there was anything like history.
What’s all this got to do with drug policy? Just this: I believe that we should introduce a novel concept into efforts to develop rational drug policy: The right to symbiosis.
This should be asserted as a fundamental right. Not simply a human right, because by definition it goes beyond that. It is an organismic right. I propose a two-part, formal explication of this principle:
- Any organism has the right to form a mutually beneficial symbiosis with any other organism.
- No species that is a member of the biospheric community has the authority or right to seek the eradication of any other species in the biosphere.
If these tenets were adopted in the formulation of drug policy, it would foster a more compassionate and rational – indeed a more symbiotic – approach to humanity’s relationship to the biospheric community that just might overcome our estrangement from Nature. In so doing, we may rediscover our collective soul, and its connection to the soul of our planet.
