A Brief History of Drugs: From the Stone Age to the Stoned Age

Rating:
Summary: A concise version of a lengthy classic
Review: This wonderful new volume is a very readable and informative condensation of and expansion on Escohotado own previous publication, the lengthy three-volume 'Historia General de las Drogas'. Here, in a text finely balanced with history and science, he traces humanity's affair with drugs and intoxicants beginning with the third millenium B.C., and leading up to the modern hi-tech psycheledics. He traces some of the most popular drugs like caffeine and hemp back to their surprisingly early origins. Taking into account the involvement of drugs in early religious festivities, he offers an analysis how they've made an easy move from there to a more secular, pleasure-seeking culture, accompanied by the parallel villification of drugs by religion, the institution that played a leading role in their introduction to society. This concise book will make readers aware of the extent of the spread of drugs through history, and of the hopelessness of all attempts to make them disappear from future history as well.

Rating:
Summary: A concise version of a lengthy classic
Review: This wonderful new volume is a very readable and informative condensation of and expansion on Escohotado own previous publication, the lengthy three-volume 'Historia General de las Drogas'. Here, in a text finely balanced with history and science, he traces humanity's affair with drugs and intoxicants beginning with the third millenium B.C., and leading up to the modern hi-tech psycheledics. He traces some of the most popular drugs like caffeine and hemp back to their surprisingly early origins. Taking into account the involvement of drugs in early religious festivities, he offers an analysis how they've made an easy move from there to a more secular, pleasure-seeking culture, accompanied by the parallel villification of drugs by religion, the institution that played a leading role in their introduction to society. This concise book will make readers aware of the extent of the spread of drugs through history, and of the hopelessness of all attempts to make them disappear from future history as well.