A Brief History of Vice

by Robert Evans

  According to Christopher L. C. E. Witcombe, an art historian, the Venus = porn conclusion has been almost universally accepted since 1908. Her lack of a face shows that she’s an “anonymous sex object”; her lack of feet suggests that she has no agency of her own. Calling her “Venus” in the first place was actually a sexist joke on behalf of early twentieth century (male) archaeologists: The Greek goddess Venus was considered the epitome and physical ideal of a “civilized” Western woman. The potbellied, pendulum-boob’d Willendorf statue was mockingly assumed to have been the “Venus” of a less-refined, “primitive” people.

  Very few Victorian-era scientific assumptions have survived intact to the twenty-first century. But the idea that the Venus, one of the foundations of all human art, was made by a man to aid in masturbation is still widely accepted today. But in 1996 LeRoy McDermott, a professor at Central Missouri State University, turned conventional wisdom on its head: The Venus wasn’t porn at all. It was a woman’s self-portrait.

  In their 1996 article, “Toward Decolonizing Gender,” McDermott and Catherine McCoid suggest that the Venus lacks a face because a prehistoric woman couldn’t see her own face. McCoid and McDermott point out that the Venus’s proportions look remarkably like how a pregnant woman would’ve seen herself, looking down: mounds of breast and belly.

  Permission given by LeRoy McDermott

  And here’s a shot of a pregnant woman looking back at her own butt, compared with the statuette’s backside:

  Permission given by LeRoy McDermott

  It makes a lot of sense that many of the first human artists would’ve been women, and specifically, pregnant women. They would’ve spent a lot of time stationary, not out hunting or gathering, giving them ample time to hone their skills. And as Dr. McDermott told me:

  If males were actively involved with the carving of female and animal images, then why is the male body almost completely absent?

  Dr. McDermott suspects the Venus of Willendorf, and all the other Venuses archaeologists have found scattered across Stone Age dig sites, were actually crafted as obstetric aids. They were a way for women to track and better understand the process of pregnancy, providing “factual and potentially useful visual” information for women. Rather than man-made erotic art, the Venus may represent the birth of medical science, courtesy of women.

  Women alone faced the inevitable life-threatening and painful event of giving birth and it is very likely that the thought of preparing for it had crossed the mind of woman long before the process became of intellectual interest to men.

  Dr. McDermott published his theory in the journal Current Anthropology in 1996. His article was peer reviewed, and no one then—or now—was able to poke any holes in it. Dr. McDermott noted ruefully that “nobody challenged it. But nobody accepted it, either. It seemed to be ignored, quite frankly. There’s nothing anyone can say to challenge it so they just call it ‘bizarre.’”

  Dr. McDermott’s a polite guy, and all he would say is that he was “miffed.” I asked why he thought there was so much resistance within academia to the idea that women crafted the Venus, and much of early art.

  I honestly can’t tell you. I just wish I understood that better.

  The dominant competing theory seems especially absurd when you realize it revolves around ancient people fetishizing an obese woman. “Explain to me how we can have obese women in the Ice Age?” He added:

  They’re nude women. But women have other concerns besides male interest.

  The Venus follows the opposite pattern of everything else in this book. History as taught by schools has whitewashed the drunkenness out of the past. It’s minimized the influence of drugs on history’s great thinkers, and covered up the impact of prostitution and insults on human development. Wherever possible, mainstream history likes to present the most sanitized, least risqué version of events.

  With one exception: the Venus of Willendorf. For some reason, we’d prefer to teach kids it’s ancient porn, rather than a sophisticated medical device crafted by women, for women.

  Let’s say you’re a hunter living in the Amazon basin, so long ago the word American hasn’t been invented yet and the word native won’t be necessary until boats advance beyond the floating-coffin stage. You’re tromping through the jungle one day on the ancient equivalent of a Walmart run when you stumble upon a jaguar. And since that jaguar is two hundred pounds of muscle terminating in four dagger feet that could easily terminate you, your first reaction is probably to poop your loin cloth.

