Program Notes
https://www.patreon.com/radiowarnerdThe War Nerd
Guest speaker: John Dolan
Year this lecture was recorded: 2017
Today’s podcast features an interview with John Dolan, who is well known as the “War Nerd”. Additionally, he has another alter ego as the writer Gary Brecher. The War Nerd podcast covers a wild amount about the history along with speculations about the future of human warfare. In this interview, John explains the long history of drugs and war.
Follow John Dolan on Twitter,
https://twitter.com/TheWarNerd
And support John’s work through Patreon:
https://www.patreon.com/radiowarnerd
For extended reading about this deep subject, there’s
’Shooting Up: A Short History of Drugs and War’ by Lukasz Kamienski
Support the work of Lex Pelger
on the Psychedelic Salon 2.0 podcasts
(as well as all of his psychoactive advocacy)
at www.Patreon.com/NoNonsense
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from Cyberdelic Space, this is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in Psychedelic Salon
00:00:23 ►
2.0.
00:00:24 ►
This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in Psychedelic Salon 2.0.
00:00:33 ►
And before I introduce today’s podcast, I want to remind you that there are only a few days left in Arrowhead.org’s pledge drive.
00:00:41 ►
And while the matching funds still last, all donations between 500 are going to be matched by a major donor.
00:00:46 ►
So if you can, surf on over to the best source of drug information on the web, or anywhere else for that matter, and that’s Erowid, E-R-O-W-I-D dot org.
00:00:54 ►
Now, for today’s podcast, I’ll begin by saying, no, I didn’t mistype the title of this program.
00:01:02 ►
While in my humorous ways ways I could actually say that the
00:01:05 ►
interview that we are about to listen to is about the war on drugs, I could say that only if you
00:01:12 ►
place the emphasis to the word on, because this is about the ways in which wars have always been
00:01:18 ►
fought on drugs. When I was serving in Vietnam, the use of amphetamines by our pilots was, well, it was more or less an open secret that we discussed often in the officers’ clubs in Westpac.
00:01:32 ►
And I’d already known about the use of meth in World War II, but to tell the truth, I’d never really thought about it very much.
00:01:40 ►
However, after listening to the interview that I’m about to play, I’m really now much more interested in the subject than I ever was before
00:01:48 ►
And I can’t help but thinking about how clever the screwheads in Washington have been
00:01:53 ►
In changing our focus to thinking that drugs are the enemy in a war
00:01:58 ►
When drugs have, in fact, widely been used by our troops from almost every nation throughout history.
00:02:11 ►
On top of that, you are going to learn that, in the event you didn’t already realize this,
00:02:16 ►
that back in the 17th and 18th centuries, when this nation was first getting on its feet,
00:02:21 ►
that a significant number of citizens, both in the U.S. and in Europe,
00:02:26 ►
spent an inordinate amount of their waking hours drunk, or at least half drunk. And don’t buy into that Nancy Reagan bullshit about drugs and alcohol, because alcohol
00:02:33 ►
is a drug. Isn’t it amazing how those propagandists on Madison Avenue can trick us into believing that
00:02:40 ►
booze is something other than a very dangerous drug? Anyway, I’m now going to turn the program over to Lex Pelger,
00:02:48 ►
who is speaking with, well, maybe you could say it’s three people rolled up into one.
00:02:54 ►
John Dolan, who is also known as the war nerd,
00:02:57 ►
and who is also known as the writer Gary Brecher.
00:03:01 ►
Now, here’s Lex.
00:03:28 ►
Now, here’s Lex. patreon.com. As a two-person production, any help goes a long way. Join us at patreon.com slash nononsense. I’m Lex Pelger, and this is the Psychedelic Salon 2.0.
00:03:41 ►
Today is a special interview with the renowned voice behind the Radio War Nerd podcast.
00:03:48 ►
John Dolan, a.k.a. Gary Brecher, a.k.a. The War Nerd, is the kind of guy who devours technical manuals about shoulder-launched rockets.
00:03:59 ►
And, in interest to us, over the years of his work, he also collected an impressive knowledge of the relationship between human warfare and psychoactive drugs.
00:04:11 ►
John Dolan is a true researcher, who even wrote his own translation of the Iliad, which will be coming out soon.
00:04:18 ►
I know that I’m quite excited to get my copy of that. But until then, you can follow him on Twitter, listen to his excellent podcast,
00:04:25 ►
or support his work on Patreon at RadioWarNerd. Now here’s John Dolan on drugs and war.
00:04:43 ►
Hello, everybody, and I’m very pleased to be here today with John Dolan, a.k.a. Gary Brecher, a.k.a. Radio War Nerd.
00:04:51 ►
Thanks so much for joining us.
00:04:52 ►
My pleasure.
00:04:53 ►
And actually, maybe just to start, to explain your background with Radio War Nerd and your various pseudonyms and heteronyms.
00:05:02 ►
Okay. Yeah.
00:05:03 ►
On my birth certificate, it says John Dolan, and that’s what I usually go by.
00:05:09 ►
But I was a professor in New Zealand, even though I’m originally from California, until around the millennium when I moved to Moscow to work with this girlish English-language newspaper called The Exile,
00:05:28 ►
which was run by a friend of mine, Mark Ames.
00:05:31 ►
And Mark and I and a few other people were the staff of the newspaper,
00:05:35 ►
but we wrote under probably 20 different names.
00:05:39 ►
So all of us had several personalities.
00:05:43 ►
And after 9-11, suddenly all these mainstream media people who had total contempt for military matters, didn’t know a thing and didn’t want to know a thing about it, started writing all these articles on war because suddenly America was in a warlike mood. And the thing is, I was the real thing in that I spent a completely isolated, wretched, clinically depressed youth reading every page of every volume of Jane’s book of shoulder-fired missiles, Jane’s book of attack aircraft, Jane’s book of anti-ship missiles, everything like that.
00:06:26 ►
And every week, literally, I would wait in tremendous anxiety for them to put the new issue of Aviation Week and space technology inside the plastic covers at the public library because that was the highlight of my week, which gives you a great idea of what my youth was like. And I knew all these weapons they were talking about. I knew all the
00:06:52 ►
strategies and the tactics. And I couldn’t believe that these idiots were suddenly pretending to be
00:06:57 ►
experts when they hadn’t paid their dues. And so I said something complaining about this to Mark
00:07:04 ►
Ames, who said, you should article just, I don’t know, not even pretend to be like some tough guy.
00:07:10 ►
And within five minutes, we had the character of the Warnerd, who was supposedly an angry, fat data processor in Fresno named Gary Brecher.
00:07:25 ►
Gary Brecher. It wasn’t really that much of a stretch from my real self. But you know,
00:07:33 ►
it was nice to be able to write hardcore California Hick English, which was the language I sort of grew up speaking instead of having to talk like an academic all the time.
