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
(00:03):
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
got like an insane amount of stuff to get to
in this episode. Great, thank you. Hey, come on, man,
(00:26):
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
elicits a round of applause. This business is full of fascinating,
brilliant weirdos, and intoxicants are easy to get and sometimes
(00:48):
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 stant's use and abuse is sort of
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
(01:11):
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
to be out here fighting for survival. Wouldn't getting messed
up slower reflexes and make us worse at hunting or
escaping whoever is hunting us? Why would we choose to
(01:34):
regularly impair ourselves? And even if you don't drink or smoke,
odds are you probably had the occasional cup of coffee
or tea. Caffeine is the most commonly used psychoactive drug
in the world, So the question of the day, why
do we use intoxics? My name is I am a
(01:58):
post doctoral research or at the University of Salford near Manchester,
and I study primates and how they have adapted to
eating different foods. Primates includes us, right, yes, that's right,
we are primates. 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
(02:21):
developed a special interest for alcohol when we transitioned from
being tree dwelling creatures to a more terrestrial lifestyle. When
we started living 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
(02:44):
that is ethanol, a substance that smells really strongly, right,
so it could 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
(03:07):
what's interesting about this mutation is that it makes our
ethanol metabolism really really efficient, 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
(03:29):
primates who are interested in this fruity, boozy business. The
big story, the most famous story, is that elephants go
for these fermented marilla fruits. And it's a story that's
so widespread, like it's brought up in these psures for Safari's.
So there's a famous liqueur that's made out of marilla fruits.
(03:52):
It's called Amula. Amarula is a lot like Bailey's. I
have toured South Africa, I have headed over ice and
it is awesome. I have all 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
(04:16):
not the sugar, but they want to get the side effects.
And it's like this intentionality aspect. 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 II. It's
a it's a type of lemur from Madagascar. They're they're
so cool looking and they're really cute. Um that well,
(04:38):
it's in the eye to beholder. I think I think
they're cute. Some people don't agree. Wait, hold on google,
Google search. They 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
(05:00):
delete that they used to tap on tree trunks with
to find hollow parts. And then when they found a
hollow part, they gouge 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
(05:21):
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 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
(05:42):
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 you know, is that really
how the intoxication manifests while the animals only have access
to alcohol when they come across naturally fermenting sugars or
(06:05):
I guess research teams we 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 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
(06:28):
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, 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
(07:05):
name is David Natheimer, a psychiatrist and 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
(07:26):
the UK he's also known for controversy. He 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,
(07:47):
there's almost no class of drugs that I haven't studied
in humans, and humans use a branch of drugs. I
mean almost no human doesn't take any doctor, tea, coffee, alcohol, tobacco.
The world'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 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 animal experience.
(08:34):
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 our work
(08:56):
day minds. Alcohol has been used in military purposes people
before they fight, because the alcohol damnfroms down the favorite bonse.
The reason alcohol is a popular has been so popular
for so many thousands of years is a really good drug.
It gets in fast and gets in the brain fast.
You know, it's reliable in terms of what you get.
(09:16):
The effect is those related. My 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
(09:39):
metal goblet held by a priest at Catholic mass. Communal
drinking is often a rite of passage socially and 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
(10:00):
other things, mid Doory whiskey and Bailey's Irish Cream. 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 wearing fact, pretty much
(10:22):
all vertebrates, gabba calms the brain. Another neurotransmitter 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 a tight rope.
Too much glutamate and you become hyper excited, and then
you end up getting anxious or having a seizure, and
(10:47):
so gaba protects you against that, but too much gabba
you fall asleep and then you get eaten by 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
(11:09):
and Total Boss, Dorothy Parker, I like 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,
(11:31):
First you take a drink, then the drink 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
(11:51):
the road to the supermarket. He'd buy two liters of
strong cider, which is about two weeks worth of alcohol,
and the just sit there all day and drink 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
(12:14):
using toxic ins because it feels like they 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 liver,
(12:34):
in your heart, and your bloveless is accential alcohol is
like playing a piano with boxing glove song. 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
(12:58):
not done yet, but in the meantime he's created 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's it's called Centia, and it's
made of herbs and a combination that will give you
(13:20):
an effect like a low dose of alcohol, like 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.
(13:42):
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
the exhale. It has a little bit of pepper in
it Christmas ee, you know, has that sort of clothy
aspects to it. And then in a few moments, I
hope you'll feel that is beginning to have the other
(14:04):
effects of all, not just the mouth effects, but also
the brain effects. I admit that I didn't really feel
a buzz after drinking Centia. I didn't go in very
hard though, because I was afraid to munk 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
(14:25):
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
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. Fantastic to welcome were the Vienna
(14:50):
in London. The Vienna, if you haven't had a chance
to visit, feels policial, marble staircases, super high ceilings and
display cases that are the cleanest glass I have ever seen.
And I know glass is clear, but this was like
clearer than the air around it. It's just it's just
really so clean. Angela's display features rows of drinking vessels
(15:14):
from heavy metal chalices too delicate Venetian glass. The idea
of the drink display was here was much more about
what are the concepts behind drink? In particular, how did
it conn 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,
(15:35):
drinking was not an off hour's indulgence. It was a
pre wreck for civic engagement. One of the 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
(15:56):
have a drink with them to prove that. If you're
going to go to church, then you're going to drink wine.
