In the United States around 1787—the year that Thomas Jefferson took a three-month sabbatical to tour the vineyards of France and Italy—the average drinking American consumed the equivalent of an estimated six gallons of pure alcohol per year. The figure today is 2.2.

Sent to suppress elements of Nathaniel Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676, British soldiers made a soup seasoned with Datura stramonium, a hallucinogen, “the effect of which,” as an eighteenth-century historian put it, “was a very pleasant comedy; for they turned natural fools upon it for several days; one would blow up a feather in the air, another would dart straws at it with much fury, and another, stark naked, was sitting up in a corner, like a monkey, grinning and making mows at them.” D. stramonium became known as jimson weed, named after Jamestown, Virginia, where the soldiers had been sent.