00:07:38 ►
So that’s the glorious birth. And it and it just exploded from there into a
00:07:42 ►
Yeah, oh, it became by far the most popular character on the newspaper.
00:07:47 ►
I mean, and people used to argue about who Gary Brecher really was, whether there really was a Gary Brecher.
00:07:52 ►
My favorite comment of all time was when someone suggested it might be that John Dolan guy posing as Gary Brecher.
00:07:58 ►
And an angry war nerd fan looked back.
00:08:01 ►
Gary Brecher has more talent in his little finger than John Dolan does in his whole
00:08:06 ►
family. That’s great. God bless the internet. And so I encourage everyone, it’s a great podcast in
00:08:16 ►
all these different ways, but our interest here is in drugs. And I was wondering when I even first
00:08:20 ►
contacted you about this, if there was any particular drug and war intersection that
00:08:25 ►
popped into your mind as one of the most intriguing.
00:08:28 ►
Well, I think for me, Eastern Front in World War II and amphetamines, because unlike most
00:08:36 ►
war buffs or whatever you call them, I’m not terribly fond of World War II.
00:08:42 ►
I think it was an abomination.
00:08:43 ►
It was a war in which every side specialized in killing civilians in the greatest numbers they could. But it is amazing to me that something like Stalingrad could have happened because I’ve lived through three Russian winters, and I just can’t imagine anybody fighting in the ruins for any length of time. And there was real heroism there,
00:09:09 ►
but there was also an awful lot of amphetamines being peddled by both sides. So I think that one
00:09:15 ►
case in which it became very easy to understand how something like Stalingrad could have happened.
00:09:20 ►
I mean, the Russian slang term for amphetamines is Vint. The Wehrmacht was using
00:09:28 ►
something called Pervitin. And they were both being distributed in huge amounts. So I think
00:09:34 ►
that was a key moment. You can read about amphetamines on the Eastern Front in almost every account. I mean, the Germans, in their way, got really quaint with the products.
00:09:50 ►
People don’t understand this sort of kitschy, quaint side of Nazi culture,
00:09:56 ►
but they had something called Tanker’s Chocolate and Pilot’s Chocolate,
00:10:02 ►
and it was basically chocolate bars stuffed with amphetamines.
00:10:08 ►
And that’s a fairly recent development a lot of the the drugs used in war are ancient um but this is
00:10:15 ►
something that was only synthesized from the asian plant ephedra in 1887 so it’s big impact on recent
00:10:22 ►
wars yeah and before we get to the ancient ones,
00:10:25 ►
I’m more curious about the Russian attitude, because we hear a lot about the Nazis and
00:10:29 ►
meth and the Allied bomber pilots and the kamikaze pilots. But what about the Russian
00:10:34 ►
attitude towards using stimulants during the war? It was widespread in the Soviet army. I mean,
00:10:41 ►
they didn’t supply it quite as gratuitously as the Germans or the
00:10:46 ►
Allies did, but that’s because it was a much poorer army and the expectations of their soldiers were
00:10:53 ►
much lower. I mean, for example, one of our colleagues on the exile, Yasha Levine, had a
00:10:59 ►
grandfather whom he knew growing up in Russia who always always wore a hat. And he knew that his
00:11:08 ►
grandfather’s head always got cold. But when he grew up, he got the full story, which was his
00:11:12 ►
father had been in a penal battalion in the Soviet army. And of course, life was harder for the penal
00:11:20 ►
battalions than even for regular Soviet troops. So even for regular troops, there was no anesthetic,
00:11:27 ►
but especially for a penal battalion casualty. So his brother was hit in the head with a big
00:11:32 ►
piece of shrapnel. And they strapped him down on a table and chipped out a big piece of his skull.
00:11:41 ►
And there was no anesthetic within thousand miles except vodka. Vodka was
00:11:46 ►
in good supply for most of the war. So there wasn’t as much speed, but there wasn’t as much
00:11:52 ►
anything in the Soviet army, and what there was did tend to get to the soldiers at the front.
00:11:59 ►
There’s a great Italian novel called The Sergeant in the Snow about an Italian soldier who was recruited
00:12:07 ►
for the Eastern Front. And he has to retreat across a thousand miles of snow and frozen plain.
00:12:17 ►
And in that army, amphetamines are fairly closely restricted. So he doesn’t get any until his lieutenant sees that
00:12:28 ►
he’s about to fall into the snow, because if you fall into the snow, you’ll never get up.
00:12:32 ►
So at that point, he said, here, take the pills, and the guy is enabled to go on.
00:12:39 ►
So they varied. I mean, every army used amphetamines. The Japanese army, for example, was extremely fond of amphetamines.
00:12:48 ►
And Japanese chemists, along with Central European chemists, had a big role in synthesizing first benzadrine and then dexedrine from the ephedra plant, which was originally Chinese.
00:13:04 ►
You find it mentioned in Chinese books, you know,
00:13:06 ►
as ma huang, I think, though I can’t do the tones. And everyone knew this plant had a sort of
00:13:13 ►
stimulant effect, but it was actually a Romanian chemist at the end of the 19th century who
00:13:19 ►
managed to start distilling the speedy part of it and changing war forever, basically making
00:13:26 ►
soldiers who could stay awake for 48 hours, which is not so easy to do. And easier to do things that
00:13:32 ►
are atrocious. Yes. Although that’s a really interesting point. And it’s one I’m not sure
00:13:38 ►
about at all. I mean, I’ve read way too much about very dirty wars. Rwanda, for example. I don’t think anybody was on speed in
00:13:46 ►
Rwanda. I think we have to face what humans are like in large groups in certain situations.
00:13:54 ►
And it’s just pretty ugly. I mean, if you deal with drugs in the American context, you know the
00:14:03 ►
tendency of everybody to blame the drug for every horrible thing that people do. But the thing context, you know, the tendency of everybody to blame the drug for every horrible
00:14:07 ►
thing that people do. But the thing is, people do horrible things without drugs, too. We’re just
00:14:14 ►
kind of a grim species. That’s an excellent point. And dark and sad and true. To going back to
00:14:22 ►
ancient history, where we have some drugs like opium and wine that might be
00:14:25 ►
more helpful for keeping people out of you know a regular state um do you have any uh favorite
00:14:32 ►
examples from ancient warfare of drug use well there there are a lot of different drugs that
00:14:38 ►
were used in the ancient world uh some still used uh certainly forms of cannabis were very common. And for me, because
00:14:49 ►
I’m not very fond of cannabis, I’m actually afraid of cannabis. I don’t quite see it as a war drug.
