A Brief History of Vice

by Robert Evans

  Step Two was waking up with a bowel full of regret. My plan had worked painfully well, and now if this ancient Mayan remedy proved to be as bullshit as the culture’s theories on the end of the world, I was in for an unpleasant day. I got right to the mixing.

  HOW TO: Take a Urinebaccolic Shot

  Ingredients

  1 cigarette’s worth wild tobacco

  2 cloves garlic

  1 shot glass of your own pee (one shot glass being the traditional serving size of awful-tasting liquids)

  Directions

  I ground the tobacco and garlic into a fine, mushy paste with a coffee grinder, and dumped them into the urine.

  (NOTE: Scientists still debate over exactly what is a reliably fatal dose of tobacco. Some research indicates two to three cigarettes’ worth, but there have been documented cases of people surviving much higher doses. Another estimate is 1,000 milligrams, or about fifty cigarettes. A young woman at a Peruvian nature retreat died in February 2015 after drinking a tobacco tea. Maybe don’t try this one yourself.)

  I stirred, although that proved unnecessary—the garlic sank and the tobacco mostly stuck to the top. Now there was nothing to do but drink this unholy concoction.

  The pee was actually the best part. And I don’t say that because I enjoyed it. I say that because, when mixed together, tobacco and garlic form a taste wholly unique in the annals of things that taste like anus. It was like shooting a warm, liquid Slim Jim. My throat burned, and I could feel the gooey tobacco strands as they slithered down my esophagus. They felt like the snakes of hell devouring my very soul.

  Results

  It worked! After about twenty minutes my constipation was gone, and for the next hour my body purged everything it could, as fast as it could. I vomited three times, likely thanks to mild tobacco poisoning. I personally think the garlic deserves just as much blame.

  Final Verdict

  The Mayans were spot-on with their constipation cures. If you ever need to poop, and don’t care about anything else but making yourself regular again, this will do the trick. Personally, I’d stick with constipation.

  Tobacco’s Strange Evolution

  Christopher Columbus and his merry band of walking chemical weapons were the first Europeans to encounter tobacco. They brought it back to Europe, and it was far from an instant hit. The earliest Spanish colonizers seemed thoroughly disgusted by the whole habit. Waking up every morning with the booze shits was a fine Christian tradition. But smoking? That idea obviously came straight from the devil.

  In the modern world there are basically three ways you’ll see people consuming tobacco: They smoke it, chew it, or vaporize it. The Mayans weren’t so limited. They had:

  1. Jaxbil (“rubbed on body”): generally in powdered form. This was seen as an excellent way to ward off snakes and demons, which are functionally the same thing when you’ve yet to invent ambulances or emergency rooms;

  2. Lo’bil (“eaten”): just straight-up chewed and swallowed. I don’t recommend this for real stomach pain . . . or for flavor;

  3. Atinbil (“bathed in”): because the Mayans believed bathing in tobacco made you glow with a light that frightens off evil spirits/the devil. If this really worked, I can guarantee tobacco would be a lot more popular at raves;

  4. Uch’bil (“drank”): in a tea or with alcohol;

  5. Tub’tabil (“sprayed from the mouth” or “spit out”): My favorite, this is clearly the same thing as modern snuff, although I like to imagine that just spraying sodden tobacco powder in the faces of all and sundry was the norm back then; and

  6. Pak’bil (“applied as bandage”): particularly for snakebites.

  As more and more Europeans came to the New World, tobacco started to pick up a following. It spread through parlors and bars and quickly became a fashionable habit for any gentleman to acquire. Unlike the Mayans, Europe’s first nicotine addicts stuck almost exclusively to smoking the substance via pipes. Even their tobacco-based medicine focused on smoke. Have an earache and happen to be in fifteenth-century England? Your treatment might be an earful of tobacco smoke.

  The War on Tobacco

  Five hundred years ago, tobacco was far more respected by mainstream Western medicine than marijuana is even today. But that respect wasn’t universal, and, at one point, tobacco even went through its own War on Drugs era of persecution.

