Moral asceticism must be understood as part of the cognitive cure and vice-versa

Change and Permanence

Thee formal structure of philosophy can be further fleshed out with an important material characteristic. Philosophical conversion occurs within the field of the antinomy of change/permanence, which characterizes the tension between the starting point and the endpoint of the person striving toward wisdom. The end-point, happiness, was universally understood as the act of possessing the highest sum of the goods proper to man.138 The condition of happiness was therefore, obviously, the character of that which a man actually possessed. Permanence is the basic quality inherent in the nature of intellectual goods. Th is is why virtue and contemplation (understood as forms of spiritual possession) of the unchanging essence of things are the objective guarantee of the most lasting type of happiness.139 Man’s unhappiness comes from his turning his sight away from the necessary and universal (or, at the very least, comparatively lasting), and his turning toward everything which is characterized by change, decay and death.

The diagnosis of philosophy (frequently called the medicine of the soul140) connects all the dismal aspects of human life with man’s fatal turning toward the side of the transient. Th e two basic types of passions—the ones connected to desiring changeable goods and the ones connected to worrying about losing them—are the tragic symptoms of spiritual illness. The desire for wealth, power, beauty, popularity or success can never be satisfied and even when they are attained they never give us the sense of permanence. The passions destroy our happiness. As Socrates said, the chase after apparent goods is essentially just like carrying water in a sieve.141 The unavailability of certain goods and the spiral of insatiable desire on the one hand (individual), and the image of a conflagration consuming a granary or of the ingratitude of the crowd on the other (social), are the basic images of a human life consumed by unquenchable desire, uncertainty, and fear. The nature of desired goods dictates the nature of our life, which is also fleeting, fills us with the greatest of all passions: the fear of death. Therefore the diagnosis is gloomy and the transformation of fered by philosophy accomplishes itself within the perspective of an unavoidable (without the saving cure) destruction, enslavement, disease, animality and non-existence. The medicine of the soul promises freedom, self-sufficiency, and happiness, which is the freedom from the passions, independence from what does not depend upon us, and the hope of possessing the goods which cannot be taken away by anyone. This was the common promise of the philosophers; the same was said by the Epicureans, Stoics, and even the Skeptics.

Why is it that, as the philosophers so gladly repeated after the Orphics, if we are souls trapped in bodies, we do not ignore our bodily prisons or graves?142 Why does philosophy treat man as a psychophysical whole? How to explain the fact that when the soul discovers its spiritual identity, it does not become indifferent to the fate of the body, negligently allowing the passions to do as they please? There is no such negligence because responsibilities toward the body come from the discovery of the simultaneous opposition and dependence of the spiritual with the bodily. Man—through whom runs the boundary of ontological oppositions—can only have one ruler. When reason sleeps, the passions enslave the mind, by making it their servant they degrade it and destroy it in practice.143 Happiness is the possession of that which we desire, so long as we do not desire anything evil. Philosophers discovered early that, “It is not better for people to get all that they want!”144 Or as Cicero put is, “nor is it so miserable not to obtain what you will, than to will to obtain what you ought not.”145 Man is like a rider on a horse, that is, even though in truth they form a somewhat accidental totality, the rider controls his mount and the horse does not take the rider where the horse wants to go. If we do not secure the rule of reason over the whole of existence then reason will be sabotaged and the whole person will be reduced to the level of the passions. Therefore, an existential reduction will take place, an animalization that is characterized by moral and epistemological corruptions.

There is no place for compromise, the rule of one element occurs at the price of the other, “It is difficult to fight passion (one’s heart), for whatever it wishes it buys at the price of the soul.”146 Each of us, like young Hercules at the crossroads of the story told by Socrates, must choose either virtue or pleasure.147

The details of our picture of the goal of philosophizing will depend upon our view of human nature, which will determine the character of the highest good and the degree of man’s unavoidable dependence upon the body. We can assume that for all philosophers that highest good is a spiritual good, a state of internal harmony that expresses itself through the rule of reason over the passions. For the extremists, it will take the form of a cosmic order victorious over disorder and immorality.148 For everyone it will be the state of the highest spiritual freedom available to man, an internal independence understood as the state of an optimally lasting happiness. This theme expresses itself with equal force in Socrates, Plato, just as it does in the Cynics, Epicureans, and the Stoics. The common ideal is a perfect self-sufficiency, a life based upon a foundation that is reasonably lasting and independent of the vicissitudes of life, from the general ontological impermanence of sensual goods. Perfection understood as independence leads to the judgment that the happiness and unhappiness of man is essentially the state of his soul. As Democritus put it, “Happiness, like unhappiness, is a property of the soul.”149 You can search for permanence and immutability in the soul (not in the world of the senses) because it is where authentic delight, freedom, control, and the good are to be found.

Philosophy as a Spiritual Exercise

Philosophical transformation is neither easy nor definitive. When Hercules gives his hand to virtue he does not thereby take possession of it. Th e famed Diogenes of Sinope, the first to call philosophy an exercise,150 ostensibly mocked the automatism of ritual purifications.151 Diogenes is not an isolated case. All the philosophical schools, even though they defined health differently and differed in their methods of healing, agreed that the cure of the soul takes a long time.

Philosophy, as Pythagoras is said to have told Leon of the Phliasians, is the skill of striving for wisdom.152 Just like any other skill, it must be perfected. From this perspective, says Plato, “Now, it looks as though the other so-called virtues of the soul are akin to those of the body, for the really aren’t there beforehand but are added later by habit and practice [spiritual exercises].” 153 The systematized practice of Stoic, Epicurean, and Platonic was based upon methods of work upon the soul and grew out of the conviction that the basic problem of spiritual transformation is its permanence and that spiritual progress has a differentiated and gradual structure. The constant repetition of the exercises, adjusting them to the level of spiritual development, and their engagement of a person on all sides meant that conversion became the second, that is, proper nature. The spiritual masters took to heart the opinion of Democritus who taught that, “Nature is similar to teaching, since teaching transforms a man and by transforming him creates a new [second] nature.”154 There is an understanding of the role of habit (ethos) at the root of spiritual exercises, which, if we are to believe Krokiewicz’s interpretation, was already discovered by Heraclitus.155 The habit that leads to happiness, the habit of denying the heart (the realm of passions) and degrading pleasures, is the foundation of the developed concept of virtue conceived as fitness or ability (dynamis). What’s interesting is that habit is also an important element of theoretical knowledge156, which, much like virtue, the Greeks included in the wider category of abilities (dynameis). Therefore the art of properly grasping the essence of things is an ability, which, just like any art, can be perfected. This is an important qualification, which capably reflects the teleological paradigm of Greek thinking. Just like all of reality and all dynameis, knowledge and acting has its goal-oriented dimension, its proper function. The art of building ships, leading an army, the art of playing a cither, the art of healing are all different types of abilities, whose more perfect use requires the proper kinds of exercises.157 The essence of spiritual exercises is therefore the gradual perfection of man in realizing the functions proper to him qua human being. The realization of these, that is, their able and proper use, constitutes a specific type of good, a spiritual good, whose possession is synonymous with happiness.

Therefore the task of philosophy is to tear man away from unconsciousness, to wake him, to put his life under question, and then, while leading him through the succeeding phases of spiritual development, to protect him from the reefs of impermanence and doubt. The authentic doctor begins by awakening consciousness, by convincing the patient that he is sick. This is, we can assume, one of the functions of paradox: wonder, which opens up one’s eyes up to the truth. This is how Socrates saw the starting-point of his therapy. It is the reason why Socrates is like a torpedo-fish which paralyzes the confidence of so many of those who approach him158, the birth, during an incidental conversation, of the consciousness of a factual ignorance and the evanescence of goods for which people strive, and finally a brutal examination of conscience which allows one to discover, as Alcibiades acknowledges with extraordinary honesty that “my life isn’t worth living!”159 This, however, is only the beginning. Spiritual development is a slow achievement. As Pierre Hadot demonstrates in his wonderful study, paideia always takes a concrete person into consideration.160 The set and scope of the exercises depends upon the actual stage of development and the intellectual attunement of the student. Philosophy is the perfecting of the whole person, therefore we must remember the mutual conditioning of the exercises. Even though they are concerned with various aspects of human existence, they are parts of an overall personal development. In some sense logic has the quality of a moral exercise, whereas battling with the passions is an element of epistemological development. Reason cannot submerge itself in contemplation if the desiring part of the soul is in chaos. This is the elementary level of the tie between epistemology and ethics.161 Putting an end to the rebellion of the passions not only cures the soul of anxiety, but it also is the necessary condition for the proper functioning of reason. Moral asceticism must be understood as part of the cognitive cure and vice-versa. We should also remember that the exercises deal with different aspects of one and the same person and the development of the aspects tends in principle to be parallel.

All the exercises are meticulously selected for their aptitude or, to put it another way, usefulness. The principle of selecting the instruments is their effectiveness. There must be enough instruments/exercises and they must be practiced in such a wide range that the transformation will change the whole person. Therefore, when we determine what human nature is, that is, when we will know by what properly conducted functions human perfection is realized, then happiness will become the criterion of choosing the exercises—thus, paradoxically, also the criterion of the reasonableness of the teachings. This is the reason why the concept of nature decides about the various canons of education proper to the different philosophical schools, and simultaneously fulfills the role of a negative criterion that demonstrates what is not worth knowing. One of the sharpest pejorative designations is that of futility, that is, of inutility. The only one worse characterization is harmfulness. The former is connected to the conviction that happiness must be reached by the most reasonably short road without wasting precious time. These motives probably stand behind the decision of the stoic Aristo of Chios, who rejected logic and physics162, or Socrates, so often praised for his negative attitude toward the natural sciences.163 When Diogenes of Sinope calls Platonism “empty pride” , he probably had in mind the futility, which, according to him, characterized most of the Platonic exercises.164 However, when Heraclitus or Plato rail against the poets they have in mind something like anti-exercises—the strengthening of spiritual degeneracy. Futility is not at stake here, instead, they are concerned with harm. On the other hand, some exercises can become acknowledged as an indispensable condition of transformation. “That’s because you neglect geometry”165, Socrates accuses Calicles, whereas Xenocrates turns back a pupil who does not know music, geometry and astronomy telling him to, “Be gone, for you have not yet the handles of philosophy” , or according to another, more brutal, version, “Be gone, for I do not card wool here.”166 Even though this might sound iconoclastic, we can confidently say that the ancient philosophers were not interested in music, geometry, physics, semiotics or what-ever else. The philosophers were interested in happiness. Neither the advocates of the astronomical enthusiasm of Thales, nor their opponents were interested in astronomy for itself. After all, pure zeal for the curiosities of astronomy produces fruitless knowledge, for “we can know nothing about such things, or, even if we knew all about them, such knowledge would make us neither better nor happier”167, so said an opponent of these types of studies, and in principle it found a resonance in the words of their proponent, who said, “First of all we must not think that there is any other aim in knowledge of heavenly phenomena, whether in combination [with other subjects] or in isolation, than peace of mind and firm assurance.”168 This is how astronomy, in cooperation with rhetoric, can be, for example, an exercise in taming the passion for fame, limiting pride, which lie at the foundation of so many human miseries. The majestic spectacle of cosmic harmony gives resources, which when repeatedly meditated upon, will establish a disdainful stance toward the spectacular triviality of human ambitions and the impermanence of earthly accomplishments.169 The matter was much the same with all the disciplines that the ancients included in philosophy’s circle of interests: logic, natural sciences or even rhetoric (which was meant to teach how to use the human imagination to gain control over the passions). The Pythagorean brotherhood was the first to create a canonical method of philosophical transformation. Studying was accompanied by the practice of individual poverty, silence and abstinence during the period of the introductory exercises.170 We also know that Pythagoras recommended to his pupils a type of continually renewed ethical autoreflection, “It is said that he used to admonish his disciples to repeat these lines to themselves whenever they returned home to their houses, ‘In what have I transgressed? What have I done? What that I should have done have I omitted?’”171 We can surmise that a similar role was played by the Pythagorean study of music, mathematics, and astronomy, namely, they allowed thanks to meditation upon the order revealed by them, the soul of the philosopher increasingly to resemble that order. We will not consider more types of exercises.

