Human History on Drugs Human History on Drugs E-Book

Sam Kelly

• Herausgeber: Icon Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 417

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

A lively, hilarious, and entirely truthful look at the druggie side of history's most famous figures, including Shakespeare, Queen Victoria, and the Beatles, from debut author (and viral historical TikToker with over 100K followers) Sam Kelly. Did you know that Alexander the Great was a sloppy drunk, William Shakespeare was a stoner, and George Washington drank a spoonful of opium every night to staunch the pain from his fake teeth? Or how about the fact that China's first emperor, Qin Shi Huangdi, ingested liquid mercury in an (ironic) attempt to live forever, or that Alexander Shulgin, inventor of no less than 230 new psychedelic drugs, was an employee of the DEA? In Human History on Drugs, historian Sam Kelly introduces us to the history we weren't taught in school, offering up irreverent and hysterical commentary as he sheds light on some truly shocking aspects of the historical characters we only thought we knew. With chapters spanning from Ancient Greece ("The Oracle of Delphi Was Huffing Fumes") and the Victorian Era ("Vincent van Gogh Ate Yellow Paint") to Hollywood's Golden Age ("Judy Garland Was Drugged by Grown-Ups") and modern times ("Carl Sagan Got Astronomically High"), Kelly's research spans all manner of eras, places, and, of course, drugs. History is rife with drug use and drug users, and Human History on Drugs takes us through those highs (pun intended) and lows on a wittily entertaining ride that uncovers their seriously unexpected impact on our past.

Leseprobe

 

 

Published in the UK in 2025 byIcon Books Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre, 39–41 North Road, London N7 9DP

www.iconbooks.com

Copyright © 2025 by Sam Kelly

The right of Sam Kelly to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 978-183773-309-5ebook: 978-183773-310-1

A version of chapter 13 was previously published as “Queen Victoria and the First Opium War” in History Is Now Magazine on March 9, 2021. A version of chapter 14 was previously published as “The Pope Who Drank Cocaine Wine” in History Is Now Magazine on April 7, 2021. A version of chapter 20 was originally published as “The Adventures of Jean-Paul Sartre” in Philosophy Now, issue 145 (August/September 2021), 8–10.

Illustrations by Paul GirardPhotograph on page 71: Wikimedia Commons Photograph on page 113: Public Domain

Book design by Silverglass Studio

Printed and bound in the UK

Appointed GPSR EU Representative: Easy Access System Europe Oü, 16879218Address: Mustamäe tee 50, 10621, Tallinn, EstoniaContact Details: [email protected], [phone]

To Chocolate, my small furry coworker of many years, I miss you

CONTENTS

Introduction

PART 1: ANCIENT POTIONS

CHAPTER 1

The Oracle of Delphi Was Huffing Fumes

CHAPTER 2

Pharaoh Ramesses II Wanted Ganja

CHAPTER 3

Alexander the Great Was a Sloppy Drunk

CHAPTER 4

Qin Shi Huangdi’s Recipe for Immortality Backfired

CHAPTER 5

St. John the Revelator Was Tripping on Shrooms

CHAPTER 6

Marcus Aurelius’s Sleepy-Time Medicine

PART 2: MEDIEVAL HIGHS

CHAPTER 7

The Hashashin, the Devout Killer Potheads

CHAPTER 8

William Shakespeare Was a Stoner

PART 3: COLONIAL CHAOS

CHAPTER 9

George Washington’s Terrible Teeth

CHAPTER 10

Andrew Jackson Was a Mean, Crazy, Racist, Murderous Drunk

CHAPTER 11

Andrew Johnson Was Blackout Drunk

PART 4: VICTORIAN DECADENCE

CHAPTER 12

Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Trip Wore Off

CHAPTER 13

Queen Victoria Was the Biggest Drug Dealer of All Time

CHAPTER 14

The Pope Who Loved Cocaine Wine

CHAPTER 15

Friedrich Nietzsche Thought He Was Jesus

CHAPTER 16

Vincent van Gogh Ate Yellow Paint

CHAPTER 17

Sigmund Freud Was Wrong About Cocaine

PART 5: WARTIME FOGGINESS

CHAPTER 18

Adolf Hitler Was Tweaked out of His Mind

CHAPTER 19

Bill W. Took LSD to See God

CHAPTER 20

Jean-Paul Sartre’s Really Long Bad Trip

CHAPTER 21

Richard Nixon Wanted to Nuke Everyone

CHAPTER 22

John F. Kennedy Was on All Sorts of Drugs

CHAPTER 23

Audie Murphy Was the Real-Life Captain America

PART 6: SHOWBIZ BLUES

CHAPTER 24

Howard Hughes, the Drug-Addled Billionaire

CHAPTER 25

Judy Garland Was Drugged by Grown-ups

CHAPTER 26

Andy Warhol Was Really Fond of Meth

CHAPTER 27

Philip K. Dick Wrote Amphetamine-Fueled Science Fiction

CHAPTER 28

Johnny Cash Was Battling Demons

CHAPTER 29

Elvis Presley Was a Narc

PART 7: COUNTERCULTURE MAYHEM

CHAPTER 30

Albert Hofmann Invented LSD by Accident

CHAPTER 31

Aldous Huxley’s Shortcut to Enlightenment

CHAPTER 32

How the CIA Accidentally Created the Unabomber

CHAPTER 33

Ken Kesey and the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

CHAPTER 34

Timothy Leary Was the Most Dangerous Man in America

CHAPTER 35

Alexander Shulgin, the DEA Employee Who Invented 230 Psychedelics

CHAPTER 36

Sgt. Pothead’s Loaded Hard-Drug Band (a.k.a. the Beatles)

PART 8: MODERN MYSTICS

CHAPTER 37

Carl Sagan Got Astronomically High

CHAPTER 38

Dock Ellis Pitched a No-Hitter While Tripping on Acid

CHAPTER 39

John McAfee Was the World’s Biggest Troll

CHAPTER 40

Steve Jobs Loved LSD and Soaking His Feet in the Toilet

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Selected Bibliography

INTRODUCTION

You learned about history in school—or you thought you did.

