The Entire History of Drugs in 23 Minutes transcript

Hi, you're a human and like every human before you, you want to feel different than you currently feel. Maybe happier, maybe calmer, maybe like you're melting into the cosmic fabric of existence while a tree tells you its secrets. That desire is ancient and it basically invented drugs. This is the entire history of drugs from cavemen eating weird mushrooms to your cousin selling Adderall in a Wendy's parking lot. Prehistory, when we first got high.

Let's start 10,000 years ago. Humans are still figuring out farming, but somehow they've already discovered psychedelic mushrooms. Archaeologists found cave paintings in Algeria showing people holding mushrooms with little wavy lines coming off them. That's ancient for I'm tripping right now. Early drug use was mostly spiritual. Shamans would eat plants, see visions, and tell everyone what the gods wanted. Sometimes the gods wanted rain, sometimes the gods wanted a sacrifice, sometimes the gods wanted everyone to dance for 6 hours straight.

Depends on the mushroom. Meanwhile, in Mesopotamia around 3400 BC, people discovered opium poppies. They called it hul gil, which translates to joy plant. That's adorable. That's also the plant that would eventually create heroin, fentanyl, and the entire opioid crisis, but we'll get there. Over in South America, people were chewing coca leaves for energy. It's like ancient Red Bull except it grows on a bush and eventually becomes cocaine.

Workers chewed it to labor longer, messengers chewed it to run faster. It's been used continuously for over 3,000 years. Cannabis shows up in Central Asia around 2500 BC. The Scythians would throw it on hot stones in enclosed tents and hotbox themselves. Herodotus wrote about it. He said they'd howl with pleasure. The first documented stoner circle. Kava appeared in the Pacific Islands. Betel nut in Southeast Asia, which is still chewed by 600 million people today.

Peyote in Mexico among indigenous tribes. Every culture found something to alter their consciousness with. It's almost like humans are hardwired to want an escape hatch from reality. But the oldest drug, alcohol. Someone left fruit juice out too long, it fermented, they drank it, they felt funny, and humanity was like we should do this on purpose. Alcohol has been with us ever since through every war, every empire, every bad decision at a wedding reception.

Archaeological evidence suggests we were brewing beer before we were baking bread. Priorities. Ancient civilizations getting sophisticated. Fast forward to ancient Greece. Philosophers are drinking wine and debating the meaning of existence. Plato wrote about symposiums, which were basically wine parties with intellectual conversation. Socrates could allegedly drink everyone under the table and still ask annoying questions about virtue.

The Greeks also had something called kykeon, a barley drink used in religious ceremonies that may have contained psychedelic ergot fungus. Some historians think the famous Eleusinian Mysteries, a secret religious ritual, involved getting absolutely blasted on psychedelics. Plato, Aristotle, and Socrates all participated. We'll never know exactly what happened because participants were sworn to secrecy under penalty of death.

The Romans took opium trade seriously. They shipped it across the empire and used it for medicine, recreation, and probably dealing with the stress of constant gladiator scheduling. Roman physicians prescribed it for everything from insomnia to diarrhea to surgery. In China, cannabis was being used medicinally by 2700 BC. The legendary Emperor Shen Nong allegedly tested hundreds of herbs on himself and recorded their effects.

He recommended cannabis for gout, rheumatism, and absent-mindedness. Ancient Egypt was basically a pharmaceutical wonderland. The Ebers Papyrus from 1550 BC is an ancient medical textbook that recommends opium for crying children. Yes, they drugged babies. Parenting was different back then. They also used cannabis and possibly blue lotus for pain and rituals. In the Amazon, indigenous tribes were brewing ayahuasca, a psychedelic tea made by combining two plants, neither of which does anything on its own.

How they figured out that specific combination out of 80,000 plant species in the Amazon is one of history's great mysteries. The brew makes you vomit, hallucinate, and allegedly meet your ancestors. Still popular today, but now it costs $3,000 at a retreat center in Costa Rica. Hindu texts mention a mysterious drink called soma that gave strength, immortality, and visions. No one actually knows what soma was. Could be a mushroom, could be cannabis, could be ephedra, could be a plant that doesn't exist anymore.

The recipe is lost to history, which is probably for the best. And somewhere around 850 AD, a goat herder in Ethiopia noticed his goats were acting weird after eating certain berries. He tried them himself and felt energized. That's coffee, the first stimulant that wouldn't eventually land you in prison. Coffee spread to the Arab world where Sufi monks used it to stay awake for nighttime prayers. Coffee houses became centers of intellectual life.