The constant effort of attention directed at oneself, the continual coming to know oneself and contemplation of the whole of the world, Stoic meditation upon the triviality of unavoidable misfortunes, or the Epicurean meditations which discover the joy of existence through meditating upon past and future pleasures, are just a few of the many activities which led philosophical novices toward a state of inner freedom. We should however turn our attention to the importance this understanding of philosophy gave to schooling and the important role it gave to the authority of a spiritual master. A.D. Nock answers the question why philosophical schools played such a substantial role in the spiritual history of antiquity with the following: “Firstly, they offered intelligible explanations of phenomena. The Greek was naturally inquisitive, and the intellectual and political ferment of the fifth century had left many open questions. Secondly—and this is a point of cardinal importance—the schools offered a life with a scheme.

One of the terms for a school of philosophy, whatever its kind, is agoge, which means way of teaching and way of living.”172 As Ilsetraut Hadot writes, “ Ancient philosophy was, above all, help with life’s problems and spiritual guidance, and the ancient philosopher was, above all, a spiritual guide.”173

137 Ibid., p. 267.

138 Cf. Władysław Tatarkiewicz, O szczęściu [On Happiness], Warszawa: Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1985, p. 20.

139 The subjective guarantee of the absolute permanence of happiness is constituted by the unchangeableness, permanence, and immortality of the human soul.

140 This understanding of philosophy was propagated by Pl.. Cf. Grg. 464b, Th t. 167a, and Ti. 87c. It was taken up by Aristotle, cf. EN 1105b13–17; and after him by the whole of the ancient world. Healing, nursing, and the hospital are the typical metaphors that served to describe the tasks of philosophy. Cf. Juliusz Domański, Erazm i filozofia [Erasmus and Philosophy], op. cit., especially the chapter, “Filozofia jako ‘medicina animi’ a wolność filozofa” [Philosophy as ‘Medicina Animi’ and the Freedom of the Philosopher], p. 79–82.

141 Cf. Pl., Grg. 493b-c.

142 Cf. Pl., Cra. 400c; Clem. Al., Str., III.3.17.1–2. When characterizing the state of the soul in the body Aristotle uses the macabre image of an Etruscan torture that consisted in tying the bodies of the dead to the bodies of the living. Cf. Arist., Protr., fr. 107.

143 The only exception known to me is the libertine sect described by Irenaeus (Adv.
haer. I.6.2–3) which combined an ontological dualism with a belief about the total freedom of the soul toward the body, so much so, that some of the perfect were permitted debauchery. Cf. Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion, Boston: Beacon Press, 2001, p. 275–276.

144 Heraclit., fr. B110 op. cit., p. 65.

145 Cited in: Augustinus, De Trin. XIII.5.8, quotation from: Augustine, On the Trinity:
Books 8–15, trans. Stephen McKenna, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, p. 112.

146 Heraclit., fr. B85, op. cit., p. 53.

147 X., Mem. II.1.21–34.

148 “Yes, Callicles, wise men claim that partnership and friendship, orderliness, self-control, and justice hold together heaven and earth, and gods and men, and that is why they call this universe a world order, my friend, and not an undisciplined world-disorder.” Pl., Grg. 507e-508a, op. cit., p. 852.

149 Democritus also says, “Happiness does not dwell in flocks of cattle or in gold. The soul is the dwelling place of the (good and evil) genius.” Both quotes cited in: Giovanni Reale, op. cit., p. 124.

150 D.L. VI.70, op. cit., p. 243.

151 Ibid. VI.42, p. 232.

152 Cic., Tusc. V.3.8–9.

153 Pl., R. 518d, op. cit., p. 1136.

154 Democr., fr. B33, cited in: Nikolaos Bakalis, Handbook of Greek Philosophy: From Thales to the Stoics: Analysis and Fragments, Victoria BC: Traf f ord Publishing, 2006, p. 99.

155 Cf. Adam Krokiewicz, Zarys filozofii greckiej [An Outline of Greek Philosophy], op.
cit., p. 149.

156 Arist., EN 1103a15, op. cit., p. 23: “Intellectual virtue owes its origin and development mainly to teaching, for which reason its attainment requires experience and time; virtue of character is a result of habituation [ethikai from ethos], for which reason it has acquired its name through a small variation on [ethos].”

157 Ibid. 1098a5.

158 Pl., Men. 80a.

159 Pl., Smp. 216a, op. cit., p. 55.

160 Cf. Pierre Hadot, op. cit., especially the chapter “Spiritual Exercises” , p. 81–126.

161 Ibid., p. 81–83.

162 D.L. VII.160–161, op. cit., p. 318.

163 Ibid. II.21, p. 65.

164 Ibid. VI.24, p. 226.

165 Pl., Grg. 508a, op. cit., p. 852.

166 D.L. IV.10, op. cit., p. 156.

167 Cic., Rep. I.19.32, in: On the Commonwealth and On the Laws, trans. James E.G. Zetzel, Cambridge: Cammbridge University Press, 1999, p. 15.

168 Epicur., Ad. Pyth., § 85. Cited in: R.W. Sharples, Stoics, Epicureans and Skeptics: An Introduction to Hellenistic Philosophy, New York: Routledge, 1996, p. 14.

169 An example of using astronomy as this type of spiritual exercise is the unusually popular “Scipio’s Dream” which concludes Cicero’s On the Commonwealth.

170 D.L. VIII.10, op. cit., p. 342.

171 Ibid. VIII.22, p. 347.

from the book The Archparadox of Death Martyrdom as a Philosophical Category (Dariusz Karlowicz, Bartosz Adamczewski) 

The Fourth Drive - motivation for intoxication

1

There is a natural force that motivates the pursuit of intoxication.

This biological force has found expression throughout history. It pushed all the animals from Noah’s Ark into patterns of drug-seeking and drug-using behavior. It has been the basso continuo in our own behavior since long before we were civilized primates. It has led to the discovery of many intoxicants, natural and artificial, and to demonstrations of its irrepressible drive. It was responsible for Annie Meyers’ invention of the “Cocaine Dance.”

The time was 1894. Annie C. Meyers, Chicago socialite, patron of the arts, congressional appointee to the World’s Columbian Exposition, and recent widow of a distinguished naval officer, had a bad cold. Her lawyer advised her to try Birney’s Catarrh Remedy, a popular over-the-counter cold powder containing cocaine. Soon she found herself sniffing cocaine day and night. A month’s supply of cocaine cost only 50 cents, but Annie’s runaway habit totaled $10 a day, a hefty sum that forced her to forge checks and steal.

Annie was caught shoplifting in the Marshall Field store in Chicago. She had concealed several costly silks and expensive pocketbooks in her clothing and was now confronted by the store detective and manager. “If we let you go, will you keep out of the store?” asked the manager.

“Gentlemen, excuse me while I take a blow of my cocaine,” answered the always polite Mrs. Meyers, who now needed a dose every five minutes. The men were fascinated by this little lady and her white powder. They asked her to show them how it was done. Then they asked to see it again. And again. Eventually they decided to let this “unfortunate” woman go. But a few days later they stopped her in the store just as she was trying to steal a pair of fur gloves.

“Have you any more goods on you?” snapped the detective.

“Search me!” invited Annie as she threw up her hands and stepped toward him.

“Don’t come near me,” begged the detective. “I am a married man.”

He let her go again. Annie still had about $25 worth of goods on her, part of the thousands she would eventually take from that store. She resold the items on the black market.

All the money went for cocaine. After stealing a valuable diamond, she tried to sell it for 10 cents, the amount she was short for another bottle of Birney’s. She would pet the bottles and speak to them as “my baby” and “my only friend.” The only time she would leave the house was when her cocaine supply was exhausted and she had to go out to the store to buy some more. Detectives were following her everywhere, or so she imagined. Once, in the midst of a drug-induced paranoid episode, she fled to the roof of a house and refused to come down until the police passed her some cocaine via a string she lowered to them. She talked her way out of that arrest, too.

The unstoppable Mrs. Meyers used aliases and disguises, worked in different cities, and learned how to do the “Cocaine Dance”—a dance she would perform at public gatherings, then take up a collection to support her “baby.” Late one night, alone with no one to dance for, she took a pair of scissors and pried loose one of her gold teeth. With blood streaming down her face and drenching her clothes, she pawned the tooth for 80 cents. Her baby was very hungry that night.

Throughout it all, Annie was aware of a powerful force that was directing her drive for cocaine. No other experience in her life had made such a pleasing impression on her brain. During the eight years she spent under the influence, she was aware that her pursuit involved many social and psychological problems, but cocaine also stirred something deep inside her that was soothing, enlivening, vitalizing. It seemed to Annie that she was satisfying a natural, biological urge. Like the grizzly bear on the mountain ledge, it was a precarious but magnificent natural feeling.

Calling an event natural is sometimes just reporting that it happens. Over the centuries, people have sought—and drugs have offered—a wide variety of effects, including pleasure, relief from pain, mystical revelations, stimulation, relaxation, joy, ecstasy, self-understanding, escape, altered states of consciousness, or just a different feeling. These statements of motives, of what people say they seek with drugs—and there could be an endless catalogue of such motives—is also what they say they seek without drugs. They are the same internal urges, wishes, wants, and aspirations that give rise to much of our behavior. Plant drugs and other psychoactive substances have been employed as natural tools for satisfying such motives.

The motivation to use drugs to achieve these effects is not innate but acquired. The major primary drives, those associated with survival needs and part of the organism’s innate equipment, include the drives of hunger, thirst, and sex. These drives are a function of the organism satisfying certain primary biological needs. We are not born with acquired motivations yet they are not unnatural—they are simply an expression of what we strive to be. The pursuit of intoxication is no more abnormal than the pursuit of love, social attachments, thrills, power, or any number of other acquired motives. Man’s primary biological needs may be body-bound, but his acquired addictions soar beyond these needs.

