March 25, 2022 • 26 mins
Why do we use intoxicants?
Whether it’s booze, weed, opiates, or even caffeine, the drive to catch a buzz seems almost universal for members of our species. For big parts of the world, drinking alcohol plays a huge role in our social lives, in religious rituals, and in some eras it was even a prerequisite for civic engagement.
Find out how the phrase “take him down a peg or two” was derived from a drinking game, which animals consume alcohol, and hear from the professor inventing an alcohol substitute.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
All right, we're scrapping the cute stuff and cutting straight
to the chase. I'm Dessa. This is deeply human. Today
we're talking about drugs and we're already like five and
a half seconds in. Let's go hit it, James. Could
we speed it up a little. I've just I've just
(00:20):
got like an insane amount of stuff to get to
in this episode. Great, thank you. Hey, come on, man,
don't speed me. You know that always makes me dizzy,
and you know it, okay. I work as a touring
musician where it's not considered unprofessional to drink on the job.
In fact, taking a slug of whiskey on stage often
(00:40):
elicits a round of applause. This business is full of fascinating,
brilliant weirdos, and intoxicants are easy to get and sometimes
hard to avoid. Alexis Stevenson, an author friend of mine,
once told me I'm not a writer, I just drink
a lot about it, which I immediately cribbed for a
song lyric. Sub instants, use and abuse is sort of
(01:01):
baked into the culture. And that's true at the indie
level and for the A listers. To quote the late
great Robin Williams, cocaine is God's way of saying that
you are making too much money. Even being so surrounded
by it, there is still something that's sort of paradoxical
about drugs to me, not just the many hazards of abuse,
but the very idea of drugs. Isn't every organism supposed
(01:25):
to be out here fighting for survival. Wouldn't getting messed
up slower reflexes and make us worse a hunting or
escaping whoever is hunting us? Why would we choose to
regularly impair ourselves? And even if you don't drink or smoke, odsar,
you probably had the occasional cup of coffee or tea.
Caffeine is the most commonly used psychoactive drug in the world,
(01:46):
So the question of the day why do we use intoxics?
My name was Marikaniac. I am a post doctoral research
or at the University of Salford near Manchester, and I
study primates and how they have adapted to eating different foods.
(02:09):
Primates includes us, right, yes, that's right, we are premates.
It turns out that people primates have a particular genetic
advantage when it comes to digesting alcohol a k A
ethanol Marika says we may have first developed a special
interest for alcohol when we transitioned from being tree dwelling
creatures to a more terrestrial lifestyle. When we started living
(02:29):
on the ground, we were more likely to come across
fallen fruit. When fruit becomes overripe and has a lot
of sugar in it, what tends to happen is that
yeasts get in there, and yeast will start to eat
the sugars, and the end product of that is ethanol,
a substance that smells really strongly, right, so it could
(02:50):
be almost like an advertisement. It's like this this odor plume.
It's like, there's sugar here, Eat me. And we have
a particular genetic advantage that allows us to process that ethanol,
meaning we can potentially eat more energy rich fruit. There's
this mutation that humans have, and what's interesting about this
mutation is that it makes our ethanol metabolism really really efficient,
(03:13):
like forty times more efficient. Early hominids may have been
attracted to boozy stuff because it was a reliable source
of energy. Genetic evidence implies this mutation may have surfaced
ten million years ago, though it could be much longer too,
and it's not only primates who are interested in this fruity,
boozy business. The big story, the most famous story, is
(03:39):
that elephants go for these fermented marilla fruits. And it's
a story that's so widespread, like it's brought up in
these pursures for Safari's. There's a famous liqueur that's made
out of marilla fruits. It's called Amarilla. Amarula is a
lot like Bailey's. I have toured South Africa, I have
headed over ice and it is awesome. I have all
(04:00):
heard the stories of elephants totally lit up on fermented
marula fruit, stumbling around and making a mess of themselves
like a thirty ton bachelor party with tusks. But humans
want to see is that elephants want to become intoxicated.
They want to get not the sugar, but they want
to get the side effects. And it's like this intentionality aspect.
(04:22):
It's really really difficult. But how do you prove that
an animal is trying to get faded and not just
give food. So there's one to study with um something
called an i I. It's a it's a type of
lemur from Meta Gascar. They're they're so cool looking and
they're really cute um that well, it's in the eye
of the beholder. I think I think they're cute. Some
people don't agree. Wait, hold on Google Google search. They
(04:46):
have very large ears, and I don't know good about it.
I don't like that. But they have great tails, save
these grape bushy tails. And they have this amazing middle
finger that's all along and spin delete that they used
to tap on tree trunks with to find hollow parts.
And then when they found a hollow part, they gouge
(05:06):
it and usually there's some kind of big bug or
grub in there that they pull out with their spindle
a finger and then eat. But they don't just eat bugs.
They also eat a lot of nectar. And the nectar
that they consume you can tell there's ethanol in it
just from smelling it. When researchers gave eye eyes the
choice between an alcoholic mixture and just plain water, they
(05:30):
drank twice as much as the booze. And in a
study on elephants and alcohol, researchers allowed them to drink
from a boozy trough then took detailed notes on their behavior.