00:14:59 ►
But many people have used it as such. I mean, I’ve even read about gangs in mid-20th century New York warfare smoking a ton of pot before they go into a gang fight.
00:15:13 ►
And I’m thinking, that would be weird to be in a gang fight while you were stoned.
00:15:18 ►
But, you know, a lot of this is the belief in the ritual.
00:15:24 ►
A lot of this is the belief in the ritual.
00:15:30 ►
Like, I’ve drunk a ton of coffee before a job interview I ever had. It was probably a really bad move, and I sort of half knew that because I’m already fairly hyped up and nervous.
00:15:35 ►
And a ton of coffee is probably not the right thing.
00:15:38 ►
But the culture told me that coffee is a way of fortifying yourself, like wearing a tie, like polishing your shoes before you go into that sort of civilian combat situation of a job interview.
00:15:49 ►
So I always ended up taking coffee and I always ended up talking way too much to get the job.
00:15:56 ►
Yeah, the belief systems.
00:15:58 ►
I mean, during the reefer madness, there’s reports of, you know, southern boys who want to go out for fighting on Friday nights.
00:16:04 ►
And they said this weed makes you go crazy and fight and kill your parents.
00:16:08 ►
So you smoke it.
00:16:09 ►
I mean, to some extent, and it’s tricky, but to some extent, whatever you expect the drug to do will happen.
00:16:17 ►
Although I’ve been around druggies a lot, and I also know that some drugs just do what they do, whether you think they will or not.
00:16:27 ►
Like if you buy something and it’s supposed to be speed and it’s not speed, you’re going to know it’s not speed.
00:16:33 ►
You’re not going to believe in it just out of some placebo effect.
00:16:35 ►
And like I’m not a psychedelic specialist, but the times I’ve used acid, the first thing that struck me was I’m not seeing things that aren’t actually there.
00:16:46 ►
I’m seeing enhanced patterns in the things that are there. So that when somebody says,
00:16:51 ►
oh, wow, I saw little men coming up out of my coffee cup. It’s like, yeah, no, you didn’t.
00:16:56 ►
You’re just making that up.
00:16:58 ►
And there’s some great videos from the both the British and American armies of soldiers being
00:17:02 ►
ordered to do things after they’re given LSD or some other psychedelic
00:17:06 ►
and just, you know, laughing,
00:17:08 ►
giggling, going up a tree.
00:17:10 ►
On the flip side,
00:17:12 ►
my buddy Zychik said, I’ve never seen the reference,
00:17:14 ►
that Khan,
00:17:16 ►
Herman Khan,
00:17:18 ►
he came up with the secret bombing patterns
00:17:20 ►
for Cambodia on an acid
00:17:22 ►
trip. It gave him the visual power
00:17:24 ►
to realize exactly what he wanted
00:17:25 ►
to do there. And acid opened that up for him. I’ve heard that from a lot of people, especially
00:17:31 ►
in mathematics. It seems to work better for people in the hard sciences than it does for,
00:17:36 ►
you know, writer types like me. I’ve heard a lot of physicists say privately that they found it to be very effective and very powerful.
00:17:50 ►
All I can say is it doesn’t work on pros.
00:17:53 ►
I mean, there’s always Philip K. Dick, who, of course, is one of my heroes.
00:17:56 ►
But I think Philip K. Dick was more of a speed guy.
00:18:00 ►
I mean, he at least said that he didn’t use acid to write with very much.
00:18:05 ►
But I think he probably used it to break through and then use the speed to finish the book.
00:18:15 ►
And often in his books, you can see the effect.
00:18:17 ►
He has this brilliant concept.
00:18:20 ►
And for 100 pages, he writes it down brilliantly.
00:18:23 ►
And then you can just feel the energy draining away, and it ends with a kind of torpor, as if he’d simply run out of neurotransmitters, which he probably literally had.
00:18:37 ►
Yeah, it is intriguing to see the writer associated with their drug. You know, Freud’s work kind of has that same mark of cocaine on it
00:18:45 ►
where it’s just, okay, you could have said this quicker.
00:18:47 ►
Apparently Ayn Rand as well.
00:18:49 ►
Yes.
00:18:50 ►
Yes, well, Ayn Rand was a big speed freak for prescription speed.
00:18:55 ►
And, yeah, it’s a lot easier to write 900-page scolding novels
00:19:00 ►
if you’re full of prescription quality amphetamines.
00:19:06 ►
Yeah, so they have that to answer for, among other things.
00:19:11 ►
But getting back to the ancient world, for the Greeks and Romans, the use of opium and
00:19:19 ►
Marcus Aurelius being addicted to opium, I mean, how did it play out in those?
00:19:23 ►
I mean, how much do we know about how this played out on those ancient battlefields?
00:19:28 ►
Well, it depends on which ancient battlefield and how you’re using the drug.
00:19:34 ►
I think alcohol was probably the most common and the most effective battle drug in the
00:19:41 ►
world.
00:19:49 ►
in the world. I mean, the only drug that I’ve seen predispose people to violence to quite the same extent was cocaine. And alcohol is much more universal. Cocaine didn’t hit the world market
00:19:56 ►
until, I don’t know, late 18th, early 20th century. But alcohol has always been there.
00:20:03 ►
And alcohol always makes young males want to fight. And what you need is something that makes young males want to fight.
00:20:10 ►
One of the awkward truths about wars is that it’s as difficult as we’d like to think to make
00:20:15 ►
young males hurt people. They do that anyway. But if you really want to get everybody in the mood
00:20:24 ►
to hurt somebody,
00:20:25 ►
get them all very drunk. I mean, for example, there’s that endless debate about what berserkers
00:20:30 ►
were, you know, like the Viking shock troops. Were Viking berserkers high on mushrooms or were
00:20:37 ►
they just drunk out of their minds? The most effectively violent people I know are drunks.
00:20:44 ►
I don’t know any, I don’t know any i don’t know any
00:20:46 ►
just to compare with them good point and i was actually just about to ask about that one because
00:20:49 ►
there’s that great line from the old icelandic poet who said that the viking berserkers would
00:20:54 ►
go mad as dogs or wolves bit their shields and were strong as bears or wild oxen and maybe that
00:21:00 ►
was on amanita’s mushrooms which which is a fascinating idea. Yeah.
00:21:14 ►
Yeah, I have not tried Amanita, but I have read about accounts of it in eastern Siberia in the early 20th century. There’s a really interesting book by this guy who ended up there for – it’s a long story.
00:21:33 ►
But he said the people in Kamchatka loved the Amanita so much that they would trade a whole sleigh load of furs for one mushroom.
00:21:35 ►
But they didn’t become violent. He said they became giggly and drunk.
00:21:38 ►
And it’s probably because this was a small nomadic group and they had no use for violence.
