“Why animals eat psychoactive plants”
“Two months before, the professor had planted a powerful hallucinogen called silver morning glory in the pen. The mongooses had all tried it, but they didn’t seem to like it: they stumbled around disoriented for a few hours and had stayed away from it ever since. But not now. Stricken with grief, the mongoose began to chew. Before long, it had tuned in and dropped out. It turns out this wasn’t a freak occurrence in the animal kingdom. It is routine…
Here, I think, is the harder, more honest argument. Some drug use causes horrible harm, as I know very well, but the overwhelming majority of people who use prohibited drugs do it because they get something good out of it — a fun night out dancing, the ability to meet a deadline, the chance of a good night’s sleep, or insights into parts of their brain they couldn’t get to on their own. For them, it’s a positive experience, one that makes their lives better. That’s why so many of them choose it. They are not suffering from false consciousness, or hubris. They don’t need to be stopped from harming themselves, because they are not harming themselves. As the American writer Nick Gillespie puts it: “Far from our drugs controlling us, by and large we control our drugs; as with alcohol, the primary motivation is to enjoy ourselves, not to destroy ourselves . . . There is such a thing as responsible drug use, and it is the norm, not the exception.”…
Just as we are rescuing the sex drive from our subconscious and from shame, so we need to take the intoxication drive out into the open where it can breathe. Stuart Walton calls for a whole new field of human knowledge called “intoxicology.” He writes: “Intoxication plays, or has played, a part in the lives of virtually everybody who has ever lived . . . To seek to deny it is not only futile; it is a dereliction of an entirely constitutive part of who we are.””
This is really about the question of how society should approach drugs. The author quotes the ‘war on drugs’ rhetoric and points out that it treats drugs (besides alcohol, nicotine, and caffeine — my note) as an absolute evil that should be eradicated. And he questions this assumption by looking at the harmless use of drugs by humans and other animals.
I find a lot of it really anecdotal, but I appreciate the shift in perspective and being asked questions that I don’t usually pose to myself. Also thinking about the functions of community and ritual in drug use.
(probably credit to JL)
