Plague of Strength

“Maybe we shouldn’t ask athletes to live up to ideals that, let’s face it, are unsupported by the chronically weak performance of human nature. Maybe it’s time to decriminalize performance-enhancing drugs, in view of the fact that the first drug cheat was an ancient Greek and runners brought sport-doping into the modern age in 1904 by dosing themselves with strychnine.

Our Air Force gives fighter jocks “go-pills” [dexedrine and provigil] to get them through long missions, but we don’t refuse to call them heroes because they’re on speed. So what’s this strange amnesia that causes us to seek purity in athletes? Why should they have to meet a higher moral standard than soldiers? Call me naive.”

“What’s the job of an athlete really? It is to seek the limits of the human body, for our viewing pleasure. Athletes are astronauts of the physique, explorers. Some of them choose to explore by making human guinea pigs out of themselves. So maybe we should quit assigning any ethical value to what they do, and simply enjoy their feats as performance artists. Virtue was another notion dreamed up by the Greeks, only they were a lot less confused about what they meant by the term. Their word for virtue could also be accurately translated as simply “excellence.” As for the word “amateur,” it didn’t exist to them at all.”

“Doping is not a modern art. It’s just the medicine that’s new. As a recent story in National Geographic pointed out, performance enhancement grew with chemistry in the mid-19th century. Athletes choked down sugar cubes dipped in ether, brandy laced with cocaine, nitroglycerine and amphetamines. In that context, the current scourges of steroids and blood boosters are merely a sequential progression” (Jenkins).

That quote is fucking fantastic, but the end is slightly incorrect- not even the medicine is new. And lifting, stimulants, and painkillers have been so inextricably intwined with one another from the beginning that I am comfortable definitively stating that lifting culture would simply not exist as it does without stimulants or painkillers. Furthermore, it seems that the major thing setting us apart from the rest of the animal kingdom is that hominids shape the world to their will, rather than reacting to the world around them. As such, hominids have for millennia used anything and everything they had at hand to make their limited time on this planet as awesome as possible, and performance enhancing drugs are one of the main tools humans of all generations (from the early australopithecines through modern humans) have used to dominate much larger fauna. And while we seem to be the only fauna who has tamed certain flora, animals throughout the food chain have their own PEDs and medicines they consume:

Horses consume locoweed, which affects them much in the same way nicotine affects humans (it’s an ergogenic aid [Pesta]); capuchin monkeys and lemurs get high off millipedes and use them as a sex aid, narcotic, and a natural bug repellent (Zambone), reindeer eat the same psilocybin that Viking Berserkers used to make them fearless killing machines (leading to a very weird cycle in which shamans and reindeer drink each others’ piss to get high) (McBain), elephants are incorrigible drunks and rampage drunkenly through Indian towns causing wanton destruction (Hussain), and chimpanzees seem to have a rudimentary form of medical treatment in which they treat wounds on themselves and others with crushed ants to aid in healing and prevent infection.

The earliest evidence of PED usage by hominids dates to 60,000 years ago- neanderthals in paleolithic Iraq included ephedra in the burial of what appears to be some kind of an important person (Shipley). It seems that anatomically modern humans made multiple attempts to leave Africa and were really only successful around 50,000 years ago, at which point many of them lived among the ephedra-using neanderthals in the region, likely in nomadic settlements that changed with the migrations of various animals. Perhaps it was ephedra that aided humans in successfully making another push out of Africa, but whatever it was, modern humans seem to have spread precisely in the direction of both ephedra and cannabis, like the blazed speed demons many of us are even today.

Ephedra strains are also native to China, which was at that point occupied by Denisovans who may well have enjoyed it as well, and by at least 6000BC ephedra began being used in Chinese traditional medicine alongside cannabis, which was first domesticated in China about 12000 years ago for its hemp content rather than its THC. Ephedra, however, is one of the first herbal remedies to which Chinese medical texts refer, and it was in common use as both a stimulant and an herbal remedy long before we have records of a lifting culture in China, but rest assured that it existed at least the Shang dynasty (1766-1122BC).

The first recorded lifting competitions in China were held sometime in the first Chinese dynasty (the Qin, 221-206BC), after which the country is named (Qin Na, or China), and were almost certainly fueled by ephedra, because the only books China’s nut-ass first emperor didn’t order burned were the medical texts. Bros in China in the first couple Chinese dynasties (the Han dynasty that followed continued the tradition from 202BC-220AD) lifted massive cauldrons called dings in professional contests in which leadership positions in the government were the grand prize- yes, it’s insane that a weightlifting competition could earn a person the right to a high-level government post, but they were probably zooted off their faces on ephedra and make rash, snap decisions all day. As the empire and sport grew, so did the events contested and the locales in which they were held, and organized weight lifting rapidly spread throughout a region already filled to the gills with delicious, delicious PEDs.