00:21:46 ►
this was a small nomadic group and they had no use for violence. What they wanted people to do was get giggly and funny and relax a little. So probably the group will determine to some
00:21:54 ►
extent what the drug would do. That makes a lot of sense. And especially because amanitas are
00:21:59 ►
technically classified as a deliriant, which puts them closer to something like PCP, which is
00:22:05 ►
another one that when, which can be a really lovely drug, and we use a lot in the 60s and 70s
00:22:10 ►
as like a pre-ketamine fun drug. You know, when you’re in the mood to be very violent, PCP is an
00:22:17 ►
amazing drug for violence. You have this alcoholic loss of control, you have this cocaine-fueled
00:22:22 ►
speed, and then you’re out of reality as well
00:22:25 ►
with the dissociation. And it’s the other one that can just make people be able to break out
00:22:29 ►
of the back of cop cars. Yeah, I remember that. In Terminator, there was that line,
00:22:35 ►
ah, he was probably on speed. And we all know, no, he was a Terminator. That’s why he was able
00:22:42 ►
to bash up your cop car. Sorry, he was on PCP rather.
00:22:46 ►
I’ve never taken it because, you know, it’s weird which drugs people are scared of at
00:22:50 ►
particular times and places. In California, when I was doing drugs, and naturally I got into it at
00:22:55 ►
the wrong time, just at the beginning of the Reagan years, people were scared of PCP. You were
00:23:02 ►
going over a line if you did PCP.
00:23:06 ►
I don’t know if there was any basis for it, but, you know, at the same time, heroin was sort of over the line at that time.
00:23:13 ►
And then that changed in 1990, and heroin was very much a part of cool culture from then on.
00:23:20 ►
But until that point, people were frightened of it.
00:23:24 ►
then on. But until that point, people were frightened of it. And if you go back to the hippie culture, which I sort of lived through but wasn’t part of, they also had this loathing for
00:23:32 ►
the opiates. They considered them to be death drugs somehow. But they were pretty much okay
00:23:43 ►
with everything else. So I don’t know i mean i i haven’t tried
00:23:46 ►
pcp because because of this taboo but actually that sounds kind of nice um yeah uh hamilton
00:23:53 ►
morris uh likes to point out in the 70s there are more bust of uh pcp manufacturers and there
00:23:58 ►
were lsd by far people were taking it and they were enjoying it. I haven’t tried it myself either, but, you know, got to try everything once.
00:24:07 ►
Yeah, well, I actually liked it.
00:24:09 ►
I mean, one thing that I have done pretty consistently is try to follow Hunter Thompson’s example because I lived through the worst of the Reagan years.
00:24:18 ►
And I was living in Berkeley, California.
00:24:22 ►
And for me, at least, it was almost impossible to get drugs.
00:24:26 ►
I mean, who knows? Maybe that’s why I’m alive.
00:24:28 ►
But at the same time, it made things very awkward.
00:24:31 ►
And I saw people deny things that I’d seen them enjoy.
00:24:37 ►
And I saw them condemn things that I’d seen them enjoy.
00:24:40 ►
And I even, to my horror, saw people like William Burroughs making anti-drug statements.
00:24:47 ►
And the only person who didn’t do that was Hunter S. Thompson.
00:24:51 ►
And I always try to speak up.
00:24:53 ►
I’ve had many great moments, and I’ve produced some of my favorite things on drugs.
00:24:58 ►
Amen.
00:24:58 ►
And actually, you would be a perfect person to ask about the age-old crisis, the hashishin and their use of hashish.
00:25:06 ►
Yeah, that’s a really interesting question. I mean, yeah, nobody is really sure how much
00:25:13 ►
the role drugs played in that. I would suspect not a very major role. I think this was an early
00:25:20 ►
example of anti-drug propaganda in the context of a major sectarian war. The Hashashin
00:25:27 ►
were a sect of Shia Islam. And it should be easy for people to understand that because we’re living
00:25:35 ►
through a major war between Sunni and Shia in the Islamic world right now. And this was also a time of Sunni Shia sectarian violence.
00:25:47 ►
The difference was the Shia were based in places like Egypt, which are now no longer Shia.
00:25:54 ►
The Hashashin were in northern Iran. Iran was not yet Shia, that came later. So they were holed up in these impregnable castles, the mountains,
00:26:08 ►
and they could not overcome the huge armies of the Sunni Caliph through any kind of conventional
00:26:16 ►
military strategy. So they resorted to assassination as a military strategy, and they were very good at
00:26:23 ►
it. One of the reasons they
00:26:26 ►
were good at it is that they somehow managed to indoctrinate young men to be willing to die
00:26:33 ►
in order to kill their targets. One of the ways that the Sunni majority, because the Sunni
00:26:39 ►
outnumbered the Shia then just as they do now, One of the ways they explained that was, oh, they must be on drugs.
00:26:45 ►
It’s remarkably contemporary sounding. They must have given them some drug which addled their
00:26:52 ►
minds. And that’s why one of these young men was able to walk up to the court of some Sunni monarch
00:26:58 ►
smiling and making courtly conversation, and then stab him in the heart, knowing that he would be tortured to death afterwards.
00:27:07 ►
But the more I’ve researched about them, and I’ve tried to read what I can about the Hashashin,
00:27:15 ►
drugs seem to have played a very minor role.
00:27:17 ►
This was a religious war, and to some extent a local war, what we now call an ethnic war.
00:27:32 ►
a local war, what we now call an ethnic war. And you don’t make people willing to become suicide troops just through drugs. The US was handing out, for example, a lot of amphetamines during
00:27:39 ►
the Vietnam War. But if that was all it took, you could have just stuffed the South Vietnamese army
00:27:44 ►
full of amphetamines and they would have become the Waffen-SS in a couple of days.
00:27:48 ►
It doesn’t happen that way.
00:27:50 ►
These assassins of the Hashashin were committed Shia martyrs, and Shia culture, like, say,
00:28:00 ►
Irish culture, values martyrdom very highly.
00:28:05 ►
And that tradition was already in place.
00:28:07 ►
It didn’t take drugs to make them do these things.
00:28:10 ►
Yeah, but they could be enhancing along the way.
00:28:12 ►
Yeah, well, supposedly this, and I’m not sure people know this, but the legend was,
00:28:16 ►
the legend that the Sunni majority pumped out about these crazy Hashashin is that their leader,
00:28:27 ►
these crazy hashashin, is that their leader, who was this sinister old man, kind of a pusher, let’s say, would put them to sleep with one drug, and this drug would put them in some
00:28:35 ►
kind of psychedelic state.
