A Brief History of Vice
Page 1
A PLUME BOOK
A (BRIEF) HISTORY OF VICE
Matthew Black
From a young age ROBERT EVANS realized he was more into sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll than things like “wearing a tie” or “commuting to an office.” He always assumed these desires would lead him to a lucrative career as a panhandler or a drug mule. But it turned out there was another option: writing. As an editor for Cracked since 2013, Robert Evans has interviewed sources ranging from Nevada brothel workers to partisan militia on the front lines of the Ukrainian Civil War. He currently lives in a fortified compound in the Pacific Northwest and, occasionally, his car.
PLUME
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Copyright ©2016 by Robert Evans
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eBook ISBN 9780698407039
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Names: Evans, Robert, 1988- author.
Title: A (brief) history of vice : how bad behavior built civilization / Robert Evans.
Description: New York : Plume, [2016]
Identifiers: LCCN 2015048289 | ISBN 9780147517609 (hardcover)
Subjects: LCSH: Vice—History. | Civilization, Modern.
Classification: LCC BJ1534 .E93 2016 | DDC 179/.809—dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015048289
Penguin is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity. In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers; however, the story, the experiences, and the words are the author’s alone. Some names and identifying characteristics have been changed to protect the privacy of the individuals involved.
Version_1
For Cynthia
Contents
About the Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Introduction
Chapter 1: Mother Nature: History’s First Bartender
Chapter 2: Music: The First Drug?
Chapter 3: Celebrity Worship and the Greek Who Predicted TMZ
Chapter 4: How Drunken Parties Birthed (and Broke) Civilizations
Chapter 5: How Bad Behavior Saved Civilization
Chapter 6: Godstitution: The Hidden History of Sex Work
Chapter 7: Drugs, the Birth of Religion, and How to Trip Like a Philosopher
Chapter 8: Ancient Greek Acid and the Birth of Science
Chapter 9: Tobacco and Marijuana: Twins Displaced by Time
Chapter 10: Drugged Cultures and Acid Wars
Chapter 11: The Shrub That Conquered the World
Chapter 12: The Coffee-Drinking Bad Boys of Ancient Islam
Chapter 13: How We Evolved to Be Kinky
Chapter 14: The Hijacking of Genius: A Deep History of Designer Drugs
Chapter 15: The Curious History of Salamander Brandy
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
Introduction
When I was in fifth grade, a DARE officer came to our classroom to lecture us on the dangers of narcotics. He visited once a week for a couple of months, bringing along posters with pictures of drugs on them and walking us through scary facts and “facts” about various narcotics. I’m sure I learned a lot of nonsense about MDMA drilling holes in brains and psychotic pot-fueled murders, but I don’t remember finding that class ridiculous. My city, Plano, Texas, was the heroin capital of America at the time. Ten young Planoian kids died of overdoses in that year alone.
Many of my teachers knew at least one of the kids who died in what Rolling Stone writer Mike Gray called the “Texas Heroin Massacre.” It scared the shit out of every parent in the city. And as a result, our drug education program tripled down on the fear mongering. Any possible drug we might do, including alcohol or tobacco, was seen as a possible gateway to shooting a needleful of death up our arms. At the end of that DARE course my classmates and I each signed a contract promising that we’d never ever do any drugs.
DARE’s “nothing beats sobriety” attitude didn’t stick with me. I don’t think it stuck with most kids who took the course. A 2009 analysis of twenty studies of the DARE program’s efficacy concluded that teens who participated in the program were no less likely to experiment with drugs than teens who didn’t.
I didn’t wait long to start experimenting. I had my first drink at seventeen, my first hit of weed at nineteen, and my first hallucinogenic experience about two months after that, when a friend and I took heavy doses of a “research chemical” (a drug too young to be illegal yet) called 2Ci. My friend had bought it from some shady Canadian company using a precursor to Bitcoin. And while I was falling in love with the vast narcotic bounty of the twenty-first century, the US government was slowly pulling back from its war on marijuana and begrudgingly starting to approve some of the first research into the medicinal use of psychedelics in a generation.
This was all part of a broader trend: The public is starting to gain a new appreciation for all the things we once called vice. In 2003, the therapeutic value of sex work was confirmed when sexual surrogacy (literally, people having sex with patients to help them with some sexual dysfunction) was ruled legal across the country. Full frontal nudity and outright depictions of sexual acts have gone from the domain of porn and a few art movies to playing major roles in some of the most popular shows on television. Our national attitude toward drugs is slowly slipping from “Just Say No” to “Maybe Say Yes Sometimes.”
Vice is experiencing a resurgence in public sympathy. In the last few years, you’ve probably read articles like the one The New York Times published in 2013 titled “How Beer Gave Us Civilization,” which advanced the idea that early humans started settling down on farms so they could produce more sweet booze. But, as I learned from talking to the scientist behind the study cited in that article, the real theory is much more interesting. “Beer” didn’t give birth to civilization alone. The desire to hold bigger and better feasts featuring, yes, beer, but also piles of food and music, is what led to the birth of human civilization.
