For centuries, the Pirahã people lived in obscurity, hunting and gathering along the Maici River in the Amazon rainforest until missionary, and later linguist, Daniel Everett arrived in the late 1970s. Everett became the first outsider to successfully study the Pirahã language, leading to an unlikely development that sparked a noted controversy: Everett claimed that the simplicity of Pirahã, including its lack of vocabulary related to color, disproved Noam Chomsky’s linguistic theory of universal grammar; that is, that all languages on Earth share certain grammatical rules dictated by our neural biology.1

While Pirahã doesn’t have words for colors like “red” and “blue,” it does have “dark” and “light,” and otherwise makes do by use of comparison; i.e. a blue flower might be described as being “sky-colored” or a sunset as “fire-colored.” It might seem strange that a language could lack a word for red – after all, the color of blood is distinct, unmistakable, and signals danger. But it is the fact that there is little else in the natural world so vividly red that makes it undeserving of its own conceptual category. In other words, “blood-colored” is a sufficient word for “red” in an environment where red is scarce.

In general, the languages of hunter-gatherer societies tend to deprioritize words related to color and shape in contrast with their counterparts spoken in agrarian or post-agrarian societies. Instead, studies have shown that hunter-gatherers are better both at naming smells and identifying them accurately, reflecting the importance of smell in determining if foraged foods are safe to eat. After all, in large-scale agrarian societies, food safety is entrusted to a select few, while visual communication is prioritized as a means of organizing and informing the masses.

Consequently, English almost completely lacks a vocabulary for smells, preferring to borrow from the realm of taste (as in “sweet-smelling”) with only a couple of exceptions like “musty” and “rancid.” By coincidence or not, smell has been considered the least important of the five senses in Western culture since Plato derided olfactory function as “base” and “half-formed.” Neurologist Jay Gottfried has suggested that the reason smell is difficult to encode linguistically is related to the fact that, unlike our other senses, it bypasses the thalamus and is processed by the limbic system, which is responsible for long-term memory and atavistic emotional states, like hunger, fear, and anger. If Gottfried is to be believed, then Plato might have actually been right about smell, though it’s not the only percept that English speakers struggle to describe.

English, like Pirahã, often relies on comparison to serve the function of descriptive adjectives. Consider the way that the taste of a particular pinot noir might be marketed to you by a sommelier, and you will inevitably be told that it is “chocolatey,” “velvety,” or “earthy,” despite the fact that it does not contain chocolate, velvet, or earth. English broadly lacks a word that corresponds to the Romanian “amărui,” which is used to describe food or drink that is pleasantly bitter, like wine, coffee, and licorice.

Similarly, there are no English counterparts for the words that describe different flavors of meat in Italian, with the exception of “gamey,” which has a negative connotation and usually only applies to duck and venison. Though there is reason to believe that our taste buds can detect lipids in addition to saltiness, sweetness, sourness, bitterness, and umami, we lack a word analogous to the French “onctueux,” which is used for food that is fatty in a pleasant way, like butter and salmon. Of course, “umami,” the rich and savory quality of broth and cooked meat, is itself a loanword English borrowed from Japanese.

English is even more limited in terms of texture-related vocabulary – there is no equivalent for the Taiwanese Q, which describes food that is pleasantly chewy or springy, like calamari or gummy candy. More generally, we lack words to express the appeal of different kinds of seafood, like the slipperiness of oysters and the texture of fish, that is, the way it disintegrates in the mouth more easily than meat. “Crunchy” does most of the heavy lifting for texture, yet fails to capture the difference between the initial bite of a cucumber and the texture of fried food in the way that the Korean 아삭하다 (asakhada) and 바삭하다 (basakhada) do, respectively.

The fact that we lack flavor-related vocabulary is strange in light of the average American diet. Indeed, the diversity of the foods we eat is reflected by their etymology – with the exception of “beer,” “bread,” “ham,” “apple,” and a handful of others, the vast majority of the foods we eat were introduced into the diet of English speakers within recent history, including staples like “yogurt” (Turkish), “avocado” (Nahuatl), “banana” (Wolof), and “cereal” (French via Latin). If we’ve embraced foreign foods and even appropriated their names, why are flavor-related adjectives so lacking in comparison to those of languages like Chinese, Khmer, and Georgian? One reason that the introduction of foreign foods has failed to give us the vocabulary to describe them is that most loanwords from other languages are nouns, which are easier to integrate into a language than other parts of speech. As a result, while global trade networks brought foreign food-nouns to Western society, we were stuck describing them with the same handful of words as our linguistic ancestors.

