The Age of Intoxication

Origins of the Global Drug Trade

Benjamin Breen

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780812296624
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia mondiale

Eating the flesh of an Egyptian mummy prevents the plague. Distilled poppies reduce melancholy. A Turkish drink called coffee increases alertness. Tobacco cures cancer. Such beliefs circulated in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, an era when the term "drug" encompassed everything from herbs and spices—like nutmeg, cinnamon, and chamomile—to such deadly poisons as lead, mercury, and arsenic. In The Age of Intoxication, Benjamin Breen offers a window into a time when drugs were not yet separated into categories—illicit and licit, recreational and medicinal, modern and traditional—and there was no barrier between the drug dealer and the pharmacist.Focusing on the Portuguese colonies in Brazil and Angola and on the imperial capital of Lisbon, Breen examines the process by which novel drugs were located, commodified, and consumed. He then turns his attention to the British Empire, arguing that it owed much of its success in this period to its usurpation of the Portuguese drug networks. From the sickly sweet tobacco that helped finance the Atlantic slave trade to the cannabis that an East Indies merchant sold to the natural philosopher Robert Hooke in one of the earliest European coffeehouses, Breen shows how drugs have been entangled with science and empire from the very beginning.Featuring numerous illuminating anecdotes and a cast of characters that includes merchants, slaves, shamans, prophets, inquisitors, and alchemists, The Age of Intoxication rethinks a history of drugs and the early drug trade that has too often been framed as opposites—between medicinal and recreational, legal and illegal, good and evil. Breen argues that, in order to guide drug policy toward a fairer and more informed course, we first need to understand who and what set the global drug trade in motion.

PART I

Inventions of Drugs

CHAPTER 1

Searching for Drugs

Inventing Quina in Seventeenth-Century Amazonia

As for the china china, what will be necessary to know it is for the people to see a painting with the colors of the trunk, branches, leaves and fruits, because with samples of the bark alone it will be very difficult to be certain of the tree, not knowing what name the Tapuyas have given it.

—FRANCISCO DE SÁ E MENEZES, 1683

The jungle was large, and Captain Lacerda was small.

Perhaps not in stature. We can’t presume to know, although we do know that the average height of a Portuguese soldier in 1720 was a little over five feet and four inches.¹ What was small about Captain Lacerda was his knowledge, and his power. This might have been news to him. After all, Andre Pinheiro de Lacerda was a decorated officer in the Portuguese army, the leader of an imperial vanguard. But it was an empire that was far weaker than it let on. At the moment at which we join him, in the humid tropical winter of 1683, Captain Lacerda was not leading much of anything. In fact, he was lost.

We cannot know the exact physical size of the jungle Lacerda wandered within, either. During the centuries that divide us from him, Amazonia’s edges have retreated like a pool of evaporating water. Thousands of species that once thrived within its boundaries are gone now. But the jungle was not large simply because of its physical extent or the number of plants and animals it contained. It was large because this jungle, when viewed from the inside, was a system too complex to be reduced to its constituent parts.

Captain Lacerda, to his repeated frustration, was there to look for parts: parts of plants and animals, parts to be collected, packaged, sold, and consumed. He called these parts drogas.² Beyond this, Lacerda didn’t know precisely what he was in the jungle to find. He simply knew it was a bark similar to the one that the Portuguese called “quina” or “china china,” and which could cure certain types of fever. He had seen dried remains of the plant’s bark, pictures of what it might look like when alive, and a list of names that were applied to it in different places.

Yet, he had never laid eyes on a living specimen. And he had no idea what the peoples of this particular corner of the Amazon called the plant. Later, in the early nineteenth century, quina would become one of the planet’s most valuable crops, famed as a malaria treatment because of the powerful “febrifuge” (fever-fighting) alkaloids in its bark.³ For Captain Lacerda, as he stood in 1683 in an indigenous village in the Amazon, miles from any Portuguese settlement, the presence of a thing called “quina” remained little more than a rumor.

Also known as cinchona, Jesuit’s bark, or Peruvian bark, the “true” quina of Peru (genus Cinchona) had first gained global fame in the middle decades of the seventeenth century. It was said to be a miraculously effective treatment for fevers. Yet, because the most prized type of quina was (wrongly) thought to grow only in Loja, a tropical valley south of Quito, the Portuguese were reliant on their Spanish enemies’ goodwill.⁴ Lacerda and the man who gave him orders, Governor Francisco de Sá e Menezes, hoped to discover a new variety of quina in the sertão (backlands) of the Estado do Maranhão e Grão Pará, an independently administered Portuguese colony straddling the southeastern quarter of the Amazon basin.⁵ In so doing, they hoped to make the drug into a tool of Portuguese colonization and a rebuff to Spanish competition.⁶

Lacerda’s charge of “making discoveries of drugs . . . among the flora and fauna of the interior” required a deep engagement with Amazonian landscapes, languages, and modes of thought.⁷ To find quina in Maranhão, Lacerda first had to develop ties with the people he called the “Tapuya” (a catch-all Portuguese term for non-Tupi speakers in the Amazon, derived from the Tupi word for “enemy”).⁸ Portuguese hunters for drugs were building on a Spanish and Dutch colonial precedent of commodifying local cures. But they soon found that the act of “discovering” a drug in a new landscape and cultural setting was far from simple. The mental categories Lacerda brought to his task—not just the existence of a specific plant called “quina,” recognizable on the basis of its botanical characteristics, but of a specific ailment called “fever” or even a category called “drug”—did not seem to have obvious correlates among the Tapuya.

