| Insects know how to get high as well, as Georgio Samorini documents in his book, Animals and Psychedelics. So, if we ask ourselves “when did mankind first start getting high, the answer is a real mystery that only a handful of people have truly speculated on with sincerity, Terence McKenna being a primary candidate here. McKenna speculated that, from eating psychoactive mushrooms, humans then figured out… how to do things much faster and with better accuracy, developing certain parts of the brain, which led to the rapid changes that led to the building of civilizations. McKenna termed this the “stoned ape” theory. I think his words in this excerpt from Food of the Gods are valid and worthy of mention: “The first encounters between hominids and psilocybin-containing mushrooms may have predated the domestication of cattle in Africa by a million years or more. And during this million-year period, the mushrooms were not only gathered and eaten but probably also achieved the status of a cult. But domestication of wild cattle, a great step in human cultural evolution, by bringing humans into greater proximity to cattle, also entailed increased contact with the mushrooms, because these mushrooms grow only in the dung of cattle. As a result, the human-mushroom interspecies codependency was enhanced and deepened. It was at this time that religious ritual, calendar making, and natural magic came into their own.” (7) I would say Terence and I are in agreement about the idea that Amanitas did not come before psilocybin in the order of familiarity to early mankind. Although I regard McKenna to be a profound pioneer and psychonaut, I have developed my own ideas, which all and all, for the most part, are not too much different, but differ in certain details significantly. I will present these at the end of the book. Let’s take a look at what we know, or what scientists, anthropologists, and archaeologists have determined, for the most part, to be true. The Human Opiate and Endocannabinoid System Endogenous morphines, or endorphins, make up the family of peptide chains which act as our body’s natural painkillers. (8) Endorphines exist in various parts of the brain and spinal cord and our brain has specific opiate receptor sites which pair perfectly to both the brain and plant alkaloids. (9) This means that the plant alkaloids are made for humans by nature, goddess, god or whatever you like to call it, the “great architect of the universe.” Our bodies also have an endocannabinoid system full of cannabis receptors located throughout the body. These are involved in a variety of physiological processes including appetite, pain-sensation, mood, and memory. (10) Similar to opiates, our bodies are designed to interact with these plant molecules and substances. (11) Medicine has long known about the uses of both opiates and cannabis but it has not been in the pharmaceutical lobby’s interest to promote cannabis due to the possibility of it severely reducing opiate |
dependency. The Catholic Church, Great Britain and the American pharmaceutical mafia have made untold hundreds of billions of dollars in profits by both the legal medicinal use and the black-market distribution of opiates. China has had a long history battling illegal markets introduced by the British since the 1800’s while opiate addiction keeps families of lower and middle classes trapped in endless cycles of poverty and disenfranchisement. Cave People What do we know about the earliest period of human food consumption? About one and a half million years ago, australopithecine kitchen type areas for early man found that 92% of bone fragments were antelope, indicating a diet of mostly bovine animals and this diet is maintained through the fossil record up to the modern day. (12) Zhoukoudian or Choukoutien is a cave system in suburban Fangshan District, Beijing. It has yielded many archaeological discoveries, including one of the first specimens of Homo erectus (Homo erectus pekinensis), dubbed Peking Man. This early hominid culture from 750,000 years ago had been making clubs, hand-axes, knives and scrapers and had the ability to work stone, bone, skin, and sinew from the period of approximately 670,000 years ago to 530,000 years ago. At this particular site, along with discarded animal bones, mostly deer, more than forty Homo erectus skulls were found as well. There were no body bones, only heads. All the heads had been crushed by blows and opened at the base to extract the brains. (13) At this point, it might be a good idea to withhold making assumptions about what they did with the brains. We simply do not know. (7) Food of the Gods, 20 (8) AMA Encyclopedia of Medicine, Random House, 1989, p. 405 (9) Solomon H. Snyder and Steven Matthysse, Opiate Receptor Mechanisms: the MIT Press, 1975 (10) Aizpurua-Olaizola O, Elezgarai I, Rico-Barrio I, Zarandona I, Etxebarria N, Usobiaga A (January 2017). "Targeting the endocannabinoid system: future therapeutic strategies". Drug Discovery Today. 22 (1): 105–110 (11) Russell, Shamanism and Drug Propaganda, p.7 (12) ibid, p.10; Raymond A. Dart, Adventures with the Missing Link: The Institutes Press, 1967, p.173 (13) ibid, p.11; Blanc, in Sherwood L. Washburn, Social Life of Early Man, Aldin Publishing, 1961, p. 133 |