Word: kava
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Kava is a far-flung relative of the pepper plant that grows on the remote tropical islands of Polynesia. It's famous for the calm, dreamy state of mind it induces, and the locals have used it for centuries to celebrate weddings and greet visiting royalty. Kava enthusiasts claim that it can ease anything from anxiety and insomnia to menopause. In sleepless, stress-rattled America, consumers spend more than $50 million on kava--kava drinks, kava drops, kava capsules, kava candy and kava...
These days kava users aren't feeling quite so calm. Reports of liver damage have been piling up in Europe and the U.S.--including the case of a previously healthy 45-year-old American woman who took kava and suddenly needed a liver transplant. Last week the Food and Drug Administration finally issued a kava alert. Sales of the herb had already been halted in France and Switzerland and suspended in Britain. German authorities are in the process of reclassifying it as a prescription drug...
...powerful if hard-edged tool of Western medicine. So she returned to school, earned her M.D. at the University of New Mexico, and now practices a rich mix of healing arts. Her clinic is a place where pain may be treated just as easily with acupuncture, kava kava root and preparations from the black cohosh plant as with prescription drugs. "Illness is a message," she says. "Western doctors see it as something to be destroyed, but it can also tell us about how we live our lives and what we can do differently...
...powerful if hard-edged tool of Western medicine. So she returned to school, earned her M.D. at the University of New Mexico, and now practices a rich mix of healing arts. Her clinic is a place where pain may be treated just as easily with acupuncture, kava kava root and preparations from the black cohosh plant as with prescription drugs. "Illness is a message," she says. "Western doctors see it as something to be destroyed, but it can also tell us about how we live our lives and what we can do differently...
...emphasis in his historical accounts of each drug. But what about the drugs that didn't make the list? Courtwright not only emphasizes the reasons why the larger-scale drugs became globalized, but also why the others remain local and regional commodities to this day. Apparently drugs such as kava, a beverage made from a pepper root in the Pacific Islands, and qat, a leaf product that is generally chewed, never caught on because of the former's taste of "chalk and body sweat" and the latter's tendency to cause constipation and nausea. Drug users were willing to make...