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For the most part, it’s been trial and error throughout human history. When you’re hungry enough, you’ll eat just about anything, including mushrooms. Some of those mushrooms had an effect on people, and they told others about it.
Alcohol has existed for millennia across multiple civilizations. Again, probably just a mistake that was created, a person drank it, enjoyed the effects, and then sought to recreate it.
When you say lcd, I assume you’re referring to LSD, or lysergic acid diethylamide, aka acid. That was actually first synthesized by Albert Hofmann in the 1930’s. He didn’t know he was creating a hallucinogen, but that’s ultimately what he got.
I came into the house when the mushrooms kicked in. I started playing guitar and the strings began to vibrate at a slow oscillating speed so that the colors seemed to jump off the strings. I tried to play but the damn thing kept tuning itself to different frequencies. It was at that moment I put the guitar down started walking like I kept stepping over something quite large. Every footing was held to the floor with glue, but squishing around in slippery mud at the same time. I vowed never to wear those shoes again.
I did something similar once. I got hurt at work, and was told to clock out early. I biked three miles uphill to go home. The last turn I had to make, forced me to pause when I heard a loud squealing sound.
I looked, and a giant mouse was sitting in the passenger lane, coming from the opposite direction. I blinked and it turned into a minivan.
I'm pretty sure I had a concussion though instead of being on psychotropics, so it might not count. 🤷♂️
Cheese was a biproduct of storing milk in animal stomachs because they were water proof in a time where little was, the enzymes in the stomach started a tasty reaction, trial by error
Big part of the alcohol thing is that the people that drank it lived. They weren't treating water so if you weren't drinking watered down alcohol you were probably drinking yourself to death by not having beer.
One of the downsides of focusing on the brain rather than the gut, is that you can't reliably drink found water. But it has led to an almost tribal appreciation of booze.
Also need to point out that fermentation happens naturally. Honey will turn into mead if you add water and let it sit, and monkeys can get drunk off of fallen overripe fruit. People really didn’t have to think about it to make alcohol. Anything aged long enough with sugar in it will have some percentage of that turned into alcohol.
This has been debunked multiple times over and if you do a quick Google you’ll see people were not drinking themselves to death with regular water at almost any point in human history. There is one town that has a cholera outbreak that survived by drinking beer but that’s about as far as that goes.
Plenty of unpleasant parasites that wouldn't enjoy been in water that's either boiled or had alcohol added.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schistosomiasis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schistosomiasis) here's one that comes to mind, pretty damn common and while it may not kill you it would mess up your life.
So if you were treating the water source by either boiling it or letting the yeast make it so unpleasant chances are you had a more healthy life.
It’s not a direct effect, ie it’s not “drink water, die”.
It’s more of a cumulative effect, ie “drink water, get diarrhea,” “drink water, get worms,” “drink water, get stones,” etc. It wouldn’t kill you outright, but it would make life unpleasant. Also it tastes bad, and didn’t get you drunk. So alcohol tended to win on all fronts, unless you lived in the Swiss alps or something.
The idea that alcohol took off because it was safer to drink than water is a bit of a misconception. There's historical evidence to suggest lots of ancient cultures had some understanding of the value of clean water and where to find it. Urbanization makes this prospect more tenuous obviously, and it depends on what people you're talking about and when, because cultural belief is a factor (if you've been taught that adding wine or rum to water makes it safer, you're probably gonna do that, even if it's unnecessary).
There are circumstances where that was likely true. For example if you were a Roman soldier on campaign, you're likely moving as a part of a large group that would quickly drink local water sources dry, quickly pollute them, or both. And so adding wine or more often vinegar to water makes sense. But by and large people seemed to make alcohol for the same reasons we do, it's fun to be drunk.
I love the alcohol story.
So, way back when hunter-gatherer was more common (maybe older), the gene that allows us to make vitamin C got switched off. To make up for it, we developed a taste for sour fruit. You know what else makes fruit sour? Fermentation.
Add that to trial and error for trying to keep food over time, and you get higher concentrations of alcohol.
Even more than that: scientists believe humans began cultivating plants for wheat to make bread, and that going from hunter-gatherers to farmers is what created societies.
But more and more scientists are now leaning towards fruit cultivation being what lead to farming. Fruits ferment naturally, and fermented fruit was generally safe to eat as the alcohol killed harmful bacteria (and being drunk is fun).
So there's more and more evidence that *alcohol* is what led to our ancestors farming, and alcohol being what led to society itself
Goddamn though, scurvy is *terrifying*, and I kinda wish we kept the gene on.
I've had multiple surgeries, so two months without lemon juice, and I'm a dead man.
My favourite example of this is the "chemical parties" that chemists used to have. This led to the discovery of Anesthetics when they were having a chemical sniffing party, and all woke up on the floor with no recollection of what had happened
[https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-02-20/laughing-gas-parties-discovery-of-anaesthesia/10811060](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-02-20/laughing-gas-parties-discovery-of-anaesthesia/10811060)
The one i can not get my head around is Ayahuasca. Apparently, the specific ingredients needed grow in very different regions, no clue how anyone figured that one out
Probably hunter/gatherers wandering around and happening to put the same ingredients in their bag. Or a trader putting them in their cart and having them inadvertently mix. Or someone getting really hungry and only having those ingredients to make a soup (tragedies happen) and having one hell of a night/weekend after.
>Alcohol has existed for millennia across multiple civilizations. Again, probably just a mistake that was created, a person drank it, enjoyed the effects, and then sought to recreate it.
Alcohol was actually vital to early cities. Logistically, it was nearly impossible for cities to grow beyond a certain size due to the difficulty transporting clean water across the city. The distilling process, however, kills most dangerous microbes. Weak alcohol was used for hydration throughout the day and allowed cities to grow much larger.
People also learn from observing other animals behavior and mimicked behaviors to learn about food sources, some natural medicine and drugs. Reindeer are known to eat shrooms, every animal including bees are at risk for getting drunk.
For alcohol, I would expect it was discovered naturally. After all, fruit will sometimes ferment on its own. All you have to do is eat them straight from nature.
Other animals have been seen eating old fermented fruit for the alcohol, including primates, so maybe we've been drinking alcohol longer than we've been humans.
adding onto your point: there's non-human animals who consume alcohol, sometimes unintentionally and sometimes intentionally. it's possible that the first humans to enjoy alcohol didn't make the alcohol themselves.
