Speaker 1: Hello, Hey, what's going on, Sam? How are you doing good?
Speaker 2: Good? How are you?
Speaker 1: Absolutely fantastic and very excited to share a conversation with
you because this book is so damn interesting.
Speaker 2: Thank you so much.
Speaker 1: Where did you get the idea to even come up
with this? Were you googling? Were you on chat, GPT
or what?
Speaker 2: No? No, So I mean I have had a long
time love of history. You know, I graduated from Stanford
with a degree in history, but even when I was
a little kid, I would ask my teacher to borrow
the teachers edition of the textbook so I could read
all the extra like discussion questions and stuff, for you know,
stuff will spark curiosity from students, and so I've always
been interested in getting beyond the basic stories that you
hear in the classroom, beyond the minimum. And what I
found was so fascinating was that so many historical figures,
who I already studied in the course of my classes
or other stuff, I found that a lot of them would,
even in some of the official accounts, have maybe a
line or two about them using substances, but they would
bat it away like it's not interesting, even though it's
very interesting. And so I just kept I just kept
pulling on threads and seeing where they led, and it
turns out that there were a lot of rabbit holes
waiting to be explored.
Speaker 1: See, this is the kind of stuff that radio people
will dig into. So I I'm you know, I'm not
going to be shocked if I'm driving down the road
and the jock on the radio starts quoting this book,
because this is content, and we all crave content.
Speaker 2: It's exciting.
Speaker 1: The book we're talking about is human history on drugs.
So when you when you look at the book cover,
you're going, what what is it? But then when you
dive into it, you're going, oh, hell, yes, this is
exactly what I want to learn.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, no, it's so fascinating. And again it's all
this stuff is is here, but it was scattered in pieces,
and so what I've done is brought it together and created,
you know, put it in this compe of all these
different narratives of people's stories and how substances affected their life.
And I think it chose a side of these historical
personages that a lot of people haven't seen.
Speaker 1: So now let's be honest here in the way of
when they were taking the substance was it looked upon
as being drugs? I mean, because I mean you talk
about Adolf Hitler here being tweaked out. I mean it's like,
did he know it was a drug?
Speaker 2: I mean, yeah, he definitely knew he was being given drugs.
I mean, Hitler did not start doing drugs around then.
He'd fought in World War One, right, and during the
World Wars it was very standard practice for militaries to
give their troops stimulants in order to make them able
to fight longer, need less sleep, need less food. So
Hitler had spent World War One doing massive amounts of cocaine,
which he had been supplied with by his superiors in
the German military. So he was he knew what drugs were,
and he liked them. But his doctor had a list
of a hundred different substances that by World War Two
he was giving Hitler, and among them he was taking
not just methamphetamine, but he did oxy codone. He did again,
there was the cocaine, but also the strange experimental stuffs.
So Hitler liked to talk about how he was involved
in clean living, but what that was was a pr
stunt where he would brag about how he didn't drink
or smoke, and he was a vegetarian for his health,
but was also doing so many drugs that were injected
into him, and he simply didn't mention that in order
to present this image of him as this superhuman who
is the embodiment of German strength.
Speaker 1: You just talk about that clean living right away. Two
people come to mind, Gene Simmons and Donald Trump, and
I'm going and when they tell me, now there's no drugs,
I'm going got that. I just don't believe that story.
Speaker 2: I mean, we can't. It's hard to know about these
things when people are still alive. A lot of the
most useful docum mints that I found have been personal diaries,
recollections of people's doctors, or just the actual like manifests
of the actual drugs that they've gotten. A lot of
these things they really only come out after people have
passed away, because again, a lot of this stuff, certainly
for people in positions of power, it can definitely still
be seen as as harmful to their image if they
are known to be avid drug users. So a lot
of these people will actively try and at least try
and obfuscate whether they're on drugs or not. So it's
hard to know about people who are still alive.
Speaker 1: Speaking of manifesting, I mean Steve Jobs doing LSD, that
doesn't shock me because I mean, didn't he grow up
in that time period where LSD was kind of experimental.
Speaker 2: I mean, Steve Jobs had a very counter culture sort
of upbring. You know, he was a guy who he'd
spent time traveling around India trying to find himself, exploring
alternative spiritu duality he was studying. You know, he was
interested in like Japanese calligraphy and zen and all that.
