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Archive for the ‘Alchohol and Paleo’ Category

A Matter of Life or Myth: The Drunken Monkey (part IV)

Wednesday, November 11th, 2009

The Drunken Monkey

why humans love getting high (Part IV)

by Lorette C. Luzajic

For Part III of The Drunken Monkey, please click here

You may already buy drugs on a regular basis- for your cat. Isn’t it so cute the way some cats go nuts for this green leafy thing? Who among us would say, “Felix, I’ve made you an appointment because I’m worried about your catnip use”? Sure, if Felix pants by the special spot you keep his stash and stops eating or cleaning himself, you may have reason for concern. But chances are, you think it’s sweet and quite healthy the way he licks, paws, and clambers for the weed, then frolics about the house before falling into a dreamy slumber. And yes, it is what it appears to be- your cat is getting high, very high, and then coming down. It is less widely known that cats also enjoy getting high- or low, rather- from the relaxing valerian plant, which humans also use in tea as a relaxant.

The big cats have appetites for much stronger intoxicants. The jaguar seeks out and chews on a poisonous vine, then trips out of his mind. Naysayers say we can’t prove the jaguar is hallucinating, and that he chews the vine simply to purge, much as housecats chew grass in order to barf. But the shamanic tribes of the same Amazon jungles just happen to use that same plant to make ahuasca tea, that brew which sends users flying into alternate worlds for days on end. Some Peruvians say they learned to use the plant FROM observing the jaguar, which is a sacred, totem animal.

This is not farfetched. In Ronald Siegel’s Intoxication, he talks about the probability that coca leaf chewing was a habit South Americans first learned from llamas, whose gnarly temperament became cheerful and energized after chewing on the shrub. Then there’s the old legend about the goats in Africa eating coffee beans. This may well be how humans discovered the wonders of coffee.

Among dozens of other stories, Ronald Siegel talks about lab monkeys who will press a lever thousands of times to make it drop some cocaine once in a while. These monkeys will starve themselves and ignore their young to get at crack. Then there are the reindeer up north that fight over the fly agaric mushrooms that grow each year- those pretty red and white ones that are probably responsible for our conception of fairies and elves.

Birds are stoners, too. Science writer Stefan Anitei recounts in “Animals on Drugs” how Australian red-browed finches enjoy smoking. They are delighted by brush fires, parking themselves nearby and inhaling the fumes. They may get scorched or choked up and fall over, but they’ll get back to their post and continue inhaling. It may be hard to believe, but Anitei tells us that birds have built their own bonfire with twigs and lit it with a match- on their own, having learned the skill- just so they can smoke!

Other birds practice myrmecomany- “ant mania”- allowing themselves to be covered in ants, then doing strange little dances. It was long hypothesized that the ants somehow participated in cleaning the feathers and wings of the bird- but now it’s known that their venom, en masse, treats the bird to a little mind trip. Perhaps the most interesting tidbit in Stefan’s report is that chimpanzees enjoy smoking tobacco so much that they blow smoke rings and take great joy in watching them form.

Then there’s the primate known as slow loris, who enjoys a tipple time to time from the bertam palm, where shot glasses metaphorically grow on trees. The fruits are in a perpetual state of fermentation, nearing four percent alcohol. For this reason, it’s the favourite tree of many, especially the Malaysian tree shrew, to whom we are distantly related. The shrew can drink even us Germans under the table, with barely a wobble.

New Scientist magazine reports some interesting party animals:

Morphine is one of the wonders of the world, a true gift of painkilling when you’re having your leg cut off or your heart cut open. But growing them poppies is quite difficult, what with those wallabies gobbling up the crops and all. Yes, marsupials break into the poppy fields to get more heroin, just like the junkies we dismiss as depraved. “We have a problem with wallabies entering poppy fields, getting as high as a kite and going around in circles,” said Australia’s attorney general in The Mercury paper.

Female macaques love booze so much they’ll take it until they stop ovulating.

Recovering methamphetamine addicts may have the least hope of all addicts, as much of the brain damage is permanent. The only thing that can temporarily haul you out of the pit of despair is the speed, which causes more damage. Given access to meth, mice binge on it, too, and their cravings continue long after they have quit, just like in humans.