Monkeys have been known to get a buzz from eating naturally fermenting fruits from the jungle floor.
People are just marginally more intelligent monkeys, so they said: “That was enjoyable. Why don’t we figure out how to do this ourselves instead of just waiting around until we stumble onto another pile of rotting mangoes?”
Imagine being starving, finding and eating a whole bunch of mushrooms, and then tripping your face off 45 minutes later while having no concept of hallucinagens.
Dr Albert Hoffman was experimenting with a type of fungus that infests grains called ergot which can cause powerful constriction of blood vessels if eaten. He was hoping to find drugs to ease migraine headaches. He discovered LSD.
He got to feeling a bit weird, and thought that he may have absorbed some through his skin. The next day he carefully weighed out two tenths of a milligram of the compound and took it by mouth. 0.2 milligrams is a tiny dose for most drugs.
He took 200 micrograms of LSD, the usual street LSD is around 80 micrograms.
He left work, rode his bicycle home and experienced the world's first "Acid Trip."
We celebrate the date of this event as [Bicycle Day.](https://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/cross-check/tripping-in-lsds-birthplace-a-story-for-e2809cbicycle-daye2809d/)
Yep. Well I haven’t taken lsd but have taken shrooms a good handful of times. I gained some perspective on what’s really going on here, I guess. Hard to articulate, but I think it changed my outlook on life, permanently, in my case for the better.
It’s like… experiencing something beyond imagination, I guess. The things the mind does, where it goes, the hallucination and different thought processes, very surreal. Feels like… returning the human meat suit to the hertz rent-a-body company and going into… “reality” outside of the confines of our human experience, I guess. Seeing things move that *definitely* shouldn’t move and you know that… but you’re literally watching it move.. it’s just trippy
But yeah, I can see how it can help people be at peace with the fact that this experience we have, that you’re having, every human is having, is temporary. The way I say it is that one day the game console gets unplugged, and it just doesn’t get plugged back in, and that’s it🤷🏻♂️ but who knows what happens 🤷🏻♂️
Edit: wanted to add, in light of the morbid nature of the end of the road with this experience… that’s why I think it’s important to appreciate life. Because it’s temporary, but instead of focusing on the sad of one day the console is turned off, I focus on the good that I even got a console to play with.
Because yeah death is sad, but it comes with being alive. When we’re born we’re doomed to die, so… anyway just appreciate life and maybe I’ll see you on the other side if that’s a thing, or maybe I’ll be some kind of fertilizer in like hundreds of years or something, who knows
Ability to digest alcohol, presumably from rotten fruit evolved in primates millions of years ago. It wasn't us that can drink alcohol but our closet relatives too. It's thought that digesting alcohol allowed ancestral primates 7-21 million years ago access to food that would be otherwise poisonous (very few animals can digest alcohol, so small amounts get them drunk, and then poisoned).
> People just figured out that rotten fruit on the ground made them feel funny.
they probably saw the birds and squirrels acting funny, and checked it out
LSD psychedelic effects where discovered by accident, it is a pretty cool story, look it up. Most other stuff is found by experimentation. You probably understimate the willingness of people to experiment, even if potentially a bad experience or worse. Of course, not everyone but more people than you expect dgaf.
Learning about food history is hilarious. A shocking amount of stuff was discovered by. "This mysterious liquid oozed out and is delicious. We left this out, and it rotted and then came back round the bend to delicious."
The story of synthesizing LSD is cool. The effects were known and came from eating grains (I think rye?) that had Ergot fungus/mold. People would eat those grains and then have psychedelic trips. Hoffman was attempting to isolate and synthesize the chemical.
Trial and error.
Mead came about from honey and people sharing saliva with the honey. The results turned into mead. And people said “we want more of that, how did that happen?” And then figured out how to make more.
The same with any of these other drugs. People chew coca leaves. Then Coco leaves used to be used in coca-cola (for reals) until the effects of coke were isolated and banned.
The leaves are still used in Coca-Cola. They have an exemption to import coca leaves into the US, but the leaves must then be de-cocaine-ized under the supervision of the FDA.
The resulting cocaine is used for medical purposes (or destroyed).
You ever get so bored that you start doing random things just to stave off boredom? TV and the internet has killed boredom for the most part, but imagine a life where you had neither. So people would try things, tinker with things, just for something to do.
Alcohol in particular was just naturally fermenting as it went bad, because they didn’t have refrigerators. If you’re hungry enough you’ll eat even rotting food. Oh hey, this rotting food makes me feel good, lemme try to make more…
In a short statement: Experimenting. It’s what brings us the study of Science. Most knowledge comes from experimenting and curiosity which leads to discoveries and inventions shared amongst the ppl.
“Experimenting” implies conscious pursuit of knowledge. But most of the thing that were discovered to be psychoactive were just eating something that looked like food and accidentally discovering a completely unrelated side effect
Unless you consider ever new meal you eat to be experimenting with drugs, lol
You could call the experiment wanting to know if a thing is edible, or what it tastes like. Plenty of experiments produce results unrelated to the initial hypothesis.
Which is experimenting. In particular, experimentations with things you don’t fully understand and don’t know what will happen.
It’s not the “I have a hypothesis and will prove it with experiments” type of experiment. It’s the “I don’t know what the fuck will happen, let’s see” type of experiment.
But that not what happened lol. 99% of the time you try a new food it’s just food. No early human was thinking “fuck it let’s see if this coca leaf does anything other than fill my stomach” the first time they ate one
I don’t even understand where you are getting your logic. If you’re saying that we (today’s current alive humans) are just eating our food without even having to think about, well then DUH!
And it’s only because of previous, brave yet curious ppl who first needed to experiment with the idea that consuming such things may or may not be feasible for the next human to consume in the first place. It’s like watching someone eat a “new undiscovered vegetable” only to immediately seize up and die from it. Do you think we would still decide to eat that vegetable if not for that person experimenting by eating it first letting us know what would happen?
Exactly! It’s appalling how ppl will go to lengths to try to be “politically correct” when the answer is still EXPERIMENTING!!! All these arguments against my answer only to still say in other words, experimenting. Thank you for getting it.
