Having a high old time
Walking around, perusing High Society: Mind Altering Drugs in History and Culture, a comprehensive and beautifully curated exhibition of ‘getting out of it’ through the ages, one thing is obvious — this is the second favourite pastime of human beings, after sex. Our desire to alter our consciousness transcends time, class and culture — historically, the only group of people known to anthropology who did not use psychoactive substances, according to Stuart Walton, in his book, Out Of It: A Cultural History of Intoxication, is the Inuit — “for the only good reason that they were the only culture unable to grow anything”.
The rest of the world has been at it since we fell out of our collective tree. Drugs have played a profound part in our history, perhaps even our evolution. Nietzsche called the history of drugs “almost the history of ‘culture’” while ethnobotanist, Terence McKenna, in his radical, 1992 book, Food of the Gods, says it was the ingestion of psychoactive substances that got apes onto the ground in the first place, transitioning onto their hind legs, towards early hominid life, by eating plants that got them out of their heads and raised their consciousness.
