The Drinking Game by Guyon Espiner

Author:Guyon Espiner [Guyon Espiner]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Published: 2023-01-06T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 7

WAIPIRO:

MĀORI AND

ALCOHOL

Māori did not drink alcohol before the arrival of Europeans to Aotearoa, and the word they gave it — waipiro, ‘stinking water’ — illustrates their initial reaction to this imported drug. Indeed, they are one of the few societies in all of humanity that did not use intoxicating drugs. Joseph Banks, the botanist on James Cook’s 1769 voyage to New Zealand, observed Māori drinking copious amounts of water. ‘Nor did I see any signs of any other liquor being at all known to them, or any method of intoxication, if they really have not, happy they must be allowed to be above all other nations that I at least have heard of.’1

Nearly every other human society you can think of has got blitzed, blasted, flushed or fried in some way or another, often affording it top priority. According to the book of Genesis, one of the first things Noah did when leaving the ark after the Great Flood was get drunk and naked. ‘Noah, a man of the soil, proceeded to plant a vineyard. When he drank some of its wine, he became drunk and lay uncovered inside his tent.’

Alcohol was just one of many drugs humans have used throughout history. The Sumerians, one of the earliest civilisations in Mesopotamia (what is now southern Iraq), grew opium poppies from about 3400 BC, and were sufficiently fond of the crop to name it Hul Gil, the ‘joy plant’. The Egyptians, Greeks and Romans all used opium, which spread along the Silk Road to China, where it was taken up with considerable enthusiasm.

Coca leaves, which produce what we now know as cocaine, have been nibbled and chewed for about 4000 years, starting with South Americans in Colombia, Peru and Bolivia. Today the largest market for cocaine is the US, which oscillates between acceptance and prohibition, as it has done with alcohol. In 2020 Oregon became the first US state to decriminalise small amounts of cocaine for personal use. Under Measure 110, possessing meth, heroin and LSD, among other drugs, is now a civil, not a criminal, matter in the state.

Cannabis rates second only to alcohol in terms of the length and depth of human use. Archaeologists discovered evidence that cannabis was cultivated and used 10,000 years ago in the Oki Islands, an archipelago in the Sea of Japan.2 In 2019, an international team of researchers examined 10 bowls, thought to have been used as braziers, excavated from the 2500-year-old Jirzankal Cemetery on the Pamir Plateau in Central Asia. They found that nine of the braziers contained traces of tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the psychoactive ingredient in cannabis. ‘The Jirzankal cannabis features higher levels of mind-altering compounds than have yet been found at any ancient site, suggesting that people could have been intentionally cultivating certain strains of cannabis for a potent high, or selecting wild plants known to produce that effect.’3

Word clearly got around. Cannabis has played a major part in Hindu culture, with the Atharva Veda, one of the core texts of Hinduism, naming it one of the planet’s five most sacred plants.

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