Though the modern variety of options for breakfast, lunch, and dinner would boggle the mind of a 10^th century Londoner, our palates have been dulled by a language that lacks the ability to characterize them. This could easily be one reason why American diners struggle with food that transcends the crunchy-creamy dichotomy. In the era of global cuisine, English’s limitations are regrettable—without a robust vocabulary for flavor, we are less able to conceive of, and thus appreciate, what is meant to be enjoyable about food from outside of our cultural sphere.

Further Reading

1. Lehrer, A. (2009). Wine and Conversation (2nd ed.). Oxford University Press.

2. Tschann, J. (2023). Romaine Wasn’t Built in a Day: The Delightful History of Food Language. Voracious.

3. Jurafsky, D. (2014). The Language of Food: A Linguist Reads the Menu (illustrated ed.). W. W. Norton & Company.

4. Gerhardt, C. (2013). “Language and Food - Food and Language”. In: Cornelia Gerhardt, Maximiliane Frobenius & Susanne Ley (eds.), Culinary linguistics: The Chef’s Special (Culture and Language Use: Studies in Anthropological Linguistics 10), 3-50, 319-344. Amsterdam et al.: John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/clu.10.01ger

Microdosing psilocybin for productivity. Veterans with PTSD traveling abroad for ibogaine. Ayahuasca tourism in South America. Worse yet, Michael Pollan’s “How to Change Your Mind.”

Much has been made of the potential medicinal and/or psychological benefits of taking a number of psychedelic drugs, including, but not limited to, LSD, ibogaine, psilocybin, MDMA, and ayahuasca. There are good reasons to be wary of the press these drugs have gotten over the past five or ten years, not the least of which is the general tendency to taxonomize them in a way that suggests they share a similar chemistry — this is not the case.¹ Some of these drugs are synthetic, some are plant-based (and native to different continents), and they all have wildly different pharmacology and thus different effects on the bodies and brains of those who take them.

The general interest in psychedelics and the renewed calls to legalize some of them, at least for medical purposes, is well-meaning, especially considering the ineffective and inhumane ways the US government has demonized drug users since at least the 1960s. But overstating the medicinal potential of illegal drugs is misleading and ultimately fails to challenge the status quo, established many decades ago, that tolerates a drug’s use only in proportion to its purported medical benefits. We’ve already seen the exact same process play out already with cannabis, which new research suggests is worse for users’ health than previously thought, and has spawned a regulatory nightmare in states where it is legal.² For instance, six companies in the cannabis and CBD industry were busted by the Federal Trade Commission in 2020 for deceptive claims about their effectiveness in treating health conditions including cancer, heart disease, and Alzheimer’s. Meanwhile, research steadily shows that medical marijuana doesn’t have much of an effect for most indications that it’s prescribed for.

This isn’t to say that cannabis should be illegal, but something has clearly gone wrong along the way. With psychedelics coming down the regulatory pipeline next, we have to try to untangle the fraught relationship we (as Americans) have always had with drugs and try to think clearly about the ultimate goals of legalization.

The History of Criminalization

Neither psychedelics nor cannabis were made illegal because of their health risks, but for political reasons that reflected growing cultural divisions in the US at the time.