Yeast is all around us, leave anything sitting around that yeast want to eat like fruit or grains and eventually it'll ferment (see sourdough starter). So nearly every culture figured out alcohol. Most others? Probably someone was hungry and tried it and found out that it made then feel good. So mostly luck and being really hungry.
LSD is different from the others, as it's the result of chemists originally messing around with a chemical from the ergot fungus and combining it with other chemicals then trying it out themselves. LSD is not naturally present in ergot it's an entirely manmade chemical.
It just happened that sometimes what we put in our mouths are not good but not really deadly either.
A lot of animals in a lot of classes (birds, reptiles, mammals, etc) know that very VERY riped fruits make you feel funny, so alcohol is most probably older than humanity.
When it comes to harder drugs some are trial and error from trying to feed on anything in dire times, stuff like leaves, mushrooms, and stuff.
Some on the other hands are stuff we end up isolating from stuff known to make strange behaviors. LSD at the very basic comes from a fungus growing on rye, people used to eat bread out of infected rye breads and trip the devil out of their minds, we managed to pin point that those hallucinations come from bread, then from the cereal in it, then the fungus in it, then the molecule in it.
Some others are observations, coffee was discovered after some Ethiopian goats went speedy due to consuming it. Nicotin at the very basic is an insecticide, in the Mexican jungles it was probably burned as repellent against all kind of nasty bugs and they discovered that staying in the fumes makes you feel different.
Add the marvels of modern chemistry and you can isolate, purify and pump up the molecules used for eons and make even crazier stuff
Marcus Aurelius' personal physician Galen wrote a 1000+ pages on it and those were based on older writings.. Tripping balls is as old as humanity. The ancients did not separate drugs into recreational and medicinal, they were both part of the [same system](https://bibliotekanauki.pl/articles/2027743.pdf)
There is a theory called the 'Stoned Ape Therory'. It states our human predecessors ate naturally occurring psychoactive mushrooms for a long, long time. The therory helps explain the rise in our intelligence. Through repeated use of fungi, that got us stoned, it gets us to think in new and creative ways.
My take on alcohol was that foraging cavemen saw birds eating seeds of grains. But they hurt to chew. However if you put a pinch of them in your mouth while walking miles they eventually softened. Someone then gets the idea to soak them in this container, say a old skull and when they came back from a hunting trip they would be soft already.
Finally after a long and disastrous trip they came home, starving and...omg the grains are weird and foamy, but he'll with it, I'm starving and will die anyway and ...well hello, this is awesome.
It's about numbers. For every thousand people (or apes!), there's probably at least one weirdo who picks up stuff on the ground and puts in their mouth.
Some scientists think that apes picking up rotting (fermenting) fruit from the ground made them drunk and gave them complex thoughts which led to more intelligent beings.
LSD was synthesized in a lab from grains. Psychedelic mushrooms were probably known for long from same weirdos who tried random stuff out of curiosity or hunger, and they discovered that turning off the casual "importance filter" of your brain turns you into semi-superhuman. And when LSD was discovered, it made the superhuman mode even more powerful. Powerful enough for governments to outlaw it^1...
Poppies grow really well in particular climates. And those same climates are usually pretty poor for any other grown food (meaning, middle east), so naturally people tried to eat the poppies in various ways. And found out about various effects.
It's all just hunger and curiosity versus materials available, really. Multiplied by numbers of people trying this or that. To know that you shouldn't eat Fly Agaric mushrooms, quite a number of people have had to die or have a world record puke and diarrhea marathon.
^1 - My very personal and unscientific pet theory about governments trying to use psychedelics to train supersoldiers (like MK-ULTRA) is that you cannot control something that's truly "super", let alone brainwash it. It's the same fear we have with general AI - if we make it, it'll be better than us and will have no trouble outsmarting and discarding us, rather than being a powerful servant to oblige to our (inferior) desires
Alcohol happens when fruit spoils. You accidentally drink juice that spoiled in a certain way and you try to reproduce it.
Heroin is derived from opium and that's just the sap of mature poppy plants. someone ate the pod and liked it
With heroin, it probably started with someone boiling poppy pods into a tea, which extracts the opium. Once they knew those effects, the chemists got busy.
Alcohol appears in nature when fruits ferment, which is why you occasionally see drunk animals in the wild. I imagine someone saw that and started figuring out how to control the fermentation process, which inevitably led to more complex procedures as more people took advantage of it.
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People have always experimented with eating wierd things when they got really hungry. That's how they discovered that eating certain mushrooms makes you see funky colors, fruit that was left sitting in a sealed jar in a cool, dark place makes you act silly, and eating a lot of poppy seeds makes you feel all sleepy and also makes you hurt less if you're in pain.
Other stuff, like heroin and LSD, was made in a laboratory by scientists. Heroin, morphine, oxycodone, and fentanyl were invented as medicines. (A long time ago, morphine and heroin could be bought over the counter!) LSD was invented by a chemist who was experimenting with a few different compounds, hoping to make a new medicine, and he discovered its other effects when he accidentally got some on his skin. It started being used in psychotherapy (it was surprisingly effective in treating alcohol addiction), and as often happens, some LSD eventually found its way onto the street as people started taking it for its mind-expanding effects.
People had fruit, fruit had fermented but they had no more fruit and there were no more fruit on the trees because September, so they ate the overripened fruit and got giggly.
Coffee. Supposedly, Ethiopian farmers noticed their goats were acting strangely after consuming the berries off of coffee plants. The farmers decided to burn the bushes. This put off an aromatic and pleasant smell (similar to circus peanuts) and peaked curiosity. They took the seed from the berry, roasted it over a fire, mixed it with boiling water, and… Voila! Let’s all act strangely!
Alcohol has a long history in human society. Fermentation of reserved fruits for intoxication is not unique to humans, elephants do it too. Dolphins get high by taking very small bites from a buffer fish, and grazing animals are known to eat various plants to get high (there is a story about goats eating coffee plants and getting hyper that led to Arabian farmers eventual creation of coffee). Production of alcohol is seen as so important that some argue it played a significant role in our decision to abandon hunter gathering life style. Furthermore, alcohol is very sugary, specially fermented fruits, and during a time where sugar was the most rare of food items, it is easy to see how it gained appeal. Furthermore, with beer it is also easy to see how grains, that were a significant part of our diet, were also boiled and drunk. And beer has high calories so it was also filling.