  Many early Spanish colonists to the New World considered tobacco unChristian, partly because anything that made a person breathe smoke was surely the work of Satan, and partly because of racism. In 1604 King James I of England issued A Counterblaste to Tobacco, outlining all the reasons he hated his country’s latest addiction. Many of them boiled down to “Indians smoke and they’re gross!”

  And now good Countrey men let us (I pray you) consider, what honour or policie can moove us to imitate the barbarous and beastly maners of the wilde, godlesse, and slavish Indians, especially in so vile and stinking a custome?

  But while King James didn’t go on to ban tobacco, other monarchs weren’t as understanding. For example:

  Murad IV: Fought Smoking by Decapitating Smokers

  Behold Amurath IV (Murad IV to his friends), ruler of Persia from 1623 to 1640. A.k.a. this guy:

  As you might have picked up from the fact that he’s clearly about to whip out a sword and stab the guy who’s painting his portrait, Murad was not a friendly dude. He’d heard rumors that tobacco was an antiphrodisiac and might be putting the Persian people off their sex. This would mean fewer taxpaying citizens, fewer soldiers, and fewer portrait artists to replace the ones he murdered. He also hated smoke of any kind, thanks to a botched fireworks display that burned down half his capital during a birthday party. Rather than institute some sort of royal “Keep Fucking” campaign or regulate fireworks a little better, he banned tobacco.

  Murad instituted harsh penalties for anyone caught with so much as a spliff (the weed in that spliff would’ve been perfectly legal, by the way—and yes, people did smoke weed back then). If the Janissaries found a hookah or a pouch of snuff in your house they would drag you out into the street and strangle you to death. It’s horrifying, but horrifying laws were also the only laws back then. What made Murad so noteworthy was his dedication to going the extra murderous mile.

  You know how today, cops in America will sometimes pose as addicts to try and catch drug dealers? Well, Murad IV pioneered narcotics-based entrapment. He wandered the streets of Constantinople at night, begging for a smoke from anyone who might be holding. When some kind smoker offered the king a hit, Murad would have the man beheaded. According to the king’s records, more than twenty-five thousand “suspected smokers” were put to death during just fourteen years.

  It didn’t always work out for Murad. At least one of his victims got away, according to Moses Edrehi’s fascinating History of the Capital of Asia and the Turks (1855). A possibly apocryphal story exists that once, Murad happened on one of his soldiers enjoying a smoke on a lonely night. The sultan approached, pretending to be a random beggar in need of nicotine, and cautiously asked the soldier why he was willing to risk breaking the law for his habit. The soldier’s alleged reply is pretty wonderful:

  “If the Sultan neglects to pay his soldiers, or to furnish them with more substantial food, they must needs sustain themselves by other means”—and he then went on to offer his liege a hit.

  Murad took the hit, and then tried to entrap the soldier into revealing some of his tobacco-smoking buddies. This nameless trooper’s narc sense started tingling just then, and he beat Murad within an inch of his life with a cudgel. Since Murad owned the whole army, he was technically wailed on with his own property. The sultan was obviously pissed about this, but as far as the story goes that nameless soldier escaped into obscurity. Good for him.

  Persia and Murad weren’t alone in their persecution of tobacco. The Japanese banned it on five sep
arate occasions, the last time in 1616. While they didn’t decapitate suspected smokers, being caught with tobacco did come with a fine, and the government taking literally everything you owned. So . . . really, the fine was just a formality.

  The Chinese banned tobacco in 1640, and also punished smokers via cutting their damn heads off. Looking at the global attitudes toward tobacco at the time, we might find it kind of surprising King James didn’t use his powers to ban the plant he hated so deeply. Keeping it legal paid off in the end, though. Two years after writing the Counterblaste, King James granted the Virginia Company of London a charter. By 1640 the colony was exporting 1.5 million pounds of tobacco a year.

