Cultures of Addiction By Jason Lee

the vibrant multiplicity of women’s meanings that Cixous described:

Because she arrives, vibrant, over and again, we are at the beginning of a new history, or rather of a process of becoming in which several histories intersect with one another. As subject for history, woman always occurs simultaneously in several places. Woman un-thinks the unifying, regulating history that homogenizes and channels forces, herding contradictions into a single battlefield.⁴⁴

Palmer and Horowitz’s anthology provides accounts of women’s use of drugs across time and cultures that portrays an empowered feminine, one of a “thousand tongues.”⁴⁵ The anthology’s description of Peruvian Inca women’s worship and use of the coca plant, itself “deified as Mama Coca and associated with the constellation of the Virgin,” disenfranchises the notion of the degraded female drug user. Instead, the drug use was considered esteemed, even holy: “As a symbol of divinity, coca was initially used only by Inca royalty; in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries Mama Coca was the designation of several Inca queens, and some princesses adopted coca as a middle name.”⁴⁶ Women of the Bwiti cult of the Congo and West African region are empowered through the use of eboka, “the psychoactive root of a forest shrub (Tabernanthe iboga),” which has been mythologized as having the ability to communicate with spirits.⁴⁷ The spiritual powers of the psychoactive drugs of yage, used by the indigenous people of Colombia, and peyote, used by North American tribes such as the Tonkawa, Mescalero, and Lipan Apache, are also linked with women, who are considered as having great visionary and medicinal powers.

Such ancient connections between drug use and women, and the power of knowledge and the associated respect afforded these women, is captured in the poetry of Maria Sabina (1896–1985). Sabina’s heritage and her use of psychedelic mushrooms ensured her a place of honor in Oaxaca, where she was considered “the embodiment of a shaman woman”: “Her great grandfather, grandfather and father were all shamans of teonanacatl, ‘the flesh of the gods,’ the sacred mushroom that gives visions and transports