He was very much kind of like a counter culture
type guy who believed in trying to find unconventional ways
to live and certainly his it was just part of
the scene that he was in. Was that. Yeah, he
experimented with LSD several times back in the day, and
he admitted as such on a security clearance form for
the government, and he said that LSD was one of
the two or three best things that he'd done in
his life, that it helped change his thinking and helped
him think different, as the old slogan used to go.
Speaker 1: I was not shocked to learn that Sigmund Freud actually
loved cocaine. And the reason why I wasn't shocked is
because I mean, cocaine used to be in coke, so
I mean it's like it was acceptable.
Speaker 2: Oh absolutely, When Sigmund Freud was doing cocaine, it was
completely legal. A lot of the laws against cocaine did
not come into place until the twentieth century, and when
he was he was starting out in his scientific career,
cocaine was seen as a scientific novelty in Europe, to
the point where a lot of the time, the place
where he was getting cocaine was that he would just
write to pharmaceutical companies and say, Hi, I'm a respected
doctor in the community. I would let to try your products,
and that would just give three samples of medical grade cocaine.
Speaker 1: Please do not move. There's more with Sam Kelly coming
up next. Hey, welcome back to my conversation with Sam Kelly,
the name of the book Human History on Drugs. Now,
I'm right here in Andrew Jackson Country. So the thing
is one thing that they've they've never I've been to
his estate and stuff here, and I did not know
that he was a drunk. I had no clue that
this was even happening.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean Andrew Jackson was He's the part of
person where the alcohol really made him more himself. I mean,
he was already a terrifyingly violent man with a hair
trigger temper who was known for having very big reactions
to things, and this is just a scary dude in general,
and his drinking really kind of enhanced that part of
his personality, which, to be fair, is most of his
personality was this very aggressive and so it dove tailed
well with that, and so he drank a lot himself,
and he very definitely used alcohol to appeal to the
large groups of poor white men who were his biggest
These were the people who really brought into the political
system as staunch supporters of them. And basically he did
it by having campaign rallies that were a lot more
like crazy parties, or they'd served massive amounts of free
booze to people who are willing to vote for him.
Speaker 1: Wow. See this gift goes back to what you were
talking about that they kind of tuck away these these
these true stories about these people, because I mean, when
it comes to Andrew Jackson, I didn't know that he
was a drunken. Thing about it is though, is that
we always saw him as a visionary, as somebody who
stretched this nation and stuff. And you're the first person
I've ever met that said he was an angry man.
I didn't know that side of him either.
Speaker 2: Oh, I mean, he definitely was. I mean, this is
the guy who fought in over one hundred duels during
his lifetime. I mean, this is one of the only
cases I can think of where there was the time
when a guy tried to assassinate Andrew Jackson and both
the guy's guns jammed and Andrew Jackson. Now, understandably everyone
to be mad about trying to get shot like this,
but Andrew Johnson Jackson, I'm sorry, Jackson just starts jumping
on the guy and just wailing on him. Potentially several
congress people, including Congressman Davy Crockett, have to pull Andrew
Jackson off the halfless would be assassin because they're afraid
that he's going to beat a guy to death in
broad daylight.
Speaker 1: When you write a book like this, do you find
yourself wanting to do something for Netflix or even create
a podcast and do it one chapter at a time.
Speaker 2: I mean, I think that this book has a lot
of potential to be adapted into something else, like just
potentially like some kind of episodic series, especially since the
book is already divided into all these sections. You know,
there's forty people or groups and in forty chapters, and
so each one you can like knock you out in
about ten minutes or just binge the whole thing. And
so I think a format like that would lended very
well to being adapted to some kind of episodic format.
But again that depends on if people are interested in that.
I haven't been getting those offers yet, but hopefully knock
on a wood soon. You know.
Speaker 1: William Shakespeare loving cannabis. I'm not shocked, of course he did.
He's a brilliant writer. You've got to get into that
zone and bring it out.
Speaker 2: Yeah, not to mention that he made up hundreds of
words and then we just use them as if they're
part of regular language, to the point where we now
accept that as like that is in many ways he
helped create English as we know it today, simply because
he was so willing to just make up words and
then use them like they were totally real.
Speaker 1: Cocaine wine? Are you kidding me? Was this a real thing.
Speaker 2: This was a real thing that was hugely popular. Like
I said, during the nineteenth century, cocaine was mostly seen
as a novelty, a curiosity, and so this is the
kind of stuff where in the same way that you
can buy an energy drink with like gin saying and
warana and stuff like that, cocaine was seen as a
very similar thing. It's like, oh, hey, this is an
energy booster, it makes you feel good, kind of sues
you your pains. Why not add it to whatever. So
there was chewing gum with cocaine in it. There was
cocaine wine. And again the cocaine wine was so popular
that the most the most beloved brand of it was
called Vin Marianni, and multiple people in my book drank it.