You read in textbooks about famous men and women who accomplished extraordinary things. But those textbooks were whitewashed. Important facts were redacted, omitted, and censored to hide the truth. The historical figures you read about weren’t one-dimensional stick figures who popped into existence for a single day to win a pivotal battle or make a technological breakthrough. They were multifaceted individuals who led complicated, messy, often bizarre lives—like we all do—and yet textbooks seldom tell you what inspired their successes or how they coped with their occasional failures.

The truth is, many historical figures were on drugs: George Washington, Queen Victoria, Sigmund Freud, Adolf Hitler, and countless others—they were real people, with real flaws and real vices. Teachers couldn’t tell you this stuff when you were a child; there are certain truths that impressionable young minds aren’t ready to hear. But you’re older now, you deserve to know their real stories—the stuff you didn’t learn in school.

So, what’s the deal: Are drugs good or are they bad? Honestly, there is no one-size-fits-all answer to that question. Some of these individuals genuinely believed their drug use helped them to achieve their goals. But, for countless others, drug use was responsible for their downfall—and, in many cases, their death.

This book tells both sides.

Education is one of the key themes of the book. Drugs are tools: amphetamines, opioids, barbiturates—even psychedelics—have valid medical uses that can improve a person’s well-being when administered in the proper manner and dosage by a trained professional. But people often suffer serious harm when they’re not properly educated about the powerful effects and consequences of these drugs. The truth is, many of these historical figures could have made much smarter choices if only they had known the facts.

Whitewashing textbooks isn’t the answer. Scrubbing away references to drug use and pretending it didn’t happen won’t make the underlying problems go away. If you want people to learn from history, they need to know what actually happened.

I’ve been obsessed with history since I was a little kid. In elementary school, I’d beg my history teacher to let me take home the teacher’s edition of the textbook so I could read ahead and see the extra info they put in the margins to help teachers provide context. When my mom came to wake me in the morning, she’d find me sprawled on top of the bed with the history book still lying open on my chest.

History doesn’t have to be dull and lifeless. It’s not about memorizing names and dates, knowing who won what battle and when. I’ve always believed a history textbook should be the single most fascinating book of all time—as if someone took all the most dramatic things that ever happened and brought them together in one place. Who wouldn’t want to read that?

That’s why I decided to write this book, because the history text I’ve always envisioned hasn’t been written yet. My goal is to create a book that gathers together the most amazing true stories from the past and serves them up in a fun, engaging way that makes people actually want to learn about history.

I’m on the autism spectrum. When I get interested in something, I really dig into it. I’m incapable of browsing casually; instead, I develop an almost physical compulsion to know everything there is to know on a subject. As a result, I spend hours every day looking stuff up, going on tangents, and uncovering every last stub-born detail.

I studied history at Stanford University, but that’s putting it mildly—I gobbled up history courses like Pac-Man eats ghosts. By the time I graduated, I had lived in three foreign countries (England, Italy, and Germany) to better immerse myself in world history, and had studied under the tutelage of some of Stanford’s most esteemed history scholars.

For a long time, I aspired to be a teacher. I dreamed of standing at the front of a classroom, regaling students with awesome historical anecdotes. I wanted to show my students that history doesn’t have to be dry and boring. It can be as exciting as any Marvel superhero movie, but starring real-life heroes and villains. I was sure I could inspire my students to feel the same passion for history that I do.

Ultimately, though, I decided that I could reach far more people as a writer. As a teacher, I could reach maybe thirty students at a time. But as a writer, I can potentially impact tens of thousands.

Here’s my promise to you: this book won’t glamorize drug use, nor vilify it. I simply want to report the facts, fill in the blanks, and set the historical record straight—and hopefully have a little fun along the way. For better or worse, drug use has been around since the beginning of recorded time. Yet these stories have rarely, if ever, been told. Until now. Until this book.

I’ve included an appendix in which I list some of my sources. Not all of them, of course, because then the appendix would be longer than the book itself. I have spent thousands upon thousands of hours researching drug use by historical figures. I have read dozens of books and tens of thousands of individual articles. I’m not exaggerating when I say there are more than a thousand bookmarks on my computer—or at least there were before the darn thing crashed.

I can’t help it, I love this stuff. The bottom line is this: I have gone down every rabbit hole, pulled every thread, followed every lead, and gone off on every tangent—all so you don’t have to.

I have swept away the chaff, picked out the stems and seeds, and boiled it down to its purest form. You only get the good stuff.

Enjoy the journey. I hope it’s a good trip.

PART 1

ANCIENT POTIONS

CHAPTER 1

The Oracle of Delphi Was Huffing Fumes

________________

You’ve heard of the Oracle of Delphi, right? The all-knowing seer of the future who channeled the wisdom of the gods and advised Greek kings on their most momentous decisions? Yeah, she was on drugs.

