Booze, sounds more like magic mushrooms (not that I would know that).
Magic mushrooms it may well have been...
the hallucinations could have been brought on by Joey Smith eating mushrooms or some other type of drug...
Joey Smith handed out mind altering substances to his disciples in their pagan places of worship...
Some claimed to have weird visions and saw things after ingesting chemically charged stuff..
Drugs of all kinds have been known about for centuries...
Socrates used hemlock (opium) to commit suicide...
There were opium dens during Joey Smiths day...
It is possible that Joey Smith and his followers took opium...
can you say Magic Poppies ???
Joey Smith admired the Islamics and wanted to be like them...a 2nd Mohammad...
The Islamics used Opium from about the start of their religion..
Opium in the form of laudanum was used before Joey Smiths time for sleep and a pain killer...
in fact just decades before Joey smiths birth opium was used as a cure all...
There would have been no law against its use (not that that would have stopped Joey Smith
Joey Smith may have been addicted to it as he had had major operations on his leg when he was a boy and he hated pain...
In 1841 President Harrison used opium for illness and it was used by women for childbirth etc...
It was called “God’s Own Medicine”...
Why wouldnt Joey Smith and his followers use something called “God’s Own Medicine” in their pagan temple worship ???
Opium was used so much that there were more than 100,000 opium addicts in the US in the last half of the 19th century...
many of the addicts were women...I could see Joey Smith using opium to seduce his unwilling his young victims...for Joey Smith and his base lustful appetites it was whatever worked to satisfy them.....
Servant girls were often lured into prostitution with the use of opium so I doubt if Joey smith would feel any remorse or moral outrage at the idea of using that road for himself...
For Smith to introduce the use of opium into his cultish religion practices is not unlikely...
Agreed; there are several studies that link the visions that Joseph Smith and his cadre with the magic mushrooms of upstate New York, rather than ethanol.