  Tobacco quickly spread to other colonies, and nothing grown in the Americas in the 1600s was even close to as valuable. Five hundred years later the same would be true of marijuana. (Seriously—corn is worth around $30 billion a year in the United States. The marijuana market might be worth more than $100 billion.) But let’s go back, for a moment, to tobacco as its first users would have known it . . .

  HOW TO: Re-create the Ancient Nose Pipes of Central America

  Today, almost any head shop in the world will have some form of gas mask/bong for the adventurous smokers in the neighborhood. The natives of Hispaniola didn’t have gas masks per se, but they built a pipe that worked the same basic way—shooting smoke right up their noses rather than waiting for it to take its sweet-ass time being absorbed through the lungs. Here’s a description from Governor Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, a noted wet blanket probably later reincarnated as a high school principal:

  Their chiefs employ a tube shaped like a Y, filled with the lighted weed, inserting the forked extremities into their nostrils. . . . In this way they imbibe the smoke until they become unconscious and lie sprawling on the ground like men in a drunken slumber.

  I know from hard-won experience that taking your weed through a gas mask is a much harsher and much more intoxicating experience than slowly puffing a pipe. I wanted to know if these bizarre Native American nose pipes (called tabacos) worked the same way. I’d been able to find one drawing of the device:

  Tavia Morra

  A little research made it obvious how something like the tabaco might hit harder than a cigarette. Nicotine is absorbed by your mucous membranes, and nothing says mucus like the inside of a nose. There was only one way to know for sure, though. I’d have to design my own tabaco and try it out.

  My plan hit an immediate roadblock: I am an incompetent craftsman. Fortunately my fiancée, Magenta, was a small-scale medical marijuana farmer. She pointed out that the stems of pot plants look an awful lot like that drawing, if sliced properly.

  I opted to go with the closest thing to natural tobacco that I could find in Los Angeles: American Spirit cigarettes. It seemed somehow safer, too, to snort “additive-free” tobacco than whatever comes in a Marlboro red. I stuffed the end of each nose pipe with a wee bullet. It was time to huff tobacco through marijuana stems directly into my sinuses. Nicotine has never been a friend—I tend to hate it, actually. But for the sake of Lady Science and you, dear reader, I sacrificed my nasal security.

  You’re Welcome.

  My first huff was less than successful. I had the pipe in my nose, sure, but there was still airflow open around either spout inside my nasal cavity. I shoved it farther back, resisting the urge to sneeze as my sinuses stockpiled snot like they were waging some sort of cold war on my general comfort with the world. Finally I hit the sweet spot, and smoke flowed.

  It wasn’t a pleasant experience, but seconds after my first hit came the sort of head rush normally reserved for a long hookah session, or pulling much too deeply from a cigar. I leaned back in the chair, not exactly “in a drunken stupor” but pretty mellow.

  The head rush was nice, but not nearly “pass out” intense. Squeezing the bridge of the nose made for a stronger hit, if you didn’t mind spraying the contents of your nose across your face occasionally. The constant coughing and hacking really increased oxygen intake, which added to the high. On the whole, though, my first nose-pipe experience was terribly unpleasant and not much more intense than puffing vigorously on a hookah.

  Señor Oviedo’s writing didn’t make it clear if those natives had been packing a bowl, or packing the whole stem like an unusually rigid blunt. The latter would mean smoking much more tobacco, and thus a stronger high. The pipes I’d made wouldn’t be easy to stuff. The openings were narrow and I’d had to carve a bowl in the end of each to make them usable. But one nose pipe had a deep enough bowl that, if you cut off the filter, you could wedge a cigarette in the end. I did, and Quetzalcoatl help me, I smoked it.

  Digression: Years ago I threw a can of spray paint into a campfire for several complex reasons, chief among them “wanting to see what happened.” It exploded. The smoke that came out of that blast stuck in my nose and mouth for days, flavoring every meal with a tinge of the various cancers I’m sure I’d sucked down. That’s the closest thing in my memory to snorting an endless cone of nose tobacco. For eight minutes I huffed, kneeling down about three minutes in when I realized the head rush and dizziness made standing an untenable proposition.