Acquired motives such as intoxication can be as powerful as innate ones. As we have seen, animals will die in pursuit of cocaine with the same absolute determination that drives them in their quest for food or water. Additionally, many of the naturally occurring plant drugs and their derivatives produce effects that directly or indirectly address the needs of hunger, thirst, or sex, thereby increasing their value to the organism. Unlike other acquired motives, intoxication functions with the strength of a primary drive in its ability to steer the behavior of individuals, societies, and species. Like sex, hunger, and thirst, the fourth drive, to pursue intoxication, can never be repressed. It is biologically inevitable.

Annie’s dance to the power of this feeling was done in the footsteps and tracks of people and animals who have been inspired by the same driving beat throughout history. It began with Daniel’s Datura hop through the woods, along a path strewn with accidental encounters. It was where Kaldi’s goats pranced with coffee while livestock staggered on range poisons or galloped in addicting circles for locoweed. There were cats who leaped and turned for catnip while creatures everywhere twitched, shook, flipped, and rolled to a symphony of hallucinogens. Almost everyone caroused and reeled with alcohol or glided on opium. Mice jumped to the tune of morphine withdrawal. Grasshoppers did it awkwardly with marijuana resin. Llamas stepped assuredly with coca, and rats couldn’t stop with cocaine. And primates, great and small, selected a variety of chemical partners, from tobacco to ergot, so they could dance with their ancestors and gods.

We have seen that intoxication with plant drugs and other psychoactive substances has occurred in almost every species throughout history. There is a pattern of drug-seeking and drug-taking behavior that is consistent across time and species. This behavior is similar for many animals because it has been shaped and guided by the same evolution and environment, the same plants and pressures. In considering an evolutionary explanation of the phenomenon, we might ask if intoxication is in some way beneficial to the species. After all, the pursuit of intoxication with drugs has no apparent survival value and in some situations has certainly contributed to many deaths. The condition is so obviously disadvantageous for some animals, such as insect pollinators, that natural selection acted strongly to eliminate it or helped animals to coevolve adaptive mechanisms. Yet the laws of evolution, even with help from the prohibitive laws of Homo sapiens, have not prevented it from surfacing in every age and in every culture.

What then could be the evolutionary value of such a condition? One possibility is that the pursuit of intoxication is a side effect of a beneficial gene or genes. Intoxication with drugs is widespread in animals, especially mammals, and it seems plausible that in order to appear in so extensive a range of genetic contexts it was inextricably associated with something else that was of survival value. The universal pursuit of intoxication implies the existence of direct connections between the molecular chemistry of the drugs and the chemistry of the central nervous system, such as opiate receptors in the mammalian brain, a biological investment that is difficult to think of as arising by accident. We are organisms with chemical brains and drives that pit the chemistry of the individual against that of the environment. We have survived these interactions and learned to thrive on them.

Intoxication, like the syndrome of food poisoning, has adaptive evolutionary value. All species must have been under continual evolutionary pressure to develop protection against chemicals that are true toxins. The intoxication can produce sensory or physiological disturbances that so shake up the individual, they cause ingested food to be rejected by emesis. Recognizing bitter tastes, bad feelings, or other disturbances may also help the individual to learn to avoid future ingestions. These defenses provide an ideal warning system for detecting the early central effects of toxins. The emetic responses or learned taste aversions are highly advantageous for animals accidentally feeding on plant toxins.

Exposure to intoxicants can also produce pleasant experiences, thereby attracting us and forming the familiar “love-hate” fascination described by so many addicts. Annie Meyers described her passion for cocaine as an expression of motherly love and her intoxications were pure enjoyment; yet the cyclical withdrawal was hell. Her nonstop use prevented the agony of withdrawal, except when she was periodically arrested. These occasional unpleasant episodes only strengthened her determination to avoid them by staying “full of cocaine” all the time. The benefits of staying high on cocaine overshadowed the costs of stopping; use continued according to the same economic equation governing other types of intoxications.

This principle of positive effects outweighing negative effects can be illustrated by dizziness, a major drug effect that is triggered by disturbances in sensory input or motor control. When dizziness is accompanied by nausea, as in food poisoning or motion sickness, it is generally unpleasant. Animals as well as people usually reject drugs such as locoweed that produce intense dizziness. But when unaccompanied by nausea or severe physiological disturbances, the dizziness can become a desired state of intoxication, and inebriating amounts of such substances as alcohol will be sought after. Thus dizziness can be a pleasant or an unpleasant experience, and one that we seek almost as often as we avoid it. It is perhaps the most primitive form of intoxication and, aside from sleep and dreams, one of the oldest altered states of consciousness known to our species.

In the initiation rites of the !Kung Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert (the “!” denotes a click sound in their language), the men dance in a circular rut, stamping around and around, hour after hour. The dancing can generate a dizziness so extreme that it induces a trance state marked by visions. In the Umbanda rituals in Brazil, participants create an identical trance by spinning around rapidly as their heads and chests jerk back and forth in opposing directions. The whirling Sufi dervishes dance and spin like tops to achieve a similar altered state of consciousness.

Dizziness is not only an ancient and adult form of intoxication, it is one of the first to be discovered by children. It is common to find three-and four-year-olds whirling and twirling themselves into delirious stupors. Many children have discovered that a good way to induce dizziness is to wind up a swing and let it unwind while they are sitting on it. The “witch’s cradle,” a U.S. adaptation of the swinging basket once used by witches in the Middle Ages, is a more certain way to swing into a trance. The cradle is actually a metal swing in which a blindfolded rider stands upright. The swing hangs like a pendulum and moves the rider in rotating and horizontal planes in response to the slightest body movements. Typically, a trance is induced in a few minutes, giving the rider visions comparable to those produced by hallucinogens. Many amusement-park rides are designed to induce other thrilling experiences through dizziness. For example, “tilt-a-whirls” move riders in vertical and horizontal planes while spinning them around.

(...)

As they grow up, these children, who score high on psychological tests measuring their propensity to seek new sensations, sometimes experiment with household drugs that promise similar experiences. Intoxication from sniffing glue, gasoline, paint, or any number of other deliriants have been utilized by children too old to twirl yet too young to have access to other drugs, New Age Tom Sawyers who have found something else to do with the paint besides put it on the fence.

Adults were offered the opportunity to enjoy these “school-boy pleasures” in London theaters of the eighteenth century. The theaters provided “ladies and gentlemen of the first respectability” with the “chemical recreation” of nitrous oxide. People laughed and sang and danced. The gas was celebrated in songs, poems, and plays. And use continued in the nineteenth century. Philosopher William James believed that the intoxication revealed the uniqueness of our species to contemplate the hidden meaning behind language and thought. Writer Oscar Wilde once said that with the gas “I knew everything,” although he was surprised to learn that the little pink man he was watching on a distant stage was really his dentist who had just pulled a tooth. Throughout all these recreations and revelations, the people reported an intoxication marked by dizziness, delirium, and delight. A few had to be restrained from hurting themselves or others. Many became sick with symptoms resembling motion sickness.

Experiences with dizziness-provoking drugs like nitrous oxide are illustrative of intoxications in general, which cannot be easily separated into distinctive pleasant and unpleasant feelings. The initial encounters with many drugs are unpleasant and the reported effects for opiates, barbiturates, alcohol, and nicotine include nausea, vomiting, sweating, dysphoria, emotional lability, aggression, drowsiness, and lethargy. There may also be impairments in concentration, thinking, comprehension, memory, and judgment. William James didn’t vomit with nitrous oxide but his nonsensical statement that he was experiencing nausea “what’s nausea but a kind of -ausea? Sober, drunk, -unk, astonishment” leaves us with a little of our own astonishment at the cognitive dysfunction of this great thinker while under the influence. As a rule, some negative effects are accompanied by some positive effects. Why bother pursuing such a chancy condition?

2

Part of the answer may be found in the study of the self-administration of drugs that continually recycle the user through addiction and withdrawal. As we have seen, animals self-administer the same drugs we use. The behaviors of these animals have told us much about effects such as tolerance and breaking points. Yet with the exception of the pigeons and monkeys that were trained to report their hallucinations, few animal experiments tell us about the internal feelings that motivate use. And so we turn to human subjects for answers about their subjective sensations.

Many addicting drugs such as cocaine or heroin produce a rush of intense pleasure, especially if rapidly delivered through injection or smoking, followed by mild discomfort as the drug loses its euphoric effect through metabolic destruction. The discomfort is both physiological and psychological. Cocaine leaves the user with lethargy and fatigue. Heroin’s discomfort can be seen in the user’s runny eyes and nose, abdominal pains, clammy skin, and muscular malaise. Psychologically, both drugs create a craving, an aversive state that animals and people will seek to avoid by repeated self-administration of the drug. The aversive state will go away on its own, but the heightened contrast between the previous euphoria and the craving creates a universal impatience.

The important elements of this behavior are the changes in affect. The initial intoxication has a different emotional quality from the subsequent withdrawal. Cocaine’s first few doses, for example, produce an initial state of excitement and intense euphoria. The onset of the drug action is the reinforcer. But after the drug effect dissipates, the second state, the unpleasant withdrawal phase, begins. Withdrawal finally disappears with time or another dose. Therefore, both the onset of the drug effect and the removal of the withdrawal effect acquire the capability of reinforcing or rewarding behavior; both can motivate the continued use of the drug. This can be easily illustrated by cocaine addicts like Mrs. Meyers who continue to use the drug despite the fact that they no longer feel any pleasure or high from the intoxication. They have generated tolerance to the initial euphoric state, yet drug use is maintained because repeated doses act to block or remove the withdrawal effect.

Psychologist Richard Solomon has proposed a model to account for these events. It is known as the opponent-process theory and it is helpful in explaining a wide variety of acquired motivations, from addiction to Zen, from rock climbing to free-fall parachuting. According to the model, most organisms behave in the direction of restoring bodily functions to a normal state. Solomon explains that “the brains of all mammals are organized to oppose or suppress many types of emotional arousals or hedonic processes, whether they are pleasurable or aversive, whether they have been generated by positive or negative reinforcers.” The opposing processes are automatically set in motion by events that induce disturbances in physiological or psychological systems. These disturbances, in turn, elicit counterreactions that function to correct the imbalances.

For example, the first few doses of heroin produce a rush of euphoria followed by a state of craving. The rush is the positive reinforcer and the craving is the negative one. After many doses the rush is greatly diminished and euphoria is often absent. However, the withdrawal state of craving becomes longer and more intense. While the positive reinforcer (the rush) has lost most of its power, the negative reinforcer (the craving) has gained strength. It has acquired sufficient power to motivate behavior. The user may have become tolerant to the drug, but the intolerance to drug termination or absence drives him on.