Some historians credit coffee with kickstarting the Enlightenment because everyone suddenly had the energy to think. Middle Ages, distillation and global trade. During the Islamic Golden Age, Arab scholars invented distillation. Ironic, since alcohol is forbidden in Islam. But they were trying to make perfumes and medicines. What they accidentally created was the ability to make drinks way stronger. Thanks to distillation, we went from wine to whiskey, from beer to brandy.

The word alcohol itself comes from Arabic, al-kuhl. Hashish spread through the Middle East. One legend says a group called the Assassins used it before missions, which is where we get the word assassin. Probably not true, but it's a great story. What's definitely true is that hashish was popular enough that sultans kept trying to ban it. Then Europeans showed up in the Americas and everything changed. Indigenous Americans had been using tobacco for centuries in ceremonies and medicine.

Europeans looked at it and thought, "What if we did this constantly for no spiritual reason, just because?" By the 1600s, tobacco was so valuable it was used as currency in Virginia. People paid their taxes in tobacco. They bought wives with tobacco. The cash crop that built colonial America was an addictive drug. Europeans also found coca leaves in South America and brought samples back. And coffee from the Middle East.

And tea from China. Suddenly Europe had access to stimulants from three different continents. Chocolate came over, too, which contains theobromine, a mild stimulant. Everyone was getting caffeinated. The global drug trade had officially begun. Empires would rise and fall based on who controlled what substances. The 1800s, when drugs were in everything. Okay, now things get wild. The 1800s are when scientists learn to isolate the active ingredients in plants.

This changed everything. In 1804, a German pharmacist named Friedrich Serturner extracted morphine from opium. He named it after Morpheus, the Greek god of dreams. It killed pain like nothing else. It was a miracle. It was also devastatingly addictive, but they wouldn't figure that out for a while. The invention of the hypodermic needle in the 1850s made things worse because injecting morphine hits faster and harder.

The Civil War created thousands of morphine addicts. They called it soldiers disease. In 1855, cocaine was isolated from coca leaves. Doctors loved it. They used it for toothaches, depression, and surgery. It was the first effective local anesthetic. Suddenly dentists could pull teeth without making you scream. Sigmund Freud was obsessed with cocaine. He wrote papers about how great it was. He gave it to his friends, his patients, himself.

He recommended it for morphine addiction, depression, and fatigue. He was basically cocaine's hype man for years before admitting, "Maybe this stuff is a little too good." His friend and patient ended up addicted and paranoid injecting himself daily. Oops. Coca-Cola launched in 1886 with actual coca leaf extract in it. The inventor, a morphine addict, marketed it as a cure for headaches and exhaustion. The cocaine was removed in 1903 after concerns about addiction, but the name stayed.

Pepsi never had cocaine, which is why Coca-Cola won. In 1898, Bayer Pharmaceutical Company invented a new drug. They called it heroin because it made you feel heroic. They marketed it as a non-addictive cough suppressant. That's right, heroin was sold as a safe alternative to morphine. This is like marketing a chainsaw as a safe alternative to scissors. Bayer sold it until 1913. Meanwhile, laudanum, which is opium dissolved in alcohol, was everywhere.

You could buy it at any pharmacy without a prescription. Doctors gave it to women for hysteria, which was the medical term for any female emotion they didn't understand. Parents gave it to babies for teething. Soothing syrups for infants contained morphine. Victorian England was basically sedated. And for fun, people threw ether parties. You'd inhale ether and pass out briefly. It was like the vape pens of the 1840s, except you could actually die.

Chloroform parties, too. Recreational anesthesia was a whole thing. The 1800s treated drugs like candy. No regulations, no prescriptions, just pure chaos in a bottle. Sears Roebuck catalogs sold heroin kits. Patent medicines contained cocaine, morphine, and alcohol in random combinations. Nobody had to list the ingredients. Early 1900s, prohibition begins. Eventually people noticed that all these miracle drugs were creating addicts.

Oops. The first major drug law was the Opium Exclusion Act of 1909, which banned smoking opium. Notice it didn't ban all opium, just the way Chinese immigrants used it. White people's laudanum and morphine were fine. That's a pattern you'll see a lot in drug law history. In 1914, the Harrison Narcotics Act required registration and taxes for opiates and cocaine. It didn't technically ban them, but it made them much harder to get legally.

Doctors who kept prescribing to addicts got arrested. The Supreme Court ruled that maintaining an addiction wasn't a legitimate medical purpose. Then came alcohol prohibition in 1920. The government decided that alcohol was too dangerous and banned it entirely. What happened next? Organized crime exploded. Speakeasies opened everywhere. People drank moonshine that sometimes made them go blind because it contained methanol.

