Welcome back for another episode of Nick’s Non-fiction with your host Nick Muniz!

Eating the flesh of an Egyptian mummy prevents the plague. Distilled poppies reduce melancholy. A Turkish drink called coffee increases alertness. Tobacco cures cancer. Such beliefs circulated in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, an era when the term "drug" encompassed everything from herbs and spices—like nutmeg, cinnamon, and chamomile—to such deadly poisons as lead, mercury, and arsenic. In The Age of Intoxication, Benjamin Breen offers a window into a time when drugs were not yet separated into categories—illicit and licit, recreational and medicinal, modern and traditional—and there was no barrier between the drug dealer and the pharmacist.

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0:00 Introduction

5:00 About the Author

7:20 Ch1: Searching for Drugs

15:00 Ch2: Selling Drugs

29:30 Ch3: Fetishizing Drugs

38:40 Ch4: Occult Qualities

46:50 Ch5: Intoxication and the Enlightenment

56:50 Ch6: Drug Pasts and Futures

1:06:20 Next Time & Goodbye!

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