by Robert Evans
Pure, extracted ephedrine raises your blood pressure. The US Forest Service says “green ephedra” (which they also call “Mormon tea”) contains both ephedrine and pseudoephedrine. But the tea seems to lower blood pressure, making the ephedra-to-meth cycle one of those tragic cases in which human experimentation has almost exclusively fucked things up.
When you don’t screw around with the stuff, it’s actually a pretty incredible tool. I’m one of those lucky few people the universe blessed with hundreds and hundreds of allergies. Fortunately, none of them are life-threatening. But in most of the world I spend 98 percent of my time congested. Plants themselves have risen up, across the globe, to fuck with me.
And ephedra tea actually helps me fight back. Not like, a ton, but it helps. Pseudoephedrine is a bronchial dilator, so it opens up the airways and makes spring suck a tad less. Mormon tea is basically super, super weak Sudafed, only you can buy it without a prescription or some pharmacist giving you that “I’m pretty sure you’re turning all this into meth” look. (Everyone gets that look, right? It’s not just me?)
But wait, there’s more! Ephedra also stimulates your metabolism, helping you burn fat. Drinking the tea won’t have a huge effect, but unlike the superconcentrated pill form, it won’t murder your heart.
And as if that all wasn’t enough, ephedra also makes coffee work better. Weight lifters might know this as an EC stack. Ephedra and caffeine together reach a height of productivity neither can alone, increasing your metabolism even further and giving you a stronger stimulant boost. The FDA would probably appreciate it if I pointed out that the diet pills with EC or ECA (ephedra, caffeine, and aspirin) stacks are terribly bad for your health.
Ephedra is a terribly useful plant that we’ve figured out how to turn into the killing edge of the modern drug trade. Viewed in the context of history, ephedra is also something of a tragic hero, cast down into darkness from the lofty heights of its origin . . .
The Tragic History of Ephedra
I opened this chapter by calling ephedra the shrub that “conquered the world,” and I meant it. Ephedra viridis never gained much renown, but its cousin over in China (Ephedra sinica) has birthed empires. The Chinese have used ephedra, or ma huang, as a medicine for more than five thousand years. In traditional medicine, ma huang is used to cause the onset of a woman’s period. Chinese medicine is right on the money there: Ephedrine causes uterine contractions. (Hence why pregnant women should avoid ma huang: It can cause spontaneous abortions.)
Ma huang also has a long history of being combined in different ways than the liver-shanking ECA stacks found in off-brand diet pills. The Shennong Bencao Jing, or Divine Farmer’s Materia Medica, potentially written as far back as 2800 BCE, claims that ma huang, combined with “a Cinnamon twig, Armeniaca [Apricot], and Liquorice” is useful for treating:
Pain and stiffness in the head and back of the neck, fever, generalized joint pain, a floating tight pulse, absence of sweating, chest fullness, and panting. (trans. Shouzhong Yang)
Ephedra was also a common ingredient in traditional Japanese medicine. In fact, it was a Japanese man, Nagai Nagayoshi, who first synthesized pure ephedrine in 1885. And since turning an otherwise harmless plant into one deadly drug was clearly thinking much too small, Nagayoshi followed up his discovery by turning ephedrine into methamphetamine in 1893.
“I’d rather die than live in a world where ephedra can only be turned into one thing that kills people.”
Crystal meth, of Breaking Bad fame, came about a little later, in 1919. And it wasn’t Nagayoshi’s fault. A guy named Akira Ogata takes the blame for turning ephedra from a useful, if potentially dangerous, substance into something bikers form murder gangs to distribute.
Coincidentally, both Ogata and Nagayoshi attended college in Berlin. Germany in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was an . . . ambitious country, with a lot of dreams that required copious chemical energy to see through. It’s not surprising that meth took ahold of Germany like Germany took ahold of most of Europe (twice!).
During World War II, the German army started issuing meth to its soldiers in millions and millions of little tablets called Pervitin. The pills were mainly meant for soldiers in the Blitzkrieg, pilots on night missions, etc. But German soldiers at all ranks and levels fell in love with the honey-sweet promises of Lady Meth. While researching this chapter I came across a Der Spiegel article by Andreas Ulrich that quotes multiple letters sent by the Nobel Prize–winning author Heinrich Böll to his parents while he was deployed with the Wehrmacht.
