Humans Have Been Using Drugs for at Least 25,000 Years

Welcome to The Psychedelic Blog. An independent media platform covering drugs, altered states & the culture surrounding them.

This week: Ancient teeth, psychoactive betel nuts & the 25,000-year fantasy of a drug-free society.

Archaeologists studying the teeth of ancient hunter-gatherers in Indonesia found evidence that they habitually sucked psychoactive betel nuts. The discovery predates agriculture & is now considered the earliest direct evidence of habitual human drug use.

I’ve said this many times: humans love drugs. We did them before cities, organized religion or modern civilization existed. That doesn’t mean every drug is safe or beneficial...betel nut certainly isn’t. But a drug-free society has never existed & never will.

The question isn’t whether people will alter their consciousness...it’s whether we give them safer ways to do it.

We Didn’t Invent the Urge to Get High

People love to talk about drug use as if it began when modern life got too stressful. You hear the same take everywhere: people get high because they’re disconnected from nature, from themselves, blah blah blah. Umm, these hunter-gatherers were chewing psychoactive nuts thousands of years before anyone had a desk job, a smartphone or a city to escape.

We don’t know exactly what they wanted from the nuts. The researchers think they may have used them to ease tooth pain…they may also have liked how they felt. Those possibilities can coexist. But my money is on the latter.

Relief, pleasure & habit are hard to separate now, and they were hard to separate then.

The Fantasy of Abstinence

We have no trouble admitting that sex, violence & the pursuit of status are fundamental parts of the human condition. With drugs, even smart people act as though the desire to alter consciousness is a recent mistake we can talk or legislate everyone out of making. Complete & utter nonsense.

I see this in spiritual circles, where abstaining from substances is treated as proof of a higher state of consciousness. If that’s your practice, cool. But it’s a personal discipline, not evidence that the human urge to change how we feel is some modern corruption.

People were reaching for a psychoactive plant before Buddhism existed.

Policy for the Humans We Have

The betel nut story isn’t a charming tale about harmless ancient wisdom. The researchers found severe damage to these people’s teeth…something that may have relieved pain appears to have caused more of it with repeated use. That part of the story matters, too.

We can take drug risks seriously without pretending the desire for drugs will disappear. After at least 25,000 years, the burden of proof should be on anyone who thinks we can build a drug-free society.

I’d rather ask what makes use safer, what makes it more dangerous & why we keep choosing policies built around a fantasy of abstinence.

Accepting that reality is a more honest starting point for drug policy than pretending people can be persuaded to stop wanting altered states. We’ve had at least 25,000 years to learn that the urge exists. We should be asking how to make its consequences less destructive.