  By the way, the jaguar is also something of a god to you. You’ve grown up seeing his image carved into temples and embroidered on the garments of holy men, and now that he’s sitting right there you find yourself too frozen to move. Luckily for you, this big cat doesn’t have a hankering for sweet and sour manflesh. In fact, he’s too busy getting high as balls to give the first third of a fuck what you’re doing.

  That becomes increasingly clear the longer you watch. Mr. Jaguar’s not sleeping or picking the howler monkey out of his teeth, he’s sucking on a tree vine. This vine doesn’t have a name yet, because plants and jaguars have remarkably little need for names. But people in the area will eventually take to calling it ayahuasca. Centuries later, people wearing lab coats will classify this vine as a powerful monoamine oxidase inhibitor (MAOI). Today, we know MAOIs as a class of drug mostly prescribed to combat depression.

  But all you know is that the jaguar rolled around in kitty-cat bliss for a long time. It was so adorable you almost didn’t run like shit when he started to sober up. You make it back home without losing anything more than a bladder of fear pee, and immediately share the good news:

  Guys, the jungle is holding!

  That little vignette represents one likely scenario for the birth of the now-famous drug ayahuasca. And while the MAOI in ayahuasca is a potent drug in and of itself, it reaches its full potential only when mixed with the leaves of a yopo bush. Yopo just happens to contain the drug dimethyltryptamine, or DMT. The resulting mixture, generally just called ayahuasca, is one of the most powerful hallucinogens on earth.

  Today any Westerner with a MacBook’s worth of spare cash can afford to fly down to Guatemala, Costa Rica, Brazil, or whichever Latin American nation she pleases and pay a shaman to walk her through an ayahuasca ceremony. It’s certainly an intense experience—and you can find dozens of contemporary trip reports with a second’s worth of Googling—but the trip itself is actually the least interesting thing about ayahuasca.

  MAOIs like ayahuasca/Banisteriopsis caapi are an effective medication, but they don’t cause eight-hour bouts of life-changing hallucinations unless combined with DMT. DMT itself is completely inactive when taken orally . . . unless it’s taken with an MAOI, which prevents the stomach from breaking it down.

  It’s likely that the discovery of the ayahuasca mixture so famous today came at the end of many years’ worth of trial and error. Tribal legends claim that humankind first became aware of Banisteriopsis caapi when people saw jaguars chewing on the vine and adopted the habit for themselves. MAOIs clearly alter the user’s reactions to a number of drugs and food. Early users noticed this, and, eventually, the more creative/reckless among them decided to try mixing the vine with other plants they’d taken a liking to. Some of these intrepid people got sick—some of them may have died—but the smartest and luckiest among them found mixes that worked. And then they told their friends.

  The designer drug industry, worth billions of dollars today, works under the same basic model. And it all started with . . .

  The War on Pain

  Most of the people reading this right now don’t live with chronic pain every hour of every day of their lives. Let’s all give a big collective kudos to medical science for that one. But back before antibiotics and nutritional science, in the days when goiters and gout roamed the land and amputation was conventional medicine’s default answer to a ser
ious wound, pain was humankind’s most constant foe.

  Alcohol, marijuana, and opium are among the first drugs our species ever came to use. But the first two only take the edge off; they aren’t enough to deal with the most serious agonies. Opium, smoked or taken in tea, does a better job of dulling pain. But it’s still not enough to get a patient through, say, surgery.

  Chemistry and science met officially for the first time in an alchemist named Paracelsus (1493–1541). He was a pioneer in using mercury, arsenic, lead, and a variety of other deadly poisons as medicine. But when he wasn’t busy seeding entire generations of patients with deadly poison, he spent some time creating a tincture of alcohol and opium called laudanum.

