Sunday 10 February 2002

Pic of the day: Screenshot from Dark Age of Camelot. Somehow I found it fitting.

Choose your poison

What is it with humans and partial poisoning anyway? I can't believe there is any other species that seeks out and enjoys a variety of poisonous substances. (Though I know for a fact that goats eat a red mushroom with white flecks which is moderately toxic to humans. It is said to encourage agression, as if the goats ever needed that, but its main effect is to make people somewhat sick. It is not considered lethal to adult humans, because nobody likes it that much. Oh, and I grew up with goats and those mushrooms, but I did not eat them myself.)

Back to humans. Alcohol probably comes first to mind, but there are a lot of slightly poisonous foods. Coffee, tee and chocolate all contain alkaloids, toxins that influence the central nervous system. As you may have heard (hopefully not found out on your own) these are all highly toxic to dogs, and probably several other mammals too. Not recommended pet foods. Somehow humans not only survive the same quantities that kill dogs, but usually feel better than without. Strange, huh?

Still sticking to the most common stuff, there is nicotine. Tobacco leaves contain the stuff to kill off plant-eating insects. It is toxic to humans too, but even so a lot of people (a majority, I would believe) like it when they have tried it a few times. They actually seem to function better when they have trace amounts of the poison in their bloodstream, and correspondingly function worse than usual when not.

And one of the plants in the hemp family (cannabis), contains another toxin that unbalances the brain chemistry. This plant too has been used for a long time. Evidently it was cultivated in England during the Roman occupation, though it is unclear whether this was mainly for the drug or for more useful products. Probably the former, because there is another hemp plant that gives far better fiber for ropes and such.

Poppies give another group of poisons, opiates. These too have been enjoyed since the dark ages or before, originally in Asia. The use of opium for leisure was almost accepted in the west too a few generations ago, but with the new and stronger refined opiates there was a backlash.

***

OK, that should be enough for now. Here is my thought about this. Who in their right mind, or the nearest surrounding of same, has spent their time discovering these things? In the first place, I mean?

I get this weird mental image. It is the dawn of civilization, when life is nasty, brutish and short. You have to get up with the early birds and work till darkness falls to feed yourself and a heap of kids, hoping that at least a couple of them survive so your name doesn't die out of history. The world is poorly known and poorly understood. Floods hit out of the blue (or gray, at least) and drought and pests and wild beasts destroy the crops and livestock. Times are hard.

In this situation, there are a segment of the population actively testing each and every type of plant. They separate roots, stem, flower, fruit and leaves. For each they try to chew, smoke, cook and drink, and if all else fails, eat the thing. I don't know how many hundred species live around an average village. But logically they must have gone through quite a few of them before they hit on the ones they liked. How many people died while testing some kind of plant that was just a bit too toxic? And what in the world possessed them to do this?

I can concede that some people may have eaten unusual stuff because they were starving and hoped to find something edible, anything at all. But that doesn not explain the invention of smoking, which evidently happened independently on both sides of the Pacific. Perhaps they were looking to make incense, and then they found this particular smoke and thought "gods be damned, we'll keep this for ourselves". I don't know. I'm sure there is an explanation, and I'm sure it is really really weird.

Then again, aren't we all?

Oh yeah, and this entry comes to you courtesy of me eating too much dark chocolate. I don't feel too well ...