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By Root 1085 0

1906 that Mormon temples started using water instead of wine in their sacraments. When the Mormons made their big trek to Utah in 1847, they provisioned themselves with coffee, tea, and alcohol, and if you check their medical recipes of the time, they include both brandy and laudanum. But after the Mormons got to Utah they began rejecting caffeine more strictly. When the Native Americans introduced them to a piney-tasting tonic made from a desert plant, they liked it so much that it soon became known as Mormon tea. It was ephedra. According to the FDA Web site, “Its principal active ingredient is ephedrine, which when chemically synthesized is regulated as a drug. In recent years ephedra products have been extensively promoted to aid weight loss, enhance sports performance, and increase energy.” Studies have found that the drug raises blood pressure and otherwise stresses the circulatory system. These reactions have been linked to significant adverse health outcomes, including heart ailments and strokes—some fatal. In response, the sale of ephedra has recently been prohibited or limited. Mormon tea is thus now understood to be a lot stronger and more dangerous than coffee or tea, but Mormons, having never had coffee or tea, did not know this. Careful whom you scold, friends—and take both your guilt and your pride on such issues with a sip of the Great Salt Lake.

6

Cocaine and Opium

The story of cocaine can tell us a great deal about happiness drugs, and why they are sometimes considered to be a natural part of life, healthy and beneficial, and sometimes rejected by all upstanding citizens. Cocaine users speak of the drug as a happiness high that allows you to get a lot of work done. Unlike marijuana, which is often cited as relaxing the user’s work ethic, cocaine is a drug of productivity. Unlike amphetamines, cocaine is associated with euphoria. Cocaine, then, is a very interesting subject through which to ask questions about what our society tolerates. Everyone wants to be happy, but what is happiness? Can true happiness be drugged happiness? You were happy today. Does the fact that you had two cups of strong coffee and a dose of over-the-counter painkiller have anything to do with our assessment of this happiness? What if it is a prescription painkiller? What if it is just a little bit of cocaine? What if it is an unexpected and unlikely-to-be-repeated windfall of money? Because our culture has such strong feelings about cocaine as a happiness source that is not worth the risk, it is illuminating to see the roles the drug has played in other societies, and in our own past.

For most of cocaine’s history, it was used only in its leaf form. What people did with the leaves of the coca plant (and still do) is this: you roll up a few leaves and tuck the roll into your cheek. This won’t work on its own. You need to use an alkaloid, generally crushed oyster shells or wood ash, to get the drug to work, but these would burn you if you just put them in your mouth. The maneuver, instead, is to take a thin twig dampened with spit, dip it in the ash, and then poke the insides of the leaf-roll so that the leaves break down from inside the packet. Users’ spit turns bright green. Sooner or later they feel a buzz, and if they keep a packet of leaves dissolving in one cheek they can walk or work for days with very little food, water, or sleep. This routine has been prevalent for some time: There are forty-five-hundred-year-old statues of people with one bulked-out cheek. People in the mountains of Peru still count time and distance by packets of coca leaves. (One packet will suffice for about a forty-five-minute walk, or about three kilometers.) In the earliest Spanish reports we read of European wonder at the leaves and the sticks (people went about with two pouches slung around their necks, one for the leaves, one for the ash), and at the green spit. When Europeans tried it over here, they felt its delights, and they sang its praises. Yet the coca didn’t catch on in Europe: the leaves traveled poorly, the plant was hard to grow