Coffee: The world's most popular mood-altering drug

Coffee: The world's most popular mood-altering drug

The dual power to counter physical fatigue and increase alertness is part of the reason caffeine ranks as the world's most popular mood-altering drug, eclipsing the likes of nicotine and alcohol. The drug is encountered not just at the soda fountain or the espresso bar but also in diet pills and pain relievers. It is the only habit-forming psychoactive drug we routinely serve to our children (in all those sodas and chocolate bars). In fact, most babies in the developed world enter the universe with traces of caffeine in their bodies, a transfer through the umbilical cord from the mother's latte or Snapple.

Caffeine's pervasiveness is a cause for concern among some scientists and public health advocates, but that hasn't dampened its popularity. Sales of Red Bull and copycat energy drinks with names like Red Devil, Roaring Lion, RockStar, SoBe Adrenaline Rush, Go Fast, and Whoop Ass are booming. Meanwhile new coffee shops are opening so fast all over the world that even the most dedicated devotee of the triple-shot, no-foam, double-caramel, skinny macchiato can't keep track. Every working day, Starbucks opens four new outlets somewhere on the planet and hires 200 new employees. There's a joke in many cities that Starbucks is going to open a new store in the parking lot of the local Starbucks, but this is not true. Yet.

It was less than 200 years ago that people first figured out that the buzz they got from coffee and tea was the same buzz, produced by the same chemical agent. An alkaloid that occurs naturally in the leaves, seeds, and fruit of tea, coffee, cacao, kola trees, and more than 60 other plants, this ancient wonder drug had been prescribed for human use as far back as the sixth century B.C., when the great spiritual leader Lao-tzu is said to have recommended tea as an elixir for disciples of his new religion, Taoism.

But it wasn't until 1820, after coffee shops had proliferated in western Europe, that a new breed of scientist began to wonder what it was that made this drink so popular. The German chemist Friedlieb Ferdinand Runge first isolated the drug in the coffee bean. The newly discovered substance was dubbed "caffeine," meaning something found in coffee. Then, in 1838 chemists discerned that the effective ingredient in tea was the same substance as Runge's caffeine. Before the end of the century the same drug would be found in kola nuts and cacao.

It's hardly a coincidence that coffee and tea caught on in Europe just as the first factories were ushering in the industrial revolution. The widespread use of caffeinated drinks—replacing the ubiquitous beer—facilitated the great transformation of human economic endeavor from the farm to the factory. 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. In a sense, caffeine is the drug that made the modern world possible. And the more modern our world gets, the more we seem to need it. Without that useful jolt of coffee—or Diet Coke or Red Bull—to get us out of bed and back to work, the 24-hour society of the developed world couldn't exist.

"For most of human existence, your pattern of sleeping and wakefulness was basically a matter of the sun and the season," explains Charles Czeisler, a neuroscientist and sleep expert at Harvard Medical School. "When the nature of work changed from a schedule built around the sun to an indoor job timed by a clock, humans had to adapt. The widespread use of caffeinated food and drink—in combination with the invention of electric light—allowed people to cope with a work schedule set by the clock, not by daylight or the natural sleep cycle."

Czeisler, who rarely consumes any caffeine, is a bundle of wide-awake energy in his white lab coat, racing around his lab at Boston's Brigham and Women's Hospital, grabbing journal articles from the shelves and digging through charts to find the key data points. "Caffeine is what's called a wake-promoting therapeutic," he says.

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