The things that they wrote down were like swaying and
increased vocalizations and increased aggression, which it's like, are you
looking for those things because that's what humans do? Or
(05:53):
you know, is that really how the intoxication manifests? Why
the animals only have access to alcohol when they come
across naturally fermenting sugars or I guess research teams who
are willing to fill up a trough with booze? But
when did people start making alcohol on purpose? So? I
mean this is when we get into archaeological evidence, which
(06:16):
I think it's amazing. It's just so cool that you
can get residues from things that are thousands of years
old and and find evidence that you know, these were
used ferment beverages. So it goes back like about ten
thousand years that we have evidence of humans intentionally fermenting
foods and beverages. Fermentation practices might go back even further,
(06:39):
but that's hard to prove. Like if a pot was
made of wood, it might not survive millennia to be discovered. Okay,
let's transition now from prehistory to the bleeding edge of
scientific investigation. My name is David Nattimer, a psychiatrist. I'm
(07:08):
a psycho pharmacologist, so I studied effects of drugs on
the nervous system and the psychological consequences of those. David
is an internationally recognized veteran in his field. He spent
ten years advising the British government on how to create
a rational approach to drugs and how to minimize their harms,
and in the UK he's also known for controversy. He
(07:29):
was dismissed from his position after arguing that alcohol was
more harmful than a host of other drugs, and to
illustrate the relative dangers of taking the drug ecstasy, he
noted that it was no more dangerous than horseback riding.
I'd probably given more different classes of drugs to human
beings and possibly anyone ever in the history of the world.
I mean, there's almost no class of drugs that I
(07:51):
haven't studied in humans, and humans use a bunch of drugs.
I mean almost no human doesn't take any doctor, tea, coffee, alcohol, tobacco.
The God's population used and intoxicant or a brain changing
drive for some purpose, generally for benefits. I think, for example,
(08:11):
of the reason you might order a drink on a
first date. Alcohol makes you sociable, and it makes you
convivial and relaxed in companies enough to take away the
natural social anxiety we all have when we're meeting strangers
or go into parties. Stress is part of human and
(08:33):
animal experience. But then there's a second thing, which is novelty.
I mean, the human brain is a is a novelty
seeking or you know, humans fascinated by new things, which
is why we are so successful in the world. Because
we've discovered new things, and we've remembered them, and we've
adapted them and reinforced them. There's something fundamentally appealing and
feeling our consciousness temporarily transformed into something less familiar than
(08:56):
our work day minds. Alcohol has been used in military purposes.
People ink before they fight because the alcohol dampens down
the fair response. The reason alcohol is so popular has
been so popular for so many thousands of years, is
a really good drug and gets in fast and gets
in the brain fast. You know, it's reliable in terms
of what you get. The effect is those related. My
(09:22):
very first taste of alcohol was probably a sip of
a relative's Manhattan cocktail. I was maybe eight. It was gross,
and I drank it anyway as a demonstration of my worldliness,
not too long afterwards, I would have sipped wine from
a heavy metal goblet held by a priest at Catholic mass.
Communal drinking is often a rite of passage socially and
(09:45):
sometimes religiously, And pretty soon I was a sneaky teenager
trying to weasel my way into the liquor cabinet at
my friend Katie's dad's house. We poured a little bit
from every bottle to create a seriously unfortunate slurry that include,
among other things, mid Doory whiskey and Bailey's Irish Cream.
(10:07):
So how does alcohol actually work? What is it doing
to us? David Nutt explains that it affects several pathways
in the brain, and it mimics a particular neurotransmitter called gabba,
and in humans and all out of primate wear, in fact,
pretty much all vertebrates, Gabba calms the brain. Another neurotransmitter
(10:27):
called glutamate has the opposite effect. It revs you up.
And both substances are always at play in your brain,
and it's almost like your your brain is walking the
tight rope. Too much glutamate and you become hyper excited,
and then you end up getting anxious or having a seizure,
and so gather protects you against that. But too much
(10:49):
gabba you fall asleep and then you get eaten with
a tiger. So you've got to get the balance right.
When people drink, it's like they're putting a thumb on
the scale, suppressing anxiety by blunt chemical force. But of
course there are diminishing returns. To share a little poem
from the writer and Total Boss Dorothy Parker, I like
(11:11):
to have a martini to at the very most, after three,
I'm under the table. After four, I'm under my host.
Alcohol impairs judgment and cognition, and it can have life
destroying chronic consequences, disease and addiction among them. To quote F.
Scott Fitzgerald, First you take a drink, then the drink
(11:33):
takes a drink, Then the drink takes you. Our psycho pharmacologist,
David Nutt has been in the field of substance abuse
for almost forty years. I'll give you an example. One
of the recent patients of mine and his life was
to get up in the morning and he'd get a
bus up the road to the supermarket. He'd buy two
(11:54):
liters of strong cider, which is about two weeks worth
of alcohol and the just sit there all day and
drawing that, and he was destroying himself. And that's really
quite common people drinking alone and or they're using alcohol
then as an anesthetic to deaden the pain of their
lives rather than getting any benefit from it. People suffering
from addiction using toxic ins because it feels like they
(12:16):
have to. Some people cite the dangers of booze in
an argument for abstinence, but David is working on inventing
a new drug, an alternative to alcohol. Alcohol works on
multiple neurotransmitter systems. It's also a poison, you know. It
damages your deliver in your heart and your blovelesss. Accential
(12:38):
alcohol is like playing a piano with boxing glob zone.
