Hieronymous Bosch painting

Mankind has been getting high for so long, it doesn’t even make sense to ask when homo sapiens “discovered” mind-altering substances. They’ve just always sort of been there, asking to be drunk, eaten, and snuffed, a feature of our development as both a species and a civilization. From residues and fossils, we know that the use of psychoactive plants, seeds and fungi has been a steady feature of our time on this planet, dating back—way back—through humanity’s earliest known records. The late, great ethno-botanist and philosopher Terrence McKenna has even postulated that psilocybin-containing mushrooms might have spurred the final evolution of the human brain.

Evidence of our favorite prehistoric highs constitutes a global history. Mescaline beans have been found in Peru dating to around 9,000 BC. Throughout the Andes, cultures have been chewing coca leaves for at least that long. We know the Chinese were getting smashed on sweet, rudimentary wine around 7,000 BC, a full thousand years before many Americans believe the world was created as described in the Old Testament. […]