What we mean when we talk about intoxication
There is a word that Spanish—and English—hardly uses in its full sense anymore: euphoria. For Antonio Escohotado, recovering what that word meant in the ancient world is the first step toward understanding how strange our relationship with psychoactive substances has become. His essay Sobre ebriedad (On Intoxication), published in El País on July 16, 1994, is a brief and deliberately provocative piece that deserves careful, critical reading.
His starting point is an asymmetry he considers revealing: suffering requires no pedagogy, because it arrives on its own and finds us prepared; intense pleasure, however, awakens suspicion and demands surveillance. Viewed this way, the war on drugs is a war against self-induced euphoria and, at its core, a manifestation of the fear of pleasure.
Euphoria, according to the ancients
Escohotado recalls that around the 6th century BCE, Hippocrates—to whom the birth of rational medicine is attributed—saw nothing censurable in getting intoxicated from time to time, sleeping on something soft, and attending to desire when it arose. The word euphoria comes from eu-phoria, meaning something like “good spirit” or “correct mood,” and in that tradition, it held a therapeutic meaning.
From this derives an idea that seems almost exotic today: for Hippocrates, Theophrastus, or Galen, substances were not “good” or “bad” in themselves, but—in the formulation Escohotado adopts—neutral spirits, opportune or inopportune depending on the person and the moment. Moral judgment did not fall upon the substance, but upon the usage.
A Roman fact worth weighing
The essay supports its thesis with a striking historical example. According to Escohotado, in the Rome of Augustus and Tiberius, there were nearly 900 establishments dedicated exclusively to selling opium; its trade reportedly accounted for about 15% of tax revenue, and the state subsidized it, just as it did with grain, to prevent price speculation.
The detail that interests him is not the commerce, but the silence: there is no word in Latin for “opium addict,” while there are nearly a dozen for a problematic drinker, and Greco-Roman literature leaves no record of a single case of opium addiction. The same could be said, he adds, of the use of hemp, henbane, datura, or mushrooms. Curiously, the only drug that carried a moral stigma in the pagan world was wine.
A note of caution is necessary here: these figures come from Escohotado himself and the historiography he utilized, and they are not always easy to verify with ancient sources. The underlying idea—that the pattern of “addiction” as we understand it is largely a recent historical construction—is defensible; the specific figures should be taken as illustrations, not as settled data.
Sobria ebrietas: neither drunkenness nor abstinence
The heart of the essay is a concept: sobria ebrietas, or “sober intoxication.” Escohotado recalls that Philo of Alexandria linked the Greek word for intoxication, methe, to the idea of “releasing” or “permitting,” and described the intoxicated person as someone who accesses a certain “liberation of the soul.” Plato, while not ignoring that drunkenness can degenerate into clumsiness and ugliness, defended intoxicated enthusiasm as a way to loosen the rigidity of character. Much later, Montaigne would summarize that “the pagans advised intoxication to relax the soul.”
The ancient ideal was not, therefore, sobriety understood as abstinence, but the ability to enjoy enthusiasm without falling into foolishness. Escohotado carefully distinguishes the sober person from the abstinent one: the former is rational with or without substances; the latter, only without them. It is an elegant distinction, though it is also worth remembering that self-knowledge does not immunize one against the real pharmacological effects of a substance.
From apostasy to crusade
The second movement of the essay is historical. With the triumph of Christianity, Escohotado argues, that entire constellation was dismantled: ecstatic pagan cults, often associated with visionary plants, were combated, and Hippocratic-Galenic medicine was sidelined in favor of oils, relics, and holy water. The use of drugs other than wine began to be read as apostasy, and ancient pharmacological knowledge was left in the hands of healers, whose persecution would lead to the witch hunts.
That is the parallel that gives the text its strength—and its controversy: the crusade against witches and the crusade against drugs share structure and methods. Both exaggerate a supposed evil to justify the punishment and looting of many people, while fueling a prosperous black market: ointments in the 16th century, heroin or cocaine in ours.
The Puritan origin of prohibitionism
Escohotado locates the root of contemporary prohibitionism in the United States, driven by missionaries and Puritan circles as the country rose to the rank of superpower. He cites, specifically, the Reverend Wilbur S. Crafts, director of the International Reform Bureau during the time of Theodore Roosevelt, for whom the initiative was meant to serve “to celebrate the second millennium of Christian aegis over the planet.”
In contrast, he recalls that Europe recovered scientific pharmacology—and the freedom to use it—precisely when the unity between Church and State began to crack, and that since the 17th century, it returned to conceiving substances in the ancient way: as useful remedies when employed with good sense.
The conclusion: from “idiotés” to responsibility
The essay ends with an etymological play characteristic of its author. In classical Greek, idiotés refers to someone who indefinitely delegates the management of the common good—and, therefore, their own—to others. Demonizing substances, Escohotado suggests, has made us more defenseless and less in control of our own decisions. His proposal is not an apology for drug use, but the recovery of a “critical sense and moderation” that, he maintains, were the norm before the prohibitionist experiment.
Critical reading
Escohotado’s text is, above all, a combat essay: brilliant, erudite, and deliberately biased. It is worth reading while knowing what it does and does not do.
First, it idealizes the ancient world. The fact that there is no Latin word for “opium addict” does not mean there was no problematic consumption; it means, at most, that it was not conceptualized as it is today. The absence of a term is not proof of the absence of the phenomenon.
Second, the parallel between the witch hunts and the war on drugs is suggestive as a rhetorical critique, but it should not be read as a literal historical equivalence: they are phenomena with different causes, scales, and contexts.
Third, and most important for us: arguing that moral judgment should fall on the usage and not the substance is not the same as denying pharmacology. Substances have real effects, tolerances, interactions, and risks that no “sober” attitude eliminates. The critique of prohibitionism and honest information about risks are not incompatible; on the contrary, they usually go hand in hand. That is why this portal does not offer consumption guidelines, but rather historical and cultural context, and encourages readers to always cross-reference with medical and harm reduction sources.
Note on the source. The original article is by Antonio Escohotado, appeared in El País on July 16, 1994, and also circulated through his personal website. Here we reformulate and comment on it; we do not reproduce his full text.