When the ancient Greeks had important decisions to make, they wanted advice from the gods, so they’d travel all the way to the Oracle of Delphi. It was quite a schlep. The oracle was located a hundred miles away from Athens, on a high mountain surrounded by treacherous cliffs. Getting there required either a long trek over mountaintops or a perilous sea voyage. Either way, the trip would take days, or even weeks.

So why’d they go to all that muss and fuss? After all, the ancient Greeks had developed all sorts of highly scientific methods to determine what the gods were thinking, such as drawing lots, rolling dice, studying the cracks in chicken bones, and—this is my personal favorite—massaging the entrails of a dead animal, especially the liver, which was considered to be the ripest organ for purposes of prophetic prognostication.

Yet they chose to visit the oracle for one simple and compelling reason: the oracle was never wrong. Palpating a sheep’s liver was fine for the mundane decisions of everyday life, such as which crops to plant that year, but when it came to making crucial decisions that would potentially determine whether an empire would rise or fall, you couldn’t half-ass it. You had to seek out the oracle.

You see, the Oracle of Delphi was no ordinary priest. The oracle was the handpicked messenger of Apollo, a human conduit to the all-seeing gods. Apollo’s words flowed through the oracle, transforming her into a perfect vessel of wisdom, insight, and knowledge of future events.

That’s right, “her.” The oracle was a woman—which is shocking when you consider that ancient Greece was an immensely patriarchal society in which girls were not allowed to go to school and were typically married off by the time they reached age fourteen. Yet when the alpha males who ruled over ancient Greece needed advice on their most vital matters of state, they sought the counsel of a woman—and not always the same woman. The Oracle of Delphi was an institution that lasted over a thousand years, from 1400 BCE to 400 BCE, so, obviously, no one woman was around the entire time. There was a high priestess known as the Pythia, and over the years, when one Pythia expired, the gods would “divinely” select another woman to become the new Pythia.

But here’s the twist: all these women were on drugs. It wasn’t an individual choice; it was a geographical imperative. You need to understand a bit about the topography of Delphi. People seeking the oracle’s wisdom would line up at dawn and ascend a steep, winding path known as “the Sacred Way.” From there, robed attendants would guide them, one at a time, into a sunken chamber hidden deep in the bowels of a remote cave, where the Pythia would be waiting for them. According to ancient scholars who actually witnessed the Pythia deliver a prophecy, there was a three-legged stool located directly above a fissure in the floor of the cave, and weird vapors rose from the fissure. The Pythia would sit down on the three-legged stool, inhale the mysterious fumes rising from the ground, and enter into a dreamlike trance. Her body would begin to quiver and writhe (thereby “confirming” she’d entered into a state of divine possession), her voice would change, she’d make a bunch of crazy noises, and then, finally, she’d deliver a cryptic prophecy that was often only a few words long.

If that description sounds to you like someone who’s experiencing an intense drug trip, you are absolutely correct. Because it turns out those mysterious fumes she was inhaling were more than eerie set dressing; they were psychoactive vapors. Historians have long suspected the oracle was high as a kite, and now modern science has proven it. A team of scientists comprising a geologist, an archaeologist, and a chemist traveled to Delphi between 1995 and 2000 to study rock samples near the site. They discovered the oracle’s chamber was built over a geological fault that released a naturally occurring substance called ethylene. It’s a sweet-smelling petrochemical gas that produces disembodied euphoria, an altered mental state, and other intoxicating effects—or, as they described it, the feeling you get from huffing glue. Basically, the Oracle of Delphi was tripping balls.

But wait, it gets better: these psychoactive vapors weren’t the only thing she was tripping on. Remember, her temple was located on a remote mountainside. This meant she was forced to subsist on a narrow range of foods that could be locally sourced. Plus, she was a religious ascetic who didn’t necessarily feel it was appropriate to luxuriate in her food, so she was willing to eat things that were unappetizing or sometimes even dangerous. One of the staples of her diet was oleander leaves, which grew near the temple—and they are highly toxic. You heard me right: the oracle was munching on poison.

Fortunately, the human body is an amazing machine that can build up a tolerance to toxic substances by ingesting small amounts on a regular basis. Remember that line from The Princess Bride: “I spent the last few years developing an immunity to iocane powder”? It’s the same basic principle behind vaccinations—injecting a small amount of a virus into your body to train your immune system to recognize and combat it. Johns Hopkins University Press published an article in 2014 suggesting the Oracle of Delphi deliberately ingested oleander poison as a way to help inspire the divine frenzy that she exhibited when she bestowed her bizarre prophecies.

So, there wasn’t just one geological feature of Delphi that inspired the oracle’s drugged-out behavior, there were two: (1) psychoactive vapors that caused vivid hallucinations, and (2) a poisonous plant that provoked frenzied body tremors. The combination of these two substances caused the oracle to behave in ways so utterly bizarre and otherworldly that, to the ancient Greeks, divine inspiration was the only logical explanation.

But wait—if the oracle wasn’t actually communicating with the gods, how is it possible that she was always right? After all, the accuracy of the oracle’s prophecies is an indisputable part of Greek history, so doesn’t that suggest she had some sort of supernatural ability?