South American cocaine growers worry less about the law and more about the Eloria noyesi caterpillar. This caterpillar loves the leaves of the coca plant. When researchers investigated why the silkworm doesn’t bother with blow, sure enough, he is resistant to the drug, while the poor eloria noyesi’s dopamine receptors go off like fireworks, making him eager to partake over and over.

The facts go on forever: sheep and horses favour astragalus, a common weed that makes them run in circles and leap and frolic like ravers on ecstasy. Also known as locoweed, ranchers have a real problem because the stuff grows everywhere, and though once or twice won’t hurt you, a long-term habit does a lot of damage.

The legendary marula fruit tree in Africa draws a veritable Noah’s ark lineup of revelers with its rotting fruit. Most scientists dismiss the idea that the elephants get drunk as folklore, because it would take a lot of marula fruit to inebriate a few tonnes. The story began in the ‘70s with a staged “documentary.” Yet elephants DO love getting drunk, though it’s hard work, and have been known to break into liquor supplies and ransack villages for booze.

The Canadian bighorn mountain sheep has problems of its own. It likes rare yellow lichen that grows sparsely in the Rockies. This mountain moss offers no nutritional value, and it grows in dangerous rocks way up in the mountains. But it messes the sheep right up, and they will clamber to incredibly dangerous locales to get at it. And while that’s all fun and games, it’s not that great when the sheep rubs his teeth against the rock, scraping them pretty much off completely, just to get every last bit of moss. So anyone who has experienced the humiliation of scraping the last traces of whatever it was out of their bag, bowl or pipe, or licking the last of the vodka up from a spill on the table, can rest easy. We’re not alone.

What does all of this mean, then, this secret history of the world, including the natural world?

It means we’ve been barking up the wrong marula fruit tree for too long. Clearly, complete abstinence is an aberration of reality- history is soaked in just as much booze as blood. But obviously addiction and physical damage are also realities, problems we haven’t solved by stuffing our prisons full, by demeaning addicts as defective, weak, nihilistic sinners. Facing the truth is our best bet at finding balance, in becoming responsible about our natural instincts

Life is hard. The gods sent us salves to ease the pain, provide pleasure, relieve boredom, create community, and expand our spirituality. Nature is often brutal, but built into us is a desire that can lead us to relief, however temporary, so that we can catch our second wind and tarry on. What might happen if we look truthfully at history, at the economy, at those we consider to be the lower echelon of the social ladder? What would become of crime, of health, of the mental health care industry, of church, of prisons, if we acknowledged reality for a change? What might happen if we develop a reverent relationship with these primal, built-in needs? I’d love to find out.

Check out Lorette’s wildly popular series, “A Matter of Life or Myth”, here on The Paleo Garden.

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A Matter of Life or Myth: The Drunken Monkey (part III)

Wednesday, November 4th, 2009

The Drunken Monkey

why humans love getting high (Part III)

by Lorette C. Luzajic

For Part II of The Drunken Monkey, please click here

Drug addiction or abuse or even use is considered part of an “unhealthy” mind by most therapists and shrinks. It’s a “deal breaker” for relationship gurus like Dr. Phil. Yet the pursuit of intoxication rules the vast majority of the world, and for those rare animals who don’t drink coffee, take painkillers, drink, smoke, smoke up, snort, pop, puncture, inhale, inject, and so on and so on, abstinence is a harsh mistress. In fact, the “normal” model is not abstinence, but use.

But how does use turn to abuse? Why do so many of us fail at strict regimes of avoiding alcohol, or slip from moderation into persistent drunkenness? Well, it’s obvious: we love the feeling.

It may end bitterly the next day, or later on in our lives, but in the here and now, we love the feeling of two or three or four or five or six glasses of vino, lines of cocaine, cigarettes, cups of coffee. We are wired, according to more and more discoveries about the human mind, to seek out pleasure, a brief distraction from the hell of survival, the stress and sorrow of life.

See, the fact that anthropology and history textbooks skirt over drugs, except to mention that they’re bad, is really a disservice to understanding the world and humankind. Mention of drugs as religious ritual, community binding, medicine, economics, export and import, trade, migration, etc is fleeting or nonexistent, which falsely gives us the idea that drugs are of minor importance.