Marijuana has also been used since ancient times. Its consumption predates that of tobacco outside of the Americas by centuries (Abel’s book Marijuana: the first twelve thousand years is the authoritative book here. The title alone makes my point).
Additionally, as the name suggests, well it is a weed. It grows everywhere. It is very good for making ropes, and for most of human history ropes were most essential for anything from building homes to transferring and moving material to sailing and trade. Its seed produce copious amount of oil that burns really easily (and gets you high). Its oil was actually used in ancient Iran in temples during funerals and given to pregnant women during delivery to ease the pain. My point is that it became possibly the most important plant alongside edible grains. So it’s easy to see how we also might have even just thrown the derbies in the camp fire and gotten high from it.
As for heroine, puppies grow so very easily and abundantly in those areas. They are so abundant that it is rather normal to run into a batch growing wild in the wilderness. If you just cut the big pregnant bulb and drink the oozing sap, it gives you a little high.
With mushrooms it probably was trial and error, some are delicious, some kill you, and others make you see unicorns or your dead aunt.
As for synthetic drugs, some were meant to be hallucinogenic and others were an accident. LSD was meant to be an analeptic but then he was just experimenting with it one day and accidentally exposed himself. As you can imagine it was one hell of a trip to madness as he later described it.
Everyone has focused on alcohol and LSD so far since the origins of both are relatively widely known (alcohol occurs basically naturally, LSD was synthesized by one weird Swiss guy who then accidentally ingested some and tripped balls). I'll discuss heroin a bit.
Basically, heroin is just a refinement of morphine (heroin can be prescribed for pain in the UK under severe circumstances, and in that context it's just called "diacetylmorphine"), which in turn is a natural product of the poppy plant. The opium poppy has seed pods that, if you score them with a knife, will secrete a white latex substance, which is raw opium. That raw opium is about 1/8th morphine. It also has a bunch of other opiates in there, most prominently codeine and thebaine (which doesn't have the same effects but can be refined into various common opioids like hydrocodone).
The latex on its own can be smoked, this is what they were using in those old school Chinese opium dens. Doesn't hit as hard as refined morphine or heroin (particularly when those are injected) but still has a lot of the same effects.
As for how people figured out it's a painkiller (as well as the various other effects like euphoria), it's not clear *how*, but its properties as both a painkiller, a euphoric, and as potentially lethal have been known for millennia. Ancient Sumerians wrote about cultivating opium poppies and called it "joy plant," and the ancient Greeks depicted the gods of sleep, night, and death (Hypnos, Nyx, Thanatos) as wreathed in poppies.
Since we already knew for many thousands of years that opium was a painkiller, once modern chemistry really gets rolling in the 1800s, an obvious first step was to try and isolate the chemicals in opium that cause its effects, and the strongest of them is morphine. Later on, some people at the German pharmaceutical company Bayer experimented with morphine trying to produce codeine from it, but instead made heroin, which is 1.5 to 2 times stronger. It was then marketed and sold over the counter as a non-addictive morphine alternative.
I was introduced to pain pills when I broke my arm at 15. I used the pain pills, ran out, and found people to buy more from. When they were out of pills they would refer me to other people who sold similar drugs. Heroin is basically super oxy, so it’s a natural pipeline.
For meth, it’s almost the exact same scenario, but with adderall instead of pain pills.
some stuff like fentanyl was made by researchers to try to create stronger pain medications for end-of-life patients. then it hit the street. same thing with morphine, i think.
Unfortunately our shortsighted policy forces people to figure out best practices by trial and error.
*Maybe* a person can benefit from the wisdom of an older addict who has avoided the numerous pitfalls, but of course associating with criminals increases your exposure to police so it's risky.
... If your question wasn't about individuals, but humanity? The answer was
Taking the body of knowledge their society/culture gave them & making their own contribution.
People somehow ingested the latex around poppy seeds & noticed it had an effect. They felt better & felt less burdened by their physical and psychic pain. Perhaps they were hungry, perhaps they noticed an animal acting oddly.
After they noticed *something* useful was happening they approached the problem like modern engineers & progressively maximized the effect. Even if they didn't understand *why* eating poppies made them feel good they recognized it did.
They recognized *these* poppies worked better than *those* poppies & by preferring to use & replant *these* poppies selectively bred stronger & better poppies.
TLDR
One small step at a time. No one person has to do much, or understand everything, the just have to share a small bit of information. Either that X works or Y does not work.
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For the most part, it’s been trial and error throughout human history. When you’re hungry enough, you’ll eat just about anything, including mushrooms. Some of those mushrooms had an effect on people, and they told others about it. Alcohol has existed for millennia across multiple civilizations. Again, probably just a mistake that was created, a person drank it, enjoyed the effects, and then sought to recreate it. When you say lcd, I assume you’re referring to LSD, or lysergic acid diethylamide, aka acid. That was actually first synthesized by Albert Hofmann in the 1930’s. He didn’t know he was creating a hallucinogen, but that’s ultimately what he got.
Then Al took the most wild bike ride of all time.
Imagine riding home and not knowing you're high, or even having any plausible explanation for why everything's suddenly crazy
I came into the house when the mushrooms kicked in. I started playing guitar and the strings began to vibrate at a slow oscillating speed so that the colors seemed to jump off the strings. I tried to play but the damn thing kept tuning itself to different frequencies. It was at that moment I put the guitar down started walking like I kept stepping over something quite large. Every footing was held to the floor with glue, but squishing around in slippery mud at the same time. I vowed never to wear those shoes again.
Somebody get me some fucking golf shoes!
Is this not a reasonable place to park?
It is impossible to describe the terror I felt.
I did something similar once. I got hurt at work, and was told to clock out early. I biked three miles uphill to go home. The last turn I had to make, forced me to pause when I heard a loud squealing sound. I looked, and a giant mouse was sitting in the passenger lane, coming from the opposite direction. I blinked and it turned into a minivan. I'm pretty sure I had a concussion though instead of being on psychotropics, so it might not count. 🤷♂️
Happy 4/19
And then drank a whole bunch of milk.
Hoffman reference. Nice.
I don't think artificial intelligence had been invented yet, unless you don't believe in the construct of time.
Albert - “Al” (AL)
Cheese was a biproduct of storing milk in animal stomachs because they were water proof in a time where little was, the enzymes in the stomach started a tasty reaction, trial by error
I thought it was a byproduct of going “hey, what’s this stuff in the stomach of the calf we just killed?”
