Drugs

The story of how the substances that humans have used for healing and understanding for thousands of years got criminalised, who benefited from that, and what's quietly being rediscovered now that the science is catching up. Plus the small matter of MKUltra, the CIA programme that dosed its own citizens with LSD while telling everyone else the drug would melt their brains 

Transcript

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Drugs. Many of us have experimented with recreational drugs. I told a story earlier in this book about one incident that went badly wrong. The Xanax, the Dark Web, the night I thought my wife might not wake up. But there's another side to it that I think most people in my generation would recognise. In my late twenties and early 30s, cocaine was everywhere. Every time I went out, someone would be getting it or had it on them. It wasn't hidden, it wasn't whispered about, it was just there, part of the night out, as normal as ordering around. I tried it, of course I did, but I was never a fan. I found out later in life that I have ADHD, and I'd always suspected my experience of it wasn't reflective of most people's because rather than giving me energy or confidence, it actually made me quite boring and serious, which I didn't like at all. Naturally I prefer attempting to be the joker, bringing a bit of positivity when I can, and cocaine took that away from me. I'd sit there like a plank while everyone else was buzzing. Saying no was easier for me than it probably should have been, and quitting altogether wasn't a big deal. But that's not the case for many people. Once caught in the cycle, it can be truly destructive, and many lives have been torn apart and destroyed over just this one substance, and that's before I even mention some of the others that are arguably more addictive and more damaging. So how long have humans been experimenting with drugs? The answer might surprise you, because it's not decades or centuries, it's thousands of years, and for most of that time nobody thought to make them illegal. Archaeological evidence shows humans were using opium and hallucinogenic mushrooms as far back as 10,000 years ago. Cannabis seeds have been found in archaeological digs dating to 8,100 BCE in Asia. The ancient Sumerians were cultivating the opium poppy around 3,400 BCE and called it the Joy Plant because they knew exactly what it did. The Egyptians used opium to relieve pain. The Greeks prescribed cannabis for medical conditions and drank poppy juice. The Incas chewed coca leaves for stamina and energy long before anyone thought to distill it into powder. Alcohol brewing has been traced back to 7,000 BCE in China. Hallucinogens were used in sacred rituals across South America, with a 1,000-year-old stash found in Bolivia containing cocaine, ayahuasca, and anadinanthera, which must have been one hell of a night. Even Marcus Aurelius, the Roman emperor whose meditations is still one of the most respected philosophical texts ever written, was almost certainly an opium addict. One historian concluded that rather than incapacitating him, the drug fired his philosophic insight to the fever pitch of vision. Humans have been altering their consciousness for as long as we've been human. Every civilization that has ever existed has used psychoactive substances in some form, whether for medicine, ritual, recreation, or all three. It is one of the most consistent behaviours in our entire history as a species. So the question isn't why do people take drugs? The question is why, after thousands of years of doing it, did we suddenly decide it should be a crime? The answer, when you look at it honestly, has very little to do with public health and almost everything to do with race, power, and control. In the 1800s, opium, cocaine, and cannabis were all legal and widely available across Britain and America. Cocaine was an ingredient in Coca-Cola. It was in wines, tonics, elixirs, and over-the-counter medicines sold in every pharmacy. In 1895, the pharmaceutical company Bayer, yes, the same company that makes aspirin, released a new drug they marketed as safer than morphine. They called it heroin. Doctors prescribed it freely. By 1900, it's estimated that around 5% of the American population was addicted to cocaine, heroin, or morphine, and the typical addict wasn't a criminal or a drifter. It was a rural middle class white woman who'd been prescribed the stuff by her doctor. The first sensible piece of legislation was the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 in the US, which simply required products to list their ingredients on the label. That's it. No bans, no prison sentences, just tell people what's in the bottle. And it worked. Opiate sales dropped by a third almost immediately. People were making informed choices and many of them chose to stop. But that wasn't enough for some. In 1914, the US Congress passed the Harrison Narcotics Act, which banned the non-medical use of opiates and cocaine. On the surface it looked like a public health measure. Underneath it was something else entirely. The congressional hearings that built support for the law were drenched in racial propaganda. One doctor testified that most of the attacks upon white women of the South are the direct result of the cocaine crazed Negro brain. The media ran stories about Chinese opium dens corrupting white youth. The New York Times published a piece in 1914 headlined Negro Cocaine Fiends Are a New Southern Menace. The law wasn't designed to protect people from addiction. It was designed to give the state power over communities it wanted to control. Britain followed a similar path. During the First World War, restrictions were placed on cocaine and opium as part of emergency wartime measures, driven in part by wild