David has a lab team working to design a chemical
substance that can imitate the gabba effective alcohol without wreaking
as much havoc on the rest of the system, like
a proper piodist that plays the song and then goes home.
It's not done yet, but in the meantime he's created
(13:01):
and bottled a prototype that can be concocted from herbs
already on the market as food stuffs. I met him
in a corner bar in West London to try something.
This is a botanical spirit that it's called Centia, and
it's made of herbs and a combination that will give
you an effect like a low dose of alcohol, like
(13:24):
maybe a glass of wine, without having anything like as
much impact on the rest of your body. Cheers, cheers.
The very first thing you notice about Sentia is the color.
It's a burgundy that very much appealed to the vestigial
Goth teenager in me. And it's a water based drink,
but to create some of that like alcohol heat on
(13:44):
the exhale. It has a little bit of pepper in
it Christmas ee, you know, has that sort of clothy
aspects of it. And then in a few moments, I
hope you'll feel that is beginning to have the other
effects of our not just the mouth effects, but also
the brain effect. I admit that I didn't really feel
a buzz after drinking Centia. I didn't go in very
(14:07):
hard though, because I was afraid to muck up my
interview with this very accomplished science guy. David hopes the
one his new compound hits the market, it might shake
up our whole drinking culture, which is a tall order
because that well runs really deep. We just so happened
to have a cultural historian at this little mixer to
tell us all about it. Angela McShane researches the history
(14:30):
of intoxicans and she has some insight on why we
use them and how they fit into our culture at large.
She recently curated an exhibit on drinking vessels at the
Victoria and Albert Museum from tusday to welcome h VNA
in London. The v N A, if you haven't had
a chance to visit, feels palatial, marble staircases, super high
(14:50):
ceilings and display cases that are the cleanest glass I
have ever seen. And I know glasses clear, but this
was like clearer on the air around it. It's just
it's just really so clean. Angela's display features rows of
drinking vessels from heavy metal chalices too delicate Venetian glass.
(15:11):
The idea of the drink display was here was much
more about what are the concepts behind drink in particular,
how did it connect sit with the society. Why did
people feel the need to drink, Why did they often
feel the need to drink too much? For tracks of
our history, drinking was not an off hour's indulgence. It
was a pre wreck for civic engagement. One of the
(15:33):
things about the putting this story is the objects together
was to indicate that drink was at the heart of
every part of the state. If you're going to demonstrate
your loyalty to your lord, whether that's an empress or
whether that's your landlord, the chances are you're going to
need to have a drink with them to prove that.
If you're going to go to church, then you're going
(15:55):
to drink quine. There's also a lying history of competitive
social drinking. Way before a beer pong, people were egging
each other on and ribbing one another, and real invested
in making sure everyone was keeping pace with one another.
There's a phrase called taking somebody down a peg or two.
It's actually a peg peg tankards. I didn't know the
(16:16):
word tankred before kicking it with Angela at the museum.
So if it's a new term to you, imagine like um,
like a heavy beer mug, but made out of metal
and with a hinged lid on top. When you open it,
what you can see inside is little pegs, light little
pins in the tankard down where the handle is, and
(16:37):
these mark off different measures of drink. And that's because
all of these objects are intended for sharing. And the
idea is that you measure off one peg, two pegs,
and you've agreed with the people that are drinking with
you how many pegs are going to drink. And often
it can turn into a competition, of course, because they
all say, let's see you drink three pegs in one go,
(16:59):
let's see drunk. So so then it becomes a game.
And so to take somebody down a peg or two
is literally to take them down the pegs in the tankerd.
This emphasis on drinking together and ensuring that everyone drinks
their share goes back thousands of years. The phrase in
(17:20):
Vino veritas is often credited to Plenty the Elder, a
Roman statesman, and it's quoted by Plato in his text Symposium.
You may have heard it translated to means something like
in wine there is truth. But what it means is
when you read it within the context of his book
The Symposium, that because people will say things they wouldn't
(17:42):
have said if they weren't drunk, everybody has to be
drunk together. And what happens in the room stays in
the room. Obviously, many people choose not to drink for
personal reasons, health concerns, or to abide by the mandates
of their faith. Alcohol, for example, is forbidden in Islam. Okay,
(18:05):
So in present day Iran, what is the what is
the legal position on intoxican irnly is quite easy. Everything
is illegal, even beyond intoxication. You know, your sexual relationship
before marriage are illegal. So every and everything you can
think about that is you know, you know, even fouly
cool it's is illegal. So I'm Mazzi Mazzi for Friends
(18:31):
and Enemies. I am an academic at the University of Exeter,
and I've been working on things related to how people
intoxicate themselves and why they do so in in the
Middleast in particular. Mazzi grew up in Iran, then moved
to Italy, but has returned to Iran for research trips.
He stresses that the laws on the books aren't the
(18:52):
laws on the boulevard. Total prohibition is not the reality
of life in Iran life under the law. It's it's
far ambiguous and ambivalent. Because everything is prohibited in a way,
everything is also allowed. So people really kind of do
all sorts of stuff. I mean, I've done things that
I wouldn't do elsewhere. It's easier to order, you know,
(19:17):
a little bag of math or any other drugs in
Tehran than toward the pizza, and pizza is pretty easy
to order. The total ban on drugs and the serious
consequences for getting caught change the social aspect of consuming drugs. Drinkers,
for example, can't simply lounge and linger in a bar,
(19:41):
and they're more likely to drink spirits than beer or
wine because more potent drinks are easier to transport and
self for profit. The first twenty minutes of a drinking
session are very different from whatever else you've seen elsewhere.
