Book Reviews About Drugs And History
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Book Reviews About Drugs And History
Cleansing the Doors of Perception:
The Religious Significance of
Entheogenic Plants and Chemicals
A collection of essays by religious scholar and author, Huston Smith. The book looks at the entheogenic plants and chemicals various cultures and individuals have used to expand spiritual awareness.
Although the author is known for his religious books like the world's religions, he was a participant in the Good Friday experiment of 1962, when a group (headed by Timothy Leary) ingested psychedelic drugs and attended Good Friday religious services.
Cleansing the Doors of Perception Drugs and Narcotics in History
A collection of essays exploring the complex history of drugs and narcotics throughout history from ancient Greece to the present day.
The book shows how substances were originally sought as healing agents, both within and without the medical profession. Might be a little too text book like for some readers.
Drugs and Narcotics in History Essential Substances:
A Cultural History of Intoxicants in Society
This is primarily a book about the origins of drug use, rather than a view of current drug history. It does have info about the present, but that is not its primary objective.
Richard Rudgley shows how our attitudes toward these substances have been shaped by cultural values, and how our own use of intoxicants like alcohol, coffee, tea, and tobacco is an integral part of the age-old worldwide quest for altered states.
Essential Substances Forces of Habit:
Drugs and the Making of the Modern World
Easy to read, informative, and well researched. A general history of drugs that traces the spread of drug use and addiction from small isolated groups to the large scale business drugs have become today.
Includes the history of psychoactive substances, legal and illegal. Tobacco, alcohol, caffeine, cocaine, marijuana, opiates, and other less common drugs are also discussed.
A very good view of the use of drugs and the influence they have had on society from ancient times to today.
Forces of Habit Mushrooms and Mankind:
The Impact of Mushrooms on
Human Consciousness and Religion
A book about the impact psychoactive mushrooms (primarily Amanita muscaria) have had on the history of the human race. If you have any interest in psychoactive mushrooms and how they have influenced the history of our planet, you should read a copy of this small book (about 100 pages).
Spanning from pre-history to the present, the author shows the deep impact mushrooms have played in almost every culture and religion that have had access to them. Includes mushrooms and Mesopotamia, Egypt, India, USA, Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity, and more.
Mushrooms and Mankind Phantastica:
A Classic Survey on the
Use and Abuse of Mind-Altering Plants
The first book to bring non-judgmental scientific insights to the use of drugs around the world. Written in 1924, it provides detailed information on opium, cocaine, heroin, cannabis, peyote, alcohol, coffee, tobacco, and many more.
About the Author: Louis Lewin, M.D. (1850--1929) was the author of more than 200 major publications on the subject of pharmacology, including 12 books. He was the first researcher to study peyote with the Native Americans and the first to publish a monograph on kava. He directed a private laboratory in Berlin.
Phantastica Pharmacotheon:
Entheogenic Drugs Their Plant Sources and Histories
Entheogenics are hallucinogenic drugs used in a religious or shamanic context. This book explorers just about all aspects of plants that early humans used for shamanic purposes.
A very good book for those with an advanced interest in entheogenic drugs. The author includes results of several self-experiments and offers an opinion on the issue of entheogenic use.
Pharmacotheon Psychedelics Encyclopedia
Psychedelics Encyclopedia draws from scientific research, personal accounts, and popular literature to document the properties attributed to psychedelic substances, their preparation and use, and the shifting social attitudes toward them over the past half-century.
A very good sourcebook for anyone interested in the psychological, biological, physiological and cultural aspects of psychedelic drugs. A fascinating historical reference on psychedelia, from the LSD-25 of the sixties, to the memory and cognitive enhancers of today are compiled with over 200 illustrations.
Featured are the LSD family, marijuana and its botanical relatives, peyote, mescaline and San Pedro, psychoactive mushrooms, the MDA cluster, yage and harmaline, ibogaine, short-acting tryptamines (DMT, DET, DPT), nootropics, and other psychoactive substances.
Each is treated with respect to its history, botany, pharmacology, physical effects, mental effects, forms, sources, purity tests,. Included are biographies, updates, and bibliographies for further research and studies.
Psychedelics Encyclopedia Shamanism and the Drug Propaganda
Traces the roots of the modern Drug War back to their ancient origins. Draws extensively from archeological evidence, presenting object after object engraved with symbols of shamanic travels, and he deconstructs countless ancient stories and myths to show that many of them alluded to visionary states elicited by the ingestion of psychoactive plants and potions.
Shamanism and Drug Propaganda is so detail rich that a summary does it an injustice. In essence, however, Russell argues that over time, the stories told by ancient people (culminating in the New Testament), have been co-opted, corrupted, and manipulated by forces bent on producing a conformist industrial culture.
---Richard Glen Boire, Esq., Executive Director, The Alchemind Society
Shamanism and the Drug Propaganda The American Disease:
Origins of Narcotic Control
A book more for the student, than the average reader. This is a classic study of the development of drug laws in the U.S.
David Musto examines the relations between public outcry and the creation of prohibitive drug laws from the end of the Civil War to the Reagan and Clinton administrations.
The American Disease The Encyclopedia of Psychoactive Plants:
Ethnopharmacology and Its Applications
Very nice book and considering the subject matter, it's easy to understand. The botany, history, distribution, cultivation, preparation and dosage of more than 400 psychoactive plants. Over 900 pages with hundreds of black and white illustrations and full color photographs.
Information about almost every plant that has been used for medical, spiritual, or recreational purposes. Includes all the common and most of the less common plant drugs. This is the most thorough plant drug encyclopedia available at the present time.
The Encyclopedia of Psychoactive Plants The Walls of Illusion
A book about the psychedelic era as it was seen by the people who lived it. The sixties was the decade that produced hippies, flower power and free love, the era that saw an unprecedented explosion of youth culture; but above all it was the time when people began to experiment with mind-expanding drugs.
Pot, LSD, mescaline circulated freely, and their effects are imprinted on the art, music and literature of the period. The book is more about the society of the time, as opposed to the drugs themselves.
The Walls of Illusion Understanding Medications:
What the Label Doesn't Tell You
A very interesting and easy to understand history and mode of action book about most major drugs, including digitalis, aspirin, sulfanilamide, LSD, marijuana, and other drugs, both legal and illegal.
Explores the economical, ethical, and medical factors of drugs. Discusses the action of hormones, vitamins, enzymes, and other biocatalysts.
Provides the reader with information on drugs in a clear and understandable manner. Valuable reading for anyone interested in the history, uses, and action of medications.
Understanding Medications Webs Of Smoke:
Smugglers, Warlords, Spies, and the History of the International Drug Trade
This history of international drug trafficking in the first half of the 20th century follows the stories of American narcs and gangsters, Japanese spies, Chinese warlords, and soldiers of fortune whose lives revolved around opium.
Webs Of Smoke