00:28:37 ►
And without their knowledge, they’d be carried into this garden where everything was green and growing and water flowed and there were beautiful
00:28:48 ►
young women. And he would say, here, you now are in paradise. As soon as you go kill that emir
00:28:56 ►
been giving us trouble, you’re going to spend eternity in this paradise. And it’s like, okay, wow, yeah. And you can see the same
00:29:07 ►
propaganda at work right now about suicide fighters who are now Sunni, by a weird irony.
00:29:16 ►
Like people talking about how these Islamic State guys wouldn’t do it if they didn’t believe they
00:29:21 ►
were going to get 72 virgins in paradise. I’m not sure
00:29:26 ►
that’s true. I’m not sure how many of them actually believe it. Many of them have very
00:29:31 ►
little background in Islamic faith. Many of them are just full of male adolescent rage and a desire
00:29:41 ►
to make their mark by hurting people. And, you know And I went to a really lousy public high school in California,
00:29:49 ►
not even what would be considered a very rough high school.
00:29:52 ►
But to me, when explaining why young males do this kind of thing,
00:29:59 ►
it is really useful to remember ninth grade PE, as we called it, gym class, whatever.
00:30:07 ►
I can see those guys doing that in a second, and you wouldn’t have them high on drugs.
00:30:12 ►
They were full of hate and rage already.
00:30:15 ►
On the potentially helpful side, I just learned for the first time that during the British 30 Years War,
00:30:22 ►
it sounds like alcohol was being used.
00:30:24 ►
They called it Dutch courage for PTSD to kind of help ease people out of the horror of that war so they wouldn’t have as much trauma later on down the road.
00:30:34 ►
Well, OK. The British didn’t play much role in the Thirty Years’ War, although Prince Rupert, for example, fought in the Thirty Years’ War.
00:30:41 ►
The British Civil War followed immediately on the Thirty Years’ War.
00:30:44 ►
So I’m not
00:30:45 ►
sure which war. But in general, every war has left huge scars on the people who fought it.
00:30:55 ►
Not so much because they didn’t enjoy it at the time, I think a lot of them did,
00:31:00 ►
but because there was no way to adjust from that mode of consciousness to a civilian one.
00:31:06 ►
So there have always been huge drug use.
00:31:14 ►
I mean, part of this is contextual.
00:31:16 ►
How much alcohol did the average European consume in the 17th century?
00:31:21 ►
The amount is insane.
00:31:23 ►
I mean, those people were drunk most of the time.
00:31:27 ►
I mean, the way I came to this is reading about colonial America and hearing about it from Mark
00:31:33 ►
Ames, who was researching a book on rage murders in American history. And he said when he went
00:31:40 ►
back and looked at the history of colonial America, he could not believe it.
00:31:45 ►
Like everybody – we had a whiskey rebellion, right?
00:31:50 ►
An actual war fought in part, and in part that was a propaganda term, whiskey rebellion, invented by Eleanor Hamilton.
00:31:58 ►
But in part it was because on the frontier, you grew crops.
00:32:03 ►
If you just left them around, they’d rot.
00:32:06 ►
The only way you could save the value of your crops was by distilling them into corn liquor, into whiskey.
00:32:13 ►
And that when the federal government tried to tax them, a lot of people were willing to go to war.
00:32:19 ►
It also meant that there was an endless supply of really strong liquor around all the time.
00:32:28 ►
And that was just standard European culture.
00:32:32 ►
In Britain, it came with the switch from ale to gin, to distilled liquor.
00:32:39 ►
And this is the early 18th century.
00:32:41 ►
There’s a famous series of teachings about the horrendous effect of gin. It was supposedly like crack cocaine supposedly was in America in the 1980s.
00:32:54 ►
And distilled liquors were the norm. I mean, people would gouge each other’s eyes out. Brothers would stab each other. It was a very violence-inducing drug,
00:33:06 ►
and that was just part of the culture that was accepted. But to get back to your question about
00:33:10 ►
cures, it also meant that especially for the defeated, being drunk for the remainder of your
00:33:19 ►
life was probably the way you dealt with your war experience, and not just drunk.
00:33:32 ►
It’s only come out recently that a huge number of Confederate soldiers and officers after the Civil War became complete morphine and various opiate addicts.
00:33:38 ►
That was how they dealt with their defeat.
00:33:41 ►
They just stayed floating as long as they could and as often as they could.
00:33:49 ►
And one of the uses of opiates is to take away that kind of pain, emotional as well as physical
00:33:56 ►
pain. Yeah. And the American Civil War was the first war to have very widespread morphine use,
00:34:03 ►
correct? Yeah. Yeah. As far as I know, yeah.
00:34:06 ►
Yeah, but there have always been, yeah, they were just creating better distillates,
00:34:10 ►
but there had always been opium available.
00:34:14 ►
I mean, it’s not hard to make opium.
00:34:17 ►
You just, you know, cut the pod and collect the sap, and that’s opium.
00:34:23 ►
And it’s quite effective.
00:34:24 ►
You can eat it. you can smoke it,
00:34:26 ►
you can drink it mixed with alcohol,
00:34:31 ►
which would be called laudanum.
00:34:33 ►
And that was around at least by the beginning of the 19th century
00:34:37 ►
because it was around in time to give Samuel Taylor Coleridge
00:34:42 ►
some good ideas for poems, but also probably shorten his career,
00:34:46 ►
which is sort of typical. Drugs give and they take away. That’s how it works.
00:34:51 ►
And it does seem that way with the American Civil War, too. I mean, the numbers that they estimate
00:34:56 ►
of addicts coming out of that war is huge, but I’ve been seeing some stuff lately where they’re
00:34:59 ►
starting to question those numbers as being as gigantic as they were laid out.
00:35:03 ►
starting to question those numbers as being as gigantic as they were laid out.
00:35:10 ►
Well, yeah. I mean, have you known any opiate users? I know a lot of opiate users and I know few addicts. I can think of two people who actually became addicts and both of them are
00:35:15 ►
still alive and neither one is an addict now. So part of it is terminology. Who qualifies as an
00:35:20 ►
addict? I’ve known a lot of weekend opiate users, and I’m sure there were
00:35:25 ►
a lot of people who were the equivalent of weekend users in that group as well. So it all depends on
00:35:31 ►
how you classify them. And so to move up a little bit more in history, I didn’t realize that World
00:35:37 ►
War I was often known as a tobacco war for the amount of cigarettes people smoked.
00:35:42 ►
Okay. Yeah. I don’t know much about tobacco because I’ve never smoked it,
00:35:46 ►
but I don’t understand what good it would do to you. You’re smoking and you’re smoking,
00:35:53 ►
and I guess there’s some kind of high. I don’t know. But there are some great tobacco stories
00:35:58 ►
from the First World War. Like if you know the writer Saki, who wrote some really fantastic short stories and was sort of the
00:36:05 ►
direct ancestor of P.G. Woodhouse. He died because he was a lieutenant and it was forbidden to smoke
00:36:16 ►
while you were on sentry duty because you made a perfect target for snipers. And he came up to a
00:36:23 ►
sentry who was smoking and said, put out that bloody cigar and got about that far before he got shot in the head.
