Put That in Your Pipe and Smoke It

An analysis of tobacco pipes from the era of Shakespeare finds that people in the bard’s time smoked cocaine, says Dr. Francis Thackeray of South Africa’s Pretoria University. In addition, the researchers found traces of myristic acid, a hallucinogen. Does that mean Shakespeare himself used drugs? “There is some suggestive evidence in Shakespeare’s own writing,” Thackeray says. “In sonnet 76 he refers to a ‘noted weed’ which may have been a reference to cannabis. In the same sonnet, he refers to ‘compounds strange’, and the word compounds is a known reference to drugs.” (Reuters) ...So now you know why you can’t understand anything he wrote.