“The Han dynasty arose after the death of the Qin Emperor Qin Shi Huang and expanded westward into central Asia. With the demand for soldiers still running high, the Han continued ding competitions but also created a special ding known as the Han-ding made explicitly for sport (Peng 2012). The court established a “ding officer” responsible for arranging ding lifting contests at court and authorizing the title of ‘the mighty ding lifter’ to winners.

As the Han empire expanded westward, the importance of the Silk Road and trade exploded. With silk and other goods in high demand from the West, the Han dynasty experienced a boom of economic growth which created an opportunity for strength performances (see Figure 3). There were many events testing strength, speed, and power such as barbell stone lifting, broadsword performance, weighted carrying, and weighted acrobatic performances” (Buitrago).

Organized weightlifting contests featuring kettlebells probably predates the Chinese contest by a millennia or more, however, because we have evidence of ornate stone kettlebells dating at least to the Jiroft/BMAC culture (2800BC-2300BC), which was the central connecting culture between Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley Culture (IVC), the pre-Indo-European invasion Indian culture that seems to have spawned yoga, flush toilets, and possibly centrally-planned communities (BMAC, incidentally, stands for Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex), and we have evidence of Egyptian soldiers using sandbags in weight training as far back as 3000BC (and whose bag of pharmacological tricks included those of the BMAC and Ethiopia, in addition to their own medical tradition, which seems to have relied heavily on honey (for its antibacterial properties, among other things) and pomegranates (for antioxidants and vitamin C, I would assume).

The people of the BMAC civilization likely lived shockingly modern-seeming lives as they were some of the last people on the planet to have an egalitarian society featuring planned sewage systems and indoor plumbing until their reinvention in the last couple of hundred years. To give an idea of the historical scale of this, the BMAC was creating lots of ornate kettlebells 1500 and 1000 years before the Semitic people of Mesopotamia had a name for the god of the Old Testament. They lived in centrally planned cities with homes of relatively equivalent size and shape (indicating social and/or wealth equality) that had waste disposal and rudimentary sewage, making them similar in many regards to Scandinavia, but without electricity. And it was these people, living in conditions that appear to have been near-modern in many regards, who produced and used ornate the ancient stone kettlebells pictured above that gave birth to the word for that training implement in the Eastern world.

Taken alone, that might not seem, but the combination of infrastructure and advanced medicine (which that region either imported or developed in concert with the nearby Indus Valley Civilization of modern Pakistan and northern India). The IVC and BMAC cultures maintained constant and peaceful contact with each other , has been renowned with classicists for decades due to the fact that they detail elective surgeries that could not have occurred without the painkillers to make that possible.

“During the 6th Century BCE, an Indian physician named Sushruta – widely regarded in India as the ‘father of surgery’ – wrote one of the world’s earliest works on medicine and surgery. The Sushruta Samhita documented the etiology of more than 1,100 diseases, the use of hundreds of medicinal plants, and instructions for performing scores of surgical procedures – including three types of skin grafts and reconstruction of the nose.

Skin grafts entail transplanting pieces of skin from one part of the body to another. Sushruta’s treatise provides the first written record of a forehead flap rhinoplasty, a technique still used today, which a full-thickness piece of skin from the forehead is used to reconstruct a nose. At that time, patients in need of that procedure generally included those who had lost their noses as punishment for theft or adultery” (History of Medicine).

Elective surgery, in case you didn’t know, was only rarely performed again until recently, because absolutely no one is going to elect to have surgery without painkillers. Nor are they going to do it in an environment without at least rudimentary sanitation and at least a nebulous understanding of germ theory, because prior to modern antiseptic procedures, infection killed far more people than it saved- one surgeon famous for his speed and skill accidentally killed three people in a single surgery, because the patient and an attendant nicked by the bone saw both died of infection afterward (the third died of a heart attack at the violence and gore of the surgery, which was performed without anesthesia and thus required several attendants to physically restrain the man to remove his rotting limb).

As you might know, opium is indigenous to Iraq and has been in use as a painkiller for as long as humans have known it exists (since at least 3000BC in Iraq, and least 1300BC in Egypt), from the mighty halls of Ur in Sumeria to the advanced medical schools and hospitals of ancient Egypt to the egalitarian city-states of Bactria and Persia. And opium, in case you’re unaware, was the primary drug used by distance athletes in the 19th century and the early 20th, and the opioid crisis hit the bodybuilding world in the 90s and early oughts with Nubain, a drug that wasn’t even on the market by the time the opioid crisis was in full blast. It is thus very certainly a PED.

