Category:Inebriantia

The Inebriantia are the medicines, materials, and methods by which human beings have, for as long as there have been human beings, sought to alter waking consciousness into something heavier, softer, and slower. Inebriantia is the name Dale Pendell gave to this oldest and most extensively practiced of pharmacopoeias in the first volume of his Pharmako trilogy.^[1] The anchor of the class is alcohol, in its two great families of fermented beverages and distilled spirits, but Pendell's grouping reaches further: ether, the inhaled fuel and solvent vapours of the industrial era, and the small number of other materials that share the inebriant's particular signature of lowered inhibition, slowed motor function, social loosening, eventual stupor.

Alcohol is among the oldest preparations known to humanity. On a clay tablet from Sumer dated to roughly 1800 BCE, a hymn to the goddess Ninkasi describes, step by step, the brewing of beer from sprouted barley, and the tablet is itself a thousand years younger than the earliest direct archaeological evidence of fermented beverage, from the site at Jiahu in northern China, where pottery residues dated to around 7000 BCE contain a mixed beverage of rice, honey, and fruit.^[2] The earliest archaeological evidence of wine, from the Shulaveris-Gora site in modern Georgia, dates to roughly 6000 BCE, making the Caucasus the probable cradle of viticulture.^[3]

Distillation, the technical advance that took alcohol from beer-strength to spirit-strength, is generally attributed to the Persian alchemist Jabir ibn Hayyan in the 8th century CE, though earlier Mesopotamian and Hellenistic prototypes also existed. The Arab pharmacopeia carried distilled spirits across the medieval Islamic world; the word alcohol itself derives from the Arabic al-kuhl. From the alchemists' bench, distilled spirits passed into European pharmacy in the late medieval period as aqua vitae, the water of life, prescribed initially as medicine and only later consumed at scale as a beverage.

Ether is the youngest of the inebriants and the strangest. Synthesized in the sixteenth century, by the nineteenth it was being inhaled at parties as casually as wine was drunk; the phenomenon of the "ether frolic" overlapped directly with ether's emergence as a surgical anesthetic in 1846, and the same gas that abolished the pain of surgery was also the recreational inhalant of a generation. For a brief period in the late nineteenth century, in parts of northern and eastern Europe, ether was consumed orally as a substitute for alcohol, with entire villages reported to smell of it.

The twentieth century added a category Pendell treats with particular wariness: the volatile fuels and solvents of industrial chemistry, inhaled deliberately for their inebriant effect. Glue, gasoline, butane, toluene, the propellants of aerosol cans, and the nitrous oxide of whipped-cream chargers form an inebriant catalog of the cheap and the dangerous, used principally by people without ready access to other inebriants, and producing a documented pattern of hospital admissions and deaths in modern poisoning data.^[4]

The class collects:

• Ethanol in all its forms, in beer, wine, and distilled spirits
• Ether
• The volatile inhalants: toluene, butane, gasoline vapour, nitrous oxide (when used recreationally as an inebriant rather than as the metaphysical agent that Pendell groups separately under Metaphysica)

The class is small relative to most others on the wiki, but the cumulative human use of its members exceeds that of all other Pendell classes combined.

The inebriants act on the central nervous system through several mechanisms that converge on a similar end state. Ethanol is a positive allosteric modulator of GABA-A receptors and a non-competitive antagonist of NMDA glutamate receptors, the combination of which produces the characteristic profile of disinhibition followed by sedation. Ether and the inhaled volatile agents share GABA-A potentiation with additional effects on glycine receptors and on the HCN family of pacemaker channels; their pharmacology is broadly continuous with that of the inhalational anesthetics, from which they differ in dose and intent rather than in fundamental mechanism. The common thread across the class is enhancement of inhibitory neurotransmission, depression of excitatory neurotransmission, or both.

The inebriants carry significant risk relative to most other classes Pendell catalogues. Acute over-intoxication is the proximal cause of a substantial fraction of all medicine-attributable deaths globally, dominated by alcohol; the medicines in this class do not have the wide therapeutic window that characterizes most others on the wiki. Withdrawal from sustained heavy alcohol use is medically serious and can be fatal: delirium tremens carries a non-trivial mortality even with modern care. Inhalant use of the volatile-solvent variety carries a particular danger of sudden cardiac death (sudden sniffing death syndrome) that has no close parallel in other classes, with reported deaths in users on first use as well as in experienced users.^[4] Combined use with other CNS depressants (opioids, benzodiazepines) is the dominant route to fatal overdose for ethanol, and adds an additive risk wherever volatile inhalants meet sedating co-substances. As with all medicines, figures for these risks are population estimates that vary between studies, and individual response varies considerably between people.