Norman Ohler

But then you can also see that religions work as prohibitionist movements against drugs, like the Christian church.

Also the purity law, for example, it's very famous in Germany.

It's called the Reinheitsgebot.

Beer can only contain three things, water, hops, and barley or something like that.

That's the purity law.

And that was done by the church in 16th century.

And in Germany for a long time, this was seen as like, this is like a quality control, like beer has to be pure, only has these ingredients.

But it's actually a move by the church to weed out all the other ingredients that had been put in beer before, like nightshade plants.

So beer, also witches were brewing crazy beer.

You drink it and you have like visions and you dance around the fire.

It's like...

And the church didn't like this.

So the church said, this is the beer now.

And especially the hops was the new ingredient for the beer.

So the purity laws is the first prohibitionist law in the Middle Ages in Europe.

One of the very fascinating things

turning points that I have been able to kind of pinpoint or at least I think this is what happened is when do the first kings come up

They weren't kings for a very long time.

The first king that I can identify was in the so-called Sumerian high culture, was in Uruk, was Gilgamesh.

And they wrote the Gilgamesh epic about, you know, the great king.