| IN THE Smoke Shack, a "head
shop" in Nelson, British Columbia, the
air is thick with marijuana and the
atmosphere is mellow as the staff stage a
demo of their dope-related paraphernalia. The
clients range from tourists and business
types to the dreadlocked and dishevelled. All
walks of life are welcome. Over
the border in the US, the police call to the
man in the car for the last time. If he
doesn't step out they will shoot. He stays
put - maybe because he's embarrassed about
being caught naked from the waist down,
clearly aroused. Or maybe he's just too high
on methamphetamine to care.
High
up in the mountains of Peru the men brew coca
leaves into a tea. While they don't approve
of the habit of snorting the powdered
extract, the tea gives them a mild buzz that
helps fight the headaches and nausea of
altitude sickness. Up here, cocaine is part
of life.
Lounging
in a restaurant, two old friends share a
second bottle of wine, sinking lower in their
seats as they enjoy the numbing haze and
warmth it creates. Later they'll order
brandy. The bartender pours himself a cup of
coffee. It's going to be a long shift.
As
diverse as these episodes are, there is a
clear common thread running through them: the
pursuit of intoxication. Since prehistoric
times, humans have been seeking out and using
intoxicating substances. Most people who have
ever lived have experienced a chemically
induced altered state of consciousness, and
the same is true of people alive today.
That's not to say that everybody is
constantly fighting the urge to get high, nor
that intoxication is somehow a normal state
of consciousness. But how many of us can
claim never to have experienced an altered
state, whether it be a caffeine kick to help
us get going in the morning, a relaxing beer
after work, a few puffs on a joint at a party
or the euphoric high of ecstasy?
In
the present prohibitionist climate it is
difficult to talk about the use of
psychoactive, literally
"mind-altering", substances without
focusing on their harmful and habit-forming
properties. And it's true that excessive use
of consciousness-altering drugs, both legal
and illegal, is bad for individuals and bad
for society. People who seek intoxication are
taking risks with their health and flirting
with addiction. Drugs can lead to crime,
violence, accidents, family disintegration
and social decay.
Nonetheless,
intoxicants remain a part of most people's
lives. And indeed most of us are able to
consume them in moderation without spiralling
into abuse and addiction. Take alcohol, for
example. Its potent psychoactive properties
and potential for wreaking havoc are well
known, yet the majority of people still drink
and enjoy it without becoming alcoholics.
There's also ample evidence that, despite
public health campaigns and the threat of
severe penalties, millions of people every
year join the legions who have experimented
with illegal substances, from cannabis and
cocaine to ecstasy, amphetamines and LSD (for
a guide to the most commonly used
psychoactive drugs.
It
seems that intoxication in one form or
another is universal, a part of who we are.
"It's a natural part of consciousness to
change one's consciousness," argues Rick
Doblin, who runs the not-for-profit
Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic
Studies in Sarasota, Florida. But why is it
that we choose to alter our state of
consciousness by dosing our brains with
chemicals?
The
answer is straightforward. We seek
intoxication for a simple reason that we are
almost too scared to admit - we like it.
Intoxication can be fun, sociable, memorable,
therapeutic, even mind-expanding. Saying as
much in the present climate is not easy, but
an increasing number of researchers now argue
that unless we're prepared to look beyond the
"drug problem" and acknowledge the
positive aspects of intoxication, we are only
seeing half the story - like researching sex
while pretending it isn't fun.
A
full understanding of intoxication, and the
quest to achieve it, could have numerous
pay-offs. For one thing there is the prospect
of better ways to tackle abuse and addiction.
There are also good reasons for studying
intoxication as a phenomenon in its own
right. What is it about psychoactive
substances that we like? What do they tell us
about who we are? Is there a way to get the
good without the bad? Some researchers
believe that such enquiries will lead to a
new understanding of the human mind,
including the mysteries of consciousness, or
new treatments for mental illness. Others go
as far as to argue that it is time for
society to accept that intoxication is an
inextricable part of human nature, and find a
way to let us explore it openly.