Yet that’s a fallacy, as any careful analysis of the global economy or religious history would show. Yet hard facts about hard drugs are left out all the time. It’s just a wee bit important, for example, that Hitler was pumping vast quantities of methamphetamine. It doesn’t take much meth to cause paranoid, psychotic breaks with reality. It also creates megalomania and grandiosity, and keeps a user awake and energetic for days or even weeks. Adding this cocktail to a mad maniac with drive and charisma may have been the poisonous icing on the cake.

It’s ridiculous to believe that drugs have been of minimum importance in understanding our world. But does that mean just because “everybody else is doing it” we should do it, too?

Of course not. It’s all fun and games until someone loses a life. Plus, there were a lot of things our ancestors did that we shouldn’t try at home- from bloodletting to cutting our penises in half to sacrificing widows at the husband’s funeral.

That said, we might be sipping wine even as we rail against the crackheads ruining our neighbourhoods. We’re just like the drunken monkeys. We’ll take what’s available, and once we’ve developed a taste for it, we want it to keep on coming, whatever it is. We’ll find it. We’ll get it. Commonly, we’ll steal, rob and kill for it.

But why is it that humans and our ancestors are the only morons who want to cut ten years off of life to live the high life?

The answer is, we’re not. Getting high is not uniquely human. We share the fourth drive with most species. Yes, that’s correct: animals use drugs, and lots of them. Like us, they’ll use anything they can find. They’ll take as much as they can- curiously enough, like us, and they’ll take more in stressful situations. And their favourites are remarkably the same as ours- alcohol, cocaine, morphine.

Ronald Siegel’s Intoxication: the Universal Drive for Mind-Altering Substances argues that the pursuit of inebriation is not cultural, it’s natural. Omni Magazine says that Siegel knows more about drugs than anyone else alive, and indeed, the psychopharmacologist is a guru to the likes of Albert Hoffman, the man who invented LSD. The book is a veritable compendium of facts about the animal world’s pursuit of intoxication, animals from insects to humans. Spanning more than twenty years of lab experiments, field observation, and research, Siegel gathers in one place a cornucopia of information that is known but ignored.

It is unconscionable that the facts never make it to addiction treatment centres or psychiatry schools or therapy offices, where outdated misinformation about “self loathing” or “deal breaking” is still doled out religiously with no basis in fact. The “disease” model of addiction may be more relevant than the nurture people care to admit- but only because it acknowledges the biological. There is nothing sick about the desire for intoxication- it is, as Siegel writes, universal. Just as humans are hardwired for opiates, so are all other creatures.

So if this is all true, why does no one know about it?

They do. It’s just that rewriting history thing again, leaving out important parts we might not want to accept. Like Hitler’s methamphetamine psychosis, or like Aspirin’s dirty little Heroin secret.

Acknowledging the facts means we’ll require a new paradigm for drug laws and for treatment of addiction, and we’ll need to stop pathologizing moderate drug users- they are actually the paragon of truth, as opposed to abstainers or addicts. We would have to stop lumping all drugs together in our dependency literature and acknowledge specific effects, good and bad, of each “poison.” We would have to accept the spiritual connectivity millions have claimed come from drugs. We would have to acknowledge that alcohol, our drug of choice, is indeed a drug, not separate from the illegal ones, but among the most wonderful and dangerous. We would have to identify with the addict, realizing he or she is no different from us, not a victim but not weak, either. It is our poor understanding of our nature that can catch anyone unaware.

It is our all or nothing thinking that makes responsible models of consumption difficult, as we consume either in private, or to show off, both leading to potential danger.

And we would have to accept our disconnect- for the United States, the nation of zero tolerance, the nation that hates drugs more than any other- uses the most.

(Stay tuned for fun facts from the animal kingdom- monkeys on crack?)

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A Matter of Life or Myth: The Drunken Monkey (part II)

Saturday, October 31st, 2009

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.)  

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A Matter of Life or Myth: The Drunken Monkey

Wednesday, October 28th, 2009

The Drunken Monkey

why humans love getting high (Part I)

by Lorette C. Luzajic

Despite the major headway I’ve made these past few years in abolishing so many bad habits, the first thing I did after moving was head down the street to check out the neighbourhood pub.

