SHOULD WE END THE WAR ON DRUGS? A DEBATE WITH PETER HITCHENS and Johann Hari

""Professor Ronald K Seigel wrote in his book ‘Intoxication’: “After sampling the numbing nectar of certain orchids, bees drop to the ground in a temporary stupor, then weave back for more. Birds gorge themselves on inebriating berries, then fly with reckless abandon. Cats eagerly sniff aromatic ‘pleasure’ plants, then play with imaginary objects. Cows that browse special range weeds will twitch, shake, and stumble back to the plants for more. Elephants purposely get drunk off of fermented fruits. Snacks on ‘magic mushrooms’ cause monkeys to sit with their heads in their hands in a posture reminiscent of Rodin’s Thinker. The pursuit of intoxication by animals seems as purposeless as it is passionate.” Noah’s Ark, it turns out, would have looked a lot like London on a Saturday night. [Facinating stuff I didn't know.]

The impulse to get intoxicated – to have moments of relief, when our senses are indeed fuzzy – is universal. All recorded human societies have found a way to do it. The poor Inuit didn’t have any intoxicants in their environment – so they would starve themselves until they got an altered head-space. This impulse manifests itself very early: little children will spin round and round, even though they know it makes them sick, because to seek out a moment of altered consciousness is deep in our biology. Professor Siegel told me that when people deny the intoxication impulse, “they’re denying their own chemistry.”

For the overwhelming majority of human beings, this impulse to get intoxicated is harmless. Don’t take my word for it: the UN Office for Drug Control, the body that oversees the global war on drugs and supports your approach, concedes that 90 percent of drug use does not harm the user. This is, surprisingly, true of even the most stigmatized drugs.

Mild intoxication is regarded as a good thing by almost all humans in almost all cultures (and by bees and birds and elephants) for a simple reason: they find it fun. Occasional fun is one of the reasons we are alive. These days, I get my highs from running on a treadmill – I haven’t had any alcohol or drugs in years – but that dopamine hit is a real intoxicant for me. It does “stupefy” me a bit, to use your term: it makes me a bit woozy and high and I find myself listening to eighties power ballads. And I like it. Other people like a glass of wine, or a spliff, or a line of coke, or a tab of ecstasy. They are not bad people. They are human, like you and me, and they are expressing something quite basic to our natures.

So: seeking out intoxicants is inevitable, and it is harmless in the overwhelming majority of cases. The question then is – is it sensible to wage a global war that kills hundreds of thousands of people, and ruins millions, to try to prevent people expressing their innate natures, in a way that harms very few of them? I don’t think so.""

http://chasingthescream.com/letters-wit ... -hitchens/

I recommend the whole article. [Letter exchange that is.] Pros and Cons of legalization.

Any other examples of animal intoxication you can think of would be interesting reading. [More obscure the better.]

Would you class, '' sex '' and all things related to it as being a form of drug.

Duncan wrote:Would you class, '' sex '' and all things related to it as being a form of drug.

Why not? Probably the best Drug there is. I can't wait until it comes out in a pill form.

Many years ago while being a paid ginny pig to take drugs, there was a PhD researcher there who claimed he was developing a drug he called, "EASY OFF" for orgasms. Problem was finding something that would pass the Brain-Blood barrier. [back in the '70s]

Twice while nude with women on LSD, I was aware that I had no interest in physical sex, the Drug/Trip made it seem irrelevant even thought that was the Plan.

We are really no different to animals biologically, and thus have similar needs as they do, inclucing the need for intoxication.

Yes of course we are not designed to be office workers and all that crap, we are animals. We are designed to be active hunter and gatherer types, bla bla bla.

We shouldn't be asking if it is ok for us to intoxicate ourselves because we have fallen victim to some crazy powerful dictator who's trapped us into a nasty money ruled society of a concrete working model of slavery that keeps the rich, rich, and continually enslaves the 'have nots'

For frikks sake, live your life b4 it's too late, and stop asking for 'permission to live' !

War on drugs should have never been started. Nixon was failing and needed something so he started the War-On-the-American People (war on drugs) He (and other Presidents) couldn't beat the little country of North Vietnam so take it out on our population. Now its become a big cash cow for the attorneys/bar associations and scumbag US agencies like the DEA. (Drug Enforcement Administration.)

All kinds of animals like to get high on fermenting fruit and such. Back in Norcal, I used to get drunk starlings flying into my car & house every year after the grape harvest. Rats & monkeys will push a bar in a Skinner box for Cocaine until they die.

im not sure if there is a "natural need for intoxication"...

from the natures perspective, its a dangerous thing. your not alerted and a fair game for every predator who is not intoxicated.

elephants like getting drunk too.

mistah nixon- he hated him some negroes.

his motives for the drug war were pointed squarely at them, and it is very evident in the watergate tapes- he mentions it specifically, the use of the law selectively against the darkies. brilliant plan.

plus- if you will recall what was flying out of laos then to HK for refining in the day- and who was doing it- they had every reason to stifle competition.

uoglobe, hsbc, nugan hand, bcci.

the opium wars continued.
ps; barings bank, mistah bush, mistah clinton.

Its just a way to make money for Tax revenue and employes so many. I disagree with making drugs legal but would like the source to be stopped and more strict rules for the sellers not the consumers.

wackyjacky wrote:All kinds of animals like to get high on fermenting fruit and such. Back in Norcal, I used to get drunk starlings flying into my car & house every year after the grape harvest. Rats & monkeys will push a bar in a Skinner box for Cocaine until they die.

One of the ways the disease theory was established is through rat experiments – ones that were injected into the American psyche in the 1980s, in a famous advert by the Partnership for a Drug-Free America. You may remember it. The experiment is simple. Put a rat in a cage, alone. It has two water bottles. One is just water. The other is water laced with heroin or cocaine. Almost every time you run this experiment, the rat will become obsessed with the drugged water and keep coming back for more and more until it kills itself. The advert explains: “Only one drug is so addictive, nine out of ten laboratory rats will use it. And use it. And use it. Until dead. It’s called cocaine. And it can do the same thing to you.”

But in the 1970s, a Professor of Psychology in Vancouver called Bruce Alexander – raised in a conservative military family in the US – noticed something odd about this experiment. The rat is put in the cage alone. It has nothing to do but take the drugs. What would happen, he wondered, if we tried this differently? So Alexander built Rat Park – a lush cage where the rats would have colored balls and the best rat-food and tunnels to scamper down and plenty of friends: everything a rat about town could want. What, Alexander wanted to know, will happen then?

In Rat Park, all the rats tried both water bottles, because they didn’t know what was in them. But what happened next was startling. The rats with good lives didn’t like the drugged water. They mostly shunned it, consuming less than a quarter of the drugs the isolated rats used. None of them died. While all the rats who were alone and unhappy became heavy users, none of the rats who had a happy environment did…

Professor Alexander argues this discovery is a profound challenge both to the right-wing view that addiction is a moral failing caused by too much hedonistic partying, and the liberal view that addiction is a disease taking place in a chemically hijacked brain. In fact, he argues, addiction is an adaptation. It’s not you. It’s your cage.

There is overwhelming evidence emerging for this theory, going far beyond these experiments, where it is shown over and over again to be true in humans. Isolated and miserable humans will use large amounts of drugs; connected humans with a happy environment won’t. The actual chemicals only play a small role – it’s the environment that counts most. This requires us to fundamentally change our understanding of addiction.