From Poland in 1939:
It’s tough out here, and I hope you’ll understand if I’m only able to write to you once every two to four days soon. Today I’m writing you mainly to ask for some Pervitin . . . Love, Hein.
In May 1940:
Perhaps you could get me some more Pervitin so that I can have a backup supply?
And then in July 1940:
If at all possible, please send me some more Pervitin.
Heinrich was pretty clearly some level of addict. And he wasn’t alone. In the three months between April and July 1940, the German army issued thirty-five million tablets of Pervitin, and other meth pills, to its troops. Doctor after horrified doctor succeeded in significantly restricting the flow of meth after 1940. But the war in Russia brought on a new need for the pep pills. By the time of Nazi Germany’s defeat, its scientists were experimenting with a “superpill” made with a mix of meth, cocaine, and morphine that I would absolutely test if it wouldn’t constitute multiple felonies.
It’s hard to judge exactly what sort of effect all that meth might have had on Nazi atrocities. German commanders frequently issued alcohol and other substances to their troops as a reward/incentive, so blaming all the evil on meth alone probably isn’t fair. But giving meth to a bunch of heavily armed, jumpy young men didn’t make them any safer to be around.
There’s a much damning-er case against meth than Pervitin: It was also Adolf Hitler’s very favorite drug. And he quickly graduated beyond taking it in pill form. Starting in 1942, the Führer’s personal doctor gave him daily methamphetamine shots, because straight through the damn vein is the only way a dictator gets high. The meth certainly didn’t help Hitler’s stability as the war turned against Germany.
It might’ve helped those soldiers, though. Studies performed in the United States during the forties and fifties with methamphetamine showed a 5 percent improvement on mental tasks in “non-fatigued” subjects. It also improved reaction time and hand-eye coordination, and helped sleep-deprived subjects feel more alert and awake. Meth has a lot of deserved stigma, but it really, really works. That’s sort of the problem.
Ephedra has a few more black marks to its name. (As if helping Nazis Nazi faster wasn’t bad enough.) Decades after Hitler’s last meth shot, ephedra started picking up popularity among athletes (alertness and improved reflexes aren’t valued only by soldiers). A study conducted by the NCAA in 2001 suggested as many as 2.8 million Americans took supplements containing concentrated ephedra from 1999 to 2001 to further their athletic performance.
It didn’t lead to any war crimes, so that’s nice, but a whole lot of people died: at least one hundred of them by the time the Bush Administration banned ephedra supplements in 2003. Obviously, that hasn’t made the drug impossible to acquire, and the kind of body builders who are willing to do the hell out of some illegal steroids don’t think twice about pumping ephedrine into their bodies.
Well, unless they care about their penises. Then they might want to steer clear.
A quick Google of “ephedra dick” will lead you to page after page of men worrying over whether or not ephedrine causes their penises to shrink, or go all floppy and soft. I’m not able to find much science on the interaction between ephedra and wangs, but anecdotal evidence suggests they don’t mix well at all.
The opposite may be true o
f Mormon tea. Ma huang has long been regarded as an aphrodisiac. A 1998 study by Meston, C. M. and Heiman, J. R., and published in the journal Archives of Sexual Behavior, exposed twenty “sexually functional” women to concentrated ephedrine sulfate in a randomized, double-blind test. The women were dosed and exposed to “erotic films” while their vaginal pulse amplitude was measured. That’s a very fancy way of saying “they stuck a little metal tampon inside each woman and measured how much blood flowed to their vaginas.”
Women given the ephedrine showed “significantly” increased response to the porn. That response was purely physical; the women didn’t report being any more turned on as a result of the ephedrine. But their bodies responded as if they were. I am lucky enough to have a friend, Lily Cade, who works as a lesbian porn star and who was willing to test if Mormon tea did anything to her. My hope was that someone used to looking at sex as a detached professional might better notice any physiological changes.