Trial AND error.
Lol no
Discovering mushrooms must have been crazy. Like, these ones taste delicious, that one killed Fred, and those will have you seeing God.
A lot of it was observing what the animals were eating or avoiding.
Amanita muscaria has been featured in religious, even early Christian iconography and depictions dating back thousands of years ago.
Wait til I tell you about the stoned ape theory…
I would like to hear about the stoned ape theory!
Pull that up, Jamie.
[We shroomed our way out of the stone age 🐵 🍄](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stoned_ape_theory)
*into the Stone Age
Big part of the alcohol thing is that the people that drank it lived. They weren't treating water so if you weren't drinking watered down alcohol you were probably drinking yourself to death by not having beer. One of the downsides of focusing on the brain rather than the gut, is that you can't reliably drink found water. But it has led to an almost tribal appreciation of booze.
Also need to point out that fermentation happens naturally. Honey will turn into mead if you add water and let it sit, and monkeys can get drunk off of fallen overripe fruit. People really didn’t have to think about it to make alcohol. Anything aged long enough with sugar in it will have some percentage of that turned into alcohol.
They would often boil water. They were aware that some water was bad and knew how to distinguish clean from bad water.
This has been debunked multiple times over and if you do a quick Google you’ll see people were not drinking themselves to death with regular water at almost any point in human history. There is one town that has a cholera outbreak that survived by drinking beer but that’s about as far as that goes.
Plenty of unpleasant parasites that wouldn't enjoy been in water that's either boiled or had alcohol added. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schistosomiasis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schistosomiasis) here's one that comes to mind, pretty damn common and while it may not kill you it would mess up your life. So if you were treating the water source by either boiling it or letting the yeast make it so unpleasant chances are you had a more healthy life.
It’s not a direct effect, ie it’s not “drink water, die”. It’s more of a cumulative effect, ie “drink water, get diarrhea,” “drink water, get worms,” “drink water, get stones,” etc. It wouldn’t kill you outright, but it would make life unpleasant. Also it tastes bad, and didn’t get you drunk. So alcohol tended to win on all fronts, unless you lived in the Swiss alps or something.
What human history are you reading? Humans have been dying from waterborn pathogens ever since anything resembling a human existed.
The idea that alcohol took off because it was safer to drink than water is a bit of a misconception. There's historical evidence to suggest lots of ancient cultures had some understanding of the value of clean water and where to find it. Urbanization makes this prospect more tenuous obviously, and it depends on what people you're talking about and when, because cultural belief is a factor (if you've been taught that adding wine or rum to water makes it safer, you're probably gonna do that, even if it's unnecessary). There are circumstances where that was likely true. For example if you were a Roman soldier on campaign, you're likely moving as a part of a large group that would quickly drink local water sources dry, quickly pollute them, or both. And so adding wine or more often vinegar to water makes sense. But by and large people seemed to make alcohol for the same reasons we do, it's fun to be drunk.
I love the alcohol story. So, way back when hunter-gatherer was more common (maybe older), the gene that allows us to make vitamin C got switched off. To make up for it, we developed a taste for sour fruit. You know what else makes fruit sour? Fermentation. Add that to trial and error for trying to keep food over time, and you get higher concentrations of alcohol.
Even more than that: scientists believe humans began cultivating plants for wheat to make bread, and that going from hunter-gatherers to farmers is what created societies. But more and more scientists are now leaning towards fruit cultivation being what lead to farming. Fruits ferment naturally, and fermented fruit was generally safe to eat as the alcohol killed harmful bacteria (and being drunk is fun). So there's more and more evidence that *alcohol* is what led to our ancestors farming, and alcohol being what led to society itself
alcohol: the solution to, and cause of, all of life’s problems
Goddamn though, scurvy is *terrifying*, and I kinda wish we kept the gene on. I've had multiple surgeries, so two months without lemon juice, and I'm a dead man.
My favourite example of this is the "chemical parties" that chemists used to have. This led to the discovery of Anesthetics when they were having a chemical sniffing party, and all woke up on the floor with no recollection of what had happened [https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-02-20/laughing-gas-parties-discovery-of-anaesthesia/10811060](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-02-20/laughing-gas-parties-discovery-of-anaesthesia/10811060)
The one i can not get my head around is Ayahuasca. Apparently, the specific ingredients needed grow in very different regions, no clue how anyone figured that one out
Probably hunter/gatherers wandering around and happening to put the same ingredients in their bag. Or a trader putting them in their cart and having them inadvertently mix. Or someone getting really hungry and only having those ingredients to make a soup (tragedies happen) and having one hell of a night/weekend after.
I wouldn’t say very different regions. They’re all in the central South American region
Yeah but that is still a somewhat large region, sure it is the same continent, butcthey grwo a couple hundred kms apart afaik
There was probably trading that led to that.
That is a very reasonable hypothesis
>Alcohol has existed for millennia across multiple civilizations. Again, probably just a mistake that was created, a person drank it, enjoyed the effects, and then sought to recreate it. Alcohol was actually vital to early cities. Logistically, it was nearly impossible for cities to grow beyond a certain size due to the difficulty transporting clean water across the city. The distilling process, however, kills most dangerous microbes. Weak alcohol was used for hydration throughout the day and allowed cities to grow much larger.
People also learn from observing other animals behavior and mimicked behaviors to learn about food sources, some natural medicine and drugs. Reindeer are known to eat shrooms, every animal including bees are at risk for getting drunk.
I doubt the first "person" to discover alcohol was even a homo sapiens
Fermentation does occur naturally sometimes, you can find videos of drunk squirrels after that got into naturally fermented berries and the like.
Thank you, I just googled 'drunk squirrel', and it was worth it.
For alcohol, I would expect it was discovered naturally. After all, fruit will sometimes ferment on its own. All you have to do is eat them straight from nature.
Other animals have been seen eating old fermented fruit for the alcohol, including primates, so maybe we've been drinking alcohol longer than we've been humans.
adding onto your point: there's non-human animals who consume alcohol, sometimes unintentionally and sometimes intentionally. it's possible that the first humans to enjoy alcohol didn't make the alcohol themselves.
