The Failed Globalization of Psychedelic Drugs in the Early Modern World

Benjamin Breen

doi:10.1017/s0018246x21000224

Abstract

AbstractThis article reassesses what has been called ‘the puzzle of distribution’: why did some drugs rapidly emerge as global consumer goods in the era of the Columbian Exchange, whereas others remained restricted to regional centres of usage? I argue here that the early modern concept of transplantation allows us to approach the puzzle of distribution from a novel perspective. Early modern intoxicants were not disaggregated, free-floating commodities. Their consumption and trade took place within a larger constellation of social codes, cultural practices, ecologies, and built environments. Psychedelic compounds such as peyote and ayahuasca serve here as case studies for examining how the globalization of drugs involved far more than the transport of the substances themselves. Despite their centrality to numerous societies throughout the pre-Columbian Americas, the larger ‘assemblage’ of material cultures, cultural assumptions, and religious meanings that accrued around these substances made it difficult for them to follow the same paths as commodified drugs like cacao or tobacco.

Highlights

Why did some drugs, like tobacco, move readily across cultural and geographic barriers in the early modern era, while others, such as peyote, ayahuasca, and psilocybin mushrooms, remained confined to specific regions? What was it that made some substances into global commodities, but not others? This ‘great divergence of drugs’ in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, to adapt a phrase from economic history, has yet to be fully explained.[1]
This article reassesses what has been called ‘the puzzle of distribution’: why did some drugs rapidly emerge as global consumer goods in the era of the Columbian Exchange, whereas others remained restricted to regional centres of usage? I argue here that the early modern concept of transplantation allows us to approach the puzzle of distribution from a novel perspective
Like tobacco, move readily across cultural and geographic barriers in the early modern era, while others, such as peyote, ayahuasca, and psilocybin mushrooms, remained confined to specific regions? What was it that made some substances into global commodities, but not others? This ‘great divergence of drugs’ in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, to adapt a phrase from economic history, has yet to be fully explained.[1]

Summary

Introduction

Like tobacco, move readily across cultural and geographic barriers in the early modern era, while others, such as peyote, ayahuasca, and psilocybin mushrooms, remained confined to specific regions? What was it that made some substances into global commodities, but not others? This ‘great divergence of drugs’ in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, to adapt a phrase from economic history, has yet to be fully explained.[1].

Results

Conclusion