The
quest to understand intoxication wasn't
always so constrained. Back in the 1950s, 60s
and early 70s, many scientists took a very
personal interest in it. In those more
liberal days, researchers such as physician
Andrew Weil, latterly of the National
Institute for Mental Health in Maryland, and
ethnobotanist Terrence McKenna charted the
effects of many drugs, tested them in the lab
and in the field, explored their
mind-altering qualities first-hand,
documented their use in different cultures,
and suggested that many of the compounds had
medicinal benefits.
Many
of these pioneering researchers came to the
conclusion that seeking intoxication was
programmed into human nature. As Weil pointed
out in his 1973 book The Natural Mind,
from an early age children experiment with
spinning around or hyperventilating to
experience mind-altering giddiness. He
suggested that when we get older, this quest
to alter our feelings stays with us but we
pursue it chemically as well as physically.
The
spirit of personal research, however, was
largely quashed in the late 70s and 80s as a
US-led "war on drugs" took hold.
Drug research became dominated by the
"addiction paradigm", with pleasure
and benefits strictly off-limits. "It
was so controversial it had to be shut down
altogether," says Charles Grob, director
of the child and adolescent psychiatry
department at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center in
Torrance, California, whose interests lie
with the potential medical use of
psychedelics.
But
some researchers carried on regardless.
Ronald Siegel, now a psychopharmacologist at
the University of California, Los Angeles,
was one of them. As a psychology graduate
student in the 60s he busied himself with
studying pigeon memory. One day, a fellow
student was arrested for marijuana
possession, and his lawyer asked Siegel what
he knew about the drug's effects. Not much,
as it happened, so he brewed up an extract
and watched what happened when a pigeon got
stoned.
Ever
since, he has been fascinated by
intoxication, what it is and why we and other
animals seek it. He managed to keep studying
"controlled substances" such as
LSD, mescaline, PCP, cocaine and psilocybin
in his clinic, in animals and in volunteers,
all legal and above board. He's passed out,
thrown up, been attacked by intoxicated
animals, and even been shot at by drugs
barons - all in the name of research. And he
has gained a unique perspective, spelled out
in his 1989 book Intoxication: Life in
pursuit of artificial paradise, which is
being reissued next April by Park Street
Press of Rochester, Vermont.
Siegel
believes there is a strong biological drive
to seek intoxication. "It's the fourth
drive," he says. "After hunger,
thirst and sex, there is intoxication."
Whether we are seeking pleasure, stimulation,
pain relief or escape, at the root of this
drive, he says, is the motivation to feel
"different from normal" - what has
sometimes been called "a holiday from
reality". Some people reach this state
through travel, books, art, roller coasters,
sport, religion, exploration, love, social
contact or power. Others use intoxicants.
"It's the same motivation," says
Siegel. "We wouldn't live if we didn't
seek to feel different."
One
of the main "different" feelings we
want to experience is pleasure. Pleasure,
neuroscientists believe, is the brain's way
of telling us that we are doing something
that is good for survival, such as eating and
sex. The circuits that create the feeling are
driven by natural opioids and cannabinoids.
No surprise, then, that we have a penchant
for putting versions of these chemicals into
our brains.
But
the equation is not quite as simple as
chemical in, pleasure out. At last month's
Society for Neuroscience meeting in San
Diego, California, neuroscientist Kent
Berridge of the University of Michigan in Ann
Arbor described preliminary work showing that
rats given a natural cannabinoid, anandamide,
seemed to become unusually partial to sweet
tastes. Rats primed with anandamide had
higher pleasure responses to sugar than
unprimed rats. It seems that the cannabinoid
may not just be pleasurable in its own right,
but also enhances other pleasurable
experiences, making the world seem a
generally more likeable place. Perhaps this
is one aspect of the well-known
"munchies" effect of marijuana,
they conclude.
A
related idea is that some people take
psychoactive substances to suppress
"negative pleasure". George Koob, a
neuroscientist and addiction specialist at
the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla,
California, has proposed that the brain has a
natural system for limiting the amount of
pleasure we can feel. He argues that pleasure
has to be transient or humans and other
animals would get so absorbed in it that they
would succumb to the next predator that came
along. Koob thinks that the brain has a way
of bringing us down - a kind of
"anti-pleasure" mechanism if you
like. What if this system goes into
overdrive? "Some people seek excessive
pleasure because they are born with too much
anti-pleasure," he says. "They may
take drugs to feel normal."
