Religion and Your Drug of Choice

I was watching the History Channel again today, and I began wondering how deep our religious background played into our cultural drugs of choice. 

Let me take a couple steps back for you-- the History Channel special I was watching today was entitled "Hooked: Illegal Drugs and How They Got That Way." I highly recommend it. On the list of History Channel programs that I have actually watched in my lifetime (a number which grows exponentially the more tired I grow of the dirtier and dirtier reality shows gracing my TV guide), this special ranks just behind "Rumrunners, Moonshiners, and Bootleggers," which was a compelling history of illegal alcohol manufacturing and trafficking in America. 

Marijuana and its history took up a startling chunk of the show. They began by explaining that cannabis (and poppies, but that's another story) has roots dating far back into ancient civilizations. In the Hindu religion, cannabis is viewed as a gift from the goddess Shiva. 

This startling link between a deity and a mind-altering substance got me thinking about the many and specific mentions of wine and drunkenness in the Judaeo-Christian tradition. There is the incident shortly after the Great Flood, in which Noah gets drunk and passes out in his tent, the long line of Nazirites (which included Samson and Samuel), and the incident where Jesus turns water into wine as one of his miracles. In fact, and brief (and very nerdy) google search will discover that the word "wine" is used over 200 times in the King James Bible. 

So what does this mean? Clearly religious background influences culture, and drugs are certainly cultural expression, but does it go any further than that? Alcohol certainly leads to far more violent behavior than cannabis, and there is a notable difference between, say... The Spanish Inquisition and Ghandi. 

Is the behavior of the western culture purely dictated by the harvests of 8,000 years ago? Grapes easily lead to wine, and grow well near Jerusalem. If the ancient Jews were just drunk all the time, the necessity of a violent and vengeful God to reflect and legitimize their own violent behavior is a simple evolution of thought. 

Whereas, until Manifest Destiny bore the first fruits of the British Expansion into India, that entire continent seemed rather low-key and peaceful. Granted, there was that horrible caste system they had to ascribe to, but hey; even pot-heads need some sort of social order to keep them busy. 

This entire discussion requires infinitely more research, and a great deal of compare and contrast, but it makes a compelling extension to Marx's famous remark that "religion is the opiate of the masses."