TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/082189/08218900.056

Text File | 1990-09-19 | 4KB | 65 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."