As are other drugs McKenna takes aim at - sugar, chocolate, and television.Īnd, says Terence McKenna, they're the wrong drugs for us to be using. The three primary drugs of our culture - caffeine, nicotine, and alcohol - are ubiquitous. We use the most addictive drug known to human kind - five times more addictive than heroin - in a way that earns the tobacco barons billions of profits every year. Outside of Mormons, Seventh Day Adventists and Jehovah Witnesses (and a few other smaller mostly Christian sects), we as a society nearly all take drugs specifically to alter consciousness. Fermented from the fruit of a vine grown in the south of France, the alcohol in the glass of wine I drank altered my consciousness in a way I found pleasant, while the raw juice (wine is not heated) contains, its promoters say, some other chemicals that may be good for my heart.įact is, we're a society of drug-takers. Last night before going to bed, I took another drug. Specifically, a xanthine-family drug called caffeine that appears in the berries of a largely equatorial bush, along with a few weaker xanthine-family alkaloids that aren't as well known but are also present in the coffee bean. I took some drugs today to help me write this review.

Review by Thom Hartmann, originally published at on January 4, 2007.

Food of the Gods by Terence McKenna