What’s in it for me? Discover how drugs have been a force for human progress and innovation, and an agent of chaos bringing the world to the brink of destruction, and you'll never see history the same way again.
Queen Victoria ruled the British Empire at its peak, overseeing a quarter of the world's population from 1837 to 1901. Her personal physician prescribed her cannabis tinctures for menstrual cramps, and opium dissolved in wine as a daily tonic. She also enjoyed cocaine in her wine or her chewing gum, and consumed that daily as well.
The monarch who defined an era of strict moral propriety, whose name became synonymous with sexual repression and rigid social codes, regularly consumed hard drugs. She even knighted her doctor for his services.
This isn't some historical anomaly. It's part of a pattern that stretches from ancient temples to modern Silicon Valley boardrooms. Humanity's relationship with mind-altering substances is as old as civilization itself. Egyptian priests buried their pharaohs with hashish for the afterlife. Alexander the Great conquered the ancient world blitzed on alcohol and opium – and died from partying. Medieval nobles accidentally dosed themselves with ergot-contaminated bread, seeing visions they attributed to God. Every society, in every era, has seen its leaders, thinkers, and visionaries operating under altered consciousness.
This Blink tells the story of how drugs have shaped five thousand years of human achievement – and nearly ended it all.
Divine visions and empire decisions
Ramses II ruled ancient Egypt and Nubia for an astonishing sixty-six years, from 1279 until 1213 BCE. He is remembered for his massive construction program, building more monuments than any other pharaoh. These include the rock-cut temple complex near Abu Simbel, and additions to the Karnak Temple Complex near Luxor.
In 1976, French Egyptologists analyzing x mummy at the Museum of Mankind in Paris discovered cannabis pollen in his abdominal cavity along with traces of nicotine – despite tobacco being unknown in ancient Egypt. The pharaoh who negotiated history's first recorded peace treaty stashed marijuana in his burial wrappings for the afterlife.
A bit further North, the Oracle of Delphi shaped the entire ancient world for nearly twelve hundred years – from about 800 BC until the fourth century of the common era. This priestess was considered the voice of Apollo on earth, and the ultimate authority for Greek city-states. No one declared war, founded colonies, or enacted major laws without first climbing Mount Parnassus to the Temple and consulting the oracle. Kings waited months for an audience, and treasuries were built for the gold offered in exchange for her prophecies. The Battle of Salamis in 480 BCE, which saved Greek civilization from Persian conquest, was fought based on her cryptic prophecies.
But the Oracle's divine visions had a geological source. The temple sat directly atop two intersecting fault lines that released ethylene gas, a sweet-smelling vapor that causes euphoric hallucinations. French archaeologists in 1927 first noted the fissures beneath the temple floor, and modern analysis confirmed ethylene deposits in the spring water and travertine rock. The priestess also likely consumed oleander leaves before prophesying. This poisonous plant, which grew wild around Delphi, causes delirium and tremors in controlled doses. The most crucial decisions of the ancient Mediterranean world came from a woman breathing volcanic gases while deliberately poisoning herself.
Meanwhile in Rome, Marcus Aurelius ruled the Empire from 161 to 180 CE, and is considered the last of the Five Good Emperors. His philosophical work Meditations, remains required reading in philosophy courses worldwide. He composed these thoughts on duty, mortality, and self-discipline while commanding legions of Roman soldiers against the Germanic tribes under conditions of extreme physical hardship. The text champions emotional control and mental clarity as the highest virtues.
Marcus Aurelius’ personal physician, Galen of Pergamon, was antiquity's most influential medical authority, whose writings shaped medicine for a millennium. For the emperor’s chronic chest and stomach pain, Galen prescribed theriac – a potent mixture of opium, wine, and honey. Marcus Aurelius drank this every morning and evening. Those famous stoic reflections on accepting fate and mastering desire were written under the influence of enough opiates to knock out a modern pain patient.
Scientific breakdowns and breakthroughs
When cocaine was first isolated in 1855 from the leaves of the Coca plant, it quickly became available as an anesthetic and pain reliever throughout Europe. From 1884 to 1887, the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, consumed cocaine daily. He published papers extolling its benefits, and prescribed it liberally to patients and friends.
His 1884 paper Über Coca evangelized cocaine as a cure for depression, morphine addiction, and sexual impotence. He prescribed to his friend, Ernst von Fleischl-Marxow, to treat morphine addiction, inadvertently creating one of the first documented cases of cocaine psychosis when Fleischl-Marxow began hallucinating snakes crawling under his skin.
Freud's most revolutionary theories emerged during his heaviest cocaine use. Foundational concepts of psychoanalysis – the unconscious mind, dream interpretation, and the “talking cure” – were all developed while he consumed what he called his "medicine" multiple times daily. In letters to colleagues, Freud described how cocaine allowed him to work for twenty-hour stretches. He only stopped promoting cocaine after multiple patients died from his prescribed doses, though he continued using it himself well into the 1890s.
