I was thinking about this. When mankind regularly used things they found in the wild, medicinals like marijuana or opium thousands of years ago, did they even think of them as drugs or as creating a dependency if used regularly? Or were they just… plants? Back then, if something came from nature and had a positive and noticeable effect, it was probably just seen as useful. Something with value. Something worth keeping around. A lot of it was probably just trial and error, figuring out what helped, what hurt, and what made you feel a bit better or different. And these things probably were not abused or used excessively because they were not being farmed or cultivated. Hunter gatherers only had access to what they could find in the wild, which probably was not much. So whatever they did find was probably cherished. I doubt anyone was sitting there trying to categorize any of it as good or bad based on social rules that had not even been invented yet. There was no concept of addiction, legality, or any of the labels we use today in civil society. At what point did we start drawing that line? Somewhere along the way, certain plants went from being part of everyday life and nature to being labelled as substances, then problems, then in some cases controlled and made illegal. The plant itself did not change, only the way man decided to think about it did. It makes you wonder how much of what we call a “drug” today is actually about the substance itself, and how much of it is just the story society has built around it. If you go back far enough, it was probably just someone sitting around thinking, “this plant makes me feel nice… I might keep this one.” Obviously that does not always end well, but it is an interesting shift in perspective.