media reporting and the racist demonization of Chinese communities, through the depiction of opium dens as sites of corruption. Those temporary restrictions were made permanent in the Dangerous Drugs Act of 1920. Cannabis was added in 1928. And Britain had its own spectacular hypocrisy to answer for, because just decades earlier the British Empire had fought two actual wars, the Opium Wars, of 1839 to 1842 and 1856 to 1860, specifically to force China to keep accepting opium imports that the Chinese government was trying to ban. Britain went to war to protect its right to sell drugs to another country, then turned around and criminalized its own citizens for using them. Cannabis was banned in the US state by state from 1911, then federally in 1937 through the Marijuana Tax Act. The timing was not coincidental. The wave of anti-cannabis legislation coincided with a surge of anti-Mexican sentiment during and after the Great Depression. Cannabis was rebranded as marijuana, specifically to associate it with Mexican immigrants and make it sound foreign and threatening. By the time the federal ban came, all 50 states had already outlawed it. Then came the escalation. In 1971, Richard Nixon declared a war on drugs, calling drug abuse public enemy number one. In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan doubled down and his wife Nancy launched the Just Say No campaign as if addiction were simply a matter of willpower. In 1986, Congress passed the Anti-Drug Abuse Act, which introduced mandatory minimum sentences that were so transparently racist they barely tried to hide it. Five grams of crack cocaine, used predominantly in black communities, carried a mandatory five-year prison sentence. You needed 500 grams of powder cocaine, used predominantly by white professionals, to get the same sentence. The same drug, two different forms, and a 100 to 1 sentencing disparity that devastated an entire generation of black Americans. That ratio wasn't corrected until 2010, and even then it was only reduced to 18 to 1. Not equal, just slightly less grotesque. The war on drugs has been one of the most expensive and destructive policy failures in modern history. The United States alone has spent over$1 trillion on it. And what has it achieved? Global cocaine production has more than doubled since 2014. The area of land in Colombia dedicated to growing coca is now four times larger than it was ten years ago. In the UK, cocaine use has never been higher. We are the largest consumer of cocaine per capita in Europe, the second largest in the world behind Australia. London alone consumes an estimated 23 kilograms of the stuff every day, more than Barcelona, Amsterdam, and Berlin combined. Wastewater analysis shows it's not even a weekend drug in London. It's consumed steadily throughout the week. The UK domestic cocaine market is worth an estimated£4 billion a year. Deaths involving cocaine have risen for 13 consecutive years in England and Wales, reaching 1,279 in 2024. And who's using it? This is where it gets interesting because the narrative we've been sold for decades is that drugs are a problem of the poor, the uneducated, the underclass, the people who made bad choices. The reality is rather different. According to the Office for National Statistics, you're more likely to use cocaine if your household earns over£52,000 a year than if it earns under£10,400. In 2021, traces of cocaine were found in 11 out of 12 washrooms tested inside the Houses of Parliament. 11 out of 12. Several MPs told the Sunday Times there is a culture of cocaine in government, describing colleagues openly using it at their desks and at parties where journalists were present. The City of London's banking sector has long been identified as a hotbed for cocaine use, with former bankers describing it as the perfect drug for their industry because it's expensive, glamorous, and gives your already inflated ego an even bigger puff. So the builder on a council estate gets a criminal record and a prison sentence. The banker gets a bonus and a taxi home. The MP gets re-elected. The person sanctioned off their benefits for missing a job centre appointment can't even afford to eat, while the person making the laws that sanction them is doing lines in a Westminster toilet. And we're supposed to believe this system is about public health. There's another way. In 1999, Portugal was in crisis. It had the highest rate of drug-related AIDS in the European Union. Lisbon was known as the heroin capital of Europe. Nearly 1% of the entire population was addicted to heroin. Overdose deaths were climbing fast, with 369 recorded in 1999 alone, and everything the government had tried, the arrests, the prison sentences, the crackdowns, had made it worse. So in 2001 they did something radical. They decriminalized the personal possession of all drugs, all of them heroin, cocaine, cannabis, ecstasy, everything. This wasn't legalization. Drug trafficking still carried prison sentences, and drugs were still confiscated, but personal use was no longer a criminal offence. Instead of being arrested, anyone found with drugs was referred to a three-person panel made up of a lawyer, a health worker, and a social worker who would assess them and recommend either treatment, a fine, a warning, or no sanction at all. The results were extraordinary. Overdose deaths dropped by over 80%, from 369 in 1999 to just 30 in 2016. New HIV cases from injecting drug use plummeted from 907 in 2000 to 18 in 2017. The number of heroin addicts fell from 100,000 to 25,000. The proportion of the prison population held for drug offences dropped from over 40% to 15.7%. Drug-related deaths in Portugal fell to 3 per million compared to the EU average of 17.3 per million. People in Portugal are now 45 times less likely to die from a drug overdose than people in the United States. And the whole program cost less than$10 per citizen per year. The US spent over$1 trillion in the same period, and its overdose deaths now exceed 100,000 annually. 