No, not really. Much like Liam Neeson in Taken, the oracle had a very particular set of skills, but it wasn’t supernatural. She was always right for the simple reason that she never gave a clear answer to the questions posed to her. She was notorious for delivering cryptic prophecies that were difficult to decipher and susceptible to multiple (often conflicting) interpretations.

One of the most famous examples is the advice she gave to King Croesus in 550 BCE. The king asked the oracle to tell him whether he should wage war against the Persian Empire. The oracle replied, “If Croesus goes to war, a great empire shall fall.” Croesus was pumped! He was convinced this meant his victory was guaranteed. He assembled his troops, formed the necessary alliances, and attacked the Persians with everything he had—only to be utterly defeated. The Persian emperor, Cyrus the Great, took King Croesus prisoner and ordered him to be burned alive. The story goes that Croesus cried out to the gods, pleading to know why the Oracle of Delphi had betrayed him, and the gods answered, telling him the oracle had spoken the truth. You did destroy a great empire—but it was your own empire, not theirs. Twist!

Amazingly, all the textbooks lay the blame on Croesus, not the oracle. Everywhere you look, the lesson of the story is that Croesus was a victim of his own ego for daring to believe he had properly interpreted the oracle’s prophecy. You couldn’t blame the gods for his hubris, nor could you blame their vapor-huffing priestess. It is historical canon that the oracle’s prophecies were invariably accurate, so if something happened to go wrong (which it often did), it meant the person receiving the prophecy was not wise enough to decipher its true meaning. This was the ultimate secret of the oracle’s success: it’s impossible to be wrong if you never give a straight answer.

The real question is, did the oracle know she was lying to people? Maybe not. Between the hallucinogenic cave gases and the oleander poison, she was pretty much in a perpetual state of altered consciousness. Besides, she was a priestess, not a scientist, so maybe she genuinely believed that her interminable intoxication was due to a psychic link to the gods, not to taking drugs.

That’s the charitable view. The more cynical view is she knew full well she couldn’t see the future, and she was deliberately lying to people. Worse, she was gaslighting them—making them believe that if her prophecies worked out badly for them (as one of them did for King Croesus) it was their own fault, not hers.

Here’s how I like to think about it: the Oracle of Delphi was straight-up trolling people, thousands of years before the internet was invented for the very same purpose.

CHAPTER 2

Pharaoh Ramesses II Wanted Ganja

________________

You’re going to love what they found inside the mummy of Pharaoh Ramesses II, commonly known as Ramses the Great. As his nickname suggests, he was one of the greatest pharaohs of all time. He erected more statues and monuments than any other pharaoh, fathered more children than any other pharaoh (more than one hundred!), and nine subsequent pharaohs each chose to take his name when they ascended the throne, so it’s safe to say he was a popular dude.

But for thousands of years, his mummy was missing. He was originally buried in the prestigious Valley of the Kings, where only the greatest pharaohs were interred—but when archaeologists excavated his tomb, it was empty. It seems his loyal priests were afraid thieves would raid the tomb, so they repeatedly moved the mummy from one place to another like it was a highborn hot potato. Scholars weren’t able to track down his final resting place until 1881, when they discovered the pharaoh’s body had been tucked away in a large burial site known as the Royal Cache, which housed the mummies of more than fifty kings, queens, and assorted family members—sort of a WeWork space for dead Egyptian royalty.

But the big reveal came more than a hundred years later, in 1985, when a French ethnobotanist named Arlette Leroi-Gourhan performed a full scientific examination of the mummy to see what she could learn about the pharaoh’s lifestyle from the plant compounds buried deep within his royal body tissue. And can you guess what she found?

Cannabis!

That’s right, seven grains of cannabis pollen were hiding inside the pharaoh’s abdominal cavity. While seven grains might not seem like an impressive number, bear in mind these were the few grains of pollen to survive the passage of thousands of years. Just imagine how many grains of pollen there must have been when Ramses died way back in 1213 BCE. Cannabis pollen must have been sprinkled over his mummy like powdered sugar on a doughnut.

Some people theorize that a large stash of cannabis was probably stored in containers near the tomb, although it’s impossible to know for sure because, over the centuries, that portion of the Valley of the Kings has flooded no fewer than seven times. But we know it was customary to bury a pharaoh with all the goodies and trinkets he wanted to bring with him into the afterlife—everything from food and drink to jewelry and pets—and judging from the evidence in Ramses’s belly, his most precious cargo might have been cannabis.

To understand why Ramses loved cannabis so much, you need to know something about the meaning of the word “pharaoh.” While it is often translated as “king” or “ruler,” that’s a colossal understatement. “God in human form” is more accurate. The pharaoh was the ancient world’s equivalent of a superhero, and he was expected to function as both the king and the most fearless warrior— sort of like King T’Challa in Black Panther. Ramses would never have earned the respect of his people if he had supervised military campaigns from the safety of the palace. No way; his subjects wanted him to be front and center on the battlefield, personally leading the charge against the enemy troops, with thousands of bloodthirsty soldiers lined up behind him.

But guess what happens to pharaohs who go into battle. They get injured—and unlike their troops, they can’t afford to let people know they’ve been injured because bleeding on the royal carpet tends to detract from the whole “god-king” image.1 This is probably why Ramses wanted access to plenty of cannabis, because even back then, cannabis was recognized as having important medicinal uses. Scholars have discovered an ancient papyrus medical textbook from 1550 BCE that prescribes the use of hemp (a.k.a. cannabis) to alleviate pain and inflammation. What better way to maintain your reputation as a god among men than to return from a weeks-long battle looking as hale and hearty as the day you left?