But
there is more to intoxication than simply
massaging our pleasure circuits. Some altered
states, Siegel believes, have a utilitarian
value. Just as many animals naturally seek
medicinal plants such as antibiotics or
emetics, we seek to medicate our minds. When
we are agitated or in pain, emotionally as
well as physically, we seek substances that
tranquillise and sedate. When tired or
depressed, we seek stimulants. According to
some researchers, including Grob, this
medicinal use is an underlying thread running
through all forms of intoxication.
The
drive to medicate mood is pervasive
throughout the animal kingdom, Siegel says,
and he and his colleagues have documented
thousands of examples. Elephants, for
instance, enjoy the taste of fermented fruit.
They will usually just browse it, but if they
lose their mate (elephants usually mate for
life) they may seek oblivion in an alcoholic
fruit binge, even drinking neat ethanol if
researchers provide it. It's hard not to
conclude that, like humans, they are drowning
their sorrows. Stress can also lead animals
to take intoxicants as a form of escape. When
stressed by overcrowding, elephants are more
motivated to seek alcohol. And fear can take
its toll too. During the Vietnam war, Siegel
and his team filmed water buffalo grazing on
opium poppies to the point of addiction. And
animals don't just take downers: there are
numerous reports of goats guzzling stimulants
such as coffee beans and the herbal
amphetamine khat.
Medication
with uppers and downers may be fairly easy to
understand, but there are other intoxicants
whose attractions are harder to fathom. These
are the hallucinogens, which can't easily be
explained in purely survivalist terms. Most
animals actively avoid this category of
intoxicant.
Despite
this, some researchers believe that
psychedelics can have a medicinal effect in
humans. Doblin, for example, argues that the
drastically altered states they induce can
play a role in maintaining mental health.
Hallucinogens - and to some extent cannabis
and MDMA - allow us to escape, temporarily,
from a reality ruled by logic, ego and time,
and explore other aspects of our
consciousness. "The brain functions best
when it has access to altered states,"
he says.
This
might sound like hippy mumbo-jumbo, but there
is plenty of evidence in the medical
literature that hallucinogens are effective
against mental illness, including anxiety,
post-traumatic stress disorder, alcoholism
and heroin addiction. Most of this research
was done in the 1950s, but the field is now
showing signs of a revival. Grob recently
received approval to test psilocybin as a
treatment for severe anxiety in terminally
ill cancer patients, and there are ongoing
studies in the use of psilocybin for
otherwise untreatable cases of obsessive
compulsive disorder, and MDMA for serious
post-traumatic stress disorder.
Medicinal
properties notwithstanding, there are other
ideas to explain why people take
psychedelics. Siegel found that he could
persuade monkeys to voluntarily smoke the
hallucinogen DMT when they were in a
situation of severe sensory deprivation. He
had already trained three rhesus monkeys to
smoke for a reward, to study the effects of
nicotine. When he laced their smoking tubes
with DMT, they briefly tried it, then avoided
it. But after several days in darkness, with
no stimulation, the monkeys began to smoke
DMT voluntarily. They ended up grasping at
and chasing non-existent objects and hiding
from invisible dangers. "This was the
first demonstration of a non-human primate
voluntarily taking a hallucinogenic
drug," Siegel says. "We share the
same motivation to light up our lives with
chemical glimpses of another world."
Boredom it seems, will drive animals to
experiment, even when the experience is not
altogether pleasurable.
The
same drive to seek novelty or stave off
boredom could explain why people take drugs
that have overwhelmingly negative effects.
PCP, for example, which some consider to be
the most dangerous illegal drug, is a
"dissociative". Among its myriad
effects are numbness, loss of coordination,
paranoia, hallucinations, acute anxiety, mood
swings and psychosis. But for some people the
altered state is clearly worth it - PCP was
hugely popular in the US in the 1970s.
"People seem to say they liked feeling
different or funny," says Siegel.
"When there's nothing else to do, people
will take anything to feel different."
In
some ways novelty-seeking is a basic
behavioural drive. Literature on child
development reveals that once infants are no
longer sleepy, hungry or thirsty, they will
explore and seek new experiences. They
wriggle their limbs, put things in their
mouths, touch things, taste things and bash
things together. Without this drive, they
wouldn't learn anything about the world
around them. Perhaps this spirit of
exploration simply continues into adulthood
in a different form.