The opponent-process model can also account for situations in which the rush is aversive and the withdrawal is positive. For example, a para-chutist experiences terror during his first free-fall jump. Studies of military parachutists have found that even the bravest men show an initial fear reaction: eyes bulge, lips retract, and the men yell with anxiety. Once they have landed safely, they appear too stunned to talk. Then they experience relief and begin a lively chatter with other jumpers. After many parachute jumps, the fear reaction is undetectable, and affective habituation is said to have occurred. This allows the positive aftereffects of withdrawal—the removal of the anxiety upon landing and the subsequent relief—to reinforce further jumps. Now the parachutists look eager before the jump and report a thrill during the free fall. The landing is followed by a long-lasting feeling of exhilaration.

These concepts help to explain how some drug-induced intoxications can be rewarding despite the occurrence of negative effects. The most unusual and “negative” drug taken by both monkeys and people is phencyclidine (PCP), a compound that produces negative effects in 100 percent of the intoxications and positive effects only 60 percent of the time. It defies convenient classification and has mixed excitatory, sedative, anesthetic, and hallucinatory properties. The intoxications are predictably unpredictable and almost everyone reports bad trips. In a sense, the persistent use and abuse of a drug like PCP seems to be a paradox. Yet the fourth drive is not just motivating people to feel good or bad—it is a desire to feel different, to achieve a rapid change in one’s state. The direction of change, up or down, good or bad, is of secondary importance. If we can understand this nature of PCP’s attraction, then we can understand how almost any intoxicant can satisfy the fourth drive.

Before PCP reached nonmedical users it was called Sernyl and was used as a surgical anesthetic for humans. The drug did not perform well in clinical tests. Patients were oblivious to the surgery but, in the recovery room, they awoke in the midst of a lingering and confusing delirium resembling schizophrenia. While some patients felt years younger—almost as if they were “born again”—others had a stormy emergence that required constant supervision because they could become violent. Therefore, PCP was restricted to use as an immobilizing agent for animals since veterinarians were generally less concerned about the psychological aftermath in their patients. However, because it was relatively cheap and easy to manufacture and the effects of sub-anesthetic doses mimicked those of many illegal hallucinogens, PCP began to appear as an adulterant in street drugs. Familiarity bred experimentation. People started to experiment with pure PCP itself and gradually acquired a liking for the drug experience.

PCP is typically smoked, although it can be used in a number of ways, and the symptoms start to appear within a few minutes. Users report peak effects within fifteen to thirty minutes, followed by a prolonged intoxication of several hours. Recovery may take many more hours, even days. The experience is triggered by PCP’s direct action on the brain, arousing the user’s body and elevating mood. Heart rate and blood pressure increase. The mood turns euphoric. But as the extremities are numbed, motor behavior becomes uncoordinated and the user acts in a drunken manner. Further doses produce bizarre and inappropriate motor movements.

Under PCP’s influence Luther R. cut off his own penis and swallowed it. The paramedics found him lying on the kitchen floor in a pool of blood. As they attempted to stop the bleeding, Luther regurgitated his penis. He never felt the pain. At similar points of intoxication users might not be able to feel a surgeon’s knife or a blow from a police baton, yet sensory impulses in grossly distorted form do reach the brain.

Seventeen-year-old Martin L. had just finished smoking a PCP cigarette when he started breaking store windows with karate kicks as he walked along the street. When the police arrived, Martin flashed a butcher knife and attacked. The police were unable to subdue him, even after multiple baton blows, and Martin, making no sound whatsoever, was showing no signs of fatigue or pain. Additional officers were called to the scene, six in all, and eventually they restrained and handcuffed the “super-human” Martin. The handcuffs held, although other people under the influence of PCP have mustered the 550 pounds of pressure necessary to snap them. Martin’s first words came in the form of a song he sang in the hospital, words that suggested some vague, albeit distorted, awareness of the preceding events: “I’m strong to the finish ’cause I eats my spinach, I’m Popeye the sailorman!”

What is so attractive about the state of PCP intoxication? When users like Martin are examined in the hospital, they do not look as though they should be singing. Flushed, feverish, and dripping with sweat, the users seem consumed by discomfort. There may be excessive salivation and tearing. Speech is slurred and difficult. A blank stare comes over the face. Unable to stand or walk properly, they start shivering, but it’s actually preseizure muscle activity. Touch them and their muscles may become tense and rigid. However, the users remain largely detached from these physical discomforts and focus on the subjective experiences. They are so unaware of physical sensations that they often have the sensation of floating clear out of their bodies.

It is precisely this dissociation, not unlike the trance from dizziness or anesthesia from nitrous oxide, that is so attractive to many users. They have dreamlike experiences in which they feel as though they were in a different place, in a different time. A common sensation is the feeling that one is watching oneself from a distance. When we think of the last time we went swimming in the ocean, we might see a mental image of ourselves running along the beach and into the water. This is an entirely fictitious memory. We couldn’t possibly have seen ourselves. Yet memory images often contain fleeting glimpses of oneself. PCP users have similar dissociated or out-of-body perspectives but while events are taking place. In such an altered state, PCP users report a generalized feeling of well-being and a detachment from worldly tensions and anxieties. In other words, their affect is changed. For many, there is ambivalence or a blanding of affect; users claim even this can be euphoric in light of preexisting depression or unhappiness. Others experience a negativism and hostility, sometimes coupled with feelings of “sheer nothingness” and thoughts about death. This, too, can be rewarding for individuals who can find escape from the stimulus overload of their normal lives and feel stronger after surviving a powerful psychological experience.

The names given to PCP by users tell of these varying stimulus properties: Angel Dust, Devil’s Dust, Embalming Fluid, Goon, Peace, Rocket Fuel, Whack, Wobble Weed, and Zombie. Other street names suggest that PCP intoxication can also recapitulate phylogeny, at least experientially: Amoeba, Worm, Busy Bee, Dog, Hog, Pig Killer, Horse Tranquilizer, Elephant Tranquilizer, Monkey Dust, and Gorilla Tab.

According to the Los Angeles Police Department, Lenny B. turned into one of these animals after smoking a tobacco cigarette that had been dipped in liquid PCP. In his mind, Lenny was flying over a duck farm. But in his house he walked like a duck, quacked like a duck, and announced to the startled guests that he was Donald Duck. Then he savagely stabbed a man to death. He was found waddling in a puddle on the sidewalk. Lenny was unaware of these events, and later told me he enjoyed the high and would take PCP again.

Elsewhere, Linda, one of my research subjects who had taken PCP in a controlled environment, had a quiet introspective experience. She reported seeing images of God and heaven: “I was flying with the angels. When I started coming down, I felt sad that I was leaving such a lovely place. I think I even cried. I hadn’t done that in years. But most of all I remember the peace and tranquility. Everything was good. I want to be there always.”

PCP will not automatically deliver a devilish or angelic experience. Many of the horror stories retold in the media are true, but the unsung tales of beatific paradises experienced by users like Linda are much more common. As with most mind-altering drugs, the intoxication from PCP is shaped and guided by both pharmacological and behavioral variables. Individual health and personality, the size of the dose, route of administration, and frequency of dosing are a few of the more obvious factors. And so are the set (expectations) of the user and the setting (environment) for the intoxication. Less apparent, but more important, are the patterns of use in which the pursuit of intoxication finds expression. These patterns are the most critical determinants of abuse. In other words, whether or not a drug will get an individual into trouble is often a question of whether an individual gets into a trouble-some pattern of use with the drug.

(...)

If use is motivated by a desire to achieve a specific drug effect that is helpful in coping with a particular condition, the pattern of use is called circumstantial or situational. This category includes long-distance truck drivers who have relied on stimulants to provide extended alertness and endurance, as did the Apollo astronauts who used amphetamine before reentry into the Earth’s atmosphere. Both the truck drivers and the astronauts were medicating themselves in order to obtain a certain self-prescribed effect, like the baboons who treated despair with tobacco and alcohol. The same pattern is seen in the case of a student who takes caffeine pills to stay awake, an overweight woman who takes cocaine to lose a few pounds, or a worker who relaxes with an afterwork drink. The pattern is the same although the choices of drugs may not always be prudent or legal. One of the greatest dangers of this pattern is that the user will become accustomed to having the drug in similar circumstances and will be unable to exercise the control that usually accompanies medically prescribed and supervised use. Mrs. Meyers may have felt that cocaine, in addition to helping her cold, also tempered the loneliness of her recent widowhood. It was undoubtedly tempting to use the drug well after her cold was over. She quickly moved into the next pattern: intensified use.When a person perceives a need to achieve persistent effects or maintain such effects, a daily or intensified pattern of drug use may occur. In the case of many drugs, this recurrent drug taking will escalate to states of psychological or physical addiction. Intensified users include the American housewife who regularly consumes tranquilizers, the coca-chewing Bolivian miner, the daily marijuana-smoking laborer in Jamaica, and the opium-munching water buffalo in Vietnam. In these instances the pattern of drug use has become a normal and customary activity of everyday life. Daily PCP users, who are often innercity youths suffering from a high rate of unemployment, frequently cite a need to achieve constant relief from persistent unpleasant internal and external environments. A young secretary who reported that she was using cocaine a few times each day “to white-out” the depression of her recent divorce was also an intensified user who ran the risk of escalating to still greater amounts.

Escalation is common for daily cocaine or heroin users. They use at high-frequency and high-intensity levels, the mark of the compulsive pattern of drug taking. They cannot discontinue use without experiencing some physiological discomfort or psychological disruption. Mrs. Meyers was so afraid of withdrawal that she would tear her hair out and throw a temper tantrum whenever she was arrested. The strategy worked; her jailers would take pity on her and sneak her some cocaine. A characteristic of these compulsive users is that they become preoccupied with drug seeking and drug taking, often to the exclusion of other behaviors. Compulsive users are not only the prototypical street junkies, they also include alcohol-dependent white-collar workers and white rats, opiate-dependent physicians and research monkeys, and chain-smokers everywhere. The eight-year cocaine career of socialite Annie Meyers was no different from that of the skid-row alcoholic she was often mistaken for.

Some drugs offer greater risks of developing compulsive patterns than others. Because hallucinogens like LSD stop working when taken daily due to tolerance, intensified and compulsive patterns of use do not develop with these drugs. The tolerance can be so complete that even superdoses have no effect if the person has been taking the drug too often. Therefore, most LSD users will adopt experimental patterns and take the drug no more than ten times over the course of their entire lives. Conversely, cocaine has an extremely short duration of action. It doesn’t last long and, coupled with tolerance, can cause even social users to escalate short runs or binges into long-term compulsive patterns. Compulsive cocaine smokers may take hits as frequently as ten times per hour.

In a sense, the escalating patterns of drug use, from experimental to compulsive, can be viewed as points on a continuum. The different patterns cannot be separated easily, and individuals move along this continuum at speeds governed largely by the amount of the drug that is fueling the drive. For example, large and frequent experimental dosages of morphine delivered during a binge may catapult the user directly into compulsive patterns. Conversely, small measured doses can maintain intensified patterns for years without difficulty.

4

These dynamics of the fourth drive are best illustrated by the history of cocaine. The experiences of Annie Meyers came at a turning point in that history, at a time when the dosages of cocaine preparations had recently changed. Before her time, people were prevented from developing runaway compulsive habits because only coca preparations were available.