It must have proven effective at treating his injuries, because Ramses the Great was one of the longest-reigning pharaohs in history, ruling for sixty-seven years and living to be at least ninety years old. So, it shouldn’t be too surprising that when it was finally time for him to check out, he decided to pack some of his highest-quality medical marijuana in a ceramic jar to bring along with him.

Of course, cannabis wasn’t the only tool that Ramses used to establish his reputation as a badass god in human form. He also relied on an extensive public relations campaign. His PR blitz began with the Battle of Kadesh in 1275 BCE, when he attacked the Hittite army in what is today a part of Syria. Ramses led a small force of twenty thousand men against a much larger force of fifty thousand men—and he didn’t just win, he trounced them. He returned to Egypt a conquering hero.

Except it was fake news. In reality, the battle ended in a draw and he never captured the city. The war raged on for fifteen long years, until both sides finally got sick of fighting and signed a peace treaty—actually, it was the first peace treaty in recorded history. But the people of Egypt didn’t know any of that; they only knew what they were told, so he ordered poems to be written praising his victory and murals to be created depicting him as a military genius. But it was all propaganda. Ramses the Great understood at a young age that truth doesn’t matter. History isn’t written by the victors; it’s written by the publicists.

That’s why he constructed so many oversize monuments. If you are truly a god among men, there should be humongous monuments honoring your greatness; otherwise, there’s no guarantee that subsequent generations will continue to remember your amazing achievements. Ramses constructed a series of staggeringly gargantuan monoliths up and down the Nile, from one end of Egypt to the other, each more physically imposing than anything that had come before. The Great Temple of Abu Simbel features four statues of Ramses himself, each sixty-five feet tall, towering over smaller images of his conquered enemies. They depict him as being, quite literally, larger than life. There is virtually no significant monument or site in all of Egypt that does not bear witness to the greatness of Ramses II.

The monuments are so ridiculously large that a bunch of people actually believe that aliens from outer space must have helped the Egyptians build them, because no ordinary humans could have accomplished something so miraculous. Ramses would have been thrilled by such conspiracy theories. He got exactly what he wanted: he got to control the narrative . . . well, almost.

For three thousand years, his plan worked perfectly—until that darn poet Percy Bysshe Shelley came along and ruined everything. You see, the pharaoh was known to his fellow Egyptians as Ramses II or Ramses the Great, but he was known to the ancient Greeks by a different name: Ozymandias. When a large chunk of an ancient Ramses statue was unearthed in 1817 and shipped to the British Museum, the famous poet Shelley felt inspired to write a sonnet that forever changed how the world thinks of the once-great pharaoh:

“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings; Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.

The name Ozymandias quickly developed a new meaning. It became synonymous with hubris, the selfish pride of a man who seeks to be remembered after he is gone but lacks the street smarts to understand that nothing can withstand the passage of time. Unfortunately for Ramses, this new, more cynical spin on his legacy took a firm hold in popular culture. For example, one of the most famous episodes of the television series Breaking Bad is titled “Ozymandias,” and the official trailer for the final season features Bryan Cranston reciting this poem about the crumbling legacy of a once-great king.

Shelley’s poem totally knocked the wind out of Ramses’s legacy. Instead of evoking connotations of greatness, his name became synonymous with faded glory and narcissistic pride. The pharaoh became little more than a punch line—proof that overweening ambition achieves nothing.

But there’s a twist: they say “life finds a way”—and sometimes so does ego. Thanks to the hard work of a plucky French ethnobotanist, the long-dead pharaoh has a brand-new fan base. Cannabis is the new legacy of Ramses the Great.

You see, when Arlette Leroi-Gourhan discovered those seven grains of cannabis pollen in the mummy’s abdominal cavity, the mainstream media didn’t talk about it very much. But it was super–big news in marijuana-related media. Websites that either sell cannabis and/or celebrate stoner lifestyles suddenly became extremely interested in reporting the latest news about ancient Egypt.

Basically, Ramses II is like any other celebrity who seeks to remain relevant over a long period of years: he’s been forced to reinvent himself for a new audience. Nowadays, instead of being known as Ramses the Great because of the huge monuments he erected, he’s probably more accurately referred to as Ramses the Baked—the pharaoh who loved weed so much that he tried to take it with him when he died.

At least he can rest in peace, knowing the modern world now fully appreciates that this pharaoh wasn’t only mighty—he was high and mighty.

________

1. To quote Star Trek (and the animated classic The Road to El Dorado): “Gods don’t bleed.”

CHAPTER 3

Alexander the Great Was a Sloppy Drunk

________________

Alexander the Great wasn’t your ordinary teenager. When his dad went out of town on business, he didn’t borrow the old man’s car to go for a joyride. Instead, he borrowed his dad’s soldiers to crush a rebel uprising. When his father was assassinated, he didn’t pull a Hamlet and mope around the palace, paralyzed by indecisiveness. He took his army on a road trip and conquered Persia.

Alexander was great at many things. He was a gifted student who loved to learn (Aristotle was his tutor), a skilled orator who could galvanize an audience, and a charismatic leader who inspired loyalty and fearlessness in his men. Textbooks uniformly agree that he was one of history’s most brilliant strategists and never lost a battle, even against armies larger than his own.

But there was at least one thing at which Alexander was not “great”—he couldn’t hold his liquor.