00:36:29 ►
So yeah, they were all smoking.
00:36:32 ►
I suspect a lot of them were using other drugs as well.
00:36:35 ►
It would have been too soon for the amphetamines,
00:36:38 ►
but also in a trench war, what would you do with amphetamines?
00:36:43 ►
It’s kind of interesting to speculate about the relation between the kind of war you’re doing and the kind of drug you’re using.
00:36:50 ►
The Eastern Front of World War II, where there was all that amphetamine, that was a very mobile war.
00:36:55 ►
The Western Front in World War I, basically, you just had to sit there underground in the mud and the rain and the lice and the filth day after day after day.
00:37:09 ►
You wouldn’t want to be on speed.
00:37:12 ►
You’d want to be drunk or on opiates if possible.
00:37:17 ►
Though I did find out while researching for this that apparently my people, the Dutch, they were selling pure cocaine from Java to both sides in the fight.
00:37:29 ►
Wow. Wow. There was cocaine in Java. I didn’t know they brought cocaine to Java.
00:37:34 ►
I just read that today. Apparently in the British forces, it was called forced march tablets.
00:37:40 ►
They eventually banned it in 1916 in the Defense of the Realm Act.
00:37:49 ►
But, you know, the Dutch, the Dutch were dealing to both sides of the conflict.
00:38:05 ►
Wow. I always think of that as a South American product, but I suppose, yeah, you could – one thing that the empire’s British, Dutch, French were very good at doing is passing useful plants around from one part of the tropics to another.
00:38:08 ►
So it makes sense that it brought it to Java. Yeah. And speaking of the tropics, one of the last big pieces of this puzzle,
00:38:14 ►
Vietnam, the first pharmacological war.
00:38:17 ►
Yeah, I’ve heard it called that. I don’t know what people mean by that.
00:38:21 ►
They’re all pharmacological wars. I mean,
00:38:29 ►
mean by that. They’re all pharmacological wars. I mean, every war has a particular inflection to its pharmacology. But yeah, that to me is of American exceptionalism. It’s like, no, it wasn’t.
00:38:36 ►
Like, for one thing, our guys were using amphetamines all over the place in World War II.
00:38:41 ►
So how is it the first pharmacological war? And all the other drugs are much older than that, a bit in constant use.
00:38:48 ►
And I don’t know.
00:38:50 ►
Every war has its own cool or not cool or horrendous or interesting anyway drug variants.
00:39:13 ►
Ishmael Bea’s memoir of being a child soldier in Sierra Leone, he talks about a drug I’d never heard of before, which they called Brown Brown, which is a mix of cocaine and gunpowder, which when you think about it is the perfect war drug. The gunpowder doesn’t do anything pharmacologically, but it probably reinforces your belief that you’re a really fierce soldier.
00:39:23 ►
And then the cocaine just keeps you up, you know,
00:39:25 ►
and keeps you willing to kill people. You feed that to a bunch of 13 year old boys. And, you
00:39:31 ►
know, it’s no wonder things get awful. I have a quote from him right here, from Ismail Abay’s
00:39:40 ►
book. And he said, after several doses of these drugs, all I felt was numbness to everything and so much energy that I couldn’t sleep for weeks. Yes, we watched war movies at night,
00:39:49 ►
Rambo’s First Blood, First Blood Part Two. Yeah, I couldn’t wait to implement Rambo’s techniques.
00:39:54 ►
Yes, one thing you find in all contemporary African irregular war is huge influence of pop culture, mostly American pop culture.
00:40:08 ►
People always choose names from names from characters in violent movies.
00:40:14 ►
Sometimes the gangs that they fight for are even named after somebody from a movie or named after the movie itself. And that always goes along with some kind of stimulant
00:40:28 ►
because Bayard describes what’s clearly a longer lasting speed in pill form, as well as this
00:40:35 ►
cocaine gunpowder mixture. So, you know, that’s a pharmacological war too. And Vietnam was a
00:40:42 ►
pharmacological war in a slightly different sense, but it wasn’t the first one, not by a long shot. And I know you’re familiar with the work of
00:40:50 ►
Lukas Kamensky, who did that book, Shooting Up, and he’s written a good article for The Atlantic
00:40:56 ►
about the Vietnam War. But he does kind of overemphasize the newness of all this.
00:41:08 ►
overemphasize the newness of all this. And a lot of it, he says, people were, the LURPs,
00:41:17 ►
who were like the elite long range scouts, sort of scout assassin troops of the American forces there, would carry a packet which included dexedrine, a powerful prescription, amphetamine,
00:41:29 ►
which included dexedrine, a powerful prescription, amphetamine, Darvon, a not-so-powerful prescription, opiate,
00:41:35 ►
and I can’t recall, some other form of opiate as well.
00:41:42 ►
So basically they had the ability to stay up when they wanted and go down when they wanted.
00:41:47 ►
Most serious druggies that I’ve known talk in those terms,
00:41:53 ►
you know, are you going up, are you going down? And as he says, you know, this came at terrible cost in their later lives, but the terrible cost tends to come when you’ve been in a war.
00:41:59 ►
It’s not from the pharmacology so much. I’m not convinced of that.
00:42:04 ►
It’s more the adjustment from one consciousness to another.
00:42:09 ►
But anyway, yeah, it was a hugely pharmacological war, but so were a lot of others.
00:42:15 ►
So were many of them.
00:42:16 ►
I think what Americans mean when they say that about Vietnam is they’re talking about corruption,
00:42:21 ►
and they’re associating the Vietnam War with the corruption of their society.
00:42:27 ►
Whether rightly or wrongly, I don’t know.
00:42:31 ►
I don’t really think so.
00:42:33 ►
The corruption came from us sources. In the 1980s, when Reagan was waging war on drugs, supposedly, his intelligence people were also importing huge amounts of cocaine in order to fund their counter-revolutionary forces, the Contras, in Nicaragua.
00:42:55 ►
I would call that a very serious form of corruption, but they don’t see that as corruption because we won that war, essentially.
00:43:03 ►
The revolutionary movement
00:43:05 ►
was crushed uh therefore it’s it’s not a corruption story vietnam is a corruption story because
00:43:10 ►
to put it bluntly we lost i i guess the the reason he called it that uh for the vietnam was
00:43:16 ►
more because the quantity of drugs taken uh and and that you also had psychedelics uh in the mix
00:43:22 ►
you know modern psychedelics for the first time. Right.
