03. Hand-Crafted Artisanal Psilocybin Chocolate Bars
Plus a core concept: drug, set, and setting
Dear Readers,
Good morning! It’s another lovely one here in the Midwest. I’m just finishing my daily, strictly limited twelve ounces of coffee. This is part of my master plan that I like to refer to as “radical moderation.”™ No more than one dose of any intoxicant at any given time. I’m not sure how I decided that twelve ounces was a “dose” of coffee, but there it is. Seems to be what I can handle without insomnia. With alcohol it’s easier. One beer, or 1.5 ounces of liquor, or one glass of wine. It definitely works for me. Except when I’m feeling sad or lethargic or stressed out. Then I find it actually helps to have several doses at once.
I kid. Sort of.
Anyway, I’d like to continue our journey into the many ways of ingesting cannabis and why this matters to U.S. drug history, and really U.S. history as a whole, given how important drugs have been to this country’s story over the last century.
But before we do that, check this out (courtesy of our California correspondent):
“Not produced by soulless machines like the other guys’ bars.” Amen! I am absolutely sick and tired of these big psychedelic chocolate factories popping up on every block around here! When will it end!?!?
It’s also nice that you can opt for either the standard “microdose” so popular these days in Silicon Valley, or go full-on “religious.” It doesn’t even say “results may vary”! Amazing! Though perhaps they should also include a “You’ll wind up crying in the fetal position” dose, just to account for all of the possibilities.
Ok, so last time I posed the following question: Why did recreational cannabis use only begin to catch on in the U.S. in the early twentieth century even though cannabis drugs had been widely available in the United States since the 1850s?
And I offered the following hypothesis: In the nineteenth century the few Americans who were experimenting with cannabis were regularly taking large edible doses and as a result getting WAY TOO STONED, making their experiences often very unpleasant. I really like this theory. But I also have to admit it’s not bulletproof, for various reasons. We’ll eventually explore all of those reasons, but today I’d just like to consider what is probably the most important—the key concept of “drug, set, and setting.”
Of all the things you might take away from these short missives about drugs, this might be the most important: Drug effects are governed by the dynamic interplay of many factors that go far beyond the pharmacology of the drug in question. The drug does matter of course, and the dose of the drug, and, as I’ve already suggested, the way the drug is consumed (Smoked? Swallowed? Snorted? Injected? Vaporized?). But there’s much, much more. There is where it is ingested, i.e. the “setting,” both in an immediate, physical sense (At home alone in your kitchen? Out in the woods with an experienced guide? At a music festival with thousands of strangers?), and in a more diffuse cultural sense (Nineteenth century America? Twentieth century Mexico?). And there is also the psychological state of the user, or “set,” at the time of consumption (Novice user nervous about taking the drug? Experienced user taking it for the umpteenth time? Good Mood? Bad Mood?).
Thus drug-use outcomes tend to be, as scholars like to say, “overdetermined.” That is, for any given outcome there are a bunch of potential causes that are very difficult to untangle. This is especially the case with drugs that we might categorize as “psychedelics.” Indeed, it was Timothy Leary, the controversial psychedelic guru, who coined the phrase “drug, set, and setting.”
Cannabis, which sometimes is considered an “atypical psychedelic,” is especially complicated because its various strains have wildly varying levels of the cannabinoids that constitute its “active” ingredients. And there is some reason to believe that the most famous of these, THC and CBD, interact dynamically, and that these same cannabinoids can degrade into other cannabinoids, THC into CBN (cannabinol), for example.
For drugs generally it is complicated. For cannabis it is especially complicated, especially since cannabinoids weren’t even discovered until the 1960s. We have no idea what the cannabinoid content of nineteenth century “weed” was, and, given the various limitations on the sources available to us, we can only begin to unpack the set and setting of particular drug-use episodes. I’ve referred to this complexity elsewhere as “the psychoactive riddle” because it’s so difficult to untangle.
Keep that information in your pocket because we’ll come back to it continuously as we consider drugs and drug use in both the past and present.
So how widely used was cannabis in the nineteenth and early twentieth century United States? Well consider this evidence from 1910 Congressional hearings on federal drug legislation, just before there seems to have been an uptick in cannabis’ popularity as an intoxicant. Here the prominent New York druggist William J. Schieffelin was asked, “What is cannabis?”
Mr. Schieffelin: Cannabis is what is called Indian hemp, or hasheesh. It is used only to a slight extent in this country; but I heard today from Dr. Billings, with whom I breakfasted, that in the Syrian colony in New York there is a demand for it, and they get their supply of hemp. It is used in the same way that smoking opium is used. The evil is minute, but it ought to be included in the bill.
I bet that was a crazy breakfast. Twenty years earlier, when Schieffelin married Maria Louisa Vanderbilt Shepard, the hundreds of gifts included two silver dishes sent by the President of the United States and a fully furnished house gifted by the bride’s mother! Not bad. But that’s another story.
The point here is that there were a lot of pretty obvious signs that recreational cannabis use, while not unknown, was pretty darn rare in the United States. Then, in the 1910s, it starts to catch on.
Some scholars have argued that the key was that Mexicans “introduced” marijuana smoking to the United States around then. But, as I’ll demonstrate next time, Americans had known since at least the 1850s that you could smoke cannabis, they just seem to have preferred to swallow it for, I think, cultural reasons. And swallowing cannabis back then came with very unpredictable results.
But we’ll explore all of that on Friday. Until then, enjoy your week.