1. ↑ Amanita muscaria. In certain parts of Russia, these mushrooms are eaten dry and swallowed without mastication, thus producing an extended intoxication. Made into a decoction with willow runners or whortleberry, it becomes a social intoxicant, the effects of which are wild exhilaration and often an increase of strength, so that a man under its influence has been known to run miles bearing heavy burdens. It is so powerful that children have been poisoned by the milk of women who had shortly before been under its influence. Its alkaloid is allied to that of hashish or Indian hemp.—Ed.
2. ↑ The hero of Dostayevsky's most famous novel, "Crime and Punishment."—Ed.
3. ↑ But why are men that do not drink or smoke often found on an intellectual and moral plane incomparably lower than men that drink and smoke? And why is it that men that drink and smoke often display the very highest intellectual and moral qualities?
   The answer to this is: first, we do not know the height to which smokers and drinkers might attain if they did not smoke and drink. From the fact that men of strong moral fiber, though they submit to the degrading influences of stupefying things, nevertheless produce great works, we may merely conclude that they would produce still greater ones if they did not stupefy themselves. It is very evident, as an acquaintance of mine said to me, that the works of Kant would not have been written in such a strange and execrable style if he had not smoked so much.
   In the second place, we must not forget that the lower a man stands intellectually and morally, the less he is sensible of the discord between conscience and life, and therefore the less he feels the necessity of self-stupefaction; and therefore it so often happens that the most sensitive natures—those that arc painfully conscious of the discord between life and conscience—fall under the influence of narcotics, and are destroyed by them.—Author's Note.

 

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Why Do People Stupefy Themselves? TOC

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