The Portuguese in Amazonia were discovering that drugs are never a fixed category. A lump of gold might retain its core characteristics, and its value, despite crossing cultural frontiers and undergoing repeated material transformations. But drugs do not. By consuming them, we erase them. By harvesting and preparing them, we obscure their biological origins. In naming them, we sow confusion. And by turning them into tools of sociability, spirituality, or healing, we overlay a constantly changing array of cultural beliefs onto the basic facts of their existence as material objects.

Quina was no exception. As historian Matthew Crawford has pointed out, the drug had a dual identity “as both a natural object and a cultural artifact.”⁹ The individuals involved in the first phase of quina’s existence as a drug—Quechua- and Aymara-speaking indigenous healers—worked within a mental framework of healing that long predated European colonization. But quina turns out not to have had a deep history of use as a medicine to treat malarial fever, despite the fact that it was quina’s antimalarial activity that made it globally renowned. Instead, the discovery of quina’s role as a febrifuge seems to date to the sixteenth century, sparked by the transatlantic transfer of malaria-bearing Anopheles mosquitos to the New World by the 1530s, and the resulting search for a cure by Andean healers and colonists.¹⁰

In a report sent to the Overseas Council in Lisbon, Governor de Sá wrote that he had brought “two small samples” of true quina to Belém, Maranhão’s administrative center. De Sá exhibited these samples to “the Indian leaders there who had kin in the sertão” and asked them to bring him plants that looked similar. Despite receiving “a great number of medicinal barks,” however, de Sá had failed to find what he considered to be an adequate match for his quina samples. Verbal descriptions, names, and physical examples had failed to manifest the governor’s imagined Amazonian variant of quina. De Sá now pinned his hopes on a detailed illustration created by artisans in Lisbon, “painted with the colors of the trunk, the branches, the leaves, and the fruit it bears,” to communicate the “quina-ness” of quina with the indigenous peoples of the Maranhão interior.¹¹ This, too, ended in failure.

In the end, it took more than a century for the ambitions of de Sá and Lacerda to be even partially realized: by the end of the eighteenth century, a drug known as “Brazilian quina” (quina do brasil) had become a popular fever cure in the Lusophone world. But as we’ll see, it still remained unclear to Portuguese colonists and healers whether this was “true” quina of genus Cinchona. Today, half a dozen unrelated plants circulate in Brazilian folk medicine that bear a variant of the name “quina”—but none of them, according to botanists, are actually related to genus Cinchona, the “true” quina and precursor of quinine.¹²

I have chosen to begin this book on the ground in the Amazon, in a state of confusion rather than clarity, because these scenes of confusion seem to me more typical of the early modern drug trade than the more famous episodes of success. For every tobacco, chocolate, or coffee—drugs that were, in a fairly short period of time, described and categorized by European savants, transplanted to new continents, and transformed into enormously valuable commodities—there were a host of failed drugs whose stories have fallen out of the historical record. In part, this absence is because older histories of drugs tended to begin their story only after a substance made its first appearance in a European medical or botanical text.¹³ More recently, historians have looked back to the ecological and epistemic sources of drugs, studying “bioprospectors” as they hunted for new commodities and cures.¹⁴ The stories that have emerged from this work are fascinating: the French botanical spy who smuggled precious cochineal beetles out of colonial Mexico, or the missionary who, strolling in the forests of Quebec, identified a novel species of Canadian ginseng that he recognized from the reports of Jesuits in China.¹⁵

But what did it really mean to “discover” a drug? The word bioprospecting, adopted from mining, summons a mental image of the prospector as a hunter in a natural landscape with a specific and durable quarry, like gold, in mind. In reality, though, searchers for drugs in seventeenth-century tropics had enormous difficulties agreeing on the most basic questions of identification and purpose. After all, quina was not just one species, but several, scattered over a wide growing range and bearing numerous indigenous and European names. Moreover, quina’s role as a febrifuge was still quite new, a product of a secretive colonial medical culture rather than ancient and widespread knowledge. In a very real sense, there was no such thing as a single drug called quina, and no clearly-delineated bank of “traditional” knowledge that Europeans could co-opt to discover it.

The multiple reinventions of a drug like quina depended on a complex dance between hyper-localized ecological and linguistic knowledge, ever-changing disease environments, and incommensurate epistemologies of what drugs were and how they worked. More often than not, this was an exchange that ended in confusion. Captain Lacerda, wandering lost in the jungle, carrying the shriveled remains of a drug that no one can recognize, turns out to be more emblematic of the search for drugs in the early modern period than the figure of the triumphant prospector striking gold.

The Deep History of South American Drugs

The idea of the Columbian Exchange—developed by Alfred Crosby, in the 1970s and 1980s, and popularized in the 1990s by Jared Diamond—has been an enormous success. One of the few new historical concepts to filter into popular consciousness over the past decades, it is predicated on a simple argument: The voyages of Columbus and those who came after him didn’t just connect the biomes of the Old and New Worlds, the argument goes. It unleashed a differential of power between them. Afro-Eurasia is thought to have enjoyed certain prior advantages (such as a wider array of domesticated animals, an East-West corridor allowing for lateral transplantation of key crops, and greater exposure to epidemic diseases), which helped enable the Spanish conquest of Mexico and Peru and the colonization that followed.¹⁶

But there were many dimensions to the Columbian Exchange, not all of them ending in an inevitable conquest of the New World by the Old. It turns out that the Americas, especially tropical Central and South America, were far better equipped than Africa, Europe, and Asia when it ca...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction. At the Statue of Adamastor
• Part I. Inventions of Drugs
• Part II. Altered States
• Conclusion. Drug Pasts and Futures
• Notes
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index
• Acknowledgments