The Drunken Monkey
why humans love getting high (Part II)
by Lorette C. Luzajic
For Part I of The Drunken Monkey, please click here.
What on earth would Fred and Barney FLintstone order at their local wet spot? How did we satisfy our bottomless thirst without shot glasses, stir sticks, and little paper umbrellas made in China?
Patrick McGovern is an archeological chemist who has a fun job: alcohol experiments that bring history to life. He makes booze out of beets, berries, and roots, emulating as closely as possible ancient brews. Discovery Magazine writer Larry Gallagher wrote an amazing story about him back in 2005, and that’s where I learned about molecular archeology. McGovern uses spectrometers and chromatographs to analyze traces of whatnot on old artifacts. That’s how a little pot shard told him that our Neolithic pals in Jiahu, China over 9000 years ago were already enjoying the, uh, fruits of the Chinese hawthorn berry, and the Chinese’ other favourite staple, rice.
Patrick wrote Ancient Wine: The Search for the Origins of Viniculture, and Uncorking the Past: The Quest for Wine, Beer, and Other Alcoholic Beverages. In the latter, we learn a few things they forgot to tell us in grade ten health class: “The human liver is specially equipped to metabolize alcohol, with about ten percent of its enzyme machinery, including alcohol dehydrogenase, devoted to generating energy from alcohol.” (Abstainers actually have shorter life spans, he says, than drinkers. But slow down, there, my friend- so do binge drinkers. Moderation, as with everything, is king.)
Patrick is pretty sure that humans were sniffing out alcohol since we could walk upright, and maybe before, given that we’ve always loved fruit. Spoiled fruit split open in the hot sun is an easy target for airborne yeast spores, resulting in boozy goodness that we wouldn’t resist.
Patrick tells us about biologist Robert Dudley’s “drunken monkey” hypothesis, that alcoholism is as natural as human history is old, which is difficult to prove given the paucity of physical evidence. Fragments of our earliest selves are scarce, and there were no wildlife cameras available to witness our first habits. Nonetheless, it would be a big leap of the imagination to assume that ancient hominids abstained from gorging on pomegranate toddy, given what Dudley tells us about monkeys. The biologist witnessed howler monkeys in Panama greedily sucking back the ripe fruit of the palm tree, imbibing about ten standard drinks worth in twenty minutes. Like humans, apes, chimps, and monkeys of all sorts love booze, and most of them don’t stop after a small glass of wine. They drink as much as they can.
A far cry from the idea that we wouldn’t pour a highball to go with our tubers and game, McGovern says the opposite is true. We would find fermented juices wherever possible, and then look for ways to make more on our own.
Some anthropologists are sure that it is the thirst for easy access to alcohol that made us settle down to farm grains in the first place, which would mean that the pursuit of intoxication indirectly gave us everything we have accomplished. It IS pretty widely accepted that booze preceded bread, so the possibility is real. We made beer from whatever was on hand in our part of the world- sorghum, wheat, millet, corn, rice, barley.
But don’t think our hominid forebears stuck to our legal preference. They enjoyed any other plants that tripped them out without directly killing. Magic herb tinctures, fungi, cacti, steeped leaves of every sort occupied us. We hallucinated for spiritual ceremony, imbuing the highest honour and reverence to anything that made us high. In our puritanical culture of denial where we demonize “illicit” drugs, marginalizing them to the fringe of society, it’s hard to understand how important intoxicants are to human society. They were integral to religious rites in the far reaches of the world. They still are used in shamanic societies for ceremonies. Ahuasca rites promise a three day bender that makes even the best LSD seem like a pre-party. The Greeks had the true breakfast of champions- to break an overnight fast, they consumed a beverage made from barley and ergot, a potent hallucinogen. The Eulesian mystery festivals celebrated with kykeon as a sacrament, one that would send anyone into a revelatory trance.
