Every society on earth is a high society. As the sun rises in the east, caffeine is infused and sipped across China in countless forms of dried, smoked and fermented tea. From the archipelagos of Indonesia and New Guinea through Thailand, Burma and India, a hundred million chewers of betel prepare their quids of areca nut, pepper leaf and caustic lime ash, press it between their teeth and expectorate the day’s first mouthful of crimson saliva. Across the cities of Thailand, Korea and China, potent and illicit preparations such as ya’aba, home-cooked amphetamine pills swallowed or smoked, propel a young generation through the double working shifts of economic boomtime, or burn up the empty hours of unemployment, before igniting the clubs and bars of the urban nightscape.
As the sun tracks across towards the afternoon, the rooftop terraces of Yemen’s medieval mud-brick cities fill with men gathering to converse and chew khat through the scorching heat of the day. Across the concrete jungles of the Middle East, millions without the means for a midday meal make do with a heap of sugar stirred into a small cup of strong black tea. As the working day in Europe draws to a close, the traffic through the bars of the city squares begins to pick up, and high-denomination euro notes are surreptitiously exchanged for wraps of cocaine and ecstasy. In the cities of West Africa, the highlife clubs are thick with cannabis smoke, while in the forests initiates of the Bwiti religion sweat their way through their three-day intoxication by the hallucinogenic root iboga, during which they see the visions that will guide them through the passage to adulthood.
When daylight reaches the western hemisphere, it illuminates the broadest spectrum of drug cultures on the planet. Across North America’s cities, the sidewalks throng with office workers clutching lattes and espressos, while giant trucks thunder down interstate highways delivering tobacco and alcohol on a scale now rivalled by the industrial marijuana plantations concealed in giant polytunnels and warehouses among the forest tracts of California and Canada. Further south, the Huichol people oi Mexico, despite the mesh fences and enclosures spreading across their ancient hunting grounds, still make their desert pilgrimage to harvest peyote cactus for their rituals, while street children in the barrios of Colombia and Brazil stupefy themselves with petrol-soaked cocaine residue and aerosol sprays. And in the Amazon, dozens of tribes, as they have since time immemorial, squat around fires powdering, toasting and brewing the seeds, roots and leaves of the world’s most diverse mind-altering flora.
Finally the sun sets across the islands of the south Pacific, the most remote outposts of humanity. Here, almost all the drugs consumed by the rest of the world remain unknown: even alcohol and tobacco are costly imports, rare outside the urban centres. But from the middle of the afternoon, the men have been drifting in from their gardens and plantations to grate, chew and soak kava root for their evening brew. As the sun sets, they congregate in huts to drink it from coconut shells and share some whispered conversation, or squat alone on the beach to listen to its voice in the surf, as the sunset fades to darkness.
World History
