| > that you can't help but wonder if substance abuse hasn't
> been around a lot longer than we thought.
I don't know how long you thought it was around, but have you read "The
Odyssey?" You haven't? Shame on you!
But in the part where Telemachus is looking for his dad, and he drops
by Menalaus' house, and they get to weeping about the old times, and
Helen O'Troy (I guess she was Helen O'Sparta again by that time ...)
decides to give them a little pick-me-up to lift their spirits, do you
know what she gets them? Nepenthe! Which is to say, Opium. This is 1100
B.C., ya know.
Not to mention the lotus that Odysseus and his men eat, which puts them
to sleep. A well known side effect of opium -- could the lotuses really
have been poppies?
The worst case of substance abuse in that book was how Odysseus and his
friends dumped part of their wine on the ground before drinking it.
They called it a libation, but they were just abusing their substances!
And did the gods appreciate it? Look how long it to Odysseus to get
home!
The case has been made that primitive peoples actually began
cultivating in earnest in order to get a reliable source of grain from
which to make beer. Anne Rice even has a 6000-year-old vampire attest
to that assertion.
Jim B.
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