Passage: The Aspirin Pill Warning

“Perhaps the greatest enemy of ethnopharmacological research is the arrival and cheap availability of the aspirin pill.”

The passage: 'Perhaps the greatest enemy of ethnopharmacological research is the arrival and cheap availability of the aspirin pill.'

Why this passage: Schultes delivered this line at the NIMH symposium in San Francisco in 1967, the same year as the Summer of Love, the same year Leary's public advocacy was peaking, the same year the counterculture was beginning to engage with the plant knowledge that Schultes had spent two decades documenting.

He was not talking about aspirin's pharmacology. He was talking about the economics of knowledge transmission. The mechanism is simple: when a cheap, reliable Western pharmaceutical becomes available in a community that has used plant-based medicine for generations, the motivation to maintain and transmit the traditional knowledge declines. The apprenticeship to learn the knowledge is long. The aspirin pill is short, cheap, and available at the nearest shop.

The aspirin pill is a stand-in for the entire Western pharmacopeia, for the economic and cultural conditions of modernity that make traditional knowledge less necessary at exactly the moment when Western science has the tools to verify its accuracy and the urgency to preserve it before it disappears.

Schultes was describing an irreversible process. Once a knowledge tradition is disrupted, once the practitioner dies without transmitting what they know, what is lost cannot be recovered from herbarium specimens. The chemistry of the plant survives. The knowledge of how to use it does not.

This sentence was the distilled anxiety of twelve years in the Amazon, watching the world Schultes had documented being replaced, too quickly, by a world he had not.

Sources

• Schultes, NIMH Symposium (1967)
• Schultes & Hofmann, Plants of the Gods (1979)