Product Description: “The last wild frontier of classical studies.” ---The Times (UK)The Chemical Muse uncovers decades of misdirection and obfuscation to reveal the history of widespread drug use in Ancient Rome and Greece. In the city-states that gave birth to Western civilization, drugs were an everyday element of a free society...read more

Written with encyclopedic scope, this candid, sober, hard-hitting history of the global drug trade takes the reader back five centuries to the origins of the modern narcotics industry in the Western world. Reprint. 10,000 first printing.

Product Description: Lawrence Driscoll's fresh examination of the meaning of drugs from the Victorians to the present asks us to listen to historical and current voices whose positions on drugs are at variance with our "truths." Driscoll draws on the work of figures as diverse as William Burroughs, Sigmund Freud, Conan Doyle, and Anna Kavan to shed light on different or silenced ways of talking about drugs and to offer us a historical counter-memory...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Terence McKenna hypothesizes that as the North African jungles receded, giving way to savannas and grasslands near the end of the most recent ice age, a branch of our arboreal primate ancestors left the forest canopy and began living in the open areas beyond...read more

An exploration of humans' symbiotic relationships with plants and chemicals presents information on prehistoric partnership societies, the roles of spices and spirits in the rise of dominator societies; and the politics of tobacco, tea, coffee, opium, and alcohol. 17,500 first printing.