So there is a person who is in charge of
pouring whatever alcoholic drink is available. They call him soggy
(20:06):
or you know, men or women could be so there
is also the name for dealer, by the way, and
he pours the drink for everyone, making sure that everyone drinks,
and people tend to drink in the good not spping
you know, Russian way, but jams. Everyone's drunk. Usually, prohibition
(20:27):
laws are so commonly broken by so many people that
it would be outlandish for authorities to even try to
penalize everyone who did so. The law enforcement do what
they do basically everywhere. They can choose when they need
to intervene, but Mazzi says they often do so with
an ulterior motive. In Iran and around the world, drug
(20:50):
violations provide the state with a pretext to intervene in
the lives of people who have been flagged as risky
or problematic for other reasons. Consider, for example, the seventeenth
century Ottoman crackdown on coffee houses. Coffee was an exotic
substance when it arrived, you know, in the Ottoman Empire.
The whole culture of coffee drinking started around this new substance,
(21:15):
you know. And because they were also displaces, the coffee houses,
where people would meet and you know, discuss, there were
places which were seen as you know, definitely not conventional,
but also potentially dangerous in political terms, according to Mazi
and many of his colleagues. You know, in academia, you
would struggle to find anyone who supports prohibition because you know,
(21:37):
if you study drugs and addiction, there is no way
you can say that the current regime of drug prohibition works.
Your voice changes when you talk about prohibition like you
just sound hell a board. Is it just because it's
just an abject failure and there's nothing interesting to say
about it. Yeah, And so it's funny that he says,
(21:59):
so prohibition has been a total failure in Iran elsewhere,
you know, equally As a really little kid, I remember
seeing a public service announcement on TV, a warning about
the grave dangers of marijuana, which was prohibited then across
the US. I ran from the living room television set
(22:22):
to the kitchen and then back again, and found my
fears confirmed the glass object on the kitchen shelf was
in fact a bomb, which meant that one or maybe
both of my parents was a drug user. I ended
up in tears on my dad's lap. He admitted the
bomb was his and tried to soothe me with a
hug and some patient words. He asked if I thought
(22:44):
of him differently, and I told him yes, according to
the after school TV programming, he was a moral hazard
and a total deviant. But being my dad, he also
made the rules about bedtime and dinner menus, so I
didn't really have a light to stand on. Prohibition might
not be too effective, but it does say something about
(23:05):
the intensity of our motivation to use intoxicans. People around
the world are willing to risk serious consequences to get
drunk or high. Even if how we use them looks different.
It seems like we've got a really strong universal why,
and those drives are varied. When you're living Iran, a
lot of people have the feeling that they are basically
(23:26):
living in isolation from everything for everything that is happening
in the world, and that's interesting, you know, they feel
that they're losing out, and so drugs in a way
project you in a dimension which is still yours, you
know if they don't, and the dimension of your everyday life.
But you're connected, like the people are being high in California,
(23:48):
you're being high in Tehran. It's a mimicking act. We
use drugs to feel connected to each other. From communion
cup to keg stand. We all do use drugs. We
do because fundamentally we try to feel better in the world.
Some of them are legal, some of them are illegal.
(24:11):
Some of them are prescribed by you know, our pharmacists,
and some you know that may be prescribed by our dealers.
We use intoxicans to blunt our anxieties to demonstrate our allegiances.
We use them as part of our ceremonies and to
compete and connect with one another. And of course the
particular intoxicans we choose can also send messages about how
(24:32):
we'd like to be perceived. Like if a woman walks
into a bar and shoots a double shot of tequila,
that just reads differently than if she asks for a
glass of rose or a corps like tall Boy champagne
is for celebrating Long Island ice teaser for utility. Some
Irish whiskeys are shunned by Catholics and some shunned by Protestants.
(24:54):
Smoking a Virginia Slim isn't the same thing as smoking
a Marlborough Red or a Cuban cigar, And our appetite
for intoxicants is intense. Listener, I don't relish relaying this
part of the story, but that slurry of Katie's dad's booze,
it curdled like maybe a product of mixing red wine
(25:16):
and dairy, and it had to be strained through a
sock before drinking. That is so gross, That is so embarrassing.
But I remember that teenage drive to feel different, that novelty, seeking, thrill, hungry,
urge to change the settings in my head. Intoxicants might
(25:37):
not help us hunt or escape being hunted, but the
desire for them is deeply human. I don't usually do that,
and like say the name of the show as a
style thing, but that's like just this one time. I'm
just asking for a past point. Whatever is in your cup, tea, coffee,
tava or water from the tap. I am lifting a
(25:59):
glass in your general direction in this recording studio. Have fun,
be careful, and I'll see you next question. Deeply Human
is a BBC World Service and American Public Media co
production with I Heart Media, and it's hosted by Meek Dessa.
