TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/082189/08218900.056

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 3.8 KB | 75 lines

                                                                                BEHAVIOR, Page 58

Do Humans Need to Get High?


A scientist says society should provide safe, nonaddictive drugs


    The Government has declared total war on illegal drugs. But
is it a battle that can ever be won? No, according to a new book
by Ronald K. Siegel, a research psychopharmacologist at the
UCLA School of Medicine. In Intoxication: Life in Pursuit of
Artificial Paradise (Dutton; $19.95), Siegel argues that the war
is doomed because it is against man's own nature. His
controversial contention: humanity's pursuit of happiness
through chemicals -- whether caffeine, nicotine, alcohol, opium,
marijuana or cocaine -- is a universal and inescapable fact of
life.

    Siegel, a scientific consultant on the nature of drug
addiction to two presidential commissions, the National
Institute on Drug Abuse and the World Health Organization, is
not the first expert to conclude that the desire to alter one's
state of consciousness is a drive as elemental as hunger, thirst
and sex. But he takes the argument a radical step further by
proposing that society would be best served if it accepted the
inevitability of intoxication and launched an all-out effort to
invent less damaging, nonaddictive substitutes for alcohol and
the popular illicit drugs.

    In an attempt to prove his point, Siegel presents
exhaustive evidence of the quest for intoxication throughout
history and throughout the animal kingdom. In many cases, humans
and animals have shared the same drugs. Hawkmoths, for example,
fly erratically after drinking the nectar of datura flowers. The
Aztecs used the same plant as a pain-killer, and British
soldiers in Jamestown who made a salad of its leaves became
intoxicated for eleven days.

    Siegel admits that today's drugs of choice, both legal and
illegal, are too dangerous and too seductive to be used safely.
But he is convinced that nontoxic, nonaddictive drugs can be
devised, even though "the research may require the same effort
and cost man put forth to go to the moon." The utopian
intoxicants he envisions would provide pleasure or stimulation
within limits but would not cause a user to lose control, nor
pose any danger of overdose. Such wonder drugs may be years
away, Siegel concedes, but he notes that molecular chemists have
developed hundreds of new psychoactive compounds that are still
waiting to be tested.

    Siegel's book may draw spirited attacks from conservatives
and skepticism from those who have fought and conquered
addictions, but his ideas are respected by drug authorities.
Says Dr. Lester Grinspoon, a Harvard psychiatrist and author of
several books on drugs: "I have come to the view that humans
have a need -- perhaps even a drive -- to alter their state of
consciousness from time to time." Pioneer drug researcher Dr.
Andrew Weil of the University of Arizona College of Medicine
confirms that view: "There is not a shred of hope from history
or from cross-cultural studies to suggest that human beings can
live without psychoactive substances."

    But the experts part company with Siegel on the idea of
building better drugs. "There is a real danger," says Weil, "in
thinking there is a perfect drug that won't interfere with
psychological and spiritual growth -- and without the potential
for dependence and damage." Reaction from drug czar William
Bennett's newly created Office of National Drug Control Policy
is equally cool. Says Dr. Herbert Kleber, the agency's deputy
director: "I can only note that all previous attempts along this
line have ended in disaster. Remember that morphine was used to
treat opium addiction, and heroin was used to treat morphine
addiction. If the drug Siegel envisions were too good, people
would just want more of it."