A widely held belief in Western medicine was that most physical and mental diseases were caused by brain exhaustion and the best way to cure these conditions was to wake up the brain with a stimulating coca tonic. Physicians, pharmacists, and chemists recommended daily doses of coca extracts or wines that delivered an amount of cocaine equivalent to that obtained from chewing the leaves. While intensified dosage patterns were normally prescribed, abuse was held in check by the highly diluted preparations. Most coca wines contained only 10 milligrams of cocaine per fluid ounce, equivalent to one piece of the Coca-Peps gum used in the monkey studies.

Other patterns of use were encouraged by the commercial marketing of coca products. Coca was promoted as a wonder drug not only for medicine but also for social and recreational purposes. To make it more attractive, an assortment of coca preparations were sold, including tonics, gum, cigarettes, and soft drinks. Coca-Cola, originally promoted as a brain tonic for the elderly, was made with a coca extract. It reportedly contained slightly less than 60 milligrams of cocaine per eight-ounce serving, the amount found in a modern intranasal dose.

The tonics of Mrs. Meyers’s day were much more potent; cocaine had been recently isolated from the leaf, and the manufacturers substituted it for the coca extracts. Large amounts of cocaine alkaloids or salts could now be readily dissolved in almost any tonic or packed into any powder. Whereas coca products were treated as roughly equivalent to the chewing of the leaves, cocaine was advertised as two hundred times stronger. And it was. Just as the chimps on North and South Island had discovered, coca was not cocaine, and the golden age of coca medicine was in for some lackluster years.

Physicians started increasing the daily dosages to as much as 1,200 milligrams—a lethal dose for most people if taken into the body all at once. The effects of increased doses of cocaine were further complicated by the popularity of the highly efficient intranasal and injection routes of administration. By the time Mrs. Meyers bought her first bottle of Birney’s, many snuffs were pure cocaine and patients were instructed to take them as needed. Mrs. Meyers’s perceived needs went beyond the bounds of treating her cold and her pattern of use became compulsive.

When Annie Meyers was arrested for the last time, while trying to blow open a safe, she looked awful and she knew it: “My hair was mostly out. A part of my upper jawbone had rotted away. My teeth were entirely gone. My face and my entire body were a mass of putrefying cocaine ulcers. I weighed only about eighty pounds and it would be hard to conceive of a more repulsive sight.” Not hard at all. One need only examine more recent cases where users, faced with plentiful supplies of cheap cocaine, danced faster and harder than Mrs. Meyers ever could with her Birney’s.

During the early 1970s when cocaine once again became a social-recreational drug of choice for North Americans, the case of Annie Meyers seemed like a historical oddity. Studies of intranasal users during this period revealed that the daily intake averaged only 150 milligrams. But by the end of the decade, many social users had climbed the ladder to more concentrated patterns of use. Sniffing as much as 1,000 milligrams (1 gram) in a single dose, Kenny D. suffered severe nasal erosion. Once when he blew his nose, out came a large glob, thick as a cigar, that stretched across his palm. He displayed it to his amazed wife, who named it “Stillborn.” The glob was cartilage tissue. Kenny’s nose had collapsed. Cocaine seemed to dull the constant pain and Kenny continued his daily use even after another discharge, “Baby Sparrow,” was born.

Many cocaine users became concerned about the risks of such nasal damage and switched to smoking cocaine free base. Some users smoked as much as 85,000 milligrams a day! They were unaware that although their noses might be saved, their bodies and lives would be ruled by compulsive patterns of use.

Mitch R. couldn’t afford all the cocaine he wanted to smoke. When his supply was exhausted, he often searched the floors and carpet fibers for specks of cocaine to smoke. Like many cocaine smokers, Mitch had a hacking cough with a black, bloody expectorate. One day he “free-based” his black sputum and smoked it. He decided it was “a good hit” and continued the practice whenever supplies were low. Terry B. had a special glass waterpipe he named “Old Faithful.” He had been a super-stitious cocaine smoker for several years and never changed the water in the pipe. The pipe itself was wrapped in aluminum foil to prevent anyone from seeing what was growing in the stagnant, cocaine-saturated water. When Terry was out of cocaine, a swig from “Old Faithful” kept him going until he could replenish his supply.

These users had the same pale, cadaverous features that caused Annie Meyers to describe herself as repulsive. To prove her point, Mrs. Meyers included pictures of herself in her autobiographical book, Eight Years in Cocaine Hell, the first drug confession written by a woman and the first confession from a cocaine abuser. Those pictures showed the sunken eyes and emaciated look that was characteristic of Terry B. and so many other compulsive users, including the Michigan monkeys who injected themselves with cocaine. Annie’s ulcers were not shown, but a photograph of Terry’s leg, full of open sores that he picked while looking for “cocaine bugs,” was featured in a Time magazine cover story. Time decided not to use photographs of another patient who tried to remove the hallucinatory bugs from his body with a scalpel and forceps. When that effort failed, the patient attempted to burn them out with a propane torch: the pictures showed second-and third-degree burns covering his thighs and testicles.

Until the advent of the modern cocaine abuser, the odd horror tales associated with other drugs were exactly that: rare examples of highly idiosyncratic reactions to intoxications. There were cases of PCP abusers who had gouged out their own eyes; others had sat quietly while engulfed in flames; some had pulled out their teeth with pliers, and one woman had put her own baby in a caldron of steaming water. But cocaine users provided the quintessential examples of the fourth drive’s relentless power. Hit in the eye by a piece of cocaine-encrusted glass from an exploding waterpipe, one user described it as the best hit she ever had. She didn’t stop. After clumsily burning his hands with a lighter, a cocaine smoker took to wearing fireproof gloves. He solved the problem of constantly grinding his teeth by wearing a plastic mouth guard. He didn’t stop. Faced with increasing expenses for cocaine, a mother adjusted her budget by selling her baby on the black market. She didn’t stop.

Arrest finally stopped Annie Meyers from doing her Cocaine Dance. Her treatment consisted of a long stay in a sanitarium coupled with the religious and moral lectures that were popular in her day. Traditionally, society still tries to hold the drive in check through legal and moral controls that employ penalties for use, treatment for users, and preventive education for nonusers. Although these methods haven’t worked, our response in the face of such unstoppable examples of the drive as the modern cocaine abuser has been to intensify the controls. Accordingly, punishments escalate, involuntary testing programs for the detection of drug use become more widespread, treatment becomes mandatory, and educational campaigns tend to deliver more hyperbole than honest information, resulting in the recurrent message that “drugs will destroy your brain.”

Recently, there have been attempts to quiet the underlying drive itself. Psychiatrists try to block it with isolation, physical and chemical restraints, even electric shock. When all else fails, neurosurgeons in South America have severed the neural pathways in the brains of young cocaine users who refuse to stop. It seems as though the healing profession is stepping in to fulfill the promise that drugs will destroy your brain. In Annie Meyers’s time those in the healing arts also panicked. Dr. Albrecht Erlenmeyer, a famous nineteenth-century drug expert, saw so many unstoppable addicts like Mrs. Meyers that he proclaimed cocaine to be “the third scourge of mankind,” after opium and alcohol. It was really only the fourth drive, a drive our species had always danced to and always would.

Intoxication...

Ronald K. Siegel

It is clear that many animals are attracted to elements of intoxicating and hallucinogenic experiences

 In the Siberian summer, reindeer feast on a variety of mushrooms. Under the birch trees, they seek out their favorite: the Amanita muscaria. This red-capped and white-flecked mushroom is also called fly agaric because flies attracted to it will become stunned and fall into a helpless stupor after drinking its juices. Domesticated reindeer become unmanageable in their greed for this mushroom and act as if they are drunk: running aimlessly about, making noise, head-twitching, and isolating themselves from the herds. They may be no different from the Norse Vikings who ate the fly agaric to produce the ecstatic reckless rage for which they earned the nickname “Berserkers.”

The active principle is ibotenic acid, a secondary substance that is transformed by the body into an equally intoxicating chemical, muscimole. The tribesmen noticed that the reindeer display an equally intense passion for human urine that contains the muscimole metabolite. Whenever they smell urine in the vicinity, reindeer scamper to the source and start fighting with each other for access to the clumps of yellow-stained snow. The urine has the same intoxicating effect on the reindeer as the fly agaric mushrooms. The reindeer’s pursuit of urine, with or without muscimole, is so aggressive that travelers to the area have been warned about the danger of urinating in the open tundra when there are reindeer around. The Chukchee tribesmen utilize this passion by saving the muscimole-spiked urine in sealskin or sheet-metal containers for use in rounding up the reindeer or extending their own intoxications for another day. While they value the reindeer, the mushrooms are more precious. The barter price for a single fly agaric can be two or three reindeer. The reindeer may feed and clothe the body, but the mushrooms nourish the soul with ecstastic visions and this is worth more to the natives.

The mushroom chemicals are so potent that the smallest bite can produce a great deal of bizarre behavior. Head-twitching is a common sight when fly agaric is nibbled by deer, squirrels, or chipmunks. Herds of Canadian caribou, close relatives of the reindeer, show the biggest effects. During their migrations, the wild caribou move in a long single file column, as precisely spaced as pearls on a string. Occasionally the route will pass clusters of fly agaric, and adult females have been seen nibbling them. Within an hour or two, these caribou leave the column and run with an awkward side-to-side shaking of their hindquarters. If it were not for the accompanying head-twitching, this movement would be virtually identical to the “dance of death” the mother caribou will use to lure wolves or other enemies away from their young. Since the intoxicated and disoriented caribou may lag behind the column, leaving the young unprotected as well, the results may still be the same. Either mother or young may be lost to the wolves, not unlike the intoxicated robins preyed upon by cats.

While fly agaric may not kill animals directly, it can kill people, although the consequences of the intoxications are minimized for the tribes who sun-dry or toast the mushrooms, processes that seem to weaken the toxins. Nonetheless, eating even one mushroom will induce twitching, trembling, slight convulsions, and numbness in the limbs. As uncomfortable as these effects may seem to an outside observer, the users are happy and often experience a desire to dance and sing along with their hallucinations. Clinical observations have revealed a jovial, almost drunken disposition, flushing of the skin, and a slight tearing of the eyes. This picture of intoxication reminds one of American cartoonist Thomas Nast’s famous portrayal of Santa Claus with twinkling eyes and cherry nose, driving a sleigh pulled by reindeer flying over the treetops.

Hallucinogenic mushrooms such as the fly agaric have been dispersed throughout the world as widely as the image of Santa himself. And magic or sacred mushrooms, as some varieties are called, have appeared around the world, popping up from the Kamchatka peninsula of Siberia to the highlands of Mexico. The sacred mushrooms vary in many botanical characteristics but all contain derivatives of a powerful hallucinogenic substance, psilocybin.

