Lecture 19. Alcoholic beverages and psychoactive substances

Summary

Alcohol, which acts as a depressant on the human body, is produced by microbial fermentation of various plant products. This process has been discovered independently by cultures around the world. Distillation – which concentrates the alcohol content – is also practiced in many places. Alcohol is just one of many psychoactive substances, which alter peoples’ sense of perception, reality and behavior. They are used in a diversity of ways: as hunger suppresants, pain killers, aphrodisiacs and to engender altered states of consciousness. Cotton (1996) divides psychoactive plants into five categories, and discussed their active principles and mode of action:

• Stimulants, substances that make people alert and invigorated, are mostly based on alkaloids known as xanthines that increase the production of various secondary messengers, which in turn cause the general stimulation of many biochemical processes
• Inebriants, substances that cause a drunken state, most notably alcohol, cause some degree of alteration in neurotransmission
• Analgesics, substances that relieve pain by binding with specific receptors in the brain related to the sensation of pain; one of the best known is morphine from Papaver somniferum
• Tranquilizers, substances that have a calming or sedative effect, including kava, valerian and St. John’s wort
• Psychomimetics, substances that compete with natural chemicals for receptors, thus altering normal neurotransmission; an example is the tropane alkaloid hyoscine from Atropa belladona which compete for acetylcholine receptors

Another classification was proposed by Lewin who coined the general term Phantastika (see Balick and Cox):

• Excitantia, stimulants that result in apparent excitement in the brain without altering consciousness, including coffee, tobacco, betel nuts, cola nuts, guaraná and khat flowers
• Inebriantia, substances produced by fermentation, distillation or chemical synthesis, especially alcohol, that provoke a primary phase of excitement followed by a state of depression
• Hypnotica, substances that induce relaxation and sleep, including kava and valerian
• Euphorica, substances that induce a state of physical or mental comfort, for example opium, morphine, cocaine an heroin
• Phantastica, drugs that cause excitation in the form of hallucinations, illusions and visions

Curiously, most hallucinogens – plants particularly reputed for their ability to induce altered states of consciousness – are from the Western Hemisphere, though a number of species are used in the Old World.

Examples:

• The Agavaceae is a medium sized family of 20 genera and about 600 species, found mainly in arid zones of the tropics and subtropics. Many are succulents, with leaves usually crowded at the base of the stem, often fleshy, narrow and sharp-pointed. The flowers are borne in racemes or panicles, and are regular or slightly irregular and usually bisexual. Agaves are primarily known as a source of alcoholic beverages and fibres (sisal), with limited use as ornamentals. Many species of Agave (A. angustifolia, A. palmeri and A. tequilana, all native to Mexico) are used to make a fermented drink (pulque) or distilled alcoholic beverages (mescal or tequila).

The Papaveraceae is a small family of 26 genera and about 250 species, primarily found in north temperate zones.

They are herbaceous annuals and perennials, and some small shrubs, all producing yellow, milky or watery latex. The leaves are alternate and without stipules, entire but often lobed or deeply dissected. Flowers are large and conspicuous, solitary or arranged in cymes; regular and bisexual, consisting of two free sepals (falling before petals open) and two whorls of two petals. The ovary is superior, usually consisting of a single locule, and the fruit is a capsule, opening by valves or pores. The family is best known as the source of opium, and has a minor use as garden ornamentals. Papaver somniferum, the opium poppy, is native to eastern Europe and western Asia. It is one of the oldest sources of pain-killing drugs from the plant kingdom. More than 26 alkaloids have been isolated from opium, including morphine, codeine and papaverine.

• Other families providing psychoactive substances:
• Dicots – Rosidae – Linales – Erythoxylaceae (Erythroxylum)
• Dicots – Hamamelidae – Urticales – Moraceae (Cannabis)

References:

Clarke, R.C. 1998. Hashish! Los Angeles, Red Eye Press.

McKenna, T. 1992. Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge. New York, Bantam Books.

Ott, J. 1998. The Delphic bee: bees and honey as pointers to psychoactive and other medicinal plants. Economic Botany 260-266.

Parsons, J.R. and M.H. Parsons. 1990. Maguey Utilization in Highland Central Mexico: An Archaeological Ethnography. Anthropological Papers 82. Ann Arbor, Museum of Anthropology, University of Michigan.

Schultes, R.E. and R.F. Raffauf. 1992. Vine of the Soul: Medicine Men, their Plants and Rituals in the Colombian Amazonia. Oracle, Synergistic Press.

Questions for discussion:

• Unlike the legitimately traded spices, most hallucinogens are either used locally or are marketed covertly on a very large scale. Why have hallucinogens not achieved a legal worldwide trade, following the example of spices?
• How do you think that people in diverse cultures originally discovered the hallucinogenic properties of plants?
• Why has the use of hallucinogens received more attention in Latin America that in other regions?

Perspective for discussion:

"I suggest that immemorial pursuit of wild honey, the only concentrated sweet which occurs naturally, could have led inexorably to the discovery of psychoactive and other toxic honeys, while subsequent observation of bees’ foraging habits could easily have led preliterate shaman/pharmacognisists to single out toxic plant species, even against a background of extreme biodiversity, as in Amazonia…

Toxic honeys are not unusual … nor are accidental inebriations by psychoactive honeys exceptional. In satisfying the universal human ‘sweet tooth’ during human explorations of any given ecosystems, foragers would encounter psychoactive and other toxic honeys. Having consumed such honeys and experienced psychoactive or other medicinal properties of their contained alkaloids and allied phytochemicals, it would require no special technology nor great imagination to follow the bees to the nectar source, thereby easily finding valuable plants. It has been suggested that ethnomedical and culinary plants were discovered by a systematic process of ingesting all species, in the eternal search for food. Some have questioned whether such an extensive bioassay program were feasible in areas of extraordinarily-high biodiversity, such as Amazonia, thought to be home to at least 80,000 species of higher plants. Apart from observation of the effects of bioactive plants plants on domestic and wild animals, serendipitous encounters with phytotoxins in honeys could have served as highly-specific and efficient pointers to medicinal, especially psychoactive, plants, which would thus stand out in deep relief, even against a backdrop of extreme phytodiversity".

From Ott, J. 1998. The Delphic bee: bees and honey as pointers to psychoactive and other medicinal plants. Pages 260, 263-264.

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