Füvet találtak Shakespeare pipájában

Egyébként pedig: I'm pretty skeptical about this. It's fun to speculate about what famous historical figures were smoking pot, but from what I can tell, there are a lot of holes, blind spots, and leaps of logic in this analysis. For one thing, if coca was smoked in England, it wouldn't have had any psychoactive effect. Travelling from the Andes in a sixteenth-century galleon, the alkaloid in the leaf would have dissipated well before it reached the British Isles. I'm not doubting the forensic evidence. Perhaps it was smoked in South America, but I'm not even sure that burning coca leaf is a viable means of introducing cocaine into the bloodstream to begin with. Even when indigenous Andean people chewed the leaves they mixed it with lime (Calcium Carbonate) to stimulate the absorption of cocaine. As far as cannabis goes, it's odd that the author seems to conflate it with New World plants when it's widely known to come from Asia. Apart from that, it's hard to believe that if Shakespeare was smoking cannabis he left no record of the fact other than one vague line in a sonnet. "Invention of a noted weed"? Cannabis wasn't some mysterious plant. It was widely known across Europe at the time for its durable fibers. In fact, the rigging on the ship Drake took around the world was most likely made from cannabis sativa. As an intoxicant, on the other hand, it was all but unknown in Elizabethan England, except perhaps among those familiar with Portuguese travel literature (or Herodetus' reference to the Scythians). In any case, the cannabis plants growing in northern Europe would have been very low in intoxicating resin, partly due to climatic conditions and partly because of a lack of proper cultivation techniques. We could entertain the notion that Shakespeare or his contemporaries got a hold of hashish or charas from Arab traders, but this would be astonishing given the lack of written evidence for any such transactions at the turn of the seventeenth century. Again, I'm not calling the forensic evidence into question, but there may be more compelling (albeit less sexy) explanations. For example, Thackeray says little about the provenance of the pipes, other than that they were found in Shakespeare's garden and dated back to the early seventeenth century. Does this necessarily mean that the pipes lay buried there since then? Couldn't someone have smoked cannabis out of a seventeenth century pipe in, say, the nineteenth century? Would the test detect this distinction? And if the resin itself is that old, might it have come from cannabis preparations smoked elsewhere, like Persia, parts of Africa, or at least the Mediterranean region? Where were the pipes manufactured? There's a whole literature on the archaeology of pipes that goes unreferenced here. I'm not trying to be a contrarian or anything. I love the idea that Shakespeare was smoking herb to stimulate his creative energies. However, at this point I'm not at all convinced and would genuinely like to know more about the provenance of the pipes and the science behind GCMS if Professor Thackary cares to post a follow up.

Stratfordban Shakespeare nem írt semmit. Marhaság az egész.

Még a középiskolai tananyagban is szép számmal szerepelnek olyan írók, költők, művészek, akik vagy nem vetették meg az alkoholt vagy a drogokat, esetleg egyiket sem, de ha nagyon megvakarjuk olyan is akad egy-kettő akinek emberölés is volt a számláján. Ennek ellenére műveik évszázadok óta okoznak gyönyörűséget az olvasóknak. (Más szavakkal lehet, hogy kortársainak egy rémes alak volt, de ma már ez mit sem számít...Vagy érdekelnek valakit Dante politikai cselszövései, ami miatt száműzték?)

Poszthumusz is egészségére. Yaman :)