The murder rate spiked. Al Capone made $60 million a year. It was a disaster. Prohibition ended in 1933. Lesson learned, right? Nope. The government would try the exact same approach with other drugs for the next 90 years. Marijuana was next. In the 1930s, a man named Harry Anslinger ran the Federal Bureau of Narcotics and needed something to do after alcohol prohibition ended. He launched a crusade against cannabis, calling it marijuana to associate it with Mexican immigrants.

He told Congress that marijuana made people insane and violent. He said it caused white women to seek relations with black men. The propaganda film Reefer Madness warned that one puff would turn you into a violent maniac. Kids would watch this in school and then go home to parents who took morphine for headaches. Drugs were no longer a medical problem. They were a moral one. 1940s to 1950s, the pharma golden age. World War ran on amphetamines.

American soldiers, British soldiers, German soldiers, Japanese soldiers, all of them were given stimulants to stay awake during long missions. The Nazis called their pills Pervitin. It was basically crystal meth. Hitler's personal doctor injected him with it regularly among other drugs. The Blitzkrieg was partly just a meth binge. After the war, pharmaceutical companies kept making amphetamines for civilians. Housewives took them to lose weight and keep the house clean.

Truckers took them to drive all night. College students took them to study. Everyone was jittery and productive and slightly paranoid. In 1943, a Swiss chemist named Albert Hofmann accidentally discovered LSD. He was researching ergot fungus for potential medicines when some LSD 25 absorbed through his skin. He started feeling weird and rode his bicycle home while the world melted around him. That day, April 19th, is now called Bicycle Day.

It's like a holiday for psychonauts. The CIA got very interested in LSD. They launched a program called MK Ultra to see if they could use it for mind control, interrogation, and creating sleeper agents. They dosed people without their knowledge, including their own agents, mental patients, and prisoners. They paid prostitutes to dose their clients at a safe house while agents watched through one-way mirrors. One CIA employee, Frank Olson, was dosed without knowing and jumped out a window days later.

Others had mental breakdowns. The program was eventually shut down and most of the records were destroyed. What we know comes from documents that accidentally survived. Benzos arrived in the 1950s with Librium and then Valium. Finally, a pill that could calm you down without knocking you out completely. Valium became the most prescribed drug in America from 1968 to 1982. Mother's little helper, The Rolling Stones called it.

Millions of housewives were addicted. 1960s to 1970s. Counterculture and the war on drugs. A Harvard psychology professor named Timothy Leary started giving it to students and celebrities and anyone who would listen. He told everyone to turn on, tune in, drop out. Harvard fired him. He became a counterculture icon. The hippie movement embraced psychedelics as tools for consciousness expansion. Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters drove across America in a painted bus handing out acid.

The Grateful Dead played it LSD with transforming their music. Woodstock happened, psychedelic rock happened, an entire generation questioned authority, opposed the Vietnam War, and experimented with substances their parents had never heard of. The government was not pleased. Meanwhile, heroin was spreading. Partly because soldiers in Vietnam had easy access to cheap pure heroin. Some estimates say 15% of soldiers were addicted.

Many came home and kept using. In 1971, President Nixon declared a war on drugs. He called drug abuse public enemy number one. He created the DEA in 1973. He signed the Controlled Substances Act, which created the drug scheduling system we still use today. Schedule one means high abuse potential and no accepted medical use. That's where they put heroin, LSD, and marijuana. Cocaine is schedule two. Methamphetamine is schedule two.

Marijuana is in the same category as heroin, which is insane. But here's the thing. One of Nixon's top advisers, John Ehrlichman, later admitted that the war on drugs was never really about drugs. He said, "We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities." The war on drugs was a political weapon disguised as public health. 1980s, crack and mass incarceration.

Cocaine flooded into America in the 1980s. Colombian cartels led by Pablo Escobar were shipping tons of it. Miami looked like a war zone. Vice City wasn't exaggerating. The cartels were making billions and killing anyone who got in the way. Then someone figured out you could cook cocaine into a smokable form by adding baking soda and water. Crack was born. It was cheaper, more intense, and more addictive. A crack high lasts 5 to 10 minutes, so users smoke it over and over.

It devastated inner-city communities. The government response was harsh. Nancy Reagan launched the Just Say No campaign, which was about as effective as telling people to just say no to breathing. Congress passed mandatory minimum sentences. Possession of 5 g of crack got you the same sentence as 500 g of powder cocaine, even though they're chemically identical. One was associated with poor black communities, the other with wealthy white users.