Recreational cannabis use in the US goes back to at least the mid-1800s, and hemp has been cultivated as a cash crop for as long as the country has existed. Calls to regulate cannabis usage gained traction in the first half of the 1900s, fueled then (as now) by racism and xenophobia directed at Mexicans that were entering the country for work. The use of the word “marijuana” became popular with the anti-cannabis establishment, naturally evoking an association with Spanish-speaking Mexico. In 1930, noted racist Harry J. Anslinger took the helm at the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN), where he spent 32 years advocating for harsher drug penalties and promoting the stereotype of the cannabis user as a hardened criminal and/or a member of the “degenerate races,” i.e. Black people (particularly jazz musicians) and Hispanics.³ Anslinger also drafted the 1937 Marihuana Tax Act, which effectively made the drug illegal. Since then, the US has struggled tremendously with cannabis use and racial justice. The 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act, signed into law under Reagan, established mandatory sentencing for all drugs and provided a pretext for the overt racism that flooded federal prisons with Black convicts.⁴ As recently as 2010, Black people were almost four times as likely to be arrested by police for possession of cannabis, despite using at a similar rate as their white counterparts, and receive, on average, harsher penalties and sentences for the same drug-related crimes. In all, racist cannabis-related sentencing practices have imprisoned and disenfranchised millions of Black Americans (and this is to say nothing of the hysteria surrounding crack in the 1980s).

Psychedelics (LSD and psilocybin, for the purposes of this essay) have a much shorter history. LSD was made illegal in the US under the Staggers-Dodd Bill, which prohibited possession about 35 years after its discovery by Swiss chemist Albert Hoffman. Two years later, both drugs were classified as Schedule I drugs alongside cannabis by the 1970 Controlled Substances Act (CSA) under the banner of Nixon’s war on drugs. The inclusion of LSD and other psychedelics in the CSA is the indisputable result of the moral panic surrounding anti-establishment counterculture in the US, which defined itself in opposition to Nixon’s “silent majority” of white, middle-class Americans who supported the war in Vietnam. Nixon passed the baton to Reagan, then Bush, both of whom gleefully ramped up punitive measures against drug users and openly expressed contempt for anti-war, anti-establishment hippie counterculture, viewing it as a threat to American values (as well as aesthetically distasteful).⁵

The CSA became the foundation for the following 50 years of drug legislation. The act created five schedules (or classifications) for drugs, with I being the most regulated and V the least, and with each drug scheduled based on two criteria: (1) its accepted medical use; and (2) its potential for abuse.⁶ All psychedelics and cannabis are Schedule I drugs.⁷ Worthy of note is the use of the word “abuse.” What does it mean to abuse a drug, and how does it differ from merely “using” a drug? The reasoning is circular – the law that defines drug legality characterizes “abuse” as “use of an illegal drug.” That fentanyl, the infamously addictive synthetic opioid that kills over 10,000 people in the US per year, is Schedule II – owing to its use as a prescription painkiller – should also raise an eyebrow. In comparison, cannabis and LSD combined took the lives of zero Americans in 2025.

Framing drug use in medical terms has condemned all scheduled drugs to the same fate: advocacy for the decriminalization or legalization cause has to challenge the basis of a drug’s inclusion on the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA)’s schedules. In other words, there has to be widely available and reputable evidence (including well-controlled studies) that a drug has a medical use before there’s any hope of its graduation from Schedule I.

(More) Scare Tactics and Propaganda

Federal attention to illicit drug use increased considerably under Reagan, who vowed progress in the “war on drugs.” In 1983, LAPD chief Daryl Gates founded the federally-funded Drug Abuse Resistance Education program (D.A.R.E.), in which police officers made visits to public schools and warned students as young as ten about the dangers of drug use. Around the same time, Nancy Reagan launched the “Just Say No” campaign to discourage children and adolescents from caving to alleged peer pressure to use illegal drugs. These (and other) campaigns shared a common ideology that promoted abstinence from all illegal drug use at the expense of harm reduction education, and erroneously identified peer pressure as the primary reason for minor drug use.⁸

These campaigns, while empirically ineffective in preventing drug use, succeeded in inculcating in the average American mind (or ultimately a third of the US population) the idea that drugs were illegal for purely safety and public health-related reasons.⁹ They also tacitly repudiated the reason scheduled drugs were made illegal in the first place; i.e. because they were used by certain groups of people. Despite its name, you need only look at D.A.R.E.’s curriculum, which condemned graffiti and tattoos, as proof that it was part of a greater culture war. Under D.A.R.E., anyone was liable to become a victim of peer pressure, a hazard that required hyper-vigilance from a student, her parents, and the community, and thus all risky behavior was framed exclusively in terms of addiction, crime, and health.

