Saturday, December 04, 2010

Right out of the '60s ...

... this story, that is: Young People Using Nutmeg to Get High.

I never did it myself, but a friend -- a major experimenter in the field of recreational drugs -- did and said the results were pretty impressive. He had an interesting explanation of why it never caught on. In the drug culture, there is a good deal of bragging: "I did so much of this, so much of that," etc. My friend thought that if you were sitting around with a bunch of druggies going on about their exploits with ludes or coke or junk, and one of them asked you what you were into, you'd feel a little embarrassed to tell them you'd been doing a lot of ... nutmeg.

3 comments:

  1. That may or may not be a reason it didn't catch on. What's more important to know is that the lethal dose of nutmeg is about four times the effective hallucinogenic dose. My understanding is that 1/4 tsp will get the average person high and 1 tsp will kill the average person. That's not much of a margin of safety, considering the variability between individuals.

    The broader question this raises is why certain substances came to be used as food adjuncts in the first place. I'm not talking about basic foodstuffs that we learned to eat to sustain ourselves. I'm talking about things with little or no caloric value.

    Over the millennia we found lots of substances of medicinal value, to be sure. And some stuff just tastes good. But there are lots of drugs in the mix, too. And nutmeg is only one of them.

    Look in your cupboard. Coffee? Do you have any idea how complicated a process people had to figure out just to get to the point of being able to consume the stuff? Same with chocolate. Nutmeg? Gimme a break; it doesn't even look edible. Mushrooms? Most of them will kill you.

    So how did mushrooms, nutmeg, coffee, tea, cocoa (ever taste it without the sugar?), and a bunch of other odd substances become part of the human's diet? People tried them and liked the psychotropic effects, so they kept eating them. We tell each other they "taste good," but that's not the reason they're in the kitchen in the first place.

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  2. Nutmeg, when used for medicinal purposes, can be used instead of Imodium AD and other anti-diarrhea medications. Were my mind as addled as it often was in the 60s, I could probably say something clever about the connections between neurological and scatological considerations. For now, though, with my mind not altered, I leave those connections for others to explore.

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  3. Digestive problems -- I, too, will not go into details -- were another downside to nutmeg tripping.

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