INTOXICATION

Life in Pursuit of Artificial Paradise

By Ronald K. Siegel, Ph.D. (E.P. Dutton, New York 1989. 320 pages, $19.95.)

Reviewed by Rob Michels.

The recent War on Drugs and its accompanying propaganda has led to a shortage of realistic literature on the subject of intoxicants. Research by people like Timothy Leary and other free-thinking individualists has been effectively removed from the bookshelves by politicians and their minions. Few people have the courage and the medical knowledge, let alone the skills, to publish material about drugs accessible to the average reader. Ronald Siegal Ph.D is a conspicuous exception to this claim.

In his book Intoxication, Siegal tells the story of being in a class as a medical student and hearing the professor say that only humans use drugs. Thinking that this was unlikely, Siegal began to study animals as an assistant research professor at UCLA. He found that not only do animals use drugs, but they do so for many of the same reasons that humans do: boredom, depression, curiosity, health, and addiction. Both in the lab and in the wild, animals from the smallest insect to the largest elephant ingest drugs ranging from natural antibiotics to powerful hallucinogens.

Perhaps the most important fact in Siegal’s book is that animals tend to use drugs wisely. Like humans, animals become addicted to refined drugs like cocaine and distilled alcohol, but most drugs in the wild are not nearly so powerful and are thus much easier to use

in moderation. For example, both men and animals enjoy the mildly stimulating and intoxicating effects that follow the consumption of coca leaves, the source of cocaine and crack, without suffering the horrors of addiction. Similarly, many animals ingest over-ripe fruits for the intoxicating effects of the alcohol they contain. With many amusing stories, Siegel illustrates the use and effects of all the major intoxicants: alcohol, nicotine, cannabis, opium and heroin, LSD, PCP, psilocybin, uppers, downers, and a variety of designer drugs.

The message of Intoxication? Using drugs for fun is not only natural and common; it constitutes a part of our evolutionary development. As Siegal explains, ‘The pursuit of drugs is a primary motivational force in the behavior of organisms. Our nervous system, like those of [other animals] is arranged to respond to the chemical intoxicants… . Throughout our entire history as a species, intoxication has functioned like the basic drives… . sometimes overshadowing other activities in life. Intoxication is the fourth drive.’ He traces the role drugs have played in the evolutionary development of both plants and animals, and shows how the chemicals that originally defended plants have come to give us pleasure.

Because intoxication is a human biological drive, no amount of political

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oppression will stop drug use. It is like the church trying to eliminate premarital sex - it causes a lot of hypocrisy and lying, but not much chastity. Not much good comes out of it even in cases where fear has resulted in abstinence. Tax money putatively designated for the ‘social good’ subsidizes drug dealers by creating artificially high profits while lining the politicians pockets and pet programs. The government needs an enemy to justify its theft of the citizens’ money through taxes. But this time the government has declared battle against one of our basic drives. The result? Useful members of society imprisoned. Others killed. Violence caused not by drug use, but by the laws that create an unnatural market for drugs.

Siegal does not come right out and say that drugs should be legalized and he is careful to point out that his own limited drug use has only been in countries where the drugs he took were legal. But Siegal has political motives; he has served as consultant to two Presidential commissions, the World Health Federation and numerous other

prestigious organizations. The solution to our drug problems, he says, is to recognize the legitimate use of drugs, including recreation, and to make drugs safe.

Intoxication is a very readable book with no technical jargon. Siegal presents his many examples (perhaps too many) with a sense of humor. Yet he takes his subject very seriously, from the chemistry involved to the political implications of the government having to lie about drugs to justify billions of wasted dollars. (He particularly damns the commercial showing a man cracking an egg into a simmering frying pan while saying ‘This is your brain. This is drugs. [sic] This is your brain on drugs’ - a commercial which targets children young enough to actually believe it.) I question the use of experiments that forced animals to go through drug withdrawal, but otherwise judge it an enjoyable and informative book. Extropians will find Intoxication useful in combating dogma and propaganda as well as in shedding some light on the world of euphoria.

Our Enemy, ‘The State’

David Thoreau: I heartily accept the motto — ‘That government is best which governs least’; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which I also believe — ‘That government is best which governs not at all’; and when men are prepared for it, that is the kind of government which they will have. (Civil Disobedience)

Michael Bakunin: The State is ‘The most flagrant negation, the most flagrant and cynical negation of humanity.’

‘By its very principle an immense cemetery in which all manifestations of individual and local life… come to sacrifice themselves, to die and to be buried.’ (Socialist thought)

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