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By Root 1099 0

time looking at any drug that tends to increase sexual activity, and as such, they might become conscious of other health benefits of the drug. Science isn’t outside of culture, because even the questions we ask are culturally determined. We don’t go looking for, say, an intelligence correlation with those who have large second toes. Nobody has a vested interest in the answer, so there is no interest. If people become interested, studies are done, and the ones that serve people’s interests are found interesting. Modern prescription happiness drugs, like historical happiness drugs, are made of materials we found in the forest and then heated, strained, fermented, dried, or more profoundly doctored. Right now they seem like medicine, like authority, while illegal drugs (and alcohol) are very often understood as rebellion and freedom. There is a good girl who takes Xanax but looks down on potheads, and a bad girl who rejects Xanax because taking it would mean there is something wrong with her but happily does meth.

Tea and coffee are not today thought of as happiness drugs, but that is odd. Ornate rituals developed around tea on the opposite sides of the world, in Japan and England. In these countries and in others, especially China and India, we find paeans to the leaf as a happiness drug—to a degree that can make you wonder if everyone is getting the same tea. In the eighth century, the tea sage Lu Yu wrote, “Tea is not only a remedy against drowsiness. It is a way of aiding men to return to their sources, a moment in the rhythm of the day when prince and peasant share the same thoughts and same happiness while preparing to return to their respective fates.”1 The happiness provided by tea should not be underestimated. In 1757 Samuel Johnson called himself “a hardened and shameless tea-drinker, who has, for twenty years, diluted his meals with only the infusion of this fascinating plant; whose kettle has scarcely time to cool; who with tea amuses the evening, with tea solaces the midnight, and, with tea, welcomes the morning.”2 A little over a century later, in 1865, Prime Minister Gladstone wrote of tea: “If you are cold, tea will warm you; if you are too heated, it will cool you; if you are depressed, it will cheer you; if you are excited, it will calm you.” Tea was for amusement, solace, and cheer—within a schedule of hard work—and the overworked nineteenth-century Englishman brought love of tea to an extraordinary height. Ladies at temperance meetings on both sides of the Atlantic sipped tea to refresh themselves for another diatribe against the wastefulness of alcohol. They even fetishized their drug paraphernalia of fine tea sets and spoons, laying out their tea works in breakfronts, like a teenager with a water-pipe display. When Britain’s industrial and financial dominance began to fade, her people kept drinking tea, but the love affair has become quaint. Its image was exotic at first; later it was fuel for industrial dynamos. Now its image is gentle and traditional. The English still drink an amazing amount of tea: according to Britain’s Tea Council, the British are the world’s largest per capita consumers of tea.3 Yet the paraphernalia of tea drinking is often antique, its niceties the ways of an earlier era.

Coffee vendors have reconstructed the meaning of the drug in every age. The French café was the center of the later Enlightenment and of the democratic revolutions. People drank espresso there and got a lot done. Early twentieth-century America treated the coffee shop, with its weak American brew, as a place to rest. Remember the “coffee break”? Coffee was recharging you, but it was also relaxing you. That had to do with the nonwork setting of the coffee shop (no laptop computers, no kids) and the low caffeine levels of the drink. You wanted a small cup of weak brew because you wanted the waitress to come back and pour you another hot cup, and chat for a moment. Someone who comes to you, unbidden, with a hot drink and also offers pie is a mother, or a sister, or a sweetheart. She takes you seriously; she watched