  I sniffed it down to the stem. After eight long minutes I was the highest I’ve ever been on pure tobacco. I felt a little like passing out in a drunken stupor, but more like taking a hot shower and coughing up all the poison I’d just ingested into my sinuses.

  I wanted that to be the end. But as I mentioned earlier in this chapter, wild tobacco is a very different beast from its modern, tamed descendant. If I wanted the true nose-pipe experience, I was going to have to use the right tobacco. It turns out several companies sell Nicotiana rustica for the enjoyment of Native Americans and drug nerds alike. I ordered some.

  The tobacco came in several-feet-long coils, and it smelled like all the best cigars in the world had convened a conference and voted on the ideal odor of tobacco. I ground it up into a fine powder and rolled two cigarettes. (One for a friend, who couldn’t quite finish it.)

  My eyes watered, my nose and throat burned, and by the time I was done I could barely stand. To say I was light-headed would be a vast understatement. It felt like someone had pulled the core out of my body, and left me a hollow and weightless shell in its place. I was nicotine drunk—there was no other word for it.

  Modern tobacco is one of the most thoroughly modified and comprehensively marketed plants in the world. A cigarette is an almost sterile thing, sold in a clean, sealed package in a uniform dose. The tobacco that won our ancestors’ hearts was wild and unpredictable, and less prone to abuse. The cigarette is one case in which understanding and control has made a substance much more dangerous. It’s also a striking example of the impact culture can have on the very nature of a drug.

  I’d like to make the end of this chapter my official breakup letter with tobacco. I’ll never see another cigarette without thinking about the way those strands of tobacco and pee slithered down my throat. And if that mental image helps break just one person’s habit, my suffering was all worthwhile.

  We don’t give culture enough credit when we talk about how drugs affect human beings. Culture doesn’t seem like it should matter much. We’re talking about chemicals and brains here. Where those brains grew up shouldn’t make a difference in how a hit of acid affects them.

  But it does. It matters so much.

  Remember the tobacco in the last chapter that was so very strong that young native tribesmen passed out like drunken sailors after a few solid nose pulls? Maybe there was something more to that reaction than just the stronger tobacco of yore and the twisted genius of the nose pipe. To the people of Central and South America, tobacco was equally capable of warding off bugs and holding back demons. It was smoked most often in rituals, as part of religious rites.

  Tobacco was sacred. And people are a little less likely to abuse something sacred. The phrase “drug culture”
is often used as a negative term—even if you’re in favor of the responsible use of illegal intoxicants, you probably don’t support the people who glamorize smoking weed, dropping tabs at the club, taking scrotal huffs, whatever it is the kids do these days. At the least, modern drug culture leads to jobs for the talentless shills who design the marijuana leaf flags, shirts, and bumper stickers that infest head shops from Barcelona to Bombay.

  But drug culture, historically, hasn’t been about reckless consumption. It’s been about control—and enforced moderation. When you make something sacred as part of a ritual, you de facto limit its use. Tobacco for the ancient Mayans wasn’t something to fill the empty minutes of the day, it was a way of communing with . . . whatever old god favored the nose pipe. (I’m picturing Joe Camel here.) Across history, religious rituals have existed in part to curb and control the impact of various drugs on society. Drug culture may be exactly what we need to fight drug addiction.

  During my research I came across a paper published in 1977 by Wayne Harding and Norman E. Zinberg, a pair of researchers from Cambridge and Harvard. You can dig it up yourself by Googling its not-at-all-cumbersome name, “The Effectiveness of the Subculture in Developing Rituals and Social Sanctions for Controlled Drug Use.” In brief, the study covered 105 “controlled” drug users. These were people who held down jobs, had active social lives, etc., while still using marijuana, opium, or psychedelics on a semiregular basis. The researchers found that one thing all these controlled users had in common was that they’d developed a set of rituals and even a sort of “mythology” around their drug(s) of choice based on things they’d learned and discussed with other users.