That might all seem unimportant, but there is certain to be larger participation in an activity if the incidence of death is kept low, but the apparent possibility of death remains somewhat high- you know, like getting under a 600 pound bar to squat, or skydiving, or riding a vert ramp on a skateboard. Of course, there will always be the wild motherfuckers risking their lives just to spit in the face of death, but for something to have wider appeal it has to lack the ability to kill you at any time, and in a world where everyone is filthy, sick, and hungry, there’s not going to be much interest in exposing oneself to the possibility of death by infection after pinching your hand between two kettlebells or something-and there is less chance that the performance enhancing substances one would use to be hyper-successful in lifting.

Beyond that, however, they had ephedra- the sacred stimulant of the neanderthals. If you’re unaware, ephedra is indigenous to that region and grows plentifully and in several varieties there (though there are shitty version indigenous to the Americas), which is why Afghanistan is now the world’s leading exporter of methamphetamine. The herbal remedy with which the West is most accustomed is ma huang, a Chinese herbal remedy for bronchitis and asthma that was made with ephedra sourced from the aforementioned weightlifting cultures. It has been used in that region steadily since at least the time of the kettlebells, and is thought to be herbal ingredient in the drink the ancient Indians called soma, one of the sacred Indian plants of the Rigveda.

In case you simply think ephedra is little more than the building block to make the adderall you are currently grinding your teeth about, think again- ephedra has likely been used by every single permutation of “human” since we split off from the rest of the Great Apes out of what appears to be little more with general dissatisfaction with the world around us (why else would we spend all of our waking ours modifying the world to our tastes?). It has existed more or less in its present form since the Cretaceous period, which means it’s possible even velociraptors ate the shit to get a little extra speed going into the hunt. But then, they might have eaten it for its other properties, because

“ephedra is much more than just speed- heavy research on the plants by biopharmacologists have revealed that ephedra has wide-ranging and serious positive health effects that include “anticancer, anti-inflammatory, antitumor, hepatoprotective, antioxidant, and antimicrobial activities” (Elhadef).

But ephedra and and opium weren’t the only PEDs known to the people of Bactria and it’s surrounding regions- in addition to inventing the ox-drawn cart and the kettlebell while living in centrally-planned and apparently egalitarian communities, they also began selectively breeding cannabis for both its hemp and its delicious, delicious terpenes. Although cannabis was initially cultivated in China about 12000 years ago, the shit we enjoy today had its birth about 4000 years ago in the BMAC, and it was especially beloved by the tribes who replaced the Yamnaya as the horse-riding scourges of civilization, most notably the Scythians and Sarmatians. In 400BC Herodotus noted that the Scythians would gather into small tents like those used in Native American ceremonies of the Southwest, where they would throw cannabis onto a small fire and hotbox like Snoop on his way to perform at the Super Bowl. As the invasions by the smallpox-ridden horse nomads of Central Asia destroyed the very civilizations that gave the world cannabis, ephedra, and opium, they also spread the use, love, and cultivation of these plants wherever they went. And this meant that their method for getting insanely blazed became common and relatively standard throughout the region, as braziers heavily laden with THC date back to 2500BC in China, and Indian ayurvedic medicine claims it as one of the five sacred plants (alongside the stimulants ephedra and betel).

Yeah, drink that in: four of the sacred plants in Hinduism are PEDS:

• Ephedra (Soma)- Researchers aren’t yet 100% on the contents of the Vedic soma drink, but it is strongly believed to be ephedra, or a drink containing ephedra. Due to the fact that the Zoroastrians of Iran continued to drip ephedra juice into the mouths of newborns to enhance their longevity at least until the early 20th century, the fact that ancient Indian burials contain ephedra, and the fact that regional nomenclature for the plant matches the ancient name, Indian scholars have maintained for at least 40 years that ephedra is the soma of the Vedas (Mahdihassan).

“Soma, in ancient India, an unidentified plant the juice of which was a fundamental offering of the Vedic sacrifices. The stalks of the plant were pressed between stones, and the juice was filtered through sheep’s wool and then mixed with water and milk. After it was offered as a libation to the gods, the remainder of the soma was consumed by the priests and the sacrificer. It was highly valued for its exhilarating, probably hallucinogenic, effect. The personified deity Soma was the “master of plants,” the healer of disease, and the bestower of riches.