Alexander’s defining characteristic was that he was never satisfied—he always wanted more. From a military standpoint, it worked well for him. It explains why he didn’t stop after conquering Persia in his twenties; he kept going. By the time he was thirty, he had conquered most of the known world, creating an empire that spanned three continents and encompassed two million square miles. One of the reasons he was able to grow his empire so quickly is that he didn’t try to force Greek culture down the throats of the people he conquered. Instead, he let them hold on to their different beliefs and lifestyles, knowing that otherwise they would chafe under his rule and look for a chance to break free, and he’d end up fighting on too many fronts at the same time. He even adopted elements of these foreign cultures into his own life. By allowing conquered peoples to retain their local traditions, he encountered far less resistance, burnished his reputation as a wise ruler, and—most important from Alexander’s point of view—freed up his army to race toward global domination at a pace never before witnessed in the history of mankind.

From a personal standpoint, however, always wanting more worked out very badly for him. His unquenchable thirst for everything life had to offer wasn’t merely figurative; it was literal. He consumed an absurd amount of alcohol. He was the most notorious party animal in all of ancient Greece—and that’s saying something, because folks in the fourth century BCE really knew how to party.

His drink of choice was wine, and wine in ancient Greece was much more potent than the wine we drink today. Refrigerators hadn’t been invented yet, and while very rich people sometimes had their servants retrieve snow and ice from nearby mountaintops to chill their beverages, Alexander was usually on the road conquering stuff, so his wine was stored at room temperature. But it was stored with ridiculously high alcohol concentrations, sometimes as much as 40 percent—because the alcohol functioned as a preservative, allowing the wine to last longer.

Of course, you weren’t supposed to drink it like that. You were supposed to add water so it wouldn’t be so highly concentrated. The typical ratio was three parts water to one part wine.

But not Alexander. He insisted on drinking his wine “unwatered,” as was the style in Macedonia, where he was born and raised. Plus, he didn’t drink his wine out of a glass; he drank it out of a bowl. He would routinely drink unwatered wine, bowl after bowl, until he was utterly and devastatingly drunk. Who can say why? Maybe he considered wine to be a performance-enhancing drug because it obliterated any fear of dying in battle, or perhaps it was an aphrodisiac to fuel his notoriously vigorous sexual appetite for men, women, or both at the same time. Whatever the reason, Alexander would routinely drink bowlfuls of wine until he got black-out drunk.

You know how sometimes you’re partying, and you think you’re having a good time, but then you wake up in the morning and find out you did something really, really bad? That sort of thing happened to Alexander the Great on a regular basis. He might have been a genius on the battlefield, but, man, he did some stupid shit when he was drunk—like the time he impaled his good friend Cleitus the Black in 328 BCE.

Cleitus was one of his best officers and most trusted friends, having saved Alexander’s life in battle a few years earlier (a fact Cleitus tended to bring up a little too often). One night, Alexander and Cleitus were sitting around, drinking heavily, and they got into a drunken argument, as friends sometimes do, and started yelling at each other. The rest of the group decided it was time to break it up before things turned ugly, so they pulled the two men apart and rushed them off in different directions. But at the last second, Alexander broke free, grabbed a spear, and impaled poor Cleitus, killing him instantly. When he finally sobered up and saw what he had done to his friend, he cried for three days straight.

You’d think that maybe, just maybe, Alexander would have learned his lesson and started to cut back on the booze, but of course that didn’t happen. Also, as if that weren’t bad enough, alcohol wasn’t the only drug he was abusing.

He was also a big fan of opium.

Remember how I said that Alexander liked to adopt elements from foreign cultures into his life? Well, opium was one of those. It was originally introduced into Greece via Egypt during the Bronze Age, and by the time Alexander became a dedicated opium enthusiast, it had been known to Greeks for almost a millennium. Opium did something for him that alcohol did not—it was a potent pain-killer and sedative. Even though Alexander never lost a battle, he did get injured from time to time. When he was introduced to opium, he felt the gods had smiled on him by revealing a magical substance that was capable of making his pain disappear. Not only did he enthusiastically embrace opium for himself, he also strongly encouraged his troops to benefit from the drug’s miraculous pain-relieving properties.

He quickly became the Johnny Appleseed of opium. He and his soldiers brought it with them on their road trips, spreading opium to Persia, India, and other parts of the world. Each time he conquered a new land, Alexander would introduce the local populace to opium, as if saying, “Hello there, this is opium, isn’t Greek culture great?” Despite his keen intelligence, Alexander did not see any danger signs from his steadily increasing opium use—after all, he was still winning, still conquering, and it seemed obvious that no man on earth could possibly defeat him.

But wine and opium finally caught up with him in 323 BCE. He had conquered his way across the Middle East and much of the Indian subcontinent, and he probably would have kept conquering, but his homesick troops said “enough” and refused to go any farther. They demanded a break from all the nonstop winning so they could return home to see their families. Alexander reluctantly agreed and declared they would set up camp at Nebuchadnezzar’s old palace in Babylon, where they would hold a grand memorial feast to honor the death of his close friend and lover Hephaestion. At the feast, he guzzled entire bowlfuls of unwatered wine. His troops cheered his massive alcohol consumption because in their minds, he was an unstoppable hero like the legendary Achilles.