Find me online at Dessa on Instagram and Dessa Darling
(26:21):
on Twitter. In Western convention, monogamy is baked into the
mainstream concept of love and romance. You meet, you catch feelings,
you share a plate of pasta and discovery, you're eating
the same noodle, you commit and you've stopped seeing other
people next time. On Deeply Human, we're asking why are
(26:44):
you supposed to love only one person at a time.
All right, we're scrapping the cute stuff and cutting straight
to the chase. I'm Dessa. This is deeply human. Today
we're talking about drugs and we're already like five and
a half seconds in. Let's go hit it, James. Could
we speed it up a little. I've just I've just
(00:20):
got like an insane amount of stuff to get to
in this episode. Great, thank you. Hey, come on, man,
don't speed me. You know that always makes me dizzy,
and you know it, okay. I work as a touring
musician where it's not considered unprofessional to drink on the job.
In fact, taking a slug of whiskey on stage often
(00:40):
elicits a round of applause. This business is full of fascinating,
brilliant weirdos, and intoxicants are easy to get and sometimes
hard to avoid. Alexis Stevenson, an author friend of mine,
once told me I'm not a writer, I just drink
a lot about it, which I immediately cribbed for a
song lyric. Sub instants, use and abuse is sort of
(01:01):
baked into the culture. And that's true at the indie
level and for the A listers. To quote the late
great Robin Williams, cocaine is God's way of saying that
you are making too much money. Even being so surrounded
by it, there is still something that's sort of paradoxical
about drugs to me, not just the many hazards of abuse,
but the very idea of drugs. Isn't every organism supposed
(01:25):
to be out here fighting for survival. Wouldn't getting messed
up slower reflexes and make us worse a hunting or
escaping whoever is hunting us? Why would we choose to
regularly impair ourselves? And even if you don't drink or smoke, odsar,
you probably had the occasional cup of coffee or tea.
Caffeine is the most commonly used psychoactive drug in the world,
(01:46):
So the question of the day why do we use intoxics?
My name was Marikaniac. I am a post doctoral research
or at the University of Salford near Manchester, and I
study primates and how they have adapted to eating different foods.
(02:09):
Primates includes us, right, yes, that's right, we are premates.
It turns out that people primates have a particular genetic
advantage when it comes to digesting alcohol a k A
ethanol Marika says we may have first developed a special
interest for alcohol when we transitioned from being tree dwelling
creatures to a more terrestrial lifestyle. When we started living
(02:29):
on the ground, we were more likely to come across
fallen fruit. When fruit becomes overripe and has a lot
of sugar in it, what tends to happen is that
yeasts get in there, and yeast will start to eat
the sugars, and the end product of that is ethanol,
a substance that smells really strongly, right, so it could
(02:50):
be almost like an advertisement. It's like this this odor plume.
It's like, there's sugar here, Eat me. And we have
a particular genetic advantage that allows us to process that ethanol,
meaning we can potentially eat more energy rich fruit. There's
this mutation that humans have, and what's interesting about this
mutation is that it makes our ethanol metabolism really really efficient,
(03:13):
like forty times more efficient. Early hominids may have been
attracted to boozy stuff because it was a reliable source
of energy. Genetic evidence implies this mutation may have surfaced
ten million years ago, though it could be much longer too,
and it's not only primates who are interested in this fruity,
boozy business. The big story, the most famous story, is
(03:39):
that elephants go for these fermented marilla fruits. And it's
a story that's so widespread, like it's brought up in
these pursures for Safari's. There's a famous liqueur that's made
out of marilla fruits. It's called Amarilla. Amarula is a
lot like Bailey's. I have toured South Africa, I have
headed over ice and it is awesome. I have all
(04:00):
heard the stories of elephants totally lit up on fermented
marula fruit, stumbling around and making a mess of themselves
like a thirty ton bachelor party with tusks. But humans
want to see is that elephants want to become intoxicated.
They want to get not the sugar, but they want
to get the side effects. And it's like this intentionality aspect.
(04:22):
It's really really difficult. But how do you prove that
an animal is trying to get faded and not just
give food. So there's one to study with um something
called an i I. It's a it's a type of
lemur from Meta Gascar. They're they're so cool looking and
they're really cute um that well, it's in the eye
of the beholder. I think I think they're cute. Some
people don't agree. Wait, hold on Google Google search. They
(04:46):
have very large ears, and I don't know good about it.
I don't like that. But they have great tails, save
these grape bushy tails. And they have this amazing middle
finger that's all along and spin delete that they used
to tap on tree trunks with to find hollow parts.
And then when they found a hollow part, they gouge
(05:06):
it and usually there's some kind of big bug or
grub in there that they pull out with their spindle
a finger and then eat. But they don't just eat bugs.
They also eat a lot of nectar. And the nectar
that they consume you can tell there's ethanol in it
just from smelling it. When researchers gave eye eyes the
choice between an alcoholic mixture and just plain water, they
(05:30):
drank twice as much as the booze. And in a
study on elephants and alcohol, researchers allowed them to drink
from a boozy trough then took detailed notes on their behavior.