There's
another drive, too, that probably plays a
role: risk-taking. For some people taking
risks is itself pleasurable. According to
Koob this might come from a slightly
different brain system to the pleasure
circuits. For animals that forage, there is
always the risk of being attacked by a
predator. In other words there is a conflict
between seeking new foraging sites, or
novelty, and risk. Evolution has got around
this conundrum by making novelty rewarding
and pleasurable in its own right.
Pleasure,
excitement, therapy, novelty: seen in this
light, the pursuit of intoxication looks very
different from its standard portrayal as a
pathological drive that must be suppressed
before it leads to harm, addiction and
squalor. Yet the mainstream debate on drugs,
alcohol and tobacco seems unable to
acknowledge that there is anything positive
at all to say about intoxication. Instead it
is locked into a sterile argument between
prohibitionists and those who want to reduce
the harmful effects by, for example, making
heroin available on prescription. Both groups
start from the belief that psychoactive
substances are inherently harmful but
disagree on what to do about it.
Some
activists, however, are starting to argue for
an entirely different attitude to
intoxication. One prominent critic of the
debate is Richard Glen Boire, director of the
Center for Cognitive Liberty and Ethics in
Davis, California. He believes that
intoxication is not just a part of human
nature, it is a basic human right. "Why
should it be illegal to alter your style of
thinking?" he says. "As long as you
don't do any harm to anyone else, what you do
in your own mind is as private as what you do
in your own bedroom." Boire advocates
changes to the law that would allow people to
experiment with psychoactive substances at
home or in designated public places.
"It's the right of people to explore the
full range of consciousness, and our duty as
a society to accommodate that," he says.
Some
scientists are moving in the same direction,
arguing that instead of suppressing,
medicalising and criminalising our basic
drive to experience altered states we should
apply ourselves to making it safer, healthier
and less squalid - in short, to taking the
"toxic" out of intoxication.
The
approach favoured by Siegel is to tweak
existing drugs to make them better, with
shorter effects and no addictive potential.
"What it would be like," he says,
"if we had a drug like alcohol, which
didn't lead to violence, fetal damage, liver
failure, that was safe, wouldn't lead to
drink driving and never gave you a hangover.
What would be wrong with it medically? Maybe
we'd even prescribe this alcohol substitute
to help people relax." We could even
design entirely new chemicals that allow us
to experience all the pleasures, thrills and
adventures of intoxication without the
downsides. "This is not science
fiction," says Siegel.
"Civilisation will eventually take this
direction."
Perhaps
this would be the greatest contribution a
full understanding of the intoxication
instinct could offer - a spur for society to
move beyond the irrational position of
sanctioning caffeine, alcohol and tobacco
while fighting a "war" against
other psychoactive substances. David Lenson,
a social theorist at the University of
Massachusetts in Amhurst and author of the
1995 book On Drugs, makes this point
by comparing the war on drugs with efforts to
eradicate homosexuality: both are based on an
incomplete understanding of human nature.
Siegel, too, sees an analogy with sex.
"We can't be expected to solve the AIDS
problem by outlawing sex," he says.
"We have to make drugs safe and healthy,
because people are not going to be able to
say no."
A window on the mind
DRUGS provide some of the best evidence we
have that the mind is the brain; that our
thoughts, beliefs and perceptions are created
by chemistry. Take a drug, particularly a
hallucinogen, and any of these can change.
This means these drugs can be scary and need
to be taken with great care and respect. But
it also means they have the potential to
reveal some of the deepest secrets about our
minds and consciousness.
A century ago, psychologist William James
experimented with the anaesthetic nitrous
oxide. Our normal rational consciousness, he
said, is just one special type of
consciousness, while all around it,
"parted from it by the filmiest of
screens", are other entirely different
forms of consciousness, always available if
the requisite stimulus is applied.
Others meticulously described the effects
of inhaling ether, chloroform and cannabis,
and the strange distortions of time,
perception and sense of humour they induced.
More curiously, they also described changes
in belief, and even in philosophy. When
Humphry Davy took nitrous oxide in 1799 he
ended up exclaiming that "nothing exists
but thoughts". Others made similar
observations and found their views profoundly
shifted by even brief forays to the other
side of that filmy screen.