But no matter how powerful, intelligent, or charismatic he was, Alexander was still a mortal man with a mortal man’s liver. The party lasted all day and all night, and he continued to drink, bowl after bowl. Complaining he wasn’t feeling well, he announced he was going to bed to recuperate a bit, but his condition steadily deteriorated. He was in tremendous pain, his fever wouldn’t break, and he was experiencing convulsions and delirium. In the days that followed, his body grew weaker and weaker. After twelve long days of excruciating agony, he was so weak that he could barely move.

When his loyal soldiers demanded to see him and entered his tent, he was incapable of speaking. They filed slowly past his bed, and he could barely acknowledge them with a slight wave of his hand. Then he lapsed into a coma and died.

Rumors have swirled for thousands of years as to the cause of Alexander’s death. Some have speculated he was poisoned by an enemy, but most historians have dismissed the idea of deliberate poisoning because he was savagely ill for twelve days, and assassins back then didn’t have access to any slow-acting poisons. Others have theorized it was a disease, such as malaria or typhoid. At least one scholar has suggested that maybe he wasn’t dead at all: a doctor from New Zealand has posited this might be an early example of pseudothanatos—a false diagnosis of death. Alexander might have been paralyzed, but still fully conscious, for six whole days after his doctors mistakenly announced that he was dead.

But the most likely explanation has always been that alcohol and opium pushed him over the edge. Sure, it’s possible that he contracted a disease like malaria, but it’s hard to believe the sudden downturn in his condition, coinciding with several days of massive drug consumption, was mere happenstance. Disease might have been a contributing factor, but the primary cause of his death was drug overdose and the complications thereof. With the benefits of modern medicine, we know people can do ruinous damage to their internal organs without appearing to be ill on the outside—but the ancient Greeks didn’t know that. They assumed from his military victories that Alexander had been blessed by the gods, and thus could only have good fortune.

In classic Greek tragic fashion, it was Alexander’s insatiable thirst for more that proved to be his undoing. It was said that no man on earth could defeat him—but it turns out there was one man who could, and it was Alexander himself. Although he never lost on the battlefield, his addiction to alcohol and opium finished him off at age thirty-two.

CHAPTER 4

Qin Shi Huangdi’s Recipe for Immortality Backfired

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Chinese emperor Qin Shi Huangdi wanted to live forever. That sounds impossible, of course—but the fact is, he’d already accomplished one thing that should have been impossible. In 221 BCE, he conquered a part of the world that had been divided into rival warring factions for thousands of years and became the first emperor of a unified China.

How did he do it? By spilling unbelievably massive amounts of blood. He was an unapologetically ruthless guy. When unifying China, he didn’t bother to use logic and reason to explain the benefits of having a single written language and a standardized system of currency, weights, and measures to facilitate trade. Instead, he chose violence. He annihilated his rivals and murdered anyone else who dared to get in his way. Similarly, a year later, when he decided to build a thick protective barrier around the Chinese empire to make it impossible for foreign invaders to attack, he didn’t ask for volunteers. He forcibly conscripted an army of laborers to build the Great Wall, and when workers died—as four hundred thousand of them did—no one was allowed to stop working. Their bodies were dumped inside the wall and became part of the foundation.

He applied the same utter ruthlessness to his quest for immortality. He issued a decree to every town and village in China to locate the fabled “elixir of life.” He commanded the local chieftains to drop everything they were doing and devote themselves entirely to the task. Whoever found the elixir would be rewarded handsomely, but anyone perceived as not trying hard enough would be sentenced to death. It was the classic “carrot and stick” approach— except in this case the “stick” was a razor-sharp blade to the neck.

Qin Shi Huangdi was obsessed with immortality for a very understandable reason. Everyone wants a job with upward mobility, right? But he was already an emperor, so there wasn’t much room for advancement; he’d reached the top of his particular profession. But if he could discover the secret of eternal life, then he could break that glass ceiling. He’d become more than an emperor—he’d become a living god.

But living forever wasn’t going to be easy, because people kept trying to kill him. Apparently, being a mercilessly murderous monarch doesn’t breed warm and fuzzy feelings among the common folk. Assassins were always after him, so he took elaborate precautions to make sure no one knew where he was: covering windows with thick curtains so no one could see inside the rooms; building elevated walkways so he could exit one building and enter another without being exposed; digging underground tunnels and walling off roads so he could travel invisibly from town to town. He insisted on absolute secrecy about his movements, and anyone who dared to speak of the emperor’s location was immediately put to death.

Unfortunately, achieving immortality requires more than dodging assassins. He needed to locate the elixir of life, or if no such thing existed, he needed someone to invent one. He tasked his advisers with finding the elusive recipe. The mission was of such paramount importance that he was willing to listen to anyone—alchemists, magicians, even charlatans. Finally, his advisers told him they had found the answer . . . liquid mercury!

The Chinese had long believed that mercury possessed super-natural properties. It seemed to defy the laws of nature because it was a metal—like iron or steel—but it wasn’t a solid; it was a liquid that flowed like water. Whoa! Plus, it was shiny, silvery, and really cool looking. Ancient science always dictated that if something looked cool, it must definitely be magic.

The alchemists convinced the emperor that these mysterious, inexplicable qualities were proof that mercury possessed a special power that, if harnessed properly, would serve as the key ingredient in his elixir of life. Bottom line: if he drank precisely the right amount of liquid mercury, he would live forever.

