General History of Drugs

Antonio Escohotado's pioneering study manages to confront prejudice with detailed observation, freeing a region marked by fear and repression from bias. Since the Greeks designated them with the double term phármakon, which indicates both remedy and poison, knowledge about drugs has been proven to be the only effective way to distinguish uses and abuses. Contemplating demonization and beatification as crude forms of ignorance, proposing pharmacological illustration involves accepting the role of drugs in our species, to look squarely at how it is precisely our lack of neutrality that leads us to forget that both opium and Cannabis, like ecstasy, are neutral spirits discovered by the investigative spirit of humanity. This first volume takes as its starting point the pagan intoxication of ancient cultures, where the use of visionary drugs makes magic, pharmacy and religion fields indistinguishable, and concludes in the genesis of a prohibitionist consciousness after millennia of peaceful interaction. General History of Drugs traces our relationship with psychoactive compounds from the dawn of time until today, without finding such a thing as a culture devoid of their use or an era that is not marked by the discovery or use of this or that psychotropic drug.