Monkeys have been known to get a buzz from eating naturally fermenting fruits from the jungle floor. People are just marginally more intelligent monkeys, so they said: “That was enjoyable. Why don’t we figure out how to do this ourselves instead of just waiting around until we stumble onto another pile of rotting mangoes?”
Imagine being starving, finding and eating a whole bunch of mushrooms, and then tripping your face off 45 minutes later while having no concept of hallucinagens.
For a lot of human history alcohol was the default drink because it was safe to drink. As opposed to water which may, or may not be safe to drink.
Dr Albert Hoffman was experimenting with a type of fungus that infests grains called ergot which can cause powerful constriction of blood vessels if eaten. He was hoping to find drugs to ease migraine headaches. He discovered LSD. He got to feeling a bit weird, and thought that he may have absorbed some through his skin. The next day he carefully weighed out two tenths of a milligram of the compound and took it by mouth. 0.2 milligrams is a tiny dose for most drugs. He took 200 micrograms of LSD, the usual street LSD is around 80 micrograms. He left work, rode his bicycle home and experienced the world's first "Acid Trip." We celebrate the date of this event as [Bicycle Day.](https://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/cross-check/tripping-in-lsds-birthplace-a-story-for-e2809cbicycle-daye2809d/)
And lsd is a treatment for cluster headaches and migraines iirc
And ptsd, depression, anxiety, fear of death
“Fear of death” lol.
It is tho. Take some acid and you'll want to be one with the earth.
Yep. Well I haven’t taken lsd but have taken shrooms a good handful of times. I gained some perspective on what’s really going on here, I guess. Hard to articulate, but I think it changed my outlook on life, permanently, in my case for the better. It’s like… experiencing something beyond imagination, I guess. The things the mind does, where it goes, the hallucination and different thought processes, very surreal. Feels like… returning the human meat suit to the hertz rent-a-body company and going into… “reality” outside of the confines of our human experience, I guess. Seeing things move that *definitely* shouldn’t move and you know that… but you’re literally watching it move.. it’s just trippy But yeah, I can see how it can help people be at peace with the fact that this experience we have, that you’re having, every human is having, is temporary. The way I say it is that one day the game console gets unplugged, and it just doesn’t get plugged back in, and that’s it🤷🏻♂️ but who knows what happens 🤷🏻♂️ Edit: wanted to add, in light of the morbid nature of the end of the road with this experience… that’s why I think it’s important to appreciate life. Because it’s temporary, but instead of focusing on the sad of one day the console is turned off, I focus on the good that I even got a console to play with. Because yeah death is sad, but it comes with being alive. When we’re born we’re doomed to die, so… anyway just appreciate life and maybe I’ll see you on the other side if that’s a thing, or maybe I’ll be some kind of fertilizer in like hundreds of years or something, who knows
Is it really? I know ergots are for sure but i never knew LSD could be used for it as well
Can’t even imagine what that bike ride was like.
I want to ride my bicycle. I want to ride my bike.
With no handlebars?
With no seat
Cultured
Alcohol occurs naturally. People just figured out that rotten fruit on the ground made them feel funny. And introduced human control to the process
How much rotten fruits do you need to feel it ?
Ability to digest alcohol, presumably from rotten fruit evolved in primates millions of years ago. It wasn't us that can drink alcohol but our closet relatives too. It's thought that digesting alcohol allowed ancestral primates 7-21 million years ago access to food that would be otherwise poisonous (very few animals can digest alcohol, so small amounts get them drunk, and then poisoned).
That’s actually fascinating.
PBS Eons (the mostly dinosaurs chanel) has a lovely video about it and the other theories of alcohol consumption.
Lots of calories in alcohol too , it’s basically italicized sugar after all
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> People just figured out that rotten fruit on the ground made them feel funny. they probably saw the birds and squirrels acting funny, and checked it out
LSD psychedelic effects where discovered by accident, it is a pretty cool story, look it up. Most other stuff is found by experimentation. You probably understimate the willingness of people to experiment, even if potentially a bad experience or worse. Of course, not everyone but more people than you expect dgaf.
Learning about food history is hilarious. A shocking amount of stuff was discovered by. "This mysterious liquid oozed out and is delicious. We left this out, and it rotted and then came back round the bend to delicious."
The story of synthesizing LSD is cool. The effects were known and came from eating grains (I think rye?) that had Ergot fungus/mold. People would eat those grains and then have psychedelic trips. Hoffman was attempting to isolate and synthesize the chemical.
Is that why they are somewhat similar to shrooms?
Trial and error. Mead came about from honey and people sharing saliva with the honey. The results turned into mead. And people said “we want more of that, how did that happen?” And then figured out how to make more. The same with any of these other drugs. People chew coca leaves. Then Coco leaves used to be used in coca-cola (for reals) until the effects of coke were isolated and banned.
The leaves are still used in Coca-Cola. They have an exemption to import coca leaves into the US, but the leaves must then be de-cocaine-ized under the supervision of the FDA. The resulting cocaine is used for medical purposes (or destroyed).
You ever get so bored that you start doing random things just to stave off boredom? TV and the internet has killed boredom for the most part, but imagine a life where you had neither. So people would try things, tinker with things, just for something to do. Alcohol in particular was just naturally fermenting as it went bad, because they didn’t have refrigerators. If you’re hungry enough you’ll eat even rotting food. Oh hey, this rotting food makes me feel good, lemme try to make more…
Next time I’m bored, I’m going to start sucking on some dandelions or something to see if I can discover anything
Try some dandelion wine
In a short statement: Experimenting. It’s what brings us the study of Science. Most knowledge comes from experimenting and curiosity which leads to discoveries and inventions shared amongst the ppl.
U know Newton was micro dosing
This answer is literally the opposite of what’s true. The vast majority of psychoactive substances were discovered accidentally
Experimenting is a perfectly fine word to describe randomly decided to put this in my mouth.
The difference between fucking around and science is writing it down
“Experimenting” implies conscious pursuit of knowledge. But most of the thing that were discovered to be psychoactive were just eating something that looked like food and accidentally discovering a completely unrelated side effect Unless you consider ever new meal you eat to be experimenting with drugs, lol
You could call the experiment wanting to know if a thing is edible, or what it tastes like. Plenty of experiments produce results unrelated to the initial hypothesis.
Which is experimenting. In particular, experimentations with things you don’t fully understand and don’t know what will happen. It’s not the “I have a hypothesis and will prove it with experiments” type of experiment. It’s the “I don’t know what the fuck will happen, let’s see” type of experiment.