  Laudanum was the drug du jour of the American frontier. If you were prescribed an addictive over-the-counter drug in the Old West, odds are it was laudanum. The next scientist to screw around with opium was Friedrich Sertumer, an apprentice apothecary in early nineteenth-century Germany who noticed that most opium products of the time varied widely in quality, and often didn’t work at all.

  He wasn’t a trained chemist, or a doctor. But this was the nineteenth century, and anyone with a test tube and some moxie had a hope of making medical breakthroughs. Sertumer got to work and spent years of trial and error trying to distill the active ingredient in opium into a concentrated form. He knew he’d finally succeeded when, suffering from a toothache, he took a shot from his latest concoction and felt his pain disappear completely.

  Sertumer’s toothache cure was what we know today as morphine. He quickly became an advocate, testing his new drug on children because—again—this was the early nineteenth century and there were just no fucking rules at all. Modern medicine eventually took notice of his achievement, though, and by the time the American Civil War rolled around, morphine was the dominant painkiller of the age.

  Heroin was next, developed in the 1890s by a Bayer chemist named Heinrich Dreser. The name heroin comes from the German word for heroic, and was meant to signify the drug’s terrifying power. Heroin does pass into the brain much faster than morphine, and generally does a more competent job of the whole killing-pain thing. But it still wasn’t enough. Shooting up an armful of horse can do a lot of things for a fellow, but it won’t entirely block out the pain of having a limb chopped off or an organ chopped out.

  For a very long time no surgery could be carried out without a set of “surgeon’s mates,” men strong enough to hold the patient relatively still while the doctor cut into him or her. The only reason this job doesn’t exist now is because we developed proper anesthetics that actually block the brain’s perception of pain entirely, long enough for the surgeons to do their work.

  Ironically, this atom bomb in the war on pain was invented back in the 1770s, well before the Revolutionary War, the Napoleonic Wars, or the Civil War, all conflicts that could’ve sorely used the presence of a functional anesthetic. Nitrous oxide was discovered in 1772 by Joseph Priestley. He published his findings in 1776, the year the United States decided to stick a thumb in the motherland’s eye.

  Nitrous was coined “laughing gas” in 1799, but that term really doesn’t go far enough in describing just how this remarkable substance affects the human body. Nitrous takes you out of yourself, and in high enough doses it renders you unable to perceive the outside world. While opium and its derivatives are painkillers, nitrous is a dissociative, like PCP. It doesn’t deaden the pain. It lifts your consciousness out of the realm where pain exists.

  If you’ve ever had dental surgery you know just how well laughing gas can work. One minute you’re sitting uncomfortably with the dreadful knowledge that a drill is about to make the lower part of your skull its bitch . . . and the next you’re floating free, utterly unaware of the fact that someone is chopping bones out of your body. Nitrous oxide works, but it didn’t have a chance to work as an anesthetic until nearly a century after its discovery.

  Nitrous oxide quickly became a novelty drug of the upper class. Wealthy fops and dandies would gather in huge tents, which would then be flooded with nitrous oxide to produce a spectacular high for all and sundry. Yes, the ads for these Victorian-era drug parties were as hilarious as you’d expect:

  This flyer, from an 1845 party in New York, warns that gas will be dispensed only to “gentlemen of the first respectability,” although the flyer seems to show a man rather forcefully dosing a lady with a massive bag of the stuff. Nitrous use appeared to be a spectacle at that point; it’s possible that more bystanders watched their fellows get high than actually partook themselves. Men from the audience were invited up to protect users from injuring themselves—a wise precaution, considering how badly nitrous tends to disrupt motor skills. This flier also makes the somewhat troubling statement that “probably no one will attempt to fight.”

  Joseph Priestley noted immediately that nitrous had a numbing effect on pain. Other chemists reported similar findings over the years, but no one hit on the idea of using the drug as an anesthetic until the mid-nineteenth century.