We ate scorpions, licked toads, chewed on “dream fish,” and smoked cobra venom. The Arabian Humor tribes hunted giraffes to scoop out their bone marrow, said to induce hallucinatory visions, though we hope this is anecdotal folklore…The Aztecs loved Teonanacatl, or “divine flesh” -mushrooms that sent you flying into other worlds. Many Paleolithic caves feature paintings that express therianthropic sentiments- that “we’re all one” sensation that the flower children were still trying to describe after thousands of years. Early Americans alone enjoyed some eighty species of mind-altering botanicals. Remains in a Neanderthal cave excavation in Iraq in 1960, the Shanidar dig, have convinced many archeologists that drugs were used some 50 thousand years ago.
Ancient Hindu Vedas reference Soma, “the food of the gods,” in over 1000 love letter-like praises. The mushroom made everything heavenly. But not all drugs did: some were horrific, and some awesome ones had a few hellish side effects or were a ‘bad trip’ risk. Is it possible that we began to perceive heaven and hell because of the worlds we witnessed?
But drugs aren’t always a religious experience. They are social, like chilling in our favourite bars. They take the edge off. They are painkillers. They put stress out of our minds. Legal drugs like booze, coffee, cigarettes, prescriptions are practically the backbone of legal commerce. The rest of our economy is bolstered by the illegal ones. In east Africa- Kenya, Yemen, Ethiopia, Somalia- the stimulant khat IS the GDP. It’s huge to think of that- whole countries subsist on khat, and coffee- the other big seller. And there is no South America without cocaine, for all the terrorism and grief it has caused. Before we all got greedy for a hastier hit, cocaine was an innocent and important staple, a small shrub whose leaves could be chewed or brewed, chock full of vitamins. Coca tea helped workers toil in high altitudes, and it was handy if your belly was empty because you wouldn’t notice. Today coca tea is still popular “slimming tea.” As a matter of trivia, Sigmund Freud was addicted to cocaine. Given how many find the aphrodisiac qualities of blow extraordinary, at least at first before they turn hellish and just plain weird, might that have had something to do with his unwavering emphasis on all things sex?
And then there’s opium. You may be surprised to know that most of the world’s opium- a powerful drug from a humble poppy plant- is made in Afghanistan. Not long ago, much of the world was addicted to opium- including our founding father Ben Franklin. Morphine, that miraculous killer of all pains, physical or emotional, was a potent lure for millions. Bayer, the maker of innocent aspirin, is the company that gave opium its brand name: Heroin.
Pulitzer prize winning science journalist Jon (not Benjamin!) Franklin talks about heroin in his book, Molecules of the Mind. He explains the nitty gritty of molecular psychology for the layperson. And this layperson was a little startled, despite my personal historical affinity for all manner of intoxicants, to learn that there is a human drive more powerful than hunger or sex. The human mind is decorated like a Christmas tree with receptors waiting with open arms for one thing alone- intoxication.
Yes, that’s right. The human body is equipped with zillions of phone jacks waiting to be plugged in to drugs.
Scientist Ronald Siegel calls this overwhelming desire the “fourth drive.”
The war on drugs is a joke, according to scientists like these, and let’s face facts- a joke according to statistics. Consider that less than five per cent of the world’s population- us- consumes most of the world’s illicit drugs. Seems Bob Marley was right, that we’d be better off to legalize it. (Pot is, after all, the United States’ biggest cash crop.)
Siegel writes in his book, Intoxication, “This ‘fourth drive’ is a natural part of our biology, creating the irrepressible demand for drugs. In a sense, the war on drugs is a war against ourselves, a denial of our very nature.”
Would legalizing our human nature work better? We know it was impossible to prohibit booze. As Jon Franklin’s states, quite the population was high or addicted- to Heroin, barbiturates, amphetamine, Valium, cocaine.
But it took a while to notice the gravity of the problem. Why? Because “the American middle class was too drunk to worry about what was going on.”
(Stay tuned for some surprising discoveries that convince me that it’s only natural.) 