But Freud wasn’t the only one to mix hard drugs and psychology. The CIA's MKUltra program, which ran from 1953 to 1973, dosed unwitting American citizens with LSD to study mind control and interrogation techniques. At Harvard in 1959, a brilliant seventeen-year-old mathematics student named Ted Kaczynski enrolled in a psychological study led by Professor Henry Murray. The professor worked with the Office of Strategic Services during World War II, and for three years Murray subjected Kaczynski to interrogations designed to destroy his sense of self, while secretly administering LSD and other drugs.
Kaczynski described these experiments as the worst experience of his life. The young genius who entered Harvard at sixteen left permanently changed, eventually retreating to a cabin in Montana where he built mail bombs that killed three people and injured twenty-three others between 1978 and 1995. MKUltra was itself illegal, and met with public outrage when it was revealed to the public in 1975 through a congressional report. When a FOIA request in 1977 revealed 20,000 documents related to the illegal program, there were congressional hearings to expose the CIA’s illegal activities.
On the more positive side, Carl Sagan brought the cosmos into American living rooms through his PBS series Cosmos, viewed by over 500 million people worldwide. The Cornell astronomer who championed scientific skepticism and rational thinking privately credited marijuana with enhancing his appreciation of art, music, and the universe itself – experiences he documented under the pseudonym "Mr. X" in a 1969 essay. For decades, Sagan consumed cannabis while developing his most creative scientific hypotheses about extraterrestrial life and planetary formation.
Sagan's widow, Ann Druyan, confirmed after his death in 1996 that Sagan used marijuana regularly from the 1960s onward. Cannabis enabled him to perceive patterns in everything from music to social behavior that remained valid when sober. He wrote that his best insights about the nature of the universe often came during altered states, which he then rigorously tested using scientific methods.
The man who sent humanity's golden records into space and warned Congress about nuclear winter believed marijuana enhanced, rather than impaired, his scientific work.
The shaky hands of fate
Adolf Hitler commanded the German Third Reich while consuming an astounding daily pharmaceutical cocktail prescribed by his personal physician, Doctor Theodor Morell. From 1936 until his suicide in 1945, Hitler relied on daily injections from Morell, which included a mix of methamphetamine, cocaine, oxycodone, and dozens of other substances.
By 1943, Hitler received up to twenty injections per day. His hands trembled uncontrollably, likely from Parkinson's disease accelerated by stimulant abuse. He made increasingly erratic military decisions, like declaring war on the United States while already fighting the Soviet Union and Britain. Before the catastrophic Battle of Stalingrad, Hitler took extra doses of methamphetamine, staying awake for days to micromanage troop movements from over a thousand miles away. His infamous rages often occurred during these amphetamine-fueled episodes.
If these records are accurate, then the Holocaust's expansion and the order to fight to the last man both came from a mind increasingly detached from reality. Doctor Morell kept detailed records which survived the war, documenting how the drug use escalated exactly when Nazi decision-making became most catastrophic.
Decades later, US President John F. Kennedy faced down nuclear apocalypse during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 – thirteen days when the world teetered on the brink of nuclear war. Throughout this tense confrontation with the Soviet Union, the president relied on daily injections from Doctor Max Jacobson, nicknamed "Dr. Feelgood" by his celebrity patients. Jacobson's syringes contained a potent mix of amphetamines, steroids, animal hormones, and vitamins.
Kennedy, who had a host of physical ailments, started seeing Jacobson in 1960 for severe back pain, but by the time of the missile crisis he was dependent on the injections. Secret Service agents watched nervously as Jacobson injected the president before crucial meetings with military advisors debating whether to bomb Soviet missile sites in Cuba.
Similarly, Richard Nixon kept the nuclear codes within reach throughout his presidency. During the darkest days of Watergate, as impeachment loomed, the most powerful man in the world regularly drank himself into rage-filled stupors in the White House residence. On multiple occasions Nixon ordered nuclear strikes while intoxicated, like October of 1973 during the Yom Kippur War when a drunk Nixon told Henry Kissinger to ready the nuclear arsenal against the Soviet Union.
Kissinger and Defense Secretary James Schlesinger developed an informal protocol: ignore any nuclear commands from the president after dark, when Nixon did his heaviest drinking. They quietly instructed military commanders to check with him or Kissinger before executing any nuclear orders from the Commander in Chief. Nixon’s own cabinet created a shadow system to prevent a drunken nuclear armageddon.
Art and literature
William Shakespeare transformed the English language between 1590 and 1613, inventing more than 1,700 words still in use today, and writing thirty-seven plays that defined Western literature. His works explored the full range of human experience with unprecedented psychological depth. Four centuries later, researchers analyzing clay pipe fragments from Shakespeare's garden in Stratford-upon-Avon detected cannabis residue in eight samples, along with traces of cocaine from two pipes from the early 1600s.