The Decriminalization of Cannabis

Cannabis managed to win the war on drugs despite the federal government’s best efforts to criminalize and stigmatize its use. In 1996, California became the first state to legalize medical cannabis under Proposition 215 following years of advocacy and growing awareness of its medical potential as a means of pain management and appetite stimulation, particularly for those undergoing chemotherapy. It’s a miracle it was ever legalized given the Food and Drug Administration requirement that mandates prior approval for any clinical research on Schedule I drugs. Until 2016, the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) was the sole entity licensed by the DEA to conduct research on cannabis. Consequently, there are very few longitudinal studies on its effects.

Cannabis has enjoyed popularity as both medicine and a safer alternative to alcohol, and now stands on the cusp of federal rescheduling and further decriminalization. However, recent research has emerged that indicates health risks, including the poorly-understood correlation between cannabis use and psychosis, bipolar disorder, depression, and anxiety; poor heart health; cognitive impairment (including decreased IQ); and addiction, both physical and psychological. There are also a number other public health headaches associated with cannabis; for instance, a warrant is required to measure the blood THC level of a person suspected of driving stoned.¹⁰ Cannabis’s medical potential has its limitations, too – it has use for the management of the symptoms of certain diseases, but is not known to directly treat any medical disorder.

On the whole, we were oversold on cannabis’s relative safety and therapeutic potential, a consequence of a system with only one exit ramp: clinical research with the goal of eventual recognition in the medical field. But to determine that a drug has medicinal uses is to effectively legalize it, and to legalize it subjects it to a complex economy and to interest groups that will reliably fail to act in the best interests of the public.¹¹ Some nuance is needed: legalizing any kind of psychoactive drug requires caution, but the possession of all drugs should be decriminalized.

The Road Ahead

Cannabis’s long journey to decriminalization and entrance into the mainstream, both as a recreational drug and medicine, cannot become the blueprint for psychedelics. The notion that a drug should have demonstrated medical benefits to warrant decriminalization is idiotic at a minimum, particularly in a country where alcohol and tobacco are legal and available on every street corner. Framing drug use this way also doesn’t save it from being overly moralized – if drug use is only okay if it’s healthful, then we close the door on every other drug that either comes with risks (even manageable ones) or that is ill-suited for investment by big pharma.

The drug scheduling system was established in bad faith and was rotten from the outset. This is why we need to go back to the very beginning, take a look at decriminalization with eyes unclouded by moral panic, and initiate an uncomfortable conversation about the limits of personal freedom in our country.

In short, this means that the repeal of the CSA should be the number one priority in drug legislation advocacy, after which drug legislation can be drafted on a case-by-case basis. Drugs that are vastly different from one another both chemically and culturally will require different approaches. For example, fentanyl use needs to be stymied with a two-pronged approach that (1) encourages harm reduction practices on the local level; and (2) foreign policy that curbs the flow of the drug and its precursors from China and Mexico.

A drug like LSD is a different story. Once the drug of choice for hippies, it has re-entered the mainstream in recent years as a means of increasing energy levels, creativity, and productivity via microdosing. LSD is a good candidate for legislation, as it carries few health risks and is cheap to produce.¹² But these reasons are exactly why legalizing it would be painful – the only way to turn a profit on micrograms per tab of LSD would be upcharges that violate the spirit of the anti-establishment, anti-commercial philosophy embraced by its original producers (of which there were only ever a handful in the whole world, even at the peak of its popularity).

It’s stomach-turning to think that we can only accept drugs that claim to be performance-enhancing and/or healthful. Even without the DEA to ruin the fun, we’ve painted ourselves into a corner culturally in which “wellness” and productivity are no longer a means to an end, but the end itself.

1 “Psychedelics” is a category like “vegetables.” Both sets are based on our subjective experience of their elements, not their scientific classifications. (“Vegetable” is a purely culinary term – in terms of scientific taxonomy, there are no vegetables, just legumes (peas, lentils, beans), roots (carrots, beets), tubers (potatoes), bulbs (onion, garlic), leaves (lettuce), and fruits (cucumbers, tomatoes, pumpkin).)

2 There are 595 legal cannabis dispensaries in New York City, and thousands more illegal ones.

3 Anslinger once said, “There are 100,000 total marijuana smokers in the U.S., and most are Negroes, Hispanics, Filipinos and entertainers. Their Satanic music, jazz and swing, result from marijuana usage. This marijuana causes white women to seek sexual relations with Negroes, entertainers and any others.”

