Kava has been labeled a narcotic containing certain pharmacologically active substances long recognized by Western chemists, pharmacists, and others. Certainly missionaries and other outsiders judged drug properties to be the reason for kava usage and took steps to ban its cultivation, processing, and use as a beverage. The main objection seems not to have been to drunkenness but to the soporific effects it produced, which prevented many men from doing a full day’s work after a night of drinking kava. Recent ethnographic accounts from Vanuatu have stressed the druglike or narcotic properties of kava (Lindstrom 1987; Lebot and Cabalion 1988; Brunton 1989).
The main chemically active constituents identified by chemists are kawain and the kava lactones. However, despite many years of investigations, mainly in German laboratories (see Lebot and Cabalion 1988) but also in Sydney (Duffield and Jamieson 1991), the precise physiological action of these substances on the human neurological and chemical system is not fully understood.
Kawain is said to be an emotional and muscular relaxant that stabilizes the feelings and stimulates the ability to think and act. It has bactericidal properties and can be used as an antimycotic. It is also a diuretic. Fresh kava has a local anesthetic effect on the chewer’s mouth. But its main effect is as a muscle relaxant (Lebot and Cabalion 1988: 35).
The chemical properties of kava and other local plants have long been of interest to visitors to the Pacific. Gilbert Cuzent, a naval pharmacist based in Tahiti from 1858 to 1860, claimed to be the first to identify (in 1858) a substance he called “Kavahine” as a result of experiments carried out on various parts of the kava plant. This claim led to a scientific argument with another French pharmacist, who had also published his analysis of the kava root in April 1857 in the newspaper Le Messager de Tahiti and, in 1858, in the Revue Coloniale. However, the French Academy of Sciences recognized Cuzent’s claim (Cuzent 1860: 189-90).
The major physiological effects are quiescent and numbing, in contrast to the enervating effects of alcohol. The kava drinker may feel a slight numbness around the mouth, but the strongest effect is on the legs; anyone who sits drinking kava for a long period of time finds it hard to stand or walk. There is no loss of consciousness, though the kava drinker may fall asleep after seven or eight cups and be hard to awaken. Some Vanuatu cultivars are more potent than others and so are more favored by drinkers for the quick effect they produce (Crowley 1990).
Kava is also said to lead to loss of appetite and to reduced libido, but such effects are reversible if the person stops drinking it for several weeks (Spencer 1941). Redness around the eyes is also a mark of a heavy drinker, as is a scaly skin.
In his studies of the plant’s usage in the eastern Pacific, Edwin Lemert (1967) noted how kava produced a nonaggressive, anaphrodisiac, mildly tranquil and dreamy state. He suggested that it depressed bodily functions such as heart and respiration rates and temperature. He labeled kava drinking “a form of retreatist or avoidance behavior, related to onerous claims which Polynesian social organization periodically makes on individuals” (Lemert 1967: 337). Many authors have noted that the quiescent and soothing effects of kava place it in direct contrast to alcohol. For this reason, kava has been introduced as a counter to heavy alcohol drinking, whether in Vanuatu or among Australian Aborigines (D’Abbs 1995).
It is true that modern writers tend to think that those who drink enough kava become drunk, yet a number of other writers over the past century and a half have either not mentioned any drunkenness, or have said that kava does not lead to such a state and that drinkers only become sleepy and quiescent.
World History