  The history of ether carries some strange similarities to that of nitrous: It, too, is a drug that, once huffed, dissociates the body from all sense of pain. Both drugs cause powerful, sometimes manic short-term addiction . . . and both were used for shits and giggles for generations before anyone thought to turn their talents to medicine. Ether actually dates back to the sixteenth century (and possibly much further), but it wasn’t until 1846 that a dentist named William Morton used it on a surgical patient.

  At the time Morton embarked on his experiment, ether, like nitrous oxide, was best known as a luxury drug of the upper class. Specifically, Harvard students (and faculty) were rather renowned for their ether-rag parties. But Morton knew ether could do so much more, and he proved it in front of a live audience on October 16, 1846, by rendering a patient insensate with an ether-soaked sponge and removing a tumor from the side of his neck. When the man awoke, he reported feeling only that his neck had been “scratched.”

  The field of anesthesiology was born that day. Nitrous oxide saw its first use as an anesthetic shortly thereafter. And while it would be decades before the practice of anesthetizing patients grew more common than that of just holding them down so the surgeon could start cuttin’, Morton’s triumph was a major victory in the war on pain.

  The story of nitrous oxide and ether has now been repeated over and over again by a parade of narcotics. It’s the pattern of the modern designer drug: A remarkable new chemical is discovered and synthesized and immediately takes off as a party drug, well before scientists figure out the best way to use it safely and responsibly.

  How a Designer Drug Lives, Kills, and Dies

  According to the Drug Enforcement Administration and countless concerned politicians, a designer drug is any narcotic made to mimic the effects of an already illegal drug. The “bath salts” that hit the news a few years back were a drug designed to imitate stimulants like methamphetamine. There are designer drug knock-offs of illegal substances like MDMA, LSD, and even marijuana. Some of them feel just like their real and illegal counterparts. Others bear only the vaguest resemblance.

  The first of these designer drugs were analogues (nearly identical versions) of fentanyl, a family of painkillers developed in the 1970s to provide a nonopiate alternative to morphine and heroin. One popular fentanyl derivative today, butyrfentanyl, is purported to be twenty times stronger than morphine.

  The first fentanyl to hit the street went by the nickname “China white.” It rose to popularity in 1979, and immediately started killing people by accidental overdose. In less than a decade, more than a hundred deaths had been attributed to various fentanyls.

  During the course of my research I was lucky enough to come into contact with a source who works inside one of the online drug bazaars that distribute these “research chemicals” to users across the United States. He was terrified of fentanyl:

  If you get this stuff,
and you don’t have a very accurate milligram scale to measure it with, it is stupendously easy to take too much. . . . Several teenagers and an old man alike have died from a mere 5 mg dose. (For reference, 5 mg is about the size of a mustard seed.)

  My source didn’t work for a company that sold very many fentanyl derivatives. But he considered the drug a major risk for the future safety of his business. “I don’t think that the research chemical market is ever going to go down, but I do see it taking a drastic hit.”

  Most recreational chemicals are legal only in the loosest sense of the word. The Federal Analog Act, passed in 1986, allows the government to treat any chemical “substantially similar” to a schedule 1 or 2 drug as one of those drugs if it is meant for human consumption—meaning my source could be prosecuted and thrown in prison for his hand in marketing a variety of research chemicals.

  There’s a very blurry line between research chemicals and designer drugs, and the difference is primarily one of intent. If the creator(s) of a substance made it intending to mimic the effects of an illegal narcotic, like the fentanyl derivatives and the various species of “legal weed” you’ll find in head shops across the world, it’s a designer drug. If a drug was created with some other purpose in mind, or made not knowing much more than “this’ll probably do something!” it’s a research chemical.

  Both are sold side by side in online markets like the one my source helps maintain. Some substances fall into both categories. For example, 4-Methylthioamphetamine (MTA) is a designer drug developed in the 1990s. For a while, it was sold as an alternative to MDMA, or ecstasy. I say alternative, but the reality of the illegal drug market is that MTA was often pressed into pills and sold as ecstasy. Dealers assumed the effects would be similar enough that no one would notice.