Psychoactive Substances Timeline

OMXUS Research • Document 07 • Unrestricted
9,000 Years of Getting High — Now We Are Arrested For It

Every substance on this timeline was legal when humans first used it.
Every single one. Then someone worked out you could make money — or control people — by taking it away.

scroll the timeline

Human use vs. criminalisation — to scale

9,000 years — ritual, medicine, ceremony, daily life


The red sliver is the entire history of drug criminalisation. Everything to its left is what came before.

Filter
All
Stimulants
Depressants
Hallucinogens
Opioids
Still Legal
Policy / Banned
Pharma Capture

Stimulant
Depressant
Hallucinogen
Opioid
Policy / Banned
Still Legal
Pharma Capture

Drag to explore • Click any dot for details

"The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and Black people. We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or Black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and Blacks with heroin, and then criminalising both heavily, we could disrupt those communities."

— John Ehrlichman, Nixon's domestic policy chief. Harper's Magazine, 2016

Exhibit

Annual deaths by substance — legal vs. illegal

Tobacco

8,000,000


Alcohol

3,000,000


Processed meat

34,000


All illicit drugs

585,000


Opioids (fentanyl era)

120,000