The Aspirin Pill, the Decorticator, and the Double Loss
Schultes warned in 1967 that the aspirin pill was destroying indigenous pharmacological knowledge faster than anything else. Herer argued that the hemp decorticator was suppressed to protect industrial interests. Both arguments are about knowledge eliminated by modernity, one through displacement, one through prohibition. The double loss has the same structure.
Richard Evans Schultes spent forty years in the Amazon documenting plant medicines before the people who held the knowledge of those medicines were displaced by Western alternatives. His 1967 warning, that the aspirin pill was destroying this knowledge faster than any other force, describes a specific mechanism of loss: not burning of libraries, not active suppression, but simple economic displacement. The aspirin works (or seems to). The complex preparation that took years to learn how to make stops being learned. The knowledge disappears.
Jack Herer spent thirty years arguing that industrial hemp was suppressed through active conspiracy, that the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937 was designed to eliminate competition for DuPont's nylon and Hearst's wood pulp, and that the evidence for this is in the documents. The decorticator, the machine that made hemp fiber economically competitive, was made illegal before it could be deployed at scale. The technology disappeared not through displacement but through prohibition.
Both arguments describe the same structure: a form of knowledge or technology that could provide significant benefit was eliminated by modernity. The mechanisms are different (economic displacement vs. political prohibition) and the evidentiary records differ in quality (Schultes is describing something that is still happening and clearly documented; Herer is arguing a conspiracy that is suggestive but not proven). But the pattern is the same.
Schultes's concern was that we were losing the empirical knowledge of thousands of plant species, accumulated over tens of thousands of years of human experimentation, faster than we could document it. What he was documenting in 1967 was already diminished from what had existed in 1900. What exists in 2024 is diminished from what he documented.
Herer's concern was that we had already lost the industrial alternative to petrochemical synthetics, that a technology that could have changed the basis of the global economy had been eliminated by a law that made no distinction between hemp and cannabis.
Both losses are real. One is well-documented and ongoing. The other is argued from circumstantial evidence. What they share is the absence of what has been lost: the knowledge of ten thousand plants, the industrial potential of one. The aspirin pill replaced the plants. The Marihuana Tax Act replaced the decorticator. Modernity is very efficient at replacement. It is less good at accounting for what it replaces.
Sources
- Schultes, NIMH Symposium (1967)
- Herer, The Emperor Wears No Clothes (1985)