4 This law also famously established a 100:1 sentencing ratio between powdered cocaine and crack. Note that they are the same drug.

5 Reagan famously said, “for those of you who don’t know what a hippie is, he’s a fellow who dresses like Tarzan, has hair like Jane, and smells like Cheetah.”

6 Notably absent: toxicity.

7 Marijuana will be rescheduled to Schedule III this year. Thanks Trump!

8 Another organization, Partnership for a Drug Free America, responsible for the 1987 “This Is Your Brain on Drugs” PSA, was embroiled in controversy when it was revealed that it had received millions of dollars in funding from tobacco, alcohol, and pharmaceutical companies. Oops!

9 There is a plethora of research that indicates that D.A.R.E. failed to stymie drug use. One oft-cited study even found students who had completed the program were more likely to use drugs. Perhaps “raising awareness” isn’t the best way to encourage people to resist temptation. More likely, once graduates of the program realized that smoking pot doesn’t kill you, it invalidated the entire curriculum and placed them back at square one with no drug savvy.

10 Depending on the source, between 20-30% of cannabis-using Americans have admitted to driving under the influence.

11 This is true for virtually everything, and doubly true for anything with addictive properties.

12 Tolerance to LSD also develops along a steep curve, making it difficult for a user to continually experience its effects over consecutive days.

You have probably heard that South Korean standards of beauty are stringent and suffocating; that friends and family members grill each other about their bodies and weight; that Apgujeong is the plastic surgery epicenter of the universe. These preconceptions are largely true, and often paired with the observation that East Asians, including South Koreans, are much slimmer than their Western counterparts.

Against this backdrop, it probably shouldn’t come as a surprise that weight-loss supplements, medications, and more dubious treatments have been wildly popular in Korea since long before GLP-1s were launched domestically in late 2024. While obesity clinics themselves are ubiquitous, many respectable gynecologists, dermatologists, and practitioners of Eastern medicine also prescribe Ministry of Food and Drug Safety-approved stimulant appetite suppressants.

Now, understanding clinical obesity and BMI is critical to interpreting this unsettling aspect of Korean society. Western media often states that the obesity rate in the United States is 42%, compared to 5% in South Korea, a statistic which is only true if you disregard the difference in the thresholds for obesity between people of different races.¹ In the US, a person is classified as obese if they exceed a BMI of 30 kg/m²; in accordance with the World Health Organization’s guidelines, a South Korea is obese at a BMI of 25. This is because obesity is not a measure of how fat a person is, but how likely she is to suffer weight-related health consequences like cardiovascular disease and diabetes. As it happens, East Asians are at a higher risk for these kinds of diseases at lower BMI thresholds, which is why 37.9% of all South Koreans are clinically obese despite the fact that the populace appears much healthier on the whole than white Americans do. This also has a considerable role to play in the fixation on weight – many South Koreans are not only told that they are fat by their mothers-in-law, they are also being told that they are obese at the doctor’s office. And they are. (Clinically!)

In December, comedian Park Na-rae made headlines when it was reported that she had been receiving prescription narcotics for weight loss from a quack doctor known as the “injection aunt.” The drug was revealed to be phentermine, a substituted amphetamine (like Adderall and other drugs banned in South Korea under its Narcotics Control Act) commonly referred to as the “butterfly drug” (나비약) for its unique shape. Phentermine is currently sold under 42 different names in South Korea, including Dietamin, Lofat, and Metamax. Its sister, phendimetrazine, is sold under another 33.

That this would constitute a scandal is ironic considering the appetite for phentermine in Korea. Of the 1.2 million people that were prescribed stimulant appetite suppressants in 2024, approximately 90% were women, suggesting that roughly 5% of South Korean women were on either drug (under the assumption that there were no duplicate prescriptions, which we’ll come to later). While their prevalence isn’t a jaw-dropping “one in every three people,” appetite suppressants still fly under the radar more than you would expect for drugs prescribed at a higher rate than Adderall is in the US.