Importantly, though, the alchemists didn’t want him to drink mercury all by itself—because it would taste like crap. No one likes an immortality potion with a lousy aftertaste, so the alchemists took the liberty of adding a few other ingredients to improve the flavor. By “ingredients,” I mean drugs. They added wine (because alcohol makes everything taste better), and natural herbs and medicines, such as ephedra leaves to create a rush of energy, stimulate his heart rate, and reduce some of the nastiest effects of drinking poisonous metals. Thanks to the various drugs and herbs, whenever the emperor sipped this yummy concoction, he immediately felt exhilarated and revitalized. His advisers would smile and say, “That’s how you know it’s working.”

Of course, anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of chemistry knows that mercury is highly toxic. It might look super rad, but it’s extremely dangerous to drink, and even more dangerous to inhale. Liquid mercury vaporizes at room temperature, and those vapors are absorbed by the human body, starting in the lungs and spreading into the blood, organs, and brain. So, if you drink or inhale enough mercury, it will kill you.

You can probably guess the next bit: Qin Shi Huangdi died of mercury poisoning. But you’ve got to appreciate the irony, right? Here was a guy who was constantly being targeted for death by skilled assassins—yet, in the end, he wasn’t killed by his enemies. He was killed (inadvertently) by those who worshipped him and wanted him to live forever.

And talk about the indignity of it all. He died while conducting a tour of his kingdom by carriage, and to hide the fact of his death for as long as possible, his lackeys placed cartloads of dead fish in front of and behind the royal carriage. They were afraid people would smell his decaying corpse and realize he was dead, so to cover up the smell, they concealed his body in a load of rotting fish—and that’s how they delivered him to his tomb.

That’s right, he had a tomb. It was his backup plan. He fully intended to live forever, but just in case things didn’t pan out, he made sure he’d be laid to rest in a tomb of unprecedented opulence. He enlisted seven hundred thousand laborers to construct a scale model of China for the inside of the tomb, complete with replicas of famous palaces, monuments, and landscapes. Then he hired the finest artisans in all of China to construct eight thousand life-size terracotta soldiers, which would be stationed around the perimeter of the tomb to stand guard for him in the afterlife. The story goes that the emperor was so impressed by these magnificent clay soldiers that as soon as they were completed, he ordered the artists to be killed. He wanted them to be buried (while still alive) next to the soldiers they’d created. Why? To ensure they’d never create anything so spectacular for anyone else.

No one has ever seen the inside of Qin Shi Huangdi’s tomb. Not because they can’t find it—we know exactly where it is, that’s not the issue. The problem is opening the tomb might kill tens of thousands of people. That’s because the most amazing features of the tomb were reported to be replicas of the Yangtze River and Yellow River—but instead of flowing with water, the replicas are flowing with liquid mercury. It would be an amazing sight to behold, but, unfortunately, the tomb needs to remain sealed because the mercury levels in the surrounding soil are astronomically high. Unless and until someone figures out a way to vent those deadly mercury fumes, excavating the tomb would release enough toxic vapors to wipe out entire cities.

But there’s one saving grace: while the death of China’s first emperor by mercury poisoning was tragic, it served to put everyone on notice about the dangers of ingesting mercury. Subsequent emperors could learn from his example and avoid sharing the same fate. After Qin Shi Huangdi, no one in China would ever be foolish enough to think that drinking mercury could be the secret to eternal life—right?

Wrong. During the Tang dynasty alone, at least six more emperors died in exactly the same way. If you throw in nobles and other high-ranking government officials, the numbers escalate to the dozens. For more than a thousand years after Qin died, Chinese rulers and aristocrats continued to mess around with elixirs containing mercury, lead, arsenic, and a variety of other poisons, all in hopes of prolonging their lives.

But isn’t repeating the same behavior over and over again and expecting a different result the very definition of insanity? Yes, it is—but bear in mind that royal alchemists had to justify their salaries somehow. They couldn’t admit their whole profession was a sham. Instead, they convinced their bosses that mercury was, in fact, the secret to immortality, but crafting precisely the right elixir of life was an incredibly complicated task requiring the utmost knowledge, skill, and experimentation—and even then, it might not always work. In modern times, we don’t blame the doctor if a patient who is suffering from stage-four cancer dies despite receiving the best treatments available—and achieving immortality is even harder than curing cancer.

Even though the alchemists failed time and again, Chinese rulers never lost hope. The pull of immortality was simply too strong. They knew from the example set by Qin Shi Huangdi—the man who, against all odds, unified the rival warring factions of China into a single empire—that a person could accomplish the impossible. It was simply a matter of being utterly ruthless in pursuit of your dream and refusing to take no for an answer.

CHAPTER 5

St. John the Revelator Was Tripping on Shrooms

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Try this conversation starter at your next cocktail party: “I heard the book of Revelation was written by someone on a bad drug trip. But he didn’t take the drugs on purpose; it was more of a culinary misadventure.”

Here’s how it happened: The ancient Romans worshipped dozens of different gods, including household names like Jupiter, Apollo, and Mercury. They believed these gods were easily offended, and if the gods felt like they were being disrespected, they’d get pissed off and start causing trouble, so the government demanded that all Roman citizens honor and make sacrifices to these gods. This posed an obvious problem for the Jewish citizens of Rome, because the Jewish religion is monotheistic: Jews believe in one unitary, allpowerful God. The Jewish populace didn’t like being told by a bunch of idol-worshipping pagans that they needed to pretend to accept Roman polytheism.