Addictive substances were generally hard to come by in the past
Substances of abuse used to be scarce—a luxury for most of us—and dopamine was at low ebb. Prior to the eighteenth century, virtually every stimulus that generated reward was hard to come by, due to either its scarcity or its expense. You had to go out of your way to obtain the various illicit drugs. There were no stores, no internet, and there was very little porn. We’ve always had gambling and prostitution, but they weren’t on every street corner. Hedonic substances were once rare, limited to alcohol from the Triangle Trade, which allowed for the transfer of slaves from Africa, sugar and rum from the Caribbean, and money from New England. Slowly but surely, advances in technology, commodity crop farming, and globalization have made various rewarding substances readily available, and the ability to engage in rewarding behaviors not just possible but almost constant. Pleasure is now easy and cheap, if nothing else. In the twenty-first century, substances of abuse have become easier and cheaper to obtain all over the world.
When did substances of abuse first appear on the scene? Archeological digs support the contention that Central Asia’s Yamnaya people (one of the three tribes that founded European civilization) had discovered and were trading cannabis as early as ten thousand years ago. The first literary reference to recreational drug use was from 5000 B.C.E., when the Sumerians chronicled the use of opium. The first reference to alcohol in the form of wine goes back to 4000 B.C.E., and the first mention of commercial production dates to 3500 B.C.E. in the form of an Egyptian brewery. But addiction didn’t really become a societal problem until we started purifying these substances. The first reference to addiction comes from China at around C.E. 1000, when opium became widely used.
In Western society, however, addiction and addicts remained a relative rarity through most of the second millennium. We’ve had wine since the time of the Romans, but we had to rely on natural fermentation for its production. In early times wine spoiled rapidly, because early vintners couldn’t get the alcohol content up past 5 percent, just like beer, which was equally likely to spoil. Although commercial beer production dates back to European monasteries in the seventh century C.E., succumbing to alcohol addiction wasn’t an option: the alcohol content was just not high enough. Alcoholism remained a matter of availability. Once it could be easily bottled, we were awash in hard spirits. Distilled alcohol became the obvious choice of most addicts, because you could ferment and distill just about anything. Alcoholism became a major societal problem throughout Europe in the 1700s once it became available and cheap. Prohibition turned out to be the anvil on which our current American society was forged. If anything, the dopamine rush from alcohol was increased tenfold by the fact that it had to be consumed in backroom speakeasys. It’s not an accident that 1933 saw the passage of the Twenty-First Amendment, which just happened to coincide with both the nadir of the Depression, and with Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal of 1933. The government needed the tax money. But despite our affinity for alcohol, the dopamine rush still remained a luxury, out of the reach of most people, either due to religion, morality, reputation, or expense.
References
- Lustig, H., Robert. The Hacking of the American Mind Chapter 6. The Purification of Addiction (Location 1924). New York, NY: Penguin Random House.
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