This raises the peculiar question of
whether what James called "our normal
rational consciousness" is necessarily
the best state for understanding the world.
After all, if one's view of the world can
change so dramatically with the aid of a
simple molecule, how can we be sure that our
normal brain chemistry is the one most suited
to doing science and philosophy? What if our
brain chemistry evolved to help us survive at
the cost of giving us false beliefs about the
world? If so, it is possible that
mind-altering drugs might in fact give us a
better, not worse, insight than we have in
our so-called normal state.
Take the common hallucinogenic experience
of losing our separate self, or becoming one
with the universe. This may seem, to some,
like mystical hogwash, but in fact it fits
far better with a scientific understanding of
the world than our normal dualist view. Most
of us feel, most of the time, that we are
some kind of separate self who inhabits our
body like a driver in a car or a pilot in a
plane. Throughout history many people have
believed in a soul or spirit. Yet science has
long known that this cannot be so. There is
just a brain that is made of exactly the same
kind of stuff as the world around it. We
really are one with the universe.
This means that the psychedelic sense of
self may actually be truer than the dualist
view. So although our normal state is better
for surviving and reproducing, it may not
always be best for understanding who and what
we are. Perhaps we ought to try doing science
in some of these intoxicated states.
This was just what psychologist Charles
Tart of the University of California, Davis,
suggested in 1972, in the journal Science.
He likened different states of consciousness
to different paradigms in science and
proposed creating "state specific
sciences", new sciences which would be
done by scientists working and communicating
in altered states. These new sciences might
only have limited application but this makes
the point that our normal state may not be
the only way to try to understand the
universe.
Since Tart's work, most psychedelic drugs
have become prohibited and research has
largely been stifled. Perhaps one day, when
prohibition is abandoned, scientists may once
again take up the promise offered by those
tiny little chemicals that can tell us who
and what we are.
Susan Blackmore
Under the influence
HOW common is the use of mind-altering
substances? Accurate figures are hard to come
by, largely because most psychoactive drugs
are illegal and the task of keeping tabs on
the legal ones is monumental. But it's safe
to say from the available figures that the
use of mind-altering substances is a
widespread - if not near-universal - human
experience.
According to the latest drug data from the
United Nations (World Drug Report 2004),
about 185 million people worldwide have used
an illicit substance in the past 12 months.
That's around 1 in 20 of the adult
population. With 146 million users, cannabis
is by far the most popular, followed by
amphetamines (30 million), cocaine (13
million) and ecstasy (8 million). Despite
prohibitionists' best efforts, these figures
have remained unchanged since the first World
Drug Report in 1997.
Illicit drug use in western countries is
higher than the global average. According to
the 2003 US National Survey on Drug Use and
Health, 19.5 million Americans had taken at
least one drug, mainly cannabis, in the 30
days before the survey. That's about 1 in 12
of the "adult" population (aged 12
plus). An even higher proportion report
having taken illicit drugs at some point in
their lives. According to a recent survey, 77
million Americans, a third of all adults,
have used drugs at least once (Human
Psychopharmacology: Clinical and Experimental,
vol 17, p 140).
And illegal drugs are just the tip of the
iceberg. The World Health Organization
estimates that there are 1.3 billion tobacco
smokers worldwide, 30 per cent of the adult
population (World Health Report, 2003).
Alcohol use is even more prevalent. In the
US, a relatively sober country, just over 50
per cent of adults have had at least one
alcoholic drink in the past month. In the UK,
88 per cent of people drink at least once a
month and 48 per cent drink at least twice a
week. Outside the Islamic world very few
people abstain completely. The figure is 20
per cent in Canada, 9 per cent in Germany,
and as low as 4 per cent in some Nordic
countries.
Of all the world's psychoactive
substances, however, none can match the reach
of caffeine, the only universally sanctioned
drug both legally and culturally. Its main
source, coffee, is immensely popular, with 79
per cent of the US adult population drinking
it regularly, according to the US National
Coffee Association. Add to that all the tea,
chocolate and caffeinated soft drinks
consumed in the world, and it's fair to say
that caffeine is the most widely consumed
psychoactive substance on Earth. The majority
of us are probably under the influence of
caffeine most of the time.
