Most biologists and botanists are of the opinion that secondary metabolites, and in particular intoxicating ones, are formed in plants as a method of self-defense against predation.
Yes Im quite aware of that idea, but I kind of just dont accept it. No basis, it just doesnt make "sense" to me. Especially things like cannabis, psilocybe mushrooms, and mescaline. Sure mescaline grows in conjunction with the harshness of the peyote's environment, but how is something that is so attractive to so many animals a defense mechanism? Dogs, bears, many species of primates, foxes, and a few others im too stoned to remember have all been proven to seek out psychoactive plants for the pleasure of the experience. All mammals are pretty much hard wired to "trip" on psychedelics.
I think that these chemicals are found within the plants because over a period of time and selective pressures of nature, humans and certain plants have evolved with each other. Psychoactive using populations have emerged from non-psychoactive using populations, and as a result our brain chemistry is more linked with psychoactive plants.
I feel as though these plants have an evolutionary history hundreds of millions of years older than humans. Were roughly 4 million years old, with about 2 million years of modern humans. I dont feel weve synced up in such a convenient way. I do believe that plants an animals evolve in a synchronized or symbiotic manner, just not in this particular instance. Besides, evolution is entirely accidental. Evolving chemicals that function as neurotransmitters in a system as complex as a human brain is like suggesting some weird mixture of materials exploded 928,000,000 million years ago, which formed a perfect floppy 5.25" disk containing the boot file for MS DOS 5.0 which I discovered in 1991 and plugged it straight into my computer and hey, it worked!
Ill accept that simple random chance of a protein forming in primordial "ooze" forms into various forms of life billions of years later. I wont accept that these same odds produced a coincidence like this.
And while on that note, it is a suggested and not-unpopular idea that the first strands of dna, or even the first simple proteins or amino acids floated onto Earth from space. Could spores have done the same? Could these simple proteins have been conjured by existences beyond human comprehension, flung into space for the purpose of hitting those few rocks out there with the right conditions to flower them into mobile creatures? Its really not that impossible.
Im not all for suggesting that "ancient aliens bioengineered life on Earth and left us their messages in the form of psychoactive crystals." I am for the idea that its no accident that these organisms contain pieces of information our organisms are meant to consume and dwell on. I know my idea is rather outlandish, and I dont exactly believe it fully, yet its something that if somehow were proven to be true, I wouldnt be surprised.
Even more interesting however is what led people to start smoking it. What ever possessed us to start taking a part of a plant and burning it to inhale it's smoke?
na this one is easy for me to grasp. Coffe isnt, not gonna go there, but a raw coffee bean is one of the nastiest (and hardest to eat) things, so who the hell would think "aw man this tastes liek shit, but I bet boiling it and drinking the water will be cool."
See when you live in a world where every waking moment of your existence is spent trying to find calories while trying to preserve calories, youll taste/cook/sniff/drink anything you come across till you see someone die from it. Perhaps not to the extent of "everything," but its easy to conceive the idea of ancient man or man's predecessors burning plant materials, cooking with plant materials, or doing some action to ingest the materials, and then tying the altered state to the plant. Bug repellent is believable too, but in any event, im sure the psychoactive properties were tied to the plant during basic experimentation as a tool, food source, or whatever.