The things that they wrote down were like swaying and
increased vocalizations and increased aggression, which it's like, are you
looking for those things because that's what humans do? Or
(05:53):
you know, is that really how the intoxication manifests? Why
the animals only have access to alcohol when they come
across naturally fermenting sugars or I guess research teams who
are willing to fill up a trough with booze? But
when did people start making alcohol on purpose? So? I
mean this is when we get into archaeological evidence, which
(06:16):
I think it's amazing. It's just so cool that you
can get residues from things that are thousands of years
old and and find evidence that you know, these were
used ferment beverages. So it goes back like about ten
thousand years that we have evidence of humans intentionally fermenting
foods and beverages. Fermentation practices might go back even further,
(06:39):
but that's hard to prove. Like if a pot was
made of wood, it might not survive millennia to be discovered. Okay,
let's transition now from prehistory to the bleeding edge of
scientific investigation. My name is David Nattimer, a psychiatrist. I'm
(07:08):
a psycho pharmacologist, so I studied effects of drugs on
the nervous system and the psychological consequences of those. David
is an internationally recognized veteran in his field. He spent
ten years advising the British government on how to create
a rational approach to drugs and how to minimize their harms,
and in the UK he's also known for controversy. He
(07:29):
was dismissed from his position after arguing that alcohol was
more harmful than a host of other drugs, and to
illustrate the relative dangers of taking the drug ecstasy, he
noted that it was no more dangerous than horseback riding.
I'd probably given more different classes of drugs to human
beings and possibly anyone ever in the history of the world.
I mean, there's almost no class of drugs that I
(07:51):
haven't studied in humans, and humans use a bunch of drugs.
I mean almost no human doesn't take any doctor, tea, coffee, alcohol, tobacco.
The God's population used and intoxicant or a brain changing
drive for some purpose, generally for benefits. I think, for example,
(08:11):
of the reason you might order a drink on a
first date. Alcohol makes you sociable, and it makes you
convivial and relaxed in companies enough to take away the
natural social anxiety we all have when we're meeting strangers
or go into parties. Stress is part of human and
(08:33):
animal experience. But then there's a second thing, which is novelty.
I mean, the human brain is a is a novelty
seeking or you know, humans fascinated by new things, which
is why we are so successful in the world. Because
we've discovered new things, and we've remembered them, and we've
adapted them and reinforced them. There's something fundamentally appealing and
feeling our consciousness temporarily transformed into something less familiar than
(08:56):
our work day minds. Alcohol has been used in military purposes.
People ink before they fight because the alcohol dampens down
the fair response. The reason alcohol is so popular has
been so popular for so many thousands of years, is
a really good drug and gets in fast and gets
in the brain fast. You know, it's reliable in terms
of what you get. The effect is those related. My
(09:22):
very first taste of alcohol was probably a sip of
a relative's Manhattan cocktail. I was maybe eight. It was gross,
and I drank it anyway as a demonstration of my worldliness,
not too long afterwards, I would have sipped wine from
a heavy metal goblet held by a priest at Catholic mass.
Communal drinking is often a rite of passage socially and
(09:45):
sometimes religiously, And pretty soon I was a sneaky teenager
trying to weasel my way into the liquor cabinet at
my friend Katie's dad's house. We poured a little bit
from every bottle to create a seriously unfortunate slurry that include,
among other things, mid Doory whiskey and Bailey's Irish Cream.
(10:07):
So how does alcohol actually work? What is it doing
to us? David Nutt explains that it affects several pathways
in the brain, and it mimics a particular neurotransmitter called gabba,
and in humans and all out of primate wear, in fact,
pretty much all vertebrates, Gabba calms the brain. Another neurotransmitter
(10:27):
called glutamate has the opposite effect. It revs you up.
And both substances are always at play in your brain,
and it's almost like your your brain is walking the
tight rope. Too much glutamate and you become hyper excited,
and then you end up getting anxious or having a seizure,
and so gather protects you against that. But too much
(10:49):
gabba you fall asleep and then you get eaten with
a tiger. So you've got to get the balance right.
When people drink, it's like they're putting a thumb on
the scale, suppressing anxiety by blunt chemical force. But of
course there are diminishing returns. To share a little poem
from the writer and Total Boss Dorothy Parker, I like
(11:11):
to have a martini to at the very most, after three,
I'm under the table. After four, I'm under my host.
Alcohol impairs judgment and cognition, and it can have life
destroying chronic consequences, disease and addiction among them. To quote F.
Scott Fitzgerald, First you take a drink, then the drink
(11:33):
takes a drink, Then the drink takes you. Our psycho pharmacologist,
David Nutt has been in the field of substance abuse
for almost forty years. I'll give you an example. One
of the recent patients of mine and his life was
to get up in the morning and he'd get a
bus up the road to the supermarket. He'd buy two
(11:54):
liters of strong cider, which is about two weeks worth
of alcohol and the just sit there all day and
drawing that, and he was destroying himself. And that's really
quite common people drinking alone and or they're using alcohol
then as an anesthetic to deaden the pain of their
lives rather than getting any benefit from it. People suffering
from addiction using toxic ins because it feels like they
(12:16):
have to. Some people cite the dangers of booze in
an argument for abstinence, but David is working on inventing
a new drug, an alternative to alcohol. Alcohol works on
multiple neurotransmitter systems. It's also a poison, you know. It
damages your deliver in your heart and your blovelesss. Accential
(12:38):
alcohol is like playing a piano with boxing glob zone.
David has a lab team working to design a chemical
substance that can imitate the gabba effective alcohol without wreaking
as much havoc on the rest of the system, like
a proper piodist that plays the song and then goes home.