90% of people referred to counselling by Portuguese police actually turn up. One former drug user in Portugal told NPR that the police are our friends, and part of the support network that helps people recover. Compare that with the UK, where the system criminalizes, stigmatizes, and punishes, and then wonders why people don't seek help. Portugal didn't solve every problem. Drug use has risen slightly in some categories, and there are signs that some of the early gains are being eroded as investment in treatment services has slipped. It's not perfect. But the core principle that addiction is a health issue, not a criminal one, that treating people with compassion produces better outcomes than treating them with handcuffs has been proven beyond any reasonable doubt, and yet most of the world, including Britain, continues to double down on the approach that has failed for over a century. If we look though specifically at cannabis, which might be the most revealing example of all, because it shows what happens when the tide of public opinion finally turns and the institutions have to adapt. Cannabis has been used by humans for at least 10,000 years. Ancient Chinese medical texts prescribed it for rheumatism and malaria. The Greeks, the Romans, the Egyptians, cultures across every continent used it in one form or another for medicine, relaxation and ritual. It was legal in Britain and America until well into the 20th century. It was banned as mentioned because of racial prejudice, and for the next 80 years it remained illegal almost everywhere, carrying prison sentences that destroyed lives, disproportionately targeting black and working class communities, while being quietly enjoyed behind closed doors by politicians, professionals, and the comfortably wealthy. Then something started to shift. States in America began legalizing cannabis, first for medical use, then recreational. As of 2024, 38 states have legalized it medically, and 24 states have legalized it for recreational use. 87% of Americans now support legalization. The US cannabis market is worth an estimated$38.5 billion and growing, contributing over$115 billion to the wider economy in 2024. Cannabis tax revenue now exceeds$25 billion, nearly double what the alcohol industry generates in tax. It has created over$425,000 full-time jobs. And here's the part that should make you pause. The moment legalization started gaining momentum, stock market returns for pharmaceutical companies dropped by 1.5 to 2% within 10 days of each new state legalizing. Investors estimated that a single legalization event would reduce annual drug company sales by$3 billion on average. Cannabis was competing directly with conventional pharmaceuticals for pain, anxiety, depression, and insomnia, and the pharmaceutical industry could see the numbers. A plant that people can grow in their garden was threatening the profit margins of billion-dollar corporations. So what happened? Big pharma didn't fight it, they positioned themselves to own it. Industry observers have noted that major pharmaceutical companies, along with Big Tobacco, are positioning themselves to seize the market the moment federal legalization arrives. The FDA has already approved cannabis-derived drugs like Epidiolex. Patent filings for new cannabis-based pharmaceutical formulations are rising. The same corporations that spent decades lobbying to keep cannabis illegal are now filing patents to ensure that when it's legal, they control the supply chain, the dosing, the pricing, and the profit. The plant that was demonized for a century because it couldn't be taxed and controlled is now being absorbed into the very system that criminalized it. If that pattern sounds familiar by this point in the book, it should. And while all of this plays out in the world of policy and profit, there's another conversation happening in the world of science that might be even more significant. And if you think the government's relationship with drugs has always been about protecting the public, you need to know about MKUltra. In 1953, the CIA launched a top secret program called MKUltra, authorized by CIA Director Alan Dulles, with the aim of developing techniques for mind control. The program was run by a chemist named Sidney Gottlieb and it encompassed over 140 separate sub-projects involving LSD, other psychoactive drugs, electroshock therapy, hypnosis, sensory deprivation, isolation, and psychological torture. Gottlieb bought the entire world supply of LSD for$240,000 and began distributing it to prisons, hospitals, universities, and military bases across America to see what it did to people. Many of the subjects had no idea they were being experimented on. Thousands of soldiers were given hallucinogenic drugs without their knowledge or consent. Prisoners were dosed with LSD every single day for extended periods. Whitey Bulger, the infamous Boston crime boss, later described how he had been given LSD daily for over a year in prison as part of what he was told was a schizophrenia study. He said the experience was horrific and that he thought he was going insane. I was in prison for committing a crime, he wrote, but they committed a greater crime on me. In one subproject known as Operation Midnight Climax, the CIA set up safe houses in San Francisco and New York disguised as brothels. Prostitutes were hired to lure men back to the premises, where they were secretly dosed with LSD and observed through one-way mirrors. The logic was that the men would be too embarrassed about where they'd been to ever report what had happened to