The failed globalization of psychedelic drugs in the early modern world
&gt; Why did some drugs, like tobacco, move readily across cultural and geographic barriers in the early modern era, while others, such as peyote, ayahuasca, and psilocybin mushrooms, remained confined to specific regions?<p>One thing that&#x27;s interesting to me is that psilocybin mushrooms were <i>already</i> widely distributed. Hallucinogenic mushrooms grow everywhere, including in Europe:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Psilocybin_mushroom#Occurrence" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Psilocybin_mushroom#Occurrence</a><p>The mushrooms you might pick or buy in Europe today are, AFAIK, those European varieties, not imported American ones.<p>But we don&#x27;t have a widespread tradition of using these mushrooms in Western Europe, do we? If you read Aristophanes, Chaucer, or Shakespeare, there are people getting drunk all over the place, but nobody ever shrooms.<p>The Sami famously use fly agaric in rituals (concentrating it in human or reindeer urine). Apparently, so do other Siberian peoples. The people we now think of as the indigenous inhabitants of the Americas are descended from Siberians who crossed the Bering Strait tens of thousands of years ago. Perhaps they took the tradition with them?<p>Europeans have known about the Sami use of mushrooms for a long time. Finns protected the Sami from Christian missionaries, because they valued their shamanic powers. Lithuanians exported mushrooms to the Sami:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Amanita_muscaria#Psychoactive_use" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Amanita_muscaria#Psychoactive_...</a><p>And (further down the above page), scholars knew about magic mushrooms in the 18th century.<p>But somehow, the magic mushroom has had no deep impact on European society.<p>Or maybe it has:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;The_Sacred_Mushroom_and_the_Cross" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;The_Sacred_Mushroom_and_the_Cr...</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2017&#x2F;12&#x2F;21&#x2F;opinion&#x2F;santa-christmas-mushrooms.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2017&#x2F;12&#x2F;21&#x2F;opinion&#x2F;santa-christmas-m...</a>