00:43:25 ►
And the idea that 10 to 15 percent of American soldiers were addicted to heroin.
00:43:29 ►
And if you read the politics of heroin in Southeast Asia by McCoy, you start to realize how much the CIA was either directly implicit in the trade or protecting Thai warlords and chemists that were turning us into heroin and getting onto American streets
00:43:47 ►
and the corrosiveness that money had on our own intelligence service.
00:43:52 ►
Yeah, that’s true.
00:43:54 ►
But the strange thing for me, and I find this in every war I research,
00:44:01 ►
is that we tend to whitewash the British Empire in an extraordinary way.
00:44:08 ►
And we’re talking about a really minor echo of the opium wars here. I mean, this is an
00:44:15 ►
unprecedented episode in history. Two huge wars against the biggest country in the world, in order to force them to accept delivery of massive amounts of opium produced in British India.
00:44:31 ►
And this was a global effort in the mid-19th century.
00:44:35 ►
First, huge tracts of farmland in northern India, mostly, were converted from raising food crops to raising opium then that opium was
00:44:49 ►
shipped to china and then the british and the french their running dogs as usual in that period
00:44:56 ►
fought a major war against the qing dynasty which was attempting to stop them from importing these huge amounts of opium.
00:45:07 ►
And the reason they needed to import opium is that there was no balance of payment with China.
00:45:12 ►
China was this remarkably self-claimed and in many ways kind of arrogant culture, which
00:45:17 ►
didn’t see that it needed anything the outside world had to offer. But the outside world needed
00:45:23 ►
their tea and needed their textiles
00:45:26 ►
and needed all these other products. So there was no balance of payment and the British Empire was
00:45:32 ►
not going to stand for that. So they needed to introduce a product that would produce its own
00:45:38 ►
need. And voila, an addictive drug. Perfect. So the harm this did to China has not begun to be calculated.
00:45:52 ►
I’ve seen all kinds of wild estimates of the number of opium addicts in early 20th century China.
00:45:59 ►
But it was a matter of course for middle class Chinese people to be addicted to opium. You read early 20th century travelers accounts of China and the population is declining everywhere.
00:46:12 ►
Whole districts of cities are abandoned.
00:46:16 ►
The few people there are completely lethargic, have no energy.
00:46:21 ►
Everyone is an opium addict.
00:46:23 ►
And this was not an accident.
00:46:26 ►
energy. Everyone is an opium addict. And this was not an accident. And it was not because Chinese people are weak-willed, which I don’t think anyone ever said about Chinese people anyway.
00:46:31 ►
I think people need to recognize this was one of the major wars of the 19th century, and it was
00:46:37 ►
fought explicitly, not secretly or quasi-secretly like the CIA’s war, but openly and explicitly to make addicts out of the world’s biggest nation.
00:46:50 ►
Are there any modern conflicts where you feel some kind of similarity
00:46:54 ►
to the British opium wars?
00:46:57 ►
In the sense that they are designed to open up markets,
00:47:00 ►
you could call an awful lot of modern wars similar to that. The fall of the
00:47:08 ►
Soviet Union, even though it wasn’t a military matter, to everyone’s surprise, everyone thought
00:47:13 ►
that would have to end with massive bloodshed, but it didn’t. And yet, it meant massive markets
00:47:19 ►
opened up and were instantly exploited.
00:47:27 ►
There’s a lot of that kind of war.
00:47:37 ►
And you can feel the pressure to produce more markets, to produce more needs, yeah.
00:47:42 ►
But I’m trying to think if there’s one that was explicitly about getting people addicted to a particular drug. And no, the US example you
00:47:46 ►
mentioned is one of the main ways in which, you know, the US is so horrible at empire compared
00:47:52 ►
to the British, because the analogy would be is if the British tried to get the British people
00:47:58 ►
addicted to opium, they didn’t, they inflicted that on somebody else. But the American intelligence agencies decided to inflict it on their own people.
00:48:11 ►
Yeah, it’s pretty awful to read the history of the CIA and drugs.
00:48:16 ►
Yeah.
00:48:16 ►
It just gets worse and we don’t even know that much, really, so much of it burned by Helms. Well, and there’s the journalist Gary Webb. My partner in Radio Warner, Mark Ames,
00:48:28 ►
has done a lot of research in what happened to Gary Webb. He was basically the person who
00:48:33 ►
broke the story about the CIA’s horrendous trade in cocaine in order to fund the militias they were using in Nicaragua. Gary Webb was smeared
00:48:48 ►
mercilessly in the mainstream press, couldn’t get a job, was driven to suicide eventually.
00:48:56 ►
And then when the pressure was off, when the war was won and nobody cared that much anymore,
00:49:01 ►
they sort of admit, yeah, we did that. Yeah. The book to read is Dark Alliance for anybody who wants to see about that terribleness.
00:49:10 ►
And I heard one researcher once say, yeah, that he committed suicide by one to the back of the head.
00:49:17 ►
I don’t know. That could be true. I don’t know. But, you know, I don’t know. I was a failed
00:49:22 ►
American career seeker myself and uh i wasn’t that
00:49:27 ►
far from it i i don’t think they’d have to do any of that spy movie stuff to you i think uh it’s not
00:49:33 ►
hard to to uh convince somebody they’re worthless yeah well i just want to i just had one more
00:49:40 ►
question i want to ask before i let you go back to the New Zealand days. But modafinil in the U.S. military, it seems to be their new wakefulness drug.
00:49:49 ►
Do you hear much about that?
00:49:51 ►
Oh, well, I tried that.
00:49:53 ►
I had high hopes of it simply because it was legal.
00:49:55 ►
Every time I try something because it’s legal, I get either disappointed or just terrified out of my mind.
00:50:00 ►
That was my experience most recently with salvia.
00:50:04 ►
It’s like, oh, salvia divinorin, huh?
00:50:06 ►
It’s legal.
00:50:07 ►
Right.
00:50:07 ►
Okay.
00:50:08 ►
Five minutes later, I’m out on the porch screaming.
00:50:10 ►
Anyway, I don’t trust these legal drugs.
00:50:14 ►
If it’s any good, it’s probably going to be illegal.
00:50:16 ►
But I have tried modafinil, and it’s a very boring drug.
00:50:21 ►
It’s not even like speed.
00:50:23 ►
It’s wakeful, yes.
00:50:24 ►
But it’s almost like it was
00:50:28 ►
invented by an office manager um all the wakeful with none of the euphoria and uh
00:50:34 ►
i can see why why it’s it’s popular with some very puritanical hierarchies like those of the U.S. military. But I don’t see it as anything that people would pay money on the street to buy.
00:50:51 ►
So I guess, do you have any final comments you’d like to talk about,
00:50:54 ►
about the past or the future use of drugs in war?
00:50:58 ►
Well, we haven’t got – I mean, there’s so much here.
00:51:02 ►
Basically, everybody will use anything they’ve got.
00:51:07 ►
And you can’t blame what they use for the wars because we do these things and we’re not as good as we’d like.
00:51:18 ►
But we will use anything we’ve got to make them more fun, if that’s not too crude a thing to say, or easier.
00:51:27 ►
We haven’t really dealt with some of the stranger drugs like ibogaine, which I’ve heard used as a cure for opiate addiction.
00:51:36 ►
And apparently people say it works for that.
00:51:38 ►
But it’s also used as a hunting drug.
00:51:46 ►
hunting drug. And it seems like it would make a perfect sniper’s drug because in West Africa, where it was used for centuries, it was primarily because often a hunter has to stay in place
00:51:54 ►
at an ambush site for a long time until the prey animal comes by. And Ibogaine apparently allowed you just to stand immobile for hours on end without moving or feeling any need to itch your nose or whatever.
00:52:12 ►
I can see that as a perfect sniper drug.
00:52:30 ►
when we interviewed him that ayahuasca, the Amazonian drug, makes you hyper aware of all your surroundings. I would never have thought so. I would have thought you, you know, I’ve seen too
00:52:35 ►
many of these drugs, like these nice safe organics that make you puke your guts up and all that.
00:52:40 ►
But he said it produced this hyper-awareness.
00:52:46 ►
And it was probably also a hunting drug.
00:52:54 ►
And it’s very easy to imagine all these hunting drugs being converted to small combat drugs, sniper drugs.
00:52:55 ►
Yeah, it does make sense.
00:52:57 ►
Because at the low doses, you do kind of feel those effects.
00:52:59 ►
I think you get the same thing with mushrooms.
00:53:11 ►
Terrence McKenna always suggested that they were so helpful to early humans because they made you a better hunter. But I haven’t heard about them being used for human-on-human conflict.
00:53:17 ►
No, maybe because the hunter haven’t done very well in recent conflict.
00:53:28 ►
I mean somebody once wrote a great sentence about basically destroying the myth of Indo-European racial superiority.
00:53:32 ►
It was something like, you know why the Indo-Europeans won a lot of their wars?
00:53:34 ►
Because they were good at growing barley.
00:53:37 ►
And you can produce 10 warriors with a good barley crop.
00:53:39 ►
They don’t have to be Achilles.
00:53:44 ►
And if you’ve got 10 warriors and the nomads have one warrior, you’re going to win.
00:53:45 ►
So the hunter groups haven’t really done too well in modern war.
00:53:48 ►
Yeah, these webs with drugs and war do go on and on.
00:53:53 ►
And I want to thank you for sharing so much.
00:53:55 ►
It’s really an impressive array of knowledge, especially because drugs aren’t your first specialty.
00:53:59 ►
It’s war, and how much you know about drugs is pretty magnificent.
00:54:04 ►
Well, God knows I try, but I tell you, it’s all theory.
00:54:08 ►
My real feeling about drugs, there was a story Abraham Lincoln used to tell about some child in the backwoods.
00:54:19 ►
And this distinguished visitor comes up and pats the child on the head and says,
00:54:26 ►
Why, hello, young fellow.
00:54:28 ►
Do you like gingerbread?
00:54:37 ►
And the kid thinks about it for a while and squints up at the guy and says, I don’t suppose nobody likes it more nor gets less of it.
00:54:41 ►
All right.
00:54:43 ►
Well, I think we should leave it on that.
00:54:44 ►
Okay.
00:54:46 ►
You can’t lose on a Lincoln anecdote. No. Okay. All right. Well, I think we should leave it on that. Okay. You can’t lose on a Lincoln anecdote.
00:54:47 ►
No. Okay.
00:54:55 ►
All right. Well, John Dolan, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us and keep up the great work on your podcast.
00:54:57 ►
My pleasure. Thanks.
00:55:05 ►
Before I let you go, I have to share one of the best stories I’ve ever heard about drugs and warfare.
00:55:17 ►
I initially heard about this from Cannabis and the Soma Solution, Chris Bennett’s book on the history of cannabis and religion, which is one of the best research things on that I’ve ever seen, probably the best.
00:55:29 ►
And he found something in the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission Report, which was an incredible 10 volumes put together by the British about 100 years ago, and still one of the best things on the everyday use of cannabis ever done.
00:55:36 ►
And so they detail a story about the use of bong among the Sikhs. And bong is a drink where they pound cannabis into a milk type product or water and they drink it. It’s a sacred draught. It’s
00:55:42 ►
also a draught that you can use during warfare, and they were some of the best warriors ever to come out of the subcontinent.
00:55:49 ►
And so at one of the great battles between the legendary 10th guru of the Sikh religion,
00:55:57 ►
Gobind Singh, the founder of the Sikh religion, he was battling some of the local rajas,
00:56:12 ►
he was battling some of the local rajas, and the rajas sent a trained elephant who had a sword for slaying its enemies and breaking open the gates of forts.
00:56:21 ►
And you can imagine in the 16th century the tank-like power of an elephant with a sword that could break down giant walls.
00:56:26 ►
And so from here I’ll quote from the Indian Hemp Commission report.
00:56:33 ►
The guru gave one of his followers, Bachitar Singh, some bong and a little opium to eat and directed him to face the said elephant. This brave man obeyed the word of command of his leader and
00:56:38 ►
attacked the elephant, who was intoxicated and had achieved victory in several battles before,
00:56:43 ►
who was intoxicated and had achieved victory in several battles before,
00:56:48 ►
with the result that the animal was overpowered and the Hilrajas defeated.
00:56:53 ►
The use of bhang, therefore, is a necessary sacred draught. It is customary among the Sikhs generally to drink bhang,
00:56:56 ►
so the guru Gobind Singh himself has said in the following poem in praise of bhang,
00:57:02 ►
Give me, O Saki, a cup of green color bong as it is required
00:57:08 ►
by me at the time of battle and so there is that wonderful story if you can imagine it a drunk
00:57:17 ►
rampaging elephant with the sword and as legend goes a sikh warrior with a little bit of opium and a lot of hashish in his system
00:57:26 ►
who goes with a sword up underneath this elephant and opens up its guts underneath
00:57:32 ►
and killing an elephant, which is one of the hardest things to do anyway.
00:57:38 ►
And so there is one of the classic stories of drugs and warfare that I’ve ever heard in all of my research.
00:57:44 ►
So it’s not beautiful,
00:57:46 ►
but it is amazing.
00:57:51 ►
Thanks for listening to the Psychedelic Salon 2.0. To help us out, you can leave a review or rating
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00:58:06 ►
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