It's not done yet, but in the meantime he's created
(13:01):
and bottled a prototype that can be concocted from herbs
already on the market as food stuffs. I met him
in a corner bar in West London to try something.
This is a botanical spirit that it's called Centia, and
it's made of herbs and a combination that will give
you an effect like a low dose of alcohol, like
(13:24):
maybe a glass of wine, without having anything like as
much impact on the rest of your body. Cheers, cheers.
The very first thing you notice about Sentia is the color.
It's a burgundy that very much appealed to the vestigial
Goth teenager in me. And it's a water based drink,
but to create some of that like alcohol heat on
(13:44):
the exhale. It has a little bit of pepper in
it Christmas ee, you know, has that sort of clothy
aspects of it. And then in a few moments, I
hope you'll feel that is beginning to have the other
effects of our not just the mouth effects, but also
the brain effect. I admit that I didn't really feel
a buzz after drinking Centia. I didn't go in very
(14:07):
hard though, because I was afraid to muck up my
interview with this very accomplished science guy. David hopes the
one his new compound hits the market, it might shake
up our whole drinking culture, which is a tall order
because that well runs really deep. We just so happened
to have a cultural historian at this little mixer to
tell us all about it. Angela McShane researches the history
(14:30):
of intoxicans and she has some insight on why we
use them and how they fit into our culture at large.
She recently curated an exhibit on drinking vessels at the
Victoria and Albert Museum from tusday to welcome h VNA
in London. The v N A, if you haven't had
a chance to visit, feels palatial, marble staircases, super high
(14:50):
ceilings and display cases that are the cleanest glass I
have ever seen. And I know glasses clear, but this
was like clearer on the air around it. It's just
it's just really so clean. Angela's display features rows of
drinking vessels from heavy metal chalices too delicate Venetian glass.
(15:11):
The idea of the drink display was here was much
more about what are the concepts behind drink in particular,
how did it connect sit with the society. Why did
people feel the need to drink, Why did they often
feel the need to drink too much? For tracks of
our history, drinking was not an off hour's indulgence. It
was a pre wreck for civic engagement. One of the
(15:33):
things about the putting this story is the objects together
was to indicate that drink was at the heart of
every part of the state. If you're going to demonstrate
your loyalty to your lord, whether that's an empress or
whether that's your landlord, the chances are you're going to
need to have a drink with them to prove that.
If you're going to go to church, then you're going
(15:55):
to drink quine. There's also a lying history of competitive
social drinking. Way before a beer pong, people were egging
each other on and ribbing one another, and real invested
in making sure everyone was keeping pace with one another.
There's a phrase called taking somebody down a peg or two.
It's actually a peg peg tankards. I didn't know the
(16:16):
word tankred before kicking it with Angela at the museum.
So if it's a new term to you, imagine like um,
like a heavy beer mug, but made out of metal
and with a hinged lid on top. When you open it,
what you can see inside is little pegs, light little
pins in the tankard down where the handle is, and
(16:37):
these mark off different measures of drink. And that's because
all of these objects are intended for sharing. And the
idea is that you measure off one peg, two pegs,
and you've agreed with the people that are drinking with
you how many pegs are going to drink. And often
it can turn into a competition, of course, because they
all say, let's see you drink three pegs in one go,
(16:59):
let's see drunk. So so then it becomes a game.
And so to take somebody down a peg or two
is literally to take them down the pegs in the tankerd.
This emphasis on drinking together and ensuring that everyone drinks
their share goes back thousands of years. The phrase in
(17:20):
Vino veritas is often credited to Plenty the Elder, a
Roman statesman, and it's quoted by Plato in his text Symposium.
You may have heard it translated to means something like
in wine there is truth. But what it means is
when you read it within the context of his book
The Symposium, that because people will say things they wouldn't
(17:42):
have said if they weren't drunk, everybody has to be
drunk together. And what happens in the room stays in
the room. Obviously, many people choose not to drink for
personal reasons, health concerns, or to abide by the mandates
of their faith. Alcohol, for example, is forbidden in Islam. Okay,
(18:05):
So in present day Iran, what is the what is
the legal position on intoxican irnly is quite easy. Everything
is illegal, even beyond intoxication. You know, your sexual relationship
before marriage are illegal. So every and everything you can
think about that is you know, you know, even fouly
cool it's is illegal. So I'm Mazzi Mazzi for Friends
(18:31):
and Enemies. I am an academic at the University of Exeter,
and I've been working on things related to how people
intoxicate themselves and why they do so in in the
Middleast in particular. Mazzi grew up in Iran, then moved
to Italy, but has returned to Iran for research trips.
He stresses that the laws on the books aren't the
(18:52):
laws on the boulevard. Total prohibition is not the reality
of life in Iran life under the law. It's it's
far ambiguous and ambivalent. Because everything is prohibited in a way,
everything is also allowed. So people really kind of do
all sorts of stuff. I mean, I've done things that
I wouldn't do elsewhere. It's easier to order, you know,
(19:17):
a little bag of math or any other drugs in
Tehran than toward the pizza, and pizza is pretty easy
to order. The total ban on drugs and the serious
consequences for getting caught change the social aspect of consuming drugs. Drinkers,
for example, can't simply lounge and linger in a bar,
(19:41):
and they're more likely to drink spirits than beer or
wine because more potent drinks are easier to transport and
self for profit. The first twenty minutes of a drinking
session are very different from whatever else you've seen elsewhere.