Overall, it's hard not to conclude that
the vast majority of people are current or
former users of psychoactive substances. The
clinching figure, of course, would be one for
"lifetime abstinence", the
percentage of people who have never, ever
taken anything that alters their
consciousness. But it appears that no one has
ever worked out such a figure, perhaps
because, to all intents and purposes, it is
zero.
| Highs and lows |
| New Scientist vol
184 issue 2473 -
13 November 2004, page 37 |
| |
| A history of intoxication -
and prohibition |
| |
| 50,000 YEARS
AGO Neanderthal burial
site in Iraq found to contain remains
of the herbal stimulant ephedra.
Palaeolithic cave art across Europe
and Africa suggests artists had
experience of hallucinogens (or
possibly migraines) 10,000BC Earliest
agriculture. Some evidence that the
first crops included psychoactive
plants such as mandrake, tobacco,
coffee and cannabis
7000BC Betel
seeds, chewed for their stimulant
effects, found in archaeological
sites in Asia
6000BC Native
South Americans begin cultivating and
using tobacco
4200BC Opium poppy
seed pods found in a burial site at
Albuñol near Granada, Spain
4000BC Wine and
beer making in Egypt and Sumeria
3500BC Bronze-age
vessels show evidence of wine
consumption in eastern Mediterranean
3000BC Cannabis
cultivation in China and Asia;
evidence of cannabis smoking in
eastern Europe
2000BC Coca
residues found in the hair of Andean
mummies
1500BC - AD400
Greek writers refer to the Eleusian
Mysteries, an autumn festival
celebrated with a hallucinogenic brew
called kykeon, perhaps based on ergot
or magic mushrooms
1000BC Central
Americans erect temples to mushroom
gods
800BC
Distillation of spirits in India
430BC Greek
historian Herodotus records
recreational cannabis smoking among
the Scythian people of the Black Sea
AD625
Mohammed orders his followers to
abstain from alcohol
1450
Widespread use of coca leaves by Inca
peoples
1475
Turkish law makes it legal for a
woman to divorce her husband if he
fails to provide her with coffee
1519
Spanish courtier Gonzalo Fernandez de
Oviedo y Valdes brings tobacco plants
to Europe
1604
King James I of England publishes
"A Counterblast to Tobacco"
1633
Ottoman sultan Murad IV bans coffee
houses on the basis that they are
hotbeds of political dissent
1675
Coffee houses widespread in England;
King Charles II tries to ban them
1805
German chemist Friedrich Sertürner
separates morphine from opium
1819
German chemist Friedrich Ferdinand
Runge isolates caffeine from coffee
1850s
New York bartenders invent the
cocktail
1859
German chemist Albert Niemann
perfects isolation of cocaine from
coca leaves
1868
In the world's first piece of
anti-drug legislation, the UK Poisons
and Pharmacy act makes it illegal to
sell opium and other drugs without a
licence
1886
Recipe for Coca-Cola patented,
including coca leaves and
caffeine-rich kola nuts
1887
Amphetamine synthesised in Germany
1906
Coca leaves removed from the recpie
for Coca-Cola
1909
Opium smoking criminalised in the US
1912
MDMA synthesised by pharmaceutical
firm Merck
1914
Harrison narcotic act places cocaine
and opiates under stringent control
in the US
1920-33
Prohibition in the US. Alcohol was
also illegal in Finland from 1919 to
1932 and in various Canadian
provinces at various times between
1900 and 1948
1933
Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann
synthesises LSD and accidentally
discovers its hallucinogenic effects.
He later takes what he believes is a
tiny dose and discovers LSD's
astonishing potency
1951
US tycoon Al Hubbard tries LSD and
starts promoting its recreational use
1961
UN agrees the Single Convention on
Narcotic Drugs, which urges member
states to take action against opiates
and cocaine
1967
LSD made illegal in the US
1971
UN Convention on Psychotropic
Substances urges banning of synthetic
drugs such as amphetamines and LSD
1975
Netherlands licenses sale of cannabis
in coffee shops
1978
MDMA starts being widely used as a
recreational drug; initially called
"empathy" but quickly
becomes known as "ecstasy"
1988
Rave culture sweeps Europe
|
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