We literally started building towns and, eventually, cities so that we could throw cooler parties.
See, I’m a nerd. So when I realize I like something (in this case “general debauchery”), my natural impulse is to start reading as much about it as I can. That’s how I learned that one of the first great victories for women’s rights in history was thanks to a prostitute who became an empress. It’s also how I learned that modern genetic science was made possible by two different scientists’ acid trips.
And as I learned more about the wonderful ways vice has changed human history, I read about the long-extinct ways people used to enjoy their vices. Frankly, I was inspired. I experimented with ancient Native American nose pipes. I ate balls of coffee and butter in the style of the ancient Ethiopians. I went without eating for four days and drank wine mixed with barley and cheese to see if it would make me trip like a Greek philosopher. I hunted after a mythical hallucinogenic drink made by drowning poisonous salamanders in booze.
The book that follows is everything I’ve ever learned about t
he things we pretend not to like in polite company. It’s a celebration of the brave, drunken pioneers who built our globe-spanning civilization. Reading this book will arm you with more than just information; it will provide you with step-by-step guides for re-creating the intoxicating experiences of our ancestors. I hope what I’ve written here will help you appreciate the importance of vice in our shared human history and understand that, if we’re able to get higher than any people before us, it’s only because we’re standing on the shoulders of giants.
The most important history lesson I ever learned started with a big white bucket of rotting fruit in the kitchen of my first apartment.
I was nineteen at the time—too young to buy booze, but too old to spend my weekends sober. It was a conundrum. Sure, I knew people who were over twenty-one and willing to buy me alcohol. But most of them were just as shady as you’d expect based on the fact that they were willing to buy alcohol for teenagers. Also, I was poor enough that my options for affordable drinking were limited to six-dollar bottles of leaded vodka and, if I was really hard up, Boone’s Farm.
But a good friend of mine made beer in his kitchen, and he’d walked me through the basic chemistry of the fermentation process. I knew it started with yeast, the one-celled fungi that live in vast colonies, feast on sugar, and poop out alcohol. Brewers simply trapped yeast, a bunch of rotting sugary plant matter, and water in a container and let it all sit for a while until, eventually, beer happened.
I couldn’t afford to brew beer, though. A five-gallon batch cost upward of forty dollars in ingredients, a fortune in teenager money. Thankfully, there was a dirtier, easier, route: I could buy a bunch of cheap fruit, mash it up, toss it into a bucket with water and yeast, and let that turn into something foul but intoxicating. My friends and I called the resultant brew “hobo jug wine,” and here is the recipe we used:
Ingredients
1 five-gallon food-grade plastic bucket
1 length of hose, a finger’s width or so
1 smaller bucket
Enough pineapples/oranges/apples/whatever fruit to fill up half the bucket
Directions
Peel and chop the fruit and fill the bucket half full of fruit. Mash it into a pulp, and then add water, and cane sugar, if you feel like really taking your sobriety to task. If you’re as poor as I was, you can make do with grabbing five gallons’ worth of fruit juice concentrate from the grocer’s freezer in lieu of honest, God-fearing fruit. Drop a packet of yeast (Fleischmann’s bread yeast works just fine) into the mixture, stir, and stick the top of the bucket on.
This next part’s critical: Booze gives off a lot of CO2 while it’s fermenting. You’ll want to make a little hole in the lid of the bucket and run the hose out of it and into the smaller bucket filled with water. That hose will let enough CO2 escape that your large bucket won’t explode into shards of painful plastic-y shrapnel. (If you don’t run the hose into water, you’ll get some fruit bits spewed everywhere.) Alternatively, you can buy what’s known as an airlock from your local brew store, as well as a five-gallon plastic brew bucket with a hole already in place. Either way, let the vile brew sit for two to four weeks.
Tavia Morra
My first batch of hobo jug wine burbled away in the kitchen for three weeks before we pulled the top off and decanted it into bottles. I won’t pretend the brew smelled good, but I’ll remind you that I was nineteen and living in my first apartment. The smell of fermenting fruit was far from the worst odor to seep out of that kitchen. All that mattered was that it worked. I’d crafted an alcoholic beverage.
It was slightly sour, a little sweet, and tasted more than a bit like bread mold. But it also gave off the telltale burn of alcohol as it slid down my throat, and by the third glass I was no longer sober and thus much less judgmental of the flavor. At the time, all I knew was that I’d cracked the code to being a drunk teenager without any money. It was only years later, while researching this book, that I realized my young self had inadvertently re-created something very close to the first booze our primate ancestors ever swigged.
Ancient Alcohol in the Animal Kingdom
Humans aren’t the only species with an appreciation for alcohol, or even the only ones with a tendency to take that appreciation too far. In 2002, a pack of elephants (young and male, of course) tramped into a village in Assam, India, stole a bunch of wine, and went on a violent, drunken bender that cost six people their lives. So alcohol problems aren’t unique to Homo sapiens, but we’re certainly the species that’s taken alcohol the furthest.