Wegovy, Mounjaro, and similar medications are also highly sought-after – there were over a million prescriptions for obesity drugs in the first half of 2025, of which at least 340,000 were for Wegovy, which was launched earlier that year. (Worthy of note is that South Korean women comprise over 70% of patients receiving these prescriptions, despite higher rates of obesity among their male counterparts. But what else is new?) What’s odd about appetite suppressants is that the influx of GLP-1 competitors hasn’t seemed to put a dent in the demand for new prescriptions, suggesting an inelastic quality to their popularity.

Phentermine and phendimetrazine are banned in the EU and Japan, and are schedule IV and III controlled substances in the US, respectively. Their psychoactive properties and potential for abuse are increasingly recognized in South Korea as well – in December 2025, South Korea’s Ministry of Food and Drug Safety began requiring doctors to record prescriptions of appetite suppressants into its Narcotics Information Management System (NIMS) to prevent “doctor shopping” in which one patient (consumer?) visits multiple clinics to collect excess prescriptions of a drug.

With zero trade between North and South Korea, the latter is effectively an island nation, and one with strict border controls and an army of drug-sniffing dogs at Incheon Airport, rendering the sale of plant-based drugs (marijuana, cocaine, etc.) nearly non-existent. Citizens of South Korea are also subject to a kind of global jurisdiction such that they can be charged for consuming illegal drugs while abroad and in countries where they are legal, so few risk, say, smoking pot on a vacation to Thailand.

Insofar as Koreans (including those north of the 38th parallel) enjoy drugs, the poison of choice is unequivocally psychotropic drugs, like methamphetamine, over narcotics (like opioids) or marijuana. This probably has as much to do with the fact that the precursors for synthetics drugs are more easily sourced domestically as it does the general cultural preference for anything that can be considered “performance enhancing.” In 2025, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime reported that, “methamphetamine continues to dominate Korea’s drug landscape,” noting that crystal meth seized by the authorities averaged 95% purity, not too far a cry from Walter White’s 99.1%.

With Amphetamine-based drugs like Vyvanse and Adderall banned in South Korea, there is good reason to suspect that there is a solid contingent of people who seek psychotropic drugs, both illegal and prescription, to self-medicate. (This is to say nothing of the broader cultural stigma surrounding mental health and psychological disorders.)

It is worth remembering that a drug’s unintended side effect is as much a consequence of its pharmacology as its intended one. A 2015 paper on the potential use of stimulant appetite suppressants in patients with ADHD concluded:

The psychiatric side effects that have plagued many efficacy studies [on appetite suppressants] might actually be evidence of their mode of action and therefore their efficacy. … Indeed there is no clearly apparent logical reason why dexamphetamine is used for treating ADHD while phentermine has been retained for obesity, which raises the question of whether this was simply an accident of history.

While it would be difficult to corroborate this particular claim (and there is a dearth of studies on phentermine over the past fifty years anyhow), searching “phentermine side effects” on Naver or DCinside returns pages of anecdotes from netizens who have discovered its therapeutic potential and are using it to study law, self-medicate for depression, and boost their energy levels, among other posts describing intense withdrawals and other frightening psychological effects, like memory problems.

So, what is the significance of phentermine and phendimetrazine’s enduring popularity in Korea? Well, there is a buffet of factors in play, but there is one main point that the reader should keep in mind: it would be a mistake to interpret the hold that stimulant appetite suppressants have on the Korean market solely through the lens of rising obesity rates and rigid beauty standards. The psychoactive component of any drug is inalienable from its chemistry, so even if most people don’t start on the drug to self-medicate or for energy (or whatever other reason someone might take a stimulant), it seems inevitable that it becomes a reason they wind up staying on it.

Moreover, any use of a psychoactive drug for an unindicated purpose or in illegal quantities constitutes plain old drug use, whether or not it’s available by prescription.² The fact that stimulant appetite suppressants have a well-documented potential for abuse yet maintain unfaltering demand in a market saturated with more effective substitutes is worthy of recognition for what it is — a public health headache that sits at the intersection of lookism and drug dependency.

1 Even the OECD factsheet on obesity cites that the obesity rate in South Korea is 4%.

2 Even methamphetamine is FDA-approved for the treatment of ADHD and obesity in the US under the brand name Desoxyn.