So there is a person who is in charge of
pouring whatever alcoholic drink is available. They call him soggy
(20:06):
or you know, men or women could be so there
is also the name for dealer, by the way, and
he pours the drink for everyone, making sure that everyone drinks,
and people tend to drink in the good not spping
you know, Russian way, but jams. Everyone's drunk. Usually, prohibition
(20:27):
laws are so commonly broken by so many people that
it would be outlandish for authorities to even try to
penalize everyone who did so. The law enforcement do what
they do basically everywhere. They can choose when they need
to intervene, but Mazzi says they often do so with
an ulterior motive. In Iran and around the world, drug
(20:50):
violations provide the state with a pretext to intervene in
the lives of people who have been flagged as risky
or problematic for other reasons. Consider, for example, the seventeenth
century Ottoman crackdown on coffee houses. Coffee was an exotic
substance when it arrived, you know, in the Ottoman Empire.
The whole culture of coffee drinking started around this new substance,
(21:15):
you know. And because they were also displaces, the coffee houses,
where people would meet and you know, discuss, there were
places which were seen as you know, definitely not conventional,
but also potentially dangerous in political terms, according to Mazi
and many of his colleagues. You know, in academia, you
would struggle to find anyone who supports prohibition because you know,
(21:37):
if you study drugs and addiction, there is no way
you can say that the current regime of drug prohibition works.
Your voice changes when you talk about prohibition like you
just sound hell a board. Is it just because it's
just an abject failure and there's nothing interesting to say
about it. Yeah, And so it's funny that he says,
(21:59):
so prohibition has been a total failure in Iran elsewhere,
you know, equally As a really little kid, I remember
seeing a public service announcement on TV, a warning about
the grave dangers of marijuana, which was prohibited then across
the US. I ran from the living room television set
(22:22):
to the kitchen and then back again, and found my
fears confirmed the glass object on the kitchen shelf was
in fact a bomb, which meant that one or maybe
both of my parents was a drug user. I ended
up in tears on my dad's lap. He admitted the
bomb was his and tried to soothe me with a
hug and some patient words. He asked if I thought
(22:44):
of him differently, and I told him yes, according to
the after school TV programming, he was a moral hazard
and a total deviant. But being my dad, he also
made the rules about bedtime and dinner menus, so I
didn't really have a light to stand on. Prohibition might
not be too effective, but it does say something about
(23:05):
the intensity of our motivation to use intoxicans. People around
the world are willing to risk serious consequences to get
drunk or high. Even if how we use them looks different.
It seems like we've got a really strong universal why,
and those drives are varied. When you're living Iran, a
lot of people have the feeling that they are basically
(23:26):
living in isolation from everything for everything that is happening
in the world, and that's interesting, you know, they feel
that they're losing out, and so drugs in a way
project you in a dimension which is still yours, you
know if they don't, and the dimension of your everyday life.
But you're connected, like the people are being high in California,
(23:48):
you're being high in Tehran. It's a mimicking act. We
use drugs to feel connected to each other. From communion
cup to keg stand. We all do use drugs. We
do because fundamentally we try to feel better in the world.
Some of them are legal, some of them are illegal.
(24:11):
Some of them are prescribed by you know, our pharmacists,
and some you know that may be prescribed by our dealers.
We use intoxicans to blunt our anxieties to demonstrate our allegiances.
We use them as part of our ceremonies and to
compete and connect with one another. And of course the
particular intoxicans we choose can also send messages about how
(24:32):
we'd like to be perceived. Like if a woman walks
into a bar and shoots a double shot of tequila,
that just reads differently than if she asks for a
glass of rose or a corps like tall Boy champagne
is for celebrating Long Island ice teaser for utility. Some
Irish whiskeys are shunned by Catholics and some shunned by Protestants.
(24:54):
Smoking a Virginia Slim isn't the same thing as smoking
a Marlborough Red or a Cuban cigar, And our appetite
for intoxicants is intense. Listener, I don't relish relaying this
part of the story, but that slurry of Katie's dad's booze,
it curdled like maybe a product of mixing red wine
(25:16):
and dairy, and it had to be strained through a
sock before drinking. That is so gross, That is so embarrassing.
But I remember that teenage drive to feel different, that novelty, seeking, thrill, hungry,
urge to change the settings in my head. Intoxicants might
(25:37):
not help us hunt or escape being hunted, but the
desire for them is deeply human. I don't usually do that,
and like say the name of the show as a
style thing, but that's like just this one time. I'm
just asking for a past point. Whatever is in your cup, tea, coffee,
tava or water from the tap. I am lifting a
(25:59):
glass in your general direction in this recording studio. Have fun,
be careful, and I'll see you next question. Deeply Human
is a BBC World Service and American Public Media co
production with I Heart Media, and it's hosted by Meek Dessa.
Find me online at Dessa on Instagram and Dessa Darling
(26:21):
on Twitter. In Western convention, monogamy is baked into the
mainstream concept of love and romance. You meet, you catch feelings,
you share a plate of pasta and discovery, you're eating
the same noodle, you commit and you've stopped seeing other
people next time. On Deeply Human, we're asking why are
(26:44):
you supposed to love only one person at a time.
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