The soma cult exhibits a number of similarities to the corresponding haoma cult of the ancient Iranians and is suggestive of shared beliefs among the ancient Indo-Europeans in a kind of elixir of the gods. Like haoma, the soma plant grows in the mountains, but its true origin is believed to be heaven, whence it was brought to earth by an eagle. The pressing of soma was associated with the fertilizing rain, which makes possible all life and growth.” (Britannica).

• Betel nut/leaf (Paan)– “Betel chewing has been claimed to produce a sense of well-being, euphoria, heightened alertness, sweating, salivation, a hot sensation in the body and increased capacity to work,” but it’s banned as fuck everywhere because “leads to habituation, addiction and withdrawal” (Chu). Weirdly, betel nut is the fourth most consumed psychoactive drug after nicotine, alcohol, and caffeine, which might explain why they’re used in some Buddhist ceremonies and no Vedic ceremony can be completed without the inclusion of betel, yet I’ve only read about the red-stained mouths of slobbering betel nut addicts in ancient British novels I was too young to realize were insanely racist. It might seem like it might be worth investigating because “areca nut chewing induces positive subjective effects, including relaxation, better concentration and euphoria,” but it causes cancer, the withdrawal can literally drive you insane, and it causes developmental retardation in gestating fetuses, so you might want to just skip it.
• Cannabis (Bhang), which is most famous for healing Shiva after he was poisoned. Indians cultivated cannabis for hemp, its value as a nutrition source, and to get lit as fuck, as they domesticated the sativa strain that hyper people like myself love as a preworkout. Slightly off topic, but Egyptian traditional medicine also calls for its use “especially against infection of the bladder, uterus, eye pain, and as inhalation and as an enema (cool the anus)” (Metwaly). I’ve not got the time to deeply research Egyptian medicine and lifting at the moment, but it’s almost certain it had a serious lifting culture as did Carthage had it’s own hyper-intense lifting culture that combined the best the world had to offer, and that they were also filled to the gills with PEDs. And as I realize my personal testimonial isn’t enough to entice you, please note that the following is an incomplete list of peoples whose warriors got high before battle, which should be plenty of enticement to use it as a PWO:
  • the word ganja is actually the ancient Sanskrit name for the THC-laced PWO drink Indian warriors would drink before battle for courage, to ward off pain, and to honor the god of death and patron saint of cannabis, Shiva (Cano). It’s thought to have been introduced to Jamaica, and thus common use in English, by Indo-Jamaican workers in the 19th century.
  • the Scythians, who were so warlike they drank wine mixed with blood out of gilded human skulls and wore cloaks or made horse blankets out of the scalps of their enemies, set up what amounted to saunas to get high so often that cannabis was called “Scythian fire” in the Greek world. They got high as fuck as a group led by transgender and/or crossdressing shamans called Enarees (Hinge), especially at funerals, and the Greeks adopted this practice at least in part at the temple of Dionisis. Herodotus’ account only mentions the practice at funerals, but the Scythians were direct descendants of the tribes who destroyed the near-millennia of near total peace enjoyed by the egalitarian lifters in the BMAC and IVC cultures who had domesticated weed. The “Aryans” of classical literature were those horse nomads, and their languages supplanted the original (which was related to modern Tamil of South India and the Indian Ocean in the IVC), but they definitely retained the weed and kettlebells. And since the Indians got blazed before battle, it seems a relative certainty the Scythians (and thus all of the people in Eurasia) did too.
  • cannabis has been traditionally smoked by various African tribes for centuries, most notably by the Swazi Army in the Anglo-Boer War, who won their independence by being the anvil upon which the Boers were beaten into submission by the British army and its massive force of African auxiliaries.
• Datura (Dhutturra, Dhatura, etc), which comprises an entire family of nightshade plants off of which you could trip balls. Datura is offered to Lord Shiva, who used to smoke both it and cannabis, though I’ve no idea if they were smoked together or separately. Lest you think this couldn’t possibly be a performance enhancer, think again- in a civilization without hygenic but advanced medicine, one would need something that was anticancer, antimicrobial, lvicidal, pesticidal, antifungal, antinflammatory, and antibacterial, and datura is exctly that. And it was especially used in combination with neem and cannabis to treat inflammation during the Vedic period of Indian history (Soni).

If you’re natty and not feeling the slightest bit silly, don’t worry- I’ve got another 4000 words already in the bag on this topic, and if you don’t feel like you’re just spitting in the face of what it means to be human at the end, it’s due to your poor reading comprehension rather than my ability to craft the most insanely well-researched history ever presented to man.

Sources (this is the combined source list for the entire series to this point, which is already an additional 4000 words and isn’t even close to completion):

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