Pope Plio the thirteenth drank it. He loved it so much.
You did a full page advertisement for it, endorsing it
and gave the creator a gold medal from the Vatican.
There was also Thomas Edison Queen Victoria. You listen to
ask Brant you could just buy this stuff at the
grocery store, and lots of people did. It was very popular.
Speaker 1: You call Queen Victoria the biggest drug dealer of all time, dude, Yeah.
Speaker 2: That's right. I mean, she presided over the huge expansion
of opium dealing as one of the British Empire's main
source of income. She fights, you know, under Queen Victoria,
Britain fights two wars against China for the quote unquote
right to keep selling opium there. And that's where they
get Hong Kong from Hong Kong comes into British control
because of the battles over opium, and ultimately it ends
up providing ten to fifteen percent of the entire empire's revenue.
Speaker 1: So then why does it become illegal if everybody was
using it, why is it illegal?
Speaker 2: Oh, that's the thing. She didn't start selling it in
China after they put more restrictions on it in Britain
because in Britain they'd finally they realized that a lot
of people were getting addicted to it left and right.
The addictiveness was not like Chinese law did not allow
the sale of opium, but Britain was buying a lot
of tea from China, but China didn't really want much
else they had until opium came along. For Britain, this
was a way to reduce a trade deficit by starting
a massive drug dealing operation that would encourage They wanted
people from China buying way more of their products than
they were buying Chinese products, and the British drank a
lot of tea, and the thing that they could sell
most effectively was a super super addictive drug, so that
was part of the appeal for that.
Speaker 1: I'm shocked at tea or anything caffeine is not considered
a drug, and he.
Speaker 2: Is technically a drug. It's a lot milder. I mean,
caffeine is one of the mildest drugs out there. It's very,
very widely consumed, but there aren't really a lot of
the stories that made it into the book did rely
on somewhat harder or more unusual substances, simply because t
is both both tea and coffee are so common, and
caffeine is everywhere, and there's not a lot of the
stories you get from caffeine aren't quite as thrilling or
revolutionary as the ones from more potent drugs that do
more stuff.
Speaker 1: Well, I'm still not over the fact that they made
a federin illegal because that was my go to to
get that up. And then all of a sudden it
became illegal. It'say, well why why?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Yeah, again, that's one of those things where I
think they banned it because it could be used as
a precursor in an amphetamine based drugs. That is the
kind of reason that a lot of things do end
up getting banned, is that it's easy to make other
drugs from them. But yeah, I mean yeah. Ephedrine has
been used in the form of a federal leaves as
part of Chinese traditional medicine and a lot of other
medicine around the world since for thousands of years. So
it's strange.
Speaker 1: I would love to see how people are going to
read this book, because I mean, I'm guilty of Okay,
I go in there, I look at the you know,
the glossary, and I sit there and sit there and go, oh,
I know that person, Let me go read that story.
And so I think they're going to be, you know,
a chapter jumping is what they're going to be doing.
What do you feel?
Speaker 2: Oh? No. I encourage people to read this in any
way that they feel that it provides them the best
both entertainment and educational experience. I want people to learn
and have fun with this book, and so certainly if
people see name that they recognize and they want to
read those chapters first, I embrace that. If they want
to read it in order, I embrace that, if they
want to binge it, I embrace that. My goal is
basically that I've tried to make each chapter like fairly
self contained so it can stand on the phone, but
at the same time including plenty of references to others
so that you see how this is part of what
a bigger narrative of human beings using substances throughout time.
Speaker 1: Wow, where can people go to find out more about you?
Speaker 2: Sam? Yeah, so I am on TikTok as human History
on bergs because you can't write drugs and TikTok apparently
I know, right, It's like, couldn't someone just talk about
drugs fel different? I don't know. But then on Instagram
I am human History on Drugs. And then there's the
clearing house site for my book at Penguin Random House.
You look up Human History on Drugs Penguin Random House,
and you can see anywhere that you might want to
buy a book.
Speaker 1: You got to come back to this show anytime in
the future. Man. I love your humor. I love everything
that you're doing with your words.
Speaker 2: Hey, thank you so much. I really appreciate that. I'd
be happy to come back.
Speaker 1: Will you be brilliant today?
Speaker 2: Okay, Sam, absolutely, thank you so much