Caffeine - Overview

Overview

Caffeine is said to be consumed on a regular basis by up to 90 percent of the world's people. Humankind's fascination with caffeine dates back to prehistoric times. Andrew Weil and Winifred Rosen retold the story of coffee's accidental discovery in From Chocolate to Morphine. "Legend has it that coffee was first discovered long ago by Ethiopian nomads [or wanderers] who noticed that their domestic animals became frisky" after eating the red fruit of a certain shrub. "When people tried eating the seeds," continued the authors, "they got frisky, too, and eventually they learned to make a flavorful drink from the roasted seeds." By the fifteenth century, just as the Middle Ages (c. 500–c. 1500) were coming to a close, coffee had become a popular drink in the Arab world.

Official Drug Name: Caffeine

Also Known As: None

Drug Classifications: Not scheduled; stimulant

Thousands of years earlier, the Chinese were already steeping and drinking tea as a beverage believed to lengthen life.

A plantation worker in Indonesia looks for mature coffee beans. Dean Conger/Corbis.
A plantation worker in Indonesia looks for mature coffee beans. © Dean Conger/Corbis.

A Chinese myth about the discovery of tea dates back more than 4,000 years. According to the tale, a Chinese emperor brewed the first cup of tea after a mysterious leaf fell into the water his servant had boiled for him. The leaf, so the story goes, was from a wild tea tree.

The Road from Picking to Profits

Centuries of war, land-grabbing, oceanic explorations, and trading led to the arrival of coffee and tea in Europe by the 1500s. Coffee use spread throughout the continent and then to America. In the eighteenth century, coffee plantations were actively producing the bean in Indonesia and the West Indies.

Since then, caffeine has been credited with transforming the United States and countries in Europe from agricultural nations to industrial nations. This change has made "the modern world

The Boston Tea Party of 1773 shows the importance that American colonists placed on tea. Upset about British taxes on tea, colonists disguised themselves as Mohawk Indians and boarded several British East India Company ships. They dumped 342 cr
The Boston Tea Party of 1773 shows the importance that American colonists placed on tea. Upset about British taxes on tea, colonists disguised themselves as Mohawk Indians and boarded several British East India Company ships. They dumped 342 crates of tea into Boston Harbor in protest of the taxes. © Bettmann/Corbis.

possible," wrote T. R. Reidin National Geographic in 2005. "Boiling water to make coffee or tea helped decrease the incidence of disease among workers in crowded cities. And the caffeine in their systems kept them from falling asleep over the machinery."

Coffee farming in the South American nation of Colombiais done the old-fashioned way, noted Ruth Morris in Life in 2005. The process "still relies on strained back muscles, wooden tools, and traditional methods" such as mule power "that haven't changed much since coffee was first produced here in the early 1800s." After observing coffee farmers firsthand, Morris explained: "It's a long way from these Colombian hills to 'Skim latte, no foam, please."'