Old and new world narcotics: A statistical question and an ethnological reply

As early as 1963, Richard Evans Schultes wrote (1): "It is of interest that the New World is very much richer in narcotic plants than the Old and that the New World boasts at least 40 species of hallucinogenic or phantastica narcotics (2) as opposed to half a dozen species native to the Old World." The reason for this marked discrepancy is by no means immediately apparent. In point of fact, one might reasonably suppose that the reverse would be the case. That is, the Old World has a far greater land mass than the New and certainly as varied climates, and hence the apparent possibility of a greater number and variety of plants. Furthermore, men and proto-men who might have discovered the properties of those plants that are narcotic have existed for an incomparably longer period (from the Australopithecines and Homo habilis onward) in the Old World than in the New (only from the Late Paleolithic and Mesolithic onward). Thus, on geographicecological and botanical and also on anthropological grounds, the Old World prima facie should hold more psychotropic plant species than the New-which is quite contrary to the apparent facts. On returning to the problem in 1966, Schultes (3) cited the statistics again but cautioned: ". . . the foregoing statistics relate merely to those plants the narcotic properties of which man has discovered in his trial and error experimentation during human history. Is there any reason to presume that man in a primitive state of culture possesses any peculiar intuition enabling him to uncover more efficiently than his more civilized counterpart those plants that Nature has endowed with physiologically active principles?" There is, I think, an answer in this. But