The disparity was 100 to 1. Mass incarceration exploded. America's prison population quadrupled between 1980 and 2000. We went from 300,000 prisoners to over 2 million. The private prison industry boomed. Companies made money for every body in a cell. The DARE program taught kids that all drugs were equally dangerous and that one hit would ruin your life. Studies later showed DARE didn't actually reduce drug use. Some studies suggested it might have increased experimentation by making drugs seem more interesting, but it did create a generation that distrusted drug education entirely.

The AIDS epidemic also hit during this decade, spreading rapidly among needle-sharing heroin users. Clean needle programs could have slowed the spread, but the government was slow to act because they saw it as enabling drug use. 1990s, raves, meth, and the seeds of opioids. Ecstasy and the rave scene exploded. MDMA made everyone feel connected and lovey. Electronic music filled warehouses, glow sticks everywhere. People danced until sunrise.

Parents were terrified. MDMA was actually invented in 1912 by Merck, but nobody cared until therapists started using it in the 1970s. It made people open up, then it leaked into clubs and was banned in 1985. Meth labs started spreading, especially in rural areas. Cheap, easy to make with household chemicals like pseudoephedrine and battery acid, and extremely addictive. Meth is essentially DIY amphetamine on steroids.

Ketamine and GHB became club drugs. Drug testing at work became normal. The drug war continued, but the biggest story of the '90s happened in a boardroom, not a back alley. In 1996, Purdue Pharma released OxyContin and told doctors it was safe. Less than 1% addiction rate, they claimed, based on a one-paragraph letter to a medical journal that wasn't even a study. They sent sales reps to doctors' offices with pizza, pens, and misleading data.

Purdue targeted rural areas where people did physical labor and had chronic pain. They paid doctors to give speeches promoting the drug. They denied the addiction potential even as reports piled up. Doctors started prescribing OxyContin for everything. Back pain? Oxy. Dental work? Oxy. Stubbed toe? Oxy. The opioid crisis had been planted, it just hadn't bloomed yet. 2000s, the prescription epidemic. OxyContin prescriptions skyrocketed.

Pill mills opened in Florida where doctors would write prescriptions for cash, no questions asked. People drove from Ohio, Kentucky, and West Virginia to stock up. They called it the Oxy Express. By the mid-2000s, prescription opioids were killing more Americans than heroin. These weren't street drugs. They came in orange bottles with pharmacy labels. Your doctor gave them to you. Your insurance paid for them. Adderall abuse spread through colleges.

Kids who didn't have ADHD were taking it to study all night. It became the unofficial drug of higher education. Nobody called that a crisis because it was mostly white college kids. Purdue Pharma eventually got caught lying about OxyContin's addiction risk. Internal documents showed they knew it was addictive and marketed it anyway. They paid a $600 fine in 2007. Their executives pleaded guilty to misbranding. They got probation, no jail time.

The company kept selling pills. The Sackler family, who owned Purdue, became billionaires. They put their name on museums at the Met, the Louvre, and the Smithsonian. They donated to universities. They were philanthropists. They also knowingly caused an epidemic that would eventually kill over 500,000 Americans. 2010s. Fentanyl and reform. The opioid crisis was finally declared a public health emergency, but it kept getting worse because now there was fentanyl.

Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid that's 50 to 100 times stronger than morphine. It's made in labs, mostly in China and Mexico, and mixed into heroin to make it stronger. The problem is dosing. The difference between a dose and a lethal dose is tiny. A few grains of fentanyl can kill you. Drug dealers started mixing fentanyl into everything. Heroin, counterfeit pills, even cocaine. Users had no idea what they were getting.

Overdose deaths skyrocketed. Meanwhile, attitudes toward marijuana were shifting. Colorado and Washington legalized recreational use in 2012. Other states followed. It's now legal in most of the still federally illegal and schedule one. America contains multitudes. The Silk Road, an online marketplace on the dark web, let people buy drugs with Bitcoin and get them delivered by mail. It was eventually shut down in 2013 and its founder, Ross Ulbricht, got two life sentences plus 40 years.

Other markets popped up immediately. Designer drugs appeared. Synthetic cannabinoids like K2 and Spice. Bath salts that caused psychotic episodes and cannibalism headlines. Things cooked up in labs to technically not be illegal. Sold at gas stations until someone died. Portugal decriminalized all drugs back in 2001 and saw addiction rates, HIV infections, and overdose deaths all drop. But America mostly ignored that data because it didn't fit the narrative. 2020s, psychedelic renaissance.