There's also a long history of competitive social drinking, like
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
(16:19):
actually a peg peg tankards. I didn't know the 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
(16:44):
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 off.
Then it can turn into a competition, of course, because
they will say, let's see you drink three pegs in
(17:05):
one go. Let's see you drink right, 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 tankard. This emphasis on drinking together
and ensuring that everyone drinks their share goes back thousands
of years. The phrase in vino veritas is often credited
(17:29):
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 have said if they weren't drunk,
(17:51):
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, So in present day Iran,
(18:15):
what is the what is the legal position on intoxican
irnly is quite easy. Everything is illegal, even beyond intoxication.
You know, 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 and Enemies. I am an academic
(18:40):
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 Midleast in particular. Mazi 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 laws on the boulevard. Total
(19:01):
prohibition is not the reality of life in Iran. Life
under the law. It's far more 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 it elsewhere.
It's easier to order, you know, a little bag of
(19:25):
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
(19:45):
simply lounge and linger in a bar, 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
(20:06):
a person who is in charge of pouring whatever alcoholic
drink is available. They call him soggy or you know,
men or women could be so there is also the
name for dealer, by the way, and he puts the
drink for everyone, making sure that everyone drinks, and people
tend to drink in the go, not seeping, you know,
(20:27):
Russian way, But gentlemen, everyone's drunk. Usually, prohibition 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,
(20:51):
but Mazzi says they often do so with an ulterior motive.
In Iran and around the world, drug violations provide the
state with a pretel next 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
(21:14):
it arrived, you know, in the Ottoman Empire. The whole
culture of coffee drinking started around this new substance, 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
(21:38):
many of his colleagues. You know, in academia, you would
struggle to find anyone who supports prohibition because you know,
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 aboard? Is it just because it's just
(22:00):
an abject failure and there's nothing interesting to say about it. Yeah,
And so it's funny that prohibition has been a total
failure in Iran, you know. Equally as a really little kid,
I remember seeing a public service announcement on TV, a
(22:20):
warning about the grave dangers of marijuana, which was prohibited
then across the US. I ran from the living room
television set 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.
(22:42):
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 of him differently, and I told him yes,
according to the after school TV programming, he was a
moral hazard and a total deviance. But being my dad,
he also made the rules about bedtime and dinner menus,
(23:04):
so I didn't really have a light to stand on.
Prohibition might not be too effective, but it does say
something about 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 then those drives are varied. When you're
(23:28):
living Iran, a lot of people have the feeling that
they are basically 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 dimension of your everyday life.
(23:51):
But you're connected, like the people are being high in California,
you're being high in Tehran. It's a mimicking act. We
use drugs to feel connected to each other. From communion
cup to kegstand we all do use drugs. We do
because fundamentally we try to feel better in the world.
(24:15):
Some of them are legal, some of them are illegal,
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
(24:35):
particular in toxicans we choose can also send messages about
how 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 teas, or for utility.
(24:56):
Some Irish whiskeys are shunned by Catholics and some shunned
by contestants. 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
(25:18):
Katie's dad's booze. It curdled like maybe a product of
mixing red wine 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
(25:40):
change the settings in my head. Intoxicants might not help
us hunt or escape being hunted, but the desire for them.
This 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,
(26:03):
tava or water from the tap. I am lifting a
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 Mesa.
(26:25):
Find me online at Dessa on Instagram and Dessa Darling
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
(26:46):
people next time. On deeply Human, we're asking why are
you supposed to love only one person at a time.
All right, we're scrapping the cute stuff and cutting straight
(00:03):
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
got like an insane amount of stuff to get to
in this episode. Great, thank you. Hey, come on, man,
(00:26):
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
elicits a round of applause. This business is full of fascinating,
brilliant weirdos, and intoxicants are easy to get and sometimes
(00:48):
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 stant's use and abuse is sort of
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
(01:11):
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
to be out here fighting for survival. Wouldn't getting messed
up slower reflexes and make us worse at hunting or
escaping whoever is hunting us? Why would we choose to
(01:34):
regularly impair ourselves? And even if you don't drink or smoke,
odds are you probably had the occasional cup of coffee
or tea. Caffeine is the most commonly used psychoactive drug
in the world, So the question of the day, why
do we use intoxics? My name is I am a
(01:58):
post doctoral research or at the University of Salford near Manchester,
and I study primates and how they have adapted to
eating different foods. Primates includes us, right, yes, that's right,
we are primates. 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
(02:21):
developed a special interest for alcohol when we transitioned from
being tree dwelling creatures to a more terrestrial lifestyle. When
we started living 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
(02:44):
that is ethanol, a substance that smells really strongly, right,
so it could 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
(03:07):
what's interesting about this mutation is that it makes our
ethanol metabolism really really efficient, 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
(03:29):
primates who are interested in this fruity, boozy business. The
big story, the most famous story, is that elephants go
for these fermented marilla fruits. And it's a story that's
so widespread, like it's brought up in these psures for Safari's.
So there's a famous liqueur that's made out of marilla fruits.
(03:52):
It's called Amula. Amarula is a lot like Bailey's. I
have toured South Africa, I have headed over ice and
it is awesome. I have all 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
(04:16):
not the sugar, but they want to get the side effects.
And it's like this intentionality aspect. 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 II. It's
a it's