Lily and her partner both drank the Mormon tea twice:
I noticed that it made me feel aroused, but [my partner] didn’t. She said that it did make colors sharper. The first time we took it, she fell asleep. The second time we had sex and then also fell asleep, so there may be a kind of crash with it, which coffee also has. I personally liked it but she didn’t so much.
That supremely unscientific anecdote is the best data we’ll have on the subject unless some researcher with access to metal vagina-reading tampons feels inspired by this chapter. I know you’re out there somewhere.
Coffee is basically petroleum for people. It makes our double shifts, our overtime, our five A.M. wake-up calls, all possible. No drug in human society is as universally or acceptably used and abused as coffee. We’re so deep into it that we’ve almost forgotten that coffee is a drug.
Coffee is such an utterly ubiquitous part of our daily experience, it’s hard to accept that it isn’t a very old part of world culture: The earliest evidence places man’s first cup of recognizable joe in around the seventeenth century. The first coffee trade probably took place between Ethiopians and Yemenis sometime in the fifteenth or early sixteenth century—it went from bushes in Ethiopia, across the Red Sea, and into the eager, waiting mouths of early Muslim imams who needed that extra caffeine jolt to keep imaming through long nights at the mosque.
But where did coffee—qahweh in Arabic—come from in the first place? How did our ancestors turn a bean on a bush into the most ubiquitous intoxicant of all time? There will always be debate, but here are the two most probable precursors to the drink that starts most of your mornings:
HOW TO: Re-create an Ancient Caffeine High
Combining boiling water and coffee grounds is actually a rather advanced way to get that surge of energy. The first people to enjoy coffee’s energizing effects probably ate their way to a buzz rather than drank it. And if we’re looking for the earliest fans of coffee we’d do best to look to the Oromo people of Ethiopia. And their preferred method of ingestion was to grind the whole coffee cherry bean and the sweet leathern fruit it comes wrapped in with either animal fat or clarified butter into a big, fat ball of flavor. I’ll get more into this at the end of the chapter.
The other likely “first” coffee experience came from Somalia. People in that pirate-laden region of the world are still fans of something called bun. In layman’s terms, it consists of coffee beans fried with clarified butter and oil into a delightful snack. I’ve tested it extensively but first, the . . .
Ingredients
1 cup whole coffee beans
½ cup vegetable oil
2–3 tablespoons clarified butter (a.k.a. ghee for those who truly enjoy pronouncing things)
Bun is fairly easy to make. You wash the coffee, heat the oil up, and then fry the beans for about twenty minutes or so—you’ll smell when they’re on the edge of burning. That’s when you slide in the ghee. If you do it right, your whole house will smell faintly of burning coffee and strongly of the best morning ever.
Ghee has a savory, fatty taste. Traditionally, you’re supposed to rub a bit of the oil onto your face for some extra invigoration. I’ve found that’s mostly a fast route toward awful acne. But as a stimulant, bun is wonderful. Coffee beans are low in calories but quite flavorful, and munching a quarter cup of them leaves you buzzing like you just drank a few shots of espresso without as many of the jitters.
It isn’t exactly authentic, but if you’re interested in improving your overall bun experience, I’d recommend drizzling some salt over the cooked beans while they cool in a bowl. Salt is just what the sweet, savory flavors of cooked coffee beans really need. Combined with the fatty nature of the ghee, it makes your bun taste like speed-y Cheetos. I highly recommend.
But what about “coffee,” the brewed beverage we know and love today? How’d it get its start? Well, depending on which unreliable narrator you ask (pro tip: In history, all narrators are unreliable), humankind’s love affair with coffee may have started in the scrabbly hills outside the old city of Mocha.
The Three Great Founding Myths of Coffee
There’s a quote, generally misattributed to everyone from Winston Churchill, to Napoleon, to Hitler: “History is written by the victors.” Or, alternatively, “History is a set of lies, agreed upon.” But when you start trying to trace back the history of coffee, there aren’t really any “victors,” and no one agrees on any of the lies. What I have been able to find are three different myths for how that first glorious cup may have come about.