I reveled in a kitchen much more spacious than in my previous flat, and I wasted no time making a ten-veggie super salad and a maple pecan pork roast. But the cheerful drunken faces laughing and toasting their pints behind the glass beckoned and the first night in my new home I headed over to join them. It was a scene straight out of the always-astute Simpsons: during a cook-off, Homer ingests a chile pepper so hot it bends his mind. And Chief Wiggum whines mournfully, “I want to hallucinate, too!”

What’s the point of avoiding bread if I’m throwing back the beer? Is there any point in cutting out candy and soda if I still drink loads of wine? Yeah, yeah, it’s great that I’ve moved from imbibing the good stuff every day to special occasions only (which inevitably happen about twice a week!) And that’s probably the reason I’m still fat.

I’m not the only one who finds nixing the mind-altering substances the hardest part of healthy living. And for the most part I have nixed them. But if the icons of fitness can’t always resist a drink, how can a weak-willed mortal like me?

Paleo purists who have achieved more success than I have may scoff, but the rest of you know exactly where I’m coming from. And our guru Loren Cordain knows no one will stick with a diet that has absolute no-nos, so we are encouraged to occasionally enjoy a glass of wine with dinner if we must. Still, in The Paleo Diet for Athletes, Dr. Cordain reminds us, “Obviously, alcohol was not part of any hunter-gatherer diet.”

Obviously? Certainly moderation is sound advice, but nonetheless the good doctor is wrong.

Say what? Humans have always been boozehounds. Always. Yes, since the Stone Age, since as far back as we can go and know. In addition to our more primitive ancestors, our first civilizations in Sumer and Egypt both considered alcohol a necessity for everyday living! The Egyptian god Osiris invented beer, and beer was offered to him. Just like we do, the people enjoyed a wide selection of beers and quite a few wines as well. Booze was so important that the dead were buried with it so that they wouldn’t have to teetotal in the next world.

Sumer’s goddess of beer and alcohol was Nankasi, who used honey and dates to sweeten her malt brew. (From here on, there was no shortage of wine deities, reaching from Rome to the remote pantheons of the world.) So it seems that civilization landed in all of its glory with a taste for the sauce already in tact. Winepresses, spirit cellars, and distilleries were magically present at the very dawn, and so perhaps the secrets of turning juice to gold was indeed imparted from the gods.

While civilization meant astonishing leaps forward in creativity, architecture, engineering, medicine, literature and more, it also meant grain and the beginning of degenerative disease.

Perhaps the price of living longer and recording more about ourselves for future generations to know was the deterioration of health. No need to sentimentalize the days of the cave man- death was early and brutal, often from exposure to the elements like cold and the jaws of wild animals. Learning what was safe to eat weeded a great many of us out of the gene pool- today we know the fast-acting poisons thanks to the mistakes of our earlier selves. But the plants of a lesser poison meant degenerative diseases, which anthropologists begin finding as soon as grain agriculture hits our imagination. And those diseases usually don’t accumulate through to death until after the age of reproduction, which means we repopulate before we die. So grains meant extended survival for humans, both in a lifespan and in a cosmic, “go forth and multiply” kind of way. The same poison that ruins our bones and teeth and pancreas slowly meant we could spend that slow death writing, inventing, philosophizing, enacting theatre. Now all grains have naturally evolved poisons- pesticides, actually, and carbohydrates. Humans gravitated instantly to grains- and every other available plant or berry- fermenting or distilling them into a much faster acting poison, one that would marvelously, wonderfully intoxicate it without killing us on that same occasion. Cheers!

The Irish often claim to be the world’s hardest, happiest drinkers. Archaeologists Declan Moore and Billy Quinn confirmed that long before Guinness opened its doors, Ireland had some 4500 breweries during the Bronze Age. There are thousands of fulacht fiadhs, or horseshoe shaped mounds, that mystified experts for centuries. Moore and Quinn date wrote in Archeology Ireland that these pits were in fact microbreweries dating back more than 3500 years, making the first generations in Irish history as beer-loving as all those cute bumper stickers boast.

So the Irish have been brewing and stewing for several thousand years longer than we previously believed. And those first amazing cuneiforms and hieroglyphics tell us that before we could record the story, we already loved boozing it up. Seems the Flintstones loved a bit of firewater just as much as we do.

(Stay tuned for some amazing stories from archeologists about the first party animals, and fascinating facts about our cousins who love to get down, too.)  

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