These psilocybin derivatives are less intoxicating than the secondary chemicals in fly agaric and cause little disruption in the behavior of cattle, sheep, and goats that have been observed browsing them. Smaller animals receive proportionately larger doses and exhibit more dramatic effects. On ranches in Hawaii and Mexico, I saw dogs deliberately nipping the caps off psilocybin mushrooms and swallowing them. A few minutes later the dogs were running about in circles, head-twitching, yelping, and refusing to respond to human commands. Such behavior is similar to that recorded in Innocent Killers by Jane Goodall, who observed a jackal cub, Rufus, eating a mysterious mushroom:

Ten minutes later he seemed to go mad. He rushed around in circles and then charged, flatout, first at a Thompson’s gazelle and then at a bull wildebeest. Both animals, possibly as surprised as I was, hurried out of his way. Could the mushroom have caused hallucinations? Had Rufus been on a trip? The question must remain unanswered as I could not find another for identification.

Despite the nibbling and browsing, most animals appear to have a natural indifference to mushrooms. Primates, however, seem to love them or hate them. We offered some grocery store mushrooms to the residents in the UCLA primate center. Our laboratory-reared monkeys seemed to like them. But monkeys captured from the wild were reluctant to taste them. Several displayed alarm and fear at the mere sight of them. One stump-tailed macaque became so panicked, banging itself against the cage walls, that it had to be tranquilized so as to avoid injuring itself. It is inviting to speculate about previous experiences that these animals may have had with more potent mushrooms in their natural habitats. When one of our laboratory rhesus monkeys was given a psilocybin mushroom that caused it to become disoriented and confused, the original indifference to mushrooms was replaced by an intractable refusal to accept any future offerings of mushrooms, harmless or psychoactive. Perhaps some primates in the wild learn similar lessons.

Cultures of Homo sapiens also seem divided into groups with differing attitudes regarding the eating of wild mushrooms; most are indifferent but there are also mycophiles and mycophobes. So it is hard to understand the universal esteem granted to the truffle, a fungus that lives out its life in the dark, dank underground of oak forests. The truffle, like catnip, illustrates how a plant can evoke a powerful attraction because it excites a basic biological drive in animals.

Truffles exist in a subterranean world that seems a most unfitting habitat for an aphrodisiac. These fungi resemble crispy, jet black sea sponges; most are the size of Ping-Pong balls but, at depths of up to one meter, some have been as large as giant potatoes and weigh in at almost a kilogram. One of the most expensive foods in the world, truffles have been referred to as “black diamonds,” although Italian and Arctic varieties are white. Field mice and rabbits burrow into them and destroy them. Even chickens will try to get to them by scratching the surface soil. But pigs are the best truffle hunters, capable of detecting the musky odor from great distances.

The pig’s passion for truffles is the same as our own, according to Etruscan and Roman myths that attribute aphrodisiac qualities to the fungi. Even contemporary folktales claim that particularly odorous truffles will encourage sex by making women more tender and men more agreeable. There is a strong chemical basis for the stories.

Truffles contain a steroid, androstenol, which gives them the pronounced musklike scent and a nutty taste. This same steroid is synthesized in the testes of the boar and transferred to the salivary gland from which it is secreted during premating behavior. Androstenol makes boars more aggressive and tends to immobilize the sow in a mating stance. The concentration of the steroid in truffles is about twice the concentration found in boars, hence the vigorous interest shown by pigs in search of this delicacy. Androstenol is also synthesized by human males in the testes and secreted by axillary sweat glands, giving male sweat a musky odor that plays a preparatory role in human sexual behavior.

All this may have been appreciated by the early Spaniards, who called the truffle trufa, meaning “testicles of earth itself,” and used it to facilitate sexual behavior. And it may be an old story to Northern flying squirrels, which have been seen feeding on truffles that lie just below the surface of the Alaskan soil. In northern California, a flying squirrel was observed gliding to a slightly exposed truffle lying on the ground. After eating for a few minutes, it left carrying a small piece of the truffle. The squirrel was followed to its nest in an abandoned woodpecker’s hole. It took the truffle inside to where its mate awaited. One can only imagine the characteristic mating behavior of flying squirrels that followed: the sexual partners wrap their arms around each other and the male uses his flight skin like a cloak to surround the female.

Mystery and superstition have always shielded the effects of another fungus, ergot, from full view. Ergot is a parasitic fungus that infects rye, wheat, and other grasses. The fungus forms sclerotia—hard, dark purple bodies that secretly replace the grains and seeds in the cereals. The sclerotium itself is a veritable laboratory of potent chemicals known as ergot alkaloids, whose effects are foretold by their purple color—an ominous color that Homeric hymns have linked with the awesome powers of Lord Hades and the underworld.

Ergot alkaloids are structurally similar to neurochemicals present in the nervous tissue of warm-blooded animals. They can interfere with the flow of blood through the body as well as seriously alter the perceptions and movements of the animals. Grazing animals were probably the first to encounter this fungus, which is still a hazard to livestock. A large single meal of contaminated grasses may produce agitation and muscle spasms. The animals stagger in stiff, bounding movements, their eyes jerk back and forth, and eventually they fall. They sit with dazed appearance, isolated from the flock or herd, but as the intoxication subsides they rejoin the group. The effects from chronic feeding are not noticeable for several weeks or longer, the length of time depending on the concentration of ergot alkaloids in the grasses. Lameness appears first, then limbs become numb and necrotic. Gangrene finally erupts. Cattle stricken with gangrenous ergotism tend to segregate themselves but still remain with the herd when it starts moving. The herd leaves behind 5 percent who are prostrate, starving, and dying.

Grazing animals are not alone in their ergot intoxications. Some adventurous farmers have been tempted to taste the ergot-spotted grains after observing unusual behavior in their animals; but the first human use was probably an accident experienced by ancient agriculturists. When the infected grains found their way into breads that were then eaten, mass intoxications and poisonings resulted. The first intentional use followed shortly after the first accidents when the ancient Athenians conducted secret ceremonies in the temple at Eleusis. There, during these nocturnal “mysteries,” individuals drank kykeon, a mixture of barley with ergot, water, and mint. For two millennia, until suppression of these rites by Christianity in the fourth century A.D., thousands of people were given this unique experience annually. Participants included Aristotle, Sophocles, Plato, Aeschylus, Pindar, and several Roman emperors. It was a blissful experience, according to Homer, one that could lift men out of a gloomy darkness and give them what Cicero called “a reason to live in joy.” Confronted by a profoundly religious experience, the initiates surrendered to the visions with awe and wonderment.

The intentional uses of hallucinogenic plants by both animals and native peoples have been events just as infrequent and structured as the passage through the portals at Eleusis. The picture of animals chewing on yaje vines, iboga roots, or fly agaric mushrooms is something that is seen only intermittently. Similarly, the participants at Eleusis came only once a year; Datura ceremonies may happen only once in a lifetime; and the modern use of magic mushrooms is as intermittent in native cultures as it is at high school parties.

Ritual and recreational intoxications from hallucinogens do not occur continually with humans. A major reason for this controlled use is tolerance, which can develop quickly and block most effects. In order to overcome tolerance, increasingly larger doses have to be used. But such large doses are not always easy to come by in nature and they still may fail to break through the massive tolerance that develops to drugs such as ergot alkaloids. Humans have learned that a better way to handle the drugs is to space the doses over time, thus allowing for many weeks—even months—between intoxications. This prevents tolerance and gives people an opportunity to reflect on the experience and assimilate it into their lives. Since some animals, such as rats, also take only intermittent samples of hallucinogens in the wild, perhaps they are doing the same thing.

Periodic intoxications are seen in several animals that seem to know much about hallucinogenic plants and generally avoid the strong psychoactive parts. There is a suggestion that they also know what they are doing when they depart from their usual feeding to eat the psychoactive portions. For example, morning glories, which contain the same alkaloids as ergot, are eaten by rats, which feed regularly on the plant’s vines and fruits. The rodents tend to avoid the larger concentration of alkaloids in the seeds. Yet, when disturbed by severe weather conditions, a rat will occasionally snack on a single seed, then display the characteristic head-twitches of intoxication.

I once observed two Hawaiian mongooses depart from their regular diet of meat, eggs, and juicy fruits to chew the highly potent seeds of a silver morning glory that had been planted in their spacious outdoor pen. The mongooses twitched and circled their pen, then appeared calmed for several hours. During the next few months, the mongooses ignored the seeds. Then I observed one mongoose eating the seeds again, but it was on a special occasion: its mate had just died and a tropical storm had reduced much of the pen to a field of mud. Morning glory seeds are used by modern Mexican Indians to console themselves in times of trouble; perhaps the animals are doing the same.

It is clear that many animals are attracted to elements of intoxicating and hallucinogenic experiences. The real danger is when their natural infrequent intoxications are repeated, when the pursuit is so passionate that a life-threatening pattern of behavior is established. Birds do this with berries but they are protected by seasonal ripening. Bees do it with the stupefying nectars of specialized Umbelliferae flowers, but are also protected from frequent use by seasonal flowering. However, industrious ants can do it all the time inside their colonies. They provide a powerful example of a severe addiction to a disorienting intoxicant.

A variety of ants lives in symbiotic relationship with special beetles. The ants, playing the role of hosts, provide food and care for their beetle guests. In return, the beetles produce secretions from their abdominal areas and allow the ants to lick them. The ants may become so overwhelmed by the intoxicating nature of these secretions that they become temporarily disoriented and less sure of their footing. Entomologists have labeled the ants’ passion both a love and an addiction. Love is seen in the care and feeding the ant extends to the beetle larvae, which are accepted as part of the ant’s own brood. Consider the example of the yellow ant, Lasius flavus, and the Lomechusa beetle, named after an ancient Roman poisoner. In times of danger, the ants will even move the beetle larvae to safety before they tend to their own eggs. The addiction is manifested by the worker ants, which seem totally disinterested in anything but the intoxicating secretion produced by the beetle. Consequently, the ants allow more Lomechusa beetles to move into the colony, resulting in a corresponding dwindling of the ant population. Excessive intake of the intoxicant can cause such mania in the colony that female ant larvae become damaged in such a way that they develop into useless cripples rather than reproductive queens. Accordingly, “Lomechusa-mania,” a case of severe addiction, can contribute to the decline and fall of the ant society. The case provides a true fable for our species to contemplate regarding the presence of hallucinogenic drugs in the modern workplace.

Intoxication ...

Ronald K. Siegel

Forces of habit - introduction

 THE PSYCHOACTIVE REVOLUTION

ON JULY 13 , 1926 , Anthony Colombo, a man of many habits, all of them bad, checked into the Philadelphia General Hospital. The staff assigned him to the drug ward—a good choice, considering that each day of his life he smoked a quarter-ounce of opium, puffed 80 cigarettes, drank two cups of coffee or tea, and downed a quart of whiskey. He got drunk nearly every day, he explained to an intern. He had begun smoking the opium to sober up.

But he didn’t use the hard stuff. No cocaine. No barbiturates. “No narcotics other than opium”—a lie betrayed by his upper arms and thighs, pitted with the scars of hypodermic abscesses. Or perhaps it was a white lie. Opium smokers looked down on needle users in those days. Colombo had his pride to consider.