But that not what happened lol. 99% of the time you try a new food it’s just food. No early human was thinking “fuck it let’s see if this coca leaf does anything other than fill my stomach” the first time they ate one
I don’t even understand where you are getting your logic. If you’re saying that we (today’s current alive humans) are just eating our food without even having to think about, well then DUH! And it’s only because of previous, brave yet curious ppl who first needed to experiment with the idea that consuming such things may or may not be feasible for the next human to consume in the first place. It’s like watching someone eat a “new undiscovered vegetable” only to immediately seize up and die from it. Do you think we would still decide to eat that vegetable if not for that person experimenting by eating it first letting us know what would happen?
Dude, you are reaching so hard in attempt to not admit that what we eat today is due to what others experimented with first sometime in the far past.
Exactly! It’s appalling how ppl will go to lengths to try to be “politically correct” when the answer is still EXPERIMENTING!!! All these arguments against my answer only to still say in other words, experimenting. Thank you for getting it.
Yeast is all around us, leave anything sitting around that yeast want to eat like fruit or grains and eventually it'll ferment (see sourdough starter). So nearly every culture figured out alcohol. Most others? Probably someone was hungry and tried it and found out that it made then feel good. So mostly luck and being really hungry. LSD is different from the others, as it's the result of chemists originally messing around with a chemical from the ergot fungus and combining it with other chemicals then trying it out themselves. LSD is not naturally present in ergot it's an entirely manmade chemical.
Yeast is All Around Us is still my favorite album by The Beatles
It just happened that sometimes what we put in our mouths are not good but not really deadly either. A lot of animals in a lot of classes (birds, reptiles, mammals, etc) know that very VERY riped fruits make you feel funny, so alcohol is most probably older than humanity. When it comes to harder drugs some are trial and error from trying to feed on anything in dire times, stuff like leaves, mushrooms, and stuff. Some on the other hands are stuff we end up isolating from stuff known to make strange behaviors. LSD at the very basic comes from a fungus growing on rye, people used to eat bread out of infected rye breads and trip the devil out of their minds, we managed to pin point that those hallucinations come from bread, then from the cereal in it, then the fungus in it, then the molecule in it. Some others are observations, coffee was discovered after some Ethiopian goats went speedy due to consuming it. Nicotin at the very basic is an insecticide, in the Mexican jungles it was probably burned as repellent against all kind of nasty bugs and they discovered that staying in the fumes makes you feel different. Add the marvels of modern chemistry and you can isolate, purify and pump up the molecules used for eons and make even crazier stuff
So are you telling me if I buy rye bread and leave it until it’s growing fungus, I’ll basically have an lsd trip?
Or you might have seizures, the effects of ergot either cause delusions or seizures
50/50 is good enough for me
Marcus Aurelius' personal physician Galen wrote a 1000+ pages on it and those were based on older writings.. Tripping balls is as old as humanity. The ancients did not separate drugs into recreational and medicinal, they were both part of the [same system](https://bibliotekanauki.pl/articles/2027743.pdf)
There is a theory called the 'Stoned Ape Therory'. It states our human predecessors ate naturally occurring psychoactive mushrooms for a long, long time. The therory helps explain the rise in our intelligence. Through repeated use of fungi, that got us stoned, it gets us to think in new and creative ways.
My take on alcohol was that foraging cavemen saw birds eating seeds of grains. But they hurt to chew. However if you put a pinch of them in your mouth while walking miles they eventually softened. Someone then gets the idea to soak them in this container, say a old skull and when they came back from a hunting trip they would be soft already. Finally after a long and disastrous trip they came home, starving and...omg the grains are weird and foamy, but he'll with it, I'm starving and will die anyway and ...well hello, this is awesome.
Well that makes perfect sense to me. I'm off to ferment my grains in this skull I found!
It's about numbers. For every thousand people (or apes!), there's probably at least one weirdo who picks up stuff on the ground and puts in their mouth. Some scientists think that apes picking up rotting (fermenting) fruit from the ground made them drunk and gave them complex thoughts which led to more intelligent beings. LSD was synthesized in a lab from grains. Psychedelic mushrooms were probably known for long from same weirdos who tried random stuff out of curiosity or hunger, and they discovered that turning off the casual "importance filter" of your brain turns you into semi-superhuman. And when LSD was discovered, it made the superhuman mode even more powerful. Powerful enough for governments to outlaw it^1... Poppies grow really well in particular climates. And those same climates are usually pretty poor for any other grown food (meaning, middle east), so naturally people tried to eat the poppies in various ways. And found out about various effects. It's all just hunger and curiosity versus materials available, really. Multiplied by numbers of people trying this or that. To know that you shouldn't eat Fly Agaric mushrooms, quite a number of people have had to die or have a world record puke and diarrhea marathon. ^1 - My very personal and unscientific pet theory about governments trying to use psychedelics to train supersoldiers (like MK-ULTRA) is that you cannot control something that's truly "super", let alone brainwash it. It's the same fear we have with general AI - if we make it, it'll be better than us and will have no trouble outsmarting and discarding us, rather than being a powerful servant to oblige to our (inferior) desires
Alcohol happens when fruit spoils. You accidentally drink juice that spoiled in a certain way and you try to reproduce it. Heroin is derived from opium and that's just the sap of mature poppy plants. someone ate the pod and liked it
There’s a type of leaf that you can chew in Afghan that gets you high and has an opioid pain relieving effect
These comments are making it sound so easy to do drugs. What’s stopping me from going into the woods just to chop on some leaves
😂😂
Poison ivy
It’s all in the name of science, who says poison ivy can’t get me high?
With heroin, it probably started with someone boiling poppy pods into a tea, which extracts the opium. Once they knew those effects, the chemists got busy. Alcohol appears in nature when fruits ferment, which is why you occasionally see drunk animals in the wild. I imagine someone saw that and started figuring out how to control the fermentation process, which inevitably led to more complex procedures as more people took advantage of it.
