The Happiness Myth_ An Expose - Jennifer Hecht [43]
We often indict our own culture for supporting an unusual amount of mood-altering drug use, but a glance at the history of drugs shows this perception to be false, and not a little unfair to ourselves. Sobriety is rare. All cultures have had favorite ways for people to take in some chemical in order to feel better. In every life there is useless pain, fear, and shame; there is anxiety; there are days when it is hard to do what has to be done; and there is boredom. People use drugs to help, and they always have. The ancient West had fermented drinks, opium, and some drugs that appear to have been hallucinogenic fungi. The ancient East also had fermented drinks and soma, the psychedelic euphoric botanical that was at the center of ancient Hinduism. We find references to drug use in Europe throughout history, certainly pot smoking. In fact, we have discovered special pot-smoking braziers, where people would make a little fire of dried pot leaves and sit in a small room together and breathe the smoke. We have found these braziers, with cannabis in them, dating back to the origins of agriculture and continuously straight through the medieval period. In the ancient Indian text Artharvaveda, cannabis is one of the herbs that “release us from anxiety.” Yet the question of the use of happiness drugs is more complicated to report on than that, because there were a lot of ways to get high. Medieval Europe was a starvation culture. Every generation knew famine. In bad times, when there was nothing else, people ate the inedible: people were found dead of starvation, with grass in their mouths. People ate bark when there was nothing else; they ate bread made mostly of sawdust. Writers described finding corpses of people who had gnawed away their own hand or knee. Before it came to that, people would eat anything, which included poppies, hemp-seed bread, any mushroom or berry, and all manner of spoiled food.5 Historians have noted that there is no question that medieval men and women could find drugs. The question is: were they able to avoid them?
If there had been a great deal of drug use, we would expect to find some complaint about it, even if it fit into a very different social meaning; and, indeed, there is. For example, hemp—marijuana—was banned by the Church in medieval France. Rabelais, born sometime after 1450, wrote that his giant Pantagruel was named for an herb, which he called Pantagruelion, which was marijuana, right down to the leaf formations. He devoted three entire chapters to its praise. The giant smoked it constantly, and ate hashish-laden Turkish delight, traveling with a colossal supply of each. In the final book, Rabelais reveals that Pantagruelion is hemp. It is surprising to us, but perhaps it should not be. It seems we have been ignoring much evidence and attestation. William Salmon, writing in 1693, says that cannabis seeds, leaves, juice, essence, and decoctions could be bought at any druggist’s shop in Europe, and that cannabis was a widely used medicine. Drugs for happiness are discussed in texts from the Renaissance and early-modern period (usually defined as extending from the end of the Renaissance to the start of the Enlightenment). Writing of the many pharmaceutical cures for melancholy in 1621, Robert Burton explained, “Every city, town, almost every private man hath his own mixtures, compositions, recipes.”6 Also writing in the early seventeenth century, the poet John Donne recorded casual opium use in the beloved “Holy Sonnet X.” The poem insists that there is an afterlife and therefore we ought not be worried about death, but it also murmurs that we are tired and need sleep. As rest