them. In Canada, CIA-funded experiments were conducted at the Allen Memorial Institute, a psychiatric hospital at McGill University in Montreal, by a psychiatrist named Donald Ewan Cameron. Cameron used electroshock at up to 75 times the normal intensity, prolonged drug-induced sleep lasting weeks, massive doses of LSD, and a technique he called psychic driving, which involved forcing patients to listen to repeated recorded messages for up to 16 hours a day. His goal was to erase existing personalities and rebuild them from scratch. He reduced patients to a childlike state. Cameron was simultaneously president of the World Psychiatric Association, the American Psychiatric Association, and the Canadian Psychiatric Association. The man running the most abusive psychiatric experiments in the Western world was also the most senior psychiatrist on the planet. In 1953, a US Army biochemist named Frank Olson was secretly dosed with LSD by a CIA colleague at a work retreat. Days later, he fell from a tenth story window and died. The CIA initially ruled it a suicide. Decades later, after documents were declassified, his family fought for a new investigation. The case has never been fully resolved. When the program was finally exposed, the CIA's director, Richard Helms, ordered the destruction of all MK Ultra Files. Most were shredded before investigators could reach them. What we know today comes from a small cache of financial records that survived because they were filed in the wrong place, plus testimony from the 1975 Church Committee hearings and documents obtained through Freedom of Information requests. In 2024, the National Security Archive and ProQuest published over 1,200 declassified records on the program. When Gottlieb eventually testified before the Senate, he admitted the whole thing had been largely useless, describing it as probably not a high payoff program. He estimated the CIA had experienced as many failures as successes. We don't know how many people died. We don't know how many lives were permanently destroyed. We do know that the agency spent years dosing its own citizens with psychedelic drugs without their consent, torturing psychiatric patients, and experimenting on prisoners and soldiers, all while publicly waging a war on drugs that sent ordinary people to prison for possessing the same substances the government was secretly testing on them. All of this happened after the United States had helped create the 1948 Nuremberg Code, which explicitly required voluntary informed consent for any human experimentation. The CIA knew exactly what the rules were, they just decided the rules didn't apply to them. I've always been fascinated listening to people's experiences at ayahuasca retreats and with DMT, the kind of deeply personal, often profound accounts that people struggle to put into words afterwards. It's something I've never tried myself, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise, but the consistency of what people report across cultures, across continents, across completely unconnected individuals is hard to ignore. The sense of connection to something larger, the dissolution of the ego, the feeling of having access to truth that was always there but couldn't be seen. Whether you interpret that spiritually or neurologically, the accounts are remarkably consistent and science is starting to take it very seriously. DMT, or dimethyltryptamine, is a naturally occurring psychedelic compound. It's the active ingredient in ayahuasca, the Amazonian brew that indigenous communities have used in ceremonial and healing contexts for centuries. It's also structurally similar to serotonin, one of the brain's own neurotransmitters. Unlike most psychedelics, DMT breaks down quickly in the body, meaning the experience is intense but short, lasting minutes rather than hours. In February 2027, Researchers at Imperial College London published the results of a clinical trial that found a single dose of DMT produced significant and lasting reductions in depression symptoms in people with major depressive disorder, with effects lasting up to six months for some participants. Johns Hopkins University in the US has established a dedicated centre for psychedelic and consciousness research, one of the largest in the world, investigating psilocybin, the compound in magic mushrooms, as a treatment for depression, PTSD, addiction, anorexia, and even Alzheimer's disease. As of mid-2025, over 150 active clinical trials involving psychedelics were registered on clinicaltrials.gov. Phase three clinical trials of MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD showed response rates of around 80%. Extraordinary by any measure. In August 2024, the FDA rejected it anyway, citing concerns about the trial methodology rather than the results. A treatment that could transform the lives of millions of people suffering from PTSD was blocked not because it didn't work, but because the institution wasn't satisfied with how the evidence was gathered. The word psychedelic comes from the Greek psyche, meaning soul and dilun, meaning to reveal, to make the soul visible. These substances have been used by human beings for thousands of years in exactly that context, as tools for healing, for understanding, for seeing something that the everyday mind can't access. Indigenous cultures knew this. The ancient Greeks knew this. The Sumerians, the Egyptians, the cultures of South America and Central Asia all knew this, and for the last century we've been told they're simply dangerous, simply criminal, simply wrong. The science now suggests otherwise. The question, as always, is who gets to control them, who gets to profit from them, and whether the institutions that criminalize these substances for a century will now try to patent them instead.