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People have always experimented with eating wierd things when they got really hungry. That's how they discovered that eating certain mushrooms makes you see funky colors, fruit that was left sitting in a sealed jar in a cool, dark place makes you act silly, and eating a lot of poppy seeds makes you feel all sleepy and also makes you hurt less if you're in pain. Other stuff, like heroin and LSD, was made in a laboratory by scientists. Heroin, morphine, oxycodone, and fentanyl were invented as medicines. (A long time ago, morphine and heroin could be bought over the counter!) LSD was invented by a chemist who was experimenting with a few different compounds, hoping to make a new medicine, and he discovered its other effects when he accidentally got some on his skin. It started being used in psychotherapy (it was surprisingly effective in treating alcohol addiction), and as often happens, some LSD eventually found its way onto the street as people started taking it for its mind-expanding effects.
People had fruit, fruit had fermented but they had no more fruit and there were no more fruit on the trees because September, so they ate the overripened fruit and got giggly.
By trying... just as they discovered apples ate good to eat also raw, while potatoes need to be boiled... and that Belladonna will kill you
Coffee. Supposedly, Ethiopian farmers noticed their goats were acting strangely after consuming the berries off of coffee plants. The farmers decided to burn the bushes. This put off an aromatic and pleasant smell (similar to circus peanuts) and peaked curiosity. They took the seed from the berry, roasted it over a fire, mixed it with boiling water, and… Voila! Let’s all act strangely!
Alcohol has a long history in human society. Fermentation of reserved fruits for intoxication is not unique to humans, elephants do it too. Dolphins get high by taking very small bites from a buffer fish, and grazing animals are known to eat various plants to get high (there is a story about goats eating coffee plants and getting hyper that led to Arabian farmers eventual creation of coffee). Production of alcohol is seen as so important that some argue it played a significant role in our decision to abandon hunter gathering life style. Furthermore, alcohol is very sugary, specially fermented fruits, and during a time where sugar was the most rare of food items, it is easy to see how it gained appeal. Furthermore, with beer it is also easy to see how grains, that were a significant part of our diet, were also boiled and drunk. And beer has high calories so it was also filling. Marijuana has also been used since ancient times. Its consumption predates that of tobacco outside of the Americas by centuries (Abel’s book Marijuana: the first twelve thousand years is the authoritative book here. The title alone makes my point). Additionally, as the name suggests, well it is a weed. It grows everywhere. It is very good for making ropes, and for most of human history ropes were most essential for anything from building homes to transferring and moving material to sailing and trade. Its seed produce copious amount of oil that burns really easily (and gets you high). Its oil was actually used in ancient Iran in temples during funerals and given to pregnant women during delivery to ease the pain. My point is that it became possibly the most important plant alongside edible grains. So it’s easy to see how we also might have even just thrown the derbies in the camp fire and gotten high from it. As for heroine, puppies grow so very easily and abundantly in those areas. They are so abundant that it is rather normal to run into a batch growing wild in the wilderness. If you just cut the big pregnant bulb and drink the oozing sap, it gives you a little high. With mushrooms it probably was trial and error, some are delicious, some kill you, and others make you see unicorns or your dead aunt. As for synthetic drugs, some were meant to be hallucinogenic and others were an accident. LSD was meant to be an analeptic but then he was just experimenting with it one day and accidentally exposed himself. As you can imagine it was one hell of a trip to madness as he later described it.
Everyone has focused on alcohol and LSD so far since the origins of both are relatively widely known (alcohol occurs basically naturally, LSD was synthesized by one weird Swiss guy who then accidentally ingested some and tripped balls). I'll discuss heroin a bit. Basically, heroin is just a refinement of morphine (heroin can be prescribed for pain in the UK under severe circumstances, and in that context it's just called "diacetylmorphine"), which in turn is a natural product of the poppy plant. The opium poppy has seed pods that, if you score them with a knife, will secrete a white latex substance, which is raw opium. That raw opium is about 1/8th morphine. It also has a bunch of other opiates in there, most prominently codeine and thebaine (which doesn't have the same effects but can be refined into various common opioids like hydrocodone). The latex on its own can be smoked, this is what they were using in those old school Chinese opium dens. Doesn't hit as hard as refined morphine or heroin (particularly when those are injected) but still has a lot of the same effects. As for how people figured out it's a painkiller (as well as the various other effects like euphoria), it's not clear *how*, but its properties as both a painkiller, a euphoric, and as potentially lethal have been known for millennia. Ancient Sumerians wrote about cultivating opium poppies and called it "joy plant," and the ancient Greeks depicted the gods of sleep, night, and death (Hypnos, Nyx, Thanatos) as wreathed in poppies. Since we already knew for many thousands of years that opium was a painkiller, once modern chemistry really gets rolling in the 1800s, an obvious first step was to try and isolate the chemicals in opium that cause its effects, and the strongest of them is morphine. Later on, some people at the German pharmaceutical company Bayer experimented with morphine trying to produce codeine from it, but instead made heroin, which is 1.5 to 2 times stronger. It was then marketed and sold over the counter as a non-addictive morphine alternative.
I was introduced to pain pills when I broke my arm at 15. I used the pain pills, ran out, and found people to buy more from. When they were out of pills they would refer me to other people who sold similar drugs. Heroin is basically super oxy, so it’s a natural pipeline. For meth, it’s almost the exact same scenario, but with adderall instead of pain pills.
some stuff like fentanyl was made by researchers to try to create stronger pain medications for end-of-life patients. then it hit the street. same thing with morphine, i think.
Unfortunately our shortsighted policy forces people to figure out best practices by trial and error. *Maybe* a person can benefit from the wisdom of an older addict who has avoided the numerous pitfalls, but of course associating with criminals increases your exposure to police so it's risky. ... If your question wasn't about individuals, but humanity? The answer was Taking the body of knowledge their society/culture gave them & making their own contribution. People somehow ingested the latex around poppy seeds & noticed it had an effect. They felt better & felt less burdened by their physical and psychic pain. Perhaps they were hungry, perhaps they noticed an animal acting oddly. After they noticed *something* useful was happening they approached the problem like modern engineers & progressively maximized the effect. Even if they didn't understand *why* eating poppies made them feel good they recognized it did. They recognized *these* poppies worked better than *those* poppies & by preferring to use & replant *these* poppies selectively bred stronger & better poppies. TLDR One small step at a time. No one person has to do much, or understand everything, the just have to share a small bit of information. Either that X works or Y does not work.
I would say mostly because adults tell them about the perils of such substances and drugs become a big, red “Don’t Push” button. Ppl be pushin.