He was, after all, a working man. Addiction to opium had affected neither his will power, he boasted, nor his ability to work. He was in the liquor business, he said—a striking admission from the citizen of a country that did not, in 1926, officially have a liquor business.

The opium habit did not affect his appetite, the intern noted. Just 33 years of age, Colombo tipped the scales at 275 pounds. “The chest is immense,” he wrote; “the abdomen is large and pendulous.” Considering Colombo’s weight, his “three to five meals daily,” his opium, his four score cigarettes, his coffee, his tea, and his whiskey, some form of gratification must have been passing through his mouth practically every waking moment. Indeed, Colombo led a life—probably not a long life—of such continuous and varied stimulation and psychoactive pleasure that no emperor, no despot, no potentate of the ancient world, however wealthy, determined, or decadent, could have matched it.1Yet Anthony Colombo was a lowly man, a petty bootlegger of modest means. It was his luck, or misfortune, to live in the twentieth century, in an industrial city in an industrial nation that had, in its brief history, managed to refine and mass-market an impressive array of psychoactive pleasures. By the time Colombo checked into the hospital, millions of ordinary people throughout the world could lead, in neurochemical terms, a life-style unimaginable for even the wealthiest five hundred years earlier.

I call this development the psychoactive revolution. People everywhere have acquired progressively more, and more potent, means of altering their ordinary waking consciousness. One of the signal events of world history, this development had its roots in the transoceanic commerce and empire building of the early modern period—that is, the years from about 1500 to 1789. Forces of Habit describes how early modern merchants, planters, and other imperial elites succeeded in bringing about the confluence of the world’s psychoactive resources and then explores why, despite enormous profits and tax revenues, their successors changed their minds and restricted or prohibited many—but not all—drugs.

The term “drugs” is an extremely problematic one, connoting such things as abuse and addiction. For all its baggage, the word has one great virtue. It is short. Indeed, one of the reasons its use persisted, over the objections of offended pharmacists, was that headline writers needed something pithier than “narcotic drugs.” In this book I use “drugs” as a convenient and neutral term of reference for a long list of psychoactive substances, licit or illicit, mild or potent, deployed for medical and nonmedical purposes. Alcoholic and caffeinated beverages, cannabis, coca, cocaine, opium, morphine, and tobacco are all drugs in this sense, as are heroin, methamphetamine, and many other semisynthetic and synthetic substances. None is inherently evil. All can be abused. All are sources of profit. All have become, or at least have the potential to become, global commodities. 2This might not be apparent from a casual inspection of drug histories. Most scholarship deals with particular drugs or types of drugs in a particular setting: tea in Japan, vodka in Russia, narcotics in America, and so on. I have tried to connect these scholarly dots, linking the many separate histories in a big-picture narrative of the discovery, interchange, and exploitation of the planet’s psychoactive resources. I aim to do for drugs what William McNeill did for diseases in Plagues and Peoples (1976), a world-historical study of the exchange of microorganisms and its impact on civilizations. Disease and drug exchanges have many close parallels. That imported alcohol, for example, acted as a deadly pathogen for indigenous peoples is more than a metaphor. But there are also important differences. McNeill’s story was largely one of tragic happenstance. Invisible germs spread by human contact had lethal but usually unintended consequences. The spread of drug cultivation and manufacturing, however, was anything but accidental. It depended on conscious human enterprise, and only secondarily on unconscious biological processes.

The book’s first section describes the confluence of the world’s principal psychoactive resources, concentrating on alcoholic and caffeinated beverages, tobacco, opiates, cannabis, coca, cocaine, and sugar—the last a key ingredient in many drug products. These substances, once geographically confined, all entered the stream of global commerce, though at different times and from different places. Coffee, for example, spread from Ethiopia, where the bush was indigenous, to Arabia, and then throughout the Islamic lands and Christian Europe. Europeans took the taste and the beans to the Americas, which produced 70 percent of the world’s coffee crop by the late nineteenth century. 3 European farmers and planters, employing indentured and slave labor, enjoyed great success cultivating drug crops in both hemispheres. Their collective efforts expanded world supply, drove down prices, and drew millions of less affluent purchasers into the market, democratizing drug consumption.

But not for all drugs. Embedded in the story of psychoactive commerce is a mystery, one that is often overlooked. A number of regionally popular plant drugs—kava, betel, qat, peyote—failed to become commodities in both hemispheres in the way that wine or opium did. Global drug commerce, propelled by European overseas expansion, was highly selective. For reasons that ranged from limited shelf life to cultural biases against their effects, Europeans chose to ignore or suppress many novel psychoactive plants. The ones they found useful and acceptable they traded and cultivated throughout the world, with social and environmental consequences that are still very much in evidence.

The second section, on drugs and commerce, deals with psychoactive substances as medical and recreational products. Drugs typically began their careers as expensive and rarefied medicines, touted for a variety of human and animal ailments. Once their pleasurable and consciousness-altering properties became known, they escaped the therapeutic realm and entered that of popular consumption. As they did so, their political status changed. Widespread nonmedical use of spirits, tobacco, amphetamines, and other psychoactive substances occasioned controversy, alarm, and official intervention. All large-scale societies differentiated in some way between the medical use and the nonmedical abuse of drugs, and eventually they made this distinction the moral and legal foundation for the international drug control system.

Such a system was necessary because drugs were at once dangerous and lucrative products. The opposite of “durable goods,” they were quickly consumed and had to be just as quickly replaced by those dependent on them. Regular users needed larger doses to experience the original effect, which meant that the volume of sales was likely to increase. Inventions such as improved stills, hypodermic syringes, and blended cigarettes made for more efficient, speedier, and more profitable ways to get refined chemicals into consumers’ brains. Competition sparked further innovation and widespread advertising, as manufacturers sought to cut their costs, increase market share, and enhance the appeal of their products. As drugs became cheaper and more seductive, they attracted millions of new users, generating profitable opportunities in enterprises ranging from addiction treatment to Zippo lighters. Drug commerce and its externalities were manifestations of mature capitalism’s limbic turn, its increasing focus on pleasure and emotional gratification, as opposed to consumers’ material needs. Drug commerce, to paraphrase the anthropologist Robert Ardrey, flourished in a world in which the hungry psyche was replacing the hungry belly. 4The third section, which concerns drugs and power, shows how psychoactive trade benefited mercantile and imperial elites in ways that went beyond ordinary commercial profits. These elites quickly discovered that they could use drugs to control manual laborers and exploit indigenes. Opium, for instance, kept Chinese laborers in a state of debt and dependency. Alcohol induced native peoples to trade their furs, sell their captives into slavery, and negotiate away their lands. Early modern political elites found drugs to be dependable sources of revenue. Though rulers were often initially hostile to novel drugs (tobacco struck them as an especially nasty foreign vice, provoking sanctions from royal denunciations to ritual executions), they bowed to the inevitable and imposed taxes or their equivalents, monopolies, on the expanding commerce. They prospered beyond their dreams. By 1885 taxes on alcohol, tobacco, and tea accounted for close to half of the British government’s gross income. Drug taxation was the fiscal cornerstone of the modern state, and the chief financial prop of European colonial empires. 5Political elites do not ordinarily kill the geese that lay their golden eggs. Yet, during the last hundred years, they have selectively abandoned a policy of taxed, legal commerce for one of greater restriction and prohibition, achieved by domestic legislation and international treaties. The final chapters explore the modernizing pressures, medical developments, and political maneuvers that prompted so many governments to reverse course, and why they did so for some drugs rather than others. The psychoactive counterrevolution was strikingly erratic. Its legacy is a world in which (for now) tobacco and liquor are easily and legally available, while drugs like cannabis or heroin are generally not.

Writing world history is like peering through a microscope with a low-powered lens. The observer can see a good deal of the specimen, but only by sacrificing detail. One way to avoid this problem, and the narrative monotony it entails, is to periodically zoom in on a particular episode or personality, and then back out to the larger picture. That, at any rate, is my narrative strategy. Generalizations culled from the historical, social scientific, and scientific literature are fleshed out with specific examples and—dialing up the power further—several case studies. Among these are the democratization of amphetamines, James Duke and the cigarette industry, alcohol taxation in India, and the failure of prohibition in the Soviet Union. Each of these cases serves as a kind of parable, illustrating principles important to drug history.

The subject and my approach to it require selectivity. I have concentrated on identifying and illustrating the most significant trends of the past 500 years, and have made no attempt to provide comprehensive histories of all psychoactive drugs. That task, rendered impossible by the weight of numbers, has been beyond the capability of any one person since Louis Lewin, the pioneering German psychopharmacologist, died in 1929. I should add that I have cited only a fraction of the voluminous literature on drugs. The reader will discover, however, that my documentation is not ungenerous, and will find in it many leads to the outstanding specialized scholarship on the role and impact of drugs in the modern world. 

(...)

A TRAP BAITED WITH PLEASURE

THE IDEA THAT MOST DRUGS are dangerous substances best used in limited amounts under medical supervision has become the official attitude about their appropriate social role. But it is not the only attitude. Merchants, capitalists, and the political elites who tax them have long appreciated that drugs are seductive products and lucrative sources of revenue. The clash between opportunities for profit and concerns about health forms the central moral and political conflict running through the history of psychoactive commerce. Monetary motives and concerns are as historically significant as medical ones, and for some drugs doubtless more so. The first question to consider, however, is what is it about drugs that generates so much demand? And why do some people, as Simon Paulli observed more than three centuries ago, sacrifice everything they possess to acquire them?

 

 The Evolutionary Paradox 

Drugs are poisons. Psychoactive plant alkaloids evolved as a defense mechanism against herbivores. Insects and animals who eat them become dizzy and disoriented, or experience hallucinations. Yet some persist in eating intoxicating plants and fermented fruit, even though they disrupt their repertoire of survival skills. In evolutionary terms, accidental intoxication may be valuable: it warns an organism not to go near the plant again. Seeking intoxication, let alone profiting from it, is paradoxical. It seemingly defies the logic of natural selection.