It’s easy to imagine some starving ancient human shoveling a handful of decomposing marula fruit down his throat and, a few seconds later, realizing he felt fucking excellent. But the story of humankind’s introduction to alcohol actually starts much earlier, before men or women or anything remotely human ever existed. Our ability to metabolize alcohol, and thus get drunk, originated in some of the very first primates on earth. The enzyme ADH4 is what lets us (and gorillas and monkeys) digest alcohol, and the variation of this enzyme that lets our species appreciate the ethanol in a whiskey sour first showed up around ten million years ago.
This means there have been hominids drinking much longer than there have been human beings. The obvious question is: Why did we hold on to this adaptation? The primates who first started using alcohol must’ve been rewarded for their ability to tolerate it and their desire to seek it out. And reward in that last sentence means “they had lots of tiny, drunken animal sex.” A casual look at your city’s main drag on a Friday night illustrates the most confusing part of this story: Drunken people aren’t good at anything but starting fistfights, puking out of car windows, and having trouble with their erections.
And yet alcohol is the one drug we know our primate grand-daddies and -mommies were doing millions of years ago. So have we always loved drinking to excess? The most likely answer lies in the most aptly named theory in scientific history . . .
The Drunken Monkey Hypothesis
According to the “Drunken Monkey Hypothesis,” there’s a damn good reason our ancestors started drinking well before the evolutionary time line’s equivalent of five P.M. The Drunken Monkey Hypothesis (yes, that’s the real name) states that regular drinking carried substantial benefits for our adorable, furry forbearers.
By the time fruit starts fermenting, it’s gotten absolutely as ripe as it’s going to get. Ripe also means “full of sugar” and thus full of calories. You need a lot of calories when your whole day is spent swinging from trees and fleeing from jaguars. After all, one of alcohol’s most well known side effects is the beer belly. Beer and wine and liquor are all dense with calories. A regular drinking habit combined with a regular eating habit leads to a much fatter animal. Humans today aren’t huge fans of all those extra calories, but that’s only because whole gas stations full of them assault our waistlines on an hourly basis.
One of the great challenges for any species in the wild is simply not starving to death. When you can travel from points A to B only by walking or running and have to hunt and gather all your food, you burn a lot more fuel just staying alive. Alcohol guaranteed our ancestors more precious, life-giving calories. The telltale scent of fermentation was an easy way for them to know when a food was at its most caloric. Keeping a solid buzz was enough of an advantage that our simian great-[X]-grandparents developed noses specifically attuned to the odor of ethanol.
Scientists have even gone so far as to confirm that drinking alcohol while eating food makes you take in more calories than if you just did one after the other. Mixing booze and food is such a good survival strategy that the only monkeys who fucked enough to pass on their genes were the ones who drank. And yes, there’s hard scientific evidence to support that claim.
Frank Wiens and Annette Zitzmann, animal physiologists from the University of Bayreuth, Germany, noted in 2008 that pen-tailed tree shrews really seemed to prefer getting their ca
lories from fermented fruit nectar than from anything else.
In evolutionary terms, these guys are the distant uncle Mom refuses to talk about.
Pen-tailed tree shrews are significant, because in addition to looking like the result of a raccoon mating with a pear, they’re considered to be the spitting image of the first preprimates, genetically speaking. And while these guys have a lot in common with our earliest ancestors, they also share something with Russian dockworkers; namely, the ability to put away nine or more drinks in a night without feeling it. The pen-tailed tree shrew lives its life like one giant bar crawl, with tree branches as its taps and fermenting palm nectar in lieu of craft beer.
That nectar, colonized by naturally occurring air yeasts, can hit 3 to 4 percent alcohol by the time a shrew starts slurping it up. Nine beers seem like more than a tiny little rat-monkey should be able to handle without being too fucked-up to avoid danger. But the pen-tailed tree shrew takes its alcohol like a Yeltsin. The fact that the jungles of Malaysia aren’t filled with drunken shews falling from the sky and splattering on the ground is proof that alcohol doesn’t affect them quite the same way it affects us.
Again, scientists suspect the pen-tailed tree shrew is very close to our early primate ancestors. This suggests that our ability to enjoy alcohol’s intoxicating effects came after our desire to seek out and consume it. We started our relationship with alcohol because it made us less likely to starve to death. Over time we gained the ability to stand upright and, eventually, invent Netflix. Somewhere along that time line we also started getting drunk from alcohol, and not just fat.
Today alcohol is the most widely consumed intoxicant on earth. We spend well over a trillion dollars a year, worldwide, to get our buzz on, and for more sacred purposes than mere drunkenness; Christian churches across the world use wine to represent the blood of their god. The ancient Greeks and Romans took the opposite tack, and turned their alcohol into a god, Dionysus. There’s absolutely no drug on earth that our species has carried further or invested more creativity into than alcohol. And it all started with fermented palm nectar.