Stimulants

Stimulants are substances traded for their effect of temporarily increasing alertness, awareness, or physical capacity. This is a residual tag: the stimulant commodities of greatest historical consequence have been carved out into tags of their own — Coffee, Tea, Cocoa, Cocaine, Cannabis, and Tobacco — and Stimulants covers what remains.

Chiefly that means the stimulant plants and their preparations that carry no separate tag: kola nut, traded across the Sahara for centuries before it gave the cola drinks their name; khat, whose cathinone has supported a social custom and a cash crop across the Horn of Africa and southern Arabia; betel and areca, chewed by a substantial share of humanity across South and Southeast Asia; yerba maté and guaraná in South America; and ephedra. It also covers caffeine itself where an entry concerns the isolated compound as a traded chemical rather than a plant that contains it.