Something weird is happening. Psychedelics are becoming medicine again. Oregon decriminalized all drugs in 2020. Psilocybin therapy is being approved for treatment-resistant depression. Studies show that one or two guided sessions can have effects lasting months. MDMA is in final FDA trials for PTSD treatment and it works better than any existing treatment. Ketamine clinics are opening everywhere. It's technically legal because it's approved for anesthesia, so doctors can prescribe it off-label.

An IV drip of ketamine costs $500 and might cure your depression. Insurance usually doesn't cover it. The cannabis industry went corporate. There are publicly traded weed companies now. Martha Stewart has a CBD line. Snoop Dogg was involved from the start, obviously. Some states have billion-dollar legal markets while people are still in prison for selling weed in states next door. But fentanyl deaths keep climbing. Over 100,000 Americans died from overdoses in 2023.

Most of them from synthetic opioids. That's more than car accidents and gun deaths combined. It's more than AIDS killed at the peak of that epidemic. The debate now is harm reduction versus abstinence. Do we fight drugs with enforcement or do we accept that people will use drugs and try to minimize the damage? Safe injection sites let people use drugs with medical supervision so they don't die alone. Fentanyl test strips let users check if their supply is contaminated.

Naloxone kits can reverse overdoses if given in time. These approaches reduce deaths. Studies prove it, but some argue they enable addiction. Others argue that dead people can't recover, so keeping them alive is the first step. There's no easy answer. How drugs actually work. Quick science break. Your brain has a reward system powered by dopamine. It evolved to make you feel good when you do things that help you survive, like eating and reproducing.

Drugs hijack that system. Stimulants like cocaine and meth flood your brain with dopamine. You feel incredible, euphoric, confident, unstoppable. Then your brain adjusts by reducing its own dopamine production and sensitivity. Now you need the drug just to feel normal. That's addiction. Without the drug, you're worse than baseline. Opioids attach to receptors that control pain and pleasure. They feel like a warm blanket wrapping your entire existence.

Pain disappears, physical and emotional. They're incredibly addictive because your body stops producing its own natural painkillers and starts needing the external supply. Psychedelics work differently. They bind to serotonin receptors and disrupt the brain's default mode network, the part that creates your sense of self. That's why ego dissolution happens. That's why you feel connected to everything. They're generally not physically addictive, but they can trigger psychotic episodes in vulnerable people.

Cannabis is complicated. THC binds to cannabinoid receptors that exist throughout your brain and body. It can be relaxing or anxiety inducing depending on the strain, dose, and person. Some people use it daily for years with no problems. Others develop dependency. Set and setting matter enormously. The same drug can be transcendent or terrifying depending on your mental state, environment, and expectations. That's why clinical psychedelic therapy involves careful preparation, comfortable settings, and trained guides.

It's not about the drug, it's about the experience. Tolerance builds when your brain adapts to a substance. You need more to get the same effect. Withdrawal happens when you stop and your brain freaks out from the sudden absence. Overdose happens when you take more than your body can handle and something shuts down. What's next? Decriminalization is spreading. More psychedelics are entering clinical trials for depression, PTSD, addiction, and end-of-life anxiety.

Harm reduction is becoming mainstream, but new drugs keep appearing. Synthetic compounds designed in labs faster than laws can ban them. Fentanyl analogs that are even stronger than fentanyl. Nitazenes, a class of synthetic opioids even more potent than fentanyl, are starting to appear. Some researchers are working on addiction treatments that target the brain directly. Vaccines that create antibodies against opioids so they can't produce a high.

Implants that release naltrexone to block cravings. Ayahuasca therapy that allegedly resets addiction in one intense trip. Gene therapies that might alter how your brain responds to substances. It sounds like science fiction, but so did most of the things in this video before they happened. The relationship between humans and drugs is as old as humanity itself. We've tried prohibition, it didn't work. We've tried war, it made things worse.

We've tried pretending the problem doesn't exist. That killed people. Maybe the future involves accepting that drugs will always be here and figuring out how to minimize the harm and maximize the benefit. Maybe it involves technology we haven't invented yet. Maybe it involves treating addiction as a health issue instead of a moral failing. Or maybe we'll just keep doing what we've always done, making the same mistakes, blaming the same scapegoats, and acting surprised when it doesn't work.

That's drugs, all of it. From magic mushrooms in a prehistoric cave to fentanyl test strips in a harm reduction center. Thousands of years of humans trying to feel different than they feel. Okay, this took forever to research and I need to lie down. If you learned something, hit the like button. If this video gets enough engagement, I'll make a part two covering individual drugs in more depth. That's how the algorithm works and I am its humble servant.