Myth number one says that right around 1258 CE, Sheik Omar, a disciple of the founder of the city of Mocha, was exiled for sleeping around with the wrong sultan’s harem. He and his followers (he had followers, for some reason) wound up scraping out a meager living in a place called Ousab. They were on the brink of starvation when Omar came upon some wild berries and decided that the risk of pooping himself on poisonfruit was better than the certainty of death.
In the wild, coffee beans are delivered to our unworthy civilization wrapped in a greenish-red cherry. I had a lovely morning years ago picking and eating coffee cherries in a town called San Marcos around the deepest lake in Central America, Atitlan. Then I had a less enjoyable afternoon vomiting those cherries up. Your experience may vary.
Sheik Omar and his followers may have had a similar experience. For whatever reason, they decided the nutritious cherries surrounding those beans weren’t the food they needed. According to writings left in Paris’s Bibliothèque Nationale and reported on in William H. Ukers’s All about Coffee (1922), Omar and his cronies decided to try and turn the chewy green beans into something more edible: “Having nothing to eat except coffee, they took of it and boiled it in a saucepan and drank of the decoction.”
It apparently did the trick. The sheik and his followers lived, and they soon became a bit famous for their “medicinal” brew. Once the true glory of coffee became clear to the people of Mocha, Omar was welcomed back as a hero and received his very own monastery, which seems to have been the equivalent of a bitchin’ yacht in the ancient Muslim world.
Another myth gives the credit to a dervish named Hadji Omar. Dervishes have a unique twirling ritual dance that they do for the glory of God, and back in the day they were also a peculiar sort of beggar. Rather than asking for spare change to buy themselves food and/or liquor (which was forbidden anyway by Islam) they begged on behalf of other poor people. Either Hadji Omar’s dancing or his begging pissed off somebody because, like the earlier Omar, he was driven by enemies in Mocha out to the desert.
Rather than starving to death, he came upon some strange berries that saved his life. He didn’t like the bittersweet taste, though, and decided to roast them to try and bring out a more palatable flavor. The fire made his coffee beans too hard, so he tried to boil them with water to soften them up. The water turned brown, and soon the desperate dervish found himself perking up from history’s first black coffee. His disc
overy brought him back into favor, and into the city of Mocha. Soon Hadji Omar found himself a saint, which is either a much shittier or much better reward than the first Omar’s monastery. It really depends on whether or not saints actually got their own halos.
The last version of this myth involves yet another Omar. Despite the fact that their circumstances differ, all these Omars are guys who solved their problems by adding mystery beans to water and heat. This last Omar was the disciple of a mullah named Schadheli, who predicted his own forthcoming death and, rather than doing anything to stop it, told Omar that after he passed on a “veiled person” would appear and give Omar a command. He was told that he should follow it.
Schadheli died, and, sometime later, Omar was ambushed by a gigantic ghostly version of his teacher wearing a white veil. The monster ghost told Omar to fill a bowl with water and not stop walking until the water became “unmoveable.” Whatever that means, it happened when Omar reached the city of Mocha.
This Mocha was gripped by a horrific plague, and Omar set his water aside for a little while to pray for the sick and dying, and to cure them with the magical powers all holy men have in old stories. It worked out great for a while, until Omar cured the king’s beautiful daughter and then decided that, since he’d saved her life, it was probably God’s will that he bone her. This got him driven from the city, and exiled to a cave where he lived off wild herbs. Eventually he came upon the fruit of the coffee bush, and decided to add some of those weird, chewy beans to his nightly soup. Thus was coffee born.
Now, there’s a fourth legend about the origins of coffee, one that substitutes an exiled man named Omar and near-fatal starvation with adorably drugged-up goats. According to this myth, a goatherd named Kaldi was off, uh . . . goatherding when some of his furry charges got into a patch of coffee bushes. The goats proceeded to speed their little goat balls off and, if legend can be believed, started dancing and pirouetting around. Kaldi was the kind of young man who was only too happy to try new drugs on the advice of goats and started chewing the fruit and beans himself. Eventually some monks happened by and, being as bored as monks pretty much always are, boiled the beans and realized the resulting brew could keep them awake through long nights of worshipping the beard off their god.