One possible explanation is that the consumption of intoxicants satisfies a basic need. All people, argues Andrew Weil, possess an innate drive to alter their normal consciousness. Children at play will whirl themselves into a vertiginous stupor; holy men and women lose themselves in meditation. The desire to vacate ego-centered consciousness is deep-seated. However, some means of achieving this end are more dangerous than others. Drugs are powerful chemical shortcuts to altered states of mind. They do not alone determine the final state, which is a product of their interaction with the user’s expectations (“set”) and physical and social environment (“setting”). But they are key ingredients. Anyone who uses them to satisfy the drive is trading off toxic effects for potency and rapidity of action. 1Although Weil’s postulated drive may be inborn, social circumstances have much to do with its strength. Bored, miserable creatures are more likely to seek altered consciousness than engaged, contented ones. Animals in captivity, for example, are much more likely to use intoxicants than those in the wild. And one could say that civilization itself represents a state of captivity. Humans evolved as hunter-gatherers in itinerant bands. After the Neolithic Revolution, most of them lived as peasants in crowded, oppressive, and disease-ridden societies. The misery and grinding poverty that were the lot of 90 percent of humanity in the early modern world go far toward explaining why tobacco and other novel drugs became objects of mass consumption. They were unexpected weapons against the human condition, newfound tools of escape from the mean prison of everyday existence. “There is no more profound way of understanding the course of history,” Nathan Kline wrote, “than in terms of this effort to escape from one’s own ‘sweating self ’ and to experience even temporary states of euphoria or relief of discomfort regardless of the cost.” 2Euphoria and relief are products of a molecular accident. Only a few toxic alkaloids have molecules that, if they succeed in entering the circulatory system and passing the blood-brain barrier, mimic or influence neurotransmitters in the brain’s reward and pain-control centers. Nature is parsimonious with pleasure. Euphoria-inducing neurotransmitters are ordinarily meted out frugally and for some accomplishment that enhances survival or reproduction. Drugs fool the system, temporarily increasing the level of these pleasure-inducing neurotransmitters.

Though scientific knowledge has accumulated rapidly in the last three decades, researchers still do not know all of the ways the brain responds to different psychoactive drugs. Some, particularly alcohol, are “messy” in that they affect several neural systems. But they do appear to have at least one common denominator. They affect—directly or indirectly, strongly or weakly—the mesolimbic dopamine system, a primitive neural substrate that serves as a key pathway for pleasure and means of providing motivation for the choices we make. Drugs stimulate this system, and perhaps others not yet identified, signaling “good choice” by way of good feelings. Even a relatively nonintoxicating drug like coffee markedly elevates mood. A carefully controlled study of coffee drinking among nurses showed that those who drank two to three cups daily committed suicide only about a third as often as abstainers. It is a fascinating finding, entirely consistent with the notion of drugs as a coping tool. 3Before refilling your mug, however, bear in mind that the repeated use of caffeine and other drugs also alters the brain’s natural chemistry in ways that are not healthful. Awash with external chemicals, the brain adjusts production of their internal equivalents or the number of receptors, becoming dependent on an outside supply. If that supply ceases, unpleasant consequences follow. Opiate withdrawal in particular triggers a cascade of symptoms: restlessness, sweating, extreme anxiety, depression, irritability, dysphoria, insomnia, fever, chills, retching and vomiting, explosive diarrhea, flu-like aches and pains. The cumulative misery has tempted many patients to suicide, as may be seen in the 1925 case history of Hermann Göring:

Cause of illness: abuse of Morphine and Eukodal; severe withdrawal symptoms . . . The patient holds a prominent place in the “Hitler party” in Germany, took part in the Hitler putsch, during which he was injured and hospitalized; says he escaped from there to Austria, was given morphine by the doctors at the hospital, after which he became addicted to morphine. Admitted to Aspuddens [Nursing Home], the patient manifested violent withdrawal symptoms (in spite of the nurse allowing him more morphine), during which he became threatening and so violent that he could no longer be kept there. Threatened to take his own life, wanted to “die like a man,” threatened to commit hara-kiri, and so on.

That Göring, winner of the Pour le Mérite (the “Blue Max”), should sink to such a state, or that he should continue to use opiates intermittently for the next twenty years, nodding off in Luftwaffe staff meetings, is a testament to the extraordinary hold this class of drugs can exert on the human system. “When the druggist sells me my daily box of Eukodol [sic] ampules he smirks like I had picked up the bait to a trap,” William S. Burroughs wrote Allen Ginsberg from Tangier in 1954. “Allen, I never had a habit like this before. Shooting every two hours. Maybe it is the Eukodol, which is semisynthetic. Trust the Germans to concoct some really evil shit.” 4Physical and psychological withdrawal symptoms can follow the regular use of any of the principal psychoactive commodities, including the less potent ones like caffeinated beverages. In 1989 doctors at London’s Hammersmith Hospital discovered that the headaches commonly experienced by postoperative patients had nothing to do with anesthesia. They were a consequence of abstaining from caffeinated beverages before and during surgery. Depression, fatigue, and lethargy are other common symptoms. Though withdrawal is not synonymous with addiction, researchers have nevertheless found unequivocal evidence of a “caffeine dependence syndrome.” This refers to patients who go to extremes to obtain caffeinated drinks, use them in dangerous or inappropriate situations, and continue drinking them despite adverse health consequences and warnings by their physicians. Honoré de Balzac, whose stubborn devotion to coffee hastened his death from heart disease, is the historical prototype. 5The notion of reversal of effects helps to explain the paradox of why people persist in manifestly unhealthful behavior. They have, as Burroughs put it, walked into a trap baited with pleasure. Having begun using the drug to feel good, they dare not stop for fear of feeling bad. If addiction is the hijacking of the body’s natural reinforcement mechanisms, withdrawal is the gun held to the head. Even addicts who detoxify completely—a process that can extend over many months for a drug like cocaine—are not the same afterwards. The brain remembers the chemical shortcuts to pleasure. Environmental cues such as a familiar tavern sign can trigger powerful cravings. Addiction is a chronic, relapsing brain disease.

 

 Why Exposure Matters 

The last sentence takes us into fiercely contested terrain. Before exploring the economic implications of addiction and the related phenomenon of tolerance, it is necessary to take a closer look at compulsive use. Is it fundamentally a problem of repeatedly exposing brain cells to drugs? Or is it a problem of individuals who happen to have the wrong genetic, psychological, social, cultural, and/or moral characteristics? This issue has enormous implications for both understanding the history of drugs and implementing policies for their intelligent control.

At one extreme of the debate is a figure like Nils Bejerot who views drugs as germ-like pathogens that can artificially induce destructive drives in anyone: “No disturbed personality and no underlying social problems are required for an individual to develop a drug dependence.” Exposure is the crucial variable. It explains why physicians in Germany, the United States, and other countries have historically had narcotic addiction rates up to 100 times that of the general population. “We almost never find a lawyer who plays around with the stuff,” Harry Anslinger once remarked, “and nobody can tell me that lawyers are more moral or less inclined to get into trouble than doctors or nurses. You can’t get away from it—if people lay their hands on the stuff, there are always a few who will try.” Salvation lay in supply control. 6At the other extreme is a figure like Stanton Peele who views addiction as a people problem, not a drug problem. Addiction has nothing to do with a drug or its chemical properties. Indeed, people can become addicted to activities like gambling or drug treatment itself. In this view, addicts are essentially inadequate or misguided personalities who return again and again to drugs (or their behavioral equivalents) for a “reassuring absorption into a consuming sensation which takes away all consciousness of life’s problems.” Personal values determine whether people use, persist in using, become addicted to, and quit using drugs. Cultural values in turn shape personal ones. Cultures that tolerate drunkenness and invest alcohol with the power to control behavior suffer worse alcohol problems than those that frown on drunkenness and hold the individual accountable. Hence alcoholism is more widespread in Ireland than in Italy, despite high levels of per capita consumption in both countries. Supply matters less than the personal and cultural values that modulate demand and comportment. 7My own view of the matter (and that of most drug producers, distributors, and advertisers) is that both of these seemingly contradictory positions are true, though exposure is the critical precondition. Addiction following the use of any drug is the exception, not the rule. Only about a third of the young people who experiment with cigarettes, one of the most powerful addictive products known, become dependent users. Many individuals have inborn characteristics that confer immunity. The philosopher Karl Popper became so allergic to cigarette smoke that he turned into a virtual recluse. The real reason Bill Clinton didn’t inhale marijuana is that he couldn’t tolerate smoke in his lungs, despite repeated efforts by his friends to instruct him in this essential Oxonian art. Anyone with a persistent, violent reaction to a drug is essentially addiction-proof. Those with strong superegos and religious scruples are similarly less prone to experiment. Their opposite numbers, thrill-seeking sociopaths, are far more likely to light up. Peele has a point: individual values matter. So do collective ones. A strong taboo against consuming (as opposed to exporting) opium helped the Turks avoid a major addiction problem. LSD never became popular in Chinese cultures that equated hallucination with mental illness. The indulgent Japanese attitude toward alcohol abuse, by contrast, diminished the protective effect of the flushing genes carried by half its population. 8Yet history furnishes equally dramatic lessons about the importance of exposure. Iranian opium production expanded rapidly in the second half of the nineteenth century. The silk industry went into decline, and opium seemed an attractive export crop for which there was rising world demand. But with time the exports fell, and large numbers of Iranians took to obliterating their miseries with home-grown opium. An estimated 2.8 million of them were addicts when Reza Shah Pahlavi’s government attempted to eliminate production in the mid-1950s. The predictable result was fewer addicts, somewhere between a quarter and a half million in 1968, but more users of smuggled heroin. Heroin smuggled from neighboring countries also proved to be the bane of the Shah’s puritanical successors. Though they launched a crusade against narcotics, hanging dealers by the score, they could not stanch the flow of heroin from Afghanistan and Pakistan. Nor could they ease the severe unemployment that tempted Iranians to engage in drug use and trafficking. 9That Cubans once smoked 30 percent of all cigars made in Cuba, that Asian communities which grow and sell opium have consistently higher addiction rates than those which do not, that African transshipment points like Ghana or Nigeria have developed serious heroin and cocaine problems, that Kentuckians suffer exceptionally high rates of lung cancer—all of this strongly suggests that proximity, and hence familiarity and availability, matters. But how much? In 1973 Philip Baridon published the results of a unique global study in which he compiled officially reported addiction rates for 33 countries. He then compared these rates to twelve independent social, economic, and geographic variables (for example, urbanization, per capita income, proximity to opium- and coca-producing areas) in a multiple-regression analysis (a statistical technique for estimating relative causal weights). Proximity alone explained 45 percent of the variance, far more than any other variable. “The most fundamental fact about drug abuse is frequently overlooked in the welter of complicated psycho-social explanations,” Baridon concluded. “If the drug is not available, there will be no abuse of it.” 10This is why drug history is replete with giveaway promotions: bottles of Vin Mariani, cigarettes during rush week, smokeless tobacco at drag races, and surplus Brazilian coffee shipped gratis to Japan. The providers of the celebrated “free lunch” that accompanied the not-so-free beer in American workingmen’s saloons a century ago played a clever variation on this theme. One Chicago salesman confided to a fellow worker that “he had had to swear off the free lunch when he realized he was beginning to go to saloons more for the beer than for the food.” The idea behind all such schemes is to expose potential lifelong customers, particularly young ones whose consumption habits are still plastic. Young, single, undersocialized urban males who lack genetic or cultural protections and who are already using other drugs are on the A-list of susceptibility. They are most likely to experiment with and eventually become addicted to novel drugs, although, as Bejerot insisted, they are not the only types of people who become compulsive users. Given enough time and exposure, millions of others may join them. In 1915 American cigarette smokers were mostly confined to pool halls and street corners. In 1955 two-thirds of all American men between 25 and 64 smoked regularly, the vast majority of them cigarettes. 11 

Davit T. Courtwright