Americans have demonized drugs for decades. Now we’re

Regular drug use – from caffeine to psychedelics – has become a fundamental part of modern life. A first-person Guardian US series explores America’s shifting relationship with mind-altering substances

There are plenty of fanciful, far-out theories of how the whole of civilization emerged from drug use – like the theory that the consumption of proto-LSD in ancient Greek cults catalyzed modern philosophy; or the theory that various religious traditions have their roots in revelations occasioned by the body processing stores of endogenous DMT; or the theory that the evolution of Homo erectus into Homo sapiens, and the corresponding emergence of consciousness as a phenomenon, was driven, some hundred thousand years ago, by the consumption of psychedelic mushrooms.

But you don’t need to delve that deep into the nether regions of the psychedelic dark web to believe that the world as know it – where we think and feel and transact business and eat and sleep and read the newspaper – is built, at a fundamental, inextricable level, on a drug. That drug is caffeine.