Shakespeare's most experimental works coincided with cannabis flowing into England through trade with Asia and the Middle East. His later plays show marked changes in style – looser verse structures, wilder imagery, and dream-like sequences. The Tempest, one of his final works, unfolds like a vivid hallucination with spirits, magic, and a reality-bending plot. Sonnet 76 mentions "invention in a noted weed," while Sonnet 27 describes a "journey in my head" that keeps him awake imagining his beloved. The Bard who gave us "to be or not to be" was exploring consciousness in more ways than one.
Two centuries later, Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote Kubla Khan after taking two grains of opium for dysentery. He fell into a three-hour drug-induced sleep and experienced what he called a vivid dream where an entire 300-line poem appeared to him complete. On waking, Coleridge frantically transcribed fifty-four lines before a visitor interrupted him. When the visitor left an hour later, the rest of the vision had vanished from memory.
Though initially medicinal, Coleridge’s opium use spiraled into a forty-year addiction, which he documented extensively in his notebooks. The Lake Poets – Coleridge, Wordsworth, and De Quincey – made laudanum, or opium dissolved in alcohol, fashionable among British intellectuals. De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium-Eater became a bestseller in 1821, inspiring writers across Europe to experiment with consciousness-altering substances.
Later that century, Vincent van Gogh created his most iconic paintings during periods of severe mental crisis between 1888 and 1890. His physician, Dr. Felix Rey, treated him with digitalis extracted from foxglove plants, which causes xanthopsia – a condition that makes everything appear yellow.
The digitalis explains the golden halos around lights in The Night Café and the swirling yellow sky in The Starry Night. Van Gogh painted these masterpieces while his medication literally tinted his vision yellow. His famous sunflower series obsessively explored every shade of gold and amber. The artist who changed how humanity sees color was seeing colors that weren't actually there.
The secret of innovation
Biologist Francis Crick was determined to uncover the structure of the DNA molecule at Cambridge University in 1953, racing against Linus Pauling at Caltech to make the discovery of the century. According to multiple colleagues and later confirmed by friends, Crick experimented with LSD during the early 1950s when it was still legal and used in psychiatric research. Crick reportedly confided to colleagues that he visualized the double helix structure during an LSD experience, though he never publicly confirmed this claim during his lifetime.
Whether the LSD story is entirely accurate or embellished, Crick's later work definitely showed psychedelic influence. He spent his final decades studying consciousness itself, proposing that the claustrum region of the brain generated self-awareness. His 1981 book Life Itself argued that life on Earth originated from deliberate panspermia – alien civilizations seeding planets with microorganisms. The scientist who decoded life's blueprint spent his later years on questions that sound like acid trips.
Apple co-founder Steve Jobs called taking LSD one of the two or three most important experiences of his life. The man who revolutionized personal computing, animated films, music distribution, and mobile phones, credited psychedelics with enhancing his creativity. In 1972, Jobs traveled to India seeking enlightenment and spent the next several years experimenting with acid while developing the first Apple computer in his garage. He later told his biographer Walter Isaacson that Bill Gates would have been more innovative if he had done the same. Bill Gates, however, happily admits to both LSD and Marijana use as a teenager – he just found them less interesting.
Jobs wasn't subtle about psychedelics' influence on Apple's philosophy. The company's "Think Different" campaign and emphasis on intuitive design over technical specifications reflected what Jobs called the LSD-inspired fusion of technology and the liberal arts. When hiring engineers in Apple's early days, Jobs would ask candidates about their drug experiences, believing psychedelic use indicated creative thinking. The closed system architecture of Apple products – where hardware and software merge into one seamless experience – mirrors the ego dissolution and unity consciousness that LSD users report.
Microdosing has become a cornerstone of Silicon Valley culture. Engineers at Google, Facebook, and Tesla take sub-perceptual doses of LSD or psilocybin, claiming it enhances focus and problem-solving without hallucinations. The practice became widespread after James Fadiman's 2011 book The Psychedelic Explorer's Guide provided protocols for cognitive enhancement through tiny doses. Anonymous surveys suggest between ten and twenty percent of Silicon Valley engineers microdose regularly.
The technologies reshaping today’s society – social media algorithms, artificial intelligence, virtual reality – emerge from minds deliberately altered by the same substances that have transformed humans for generations.
Final summary
The main takeaway of this Blink to Human History on Drugs by Sam Kelly is that…
The history you learned in school likely missed a crucial detail: many of humanity's most defining moments were shaped by the influence of drugs. Divine prophecies that launched ancient wars came from priestesses breathing hallucinogenic vapors, while the psychoanalytic theories that explain human behavior emerged from Freud's cocaine-fueled sessions. Modern leaders with nuclear launch codes have been drunk, high, or both during international crises, saved only by subordinates who refused their orders. Whether by choice, medical necessity, or involuntary dosing, altered states of mind have been humanity's co-pilot through history – steering us toward transcendence, catastrophe, and everything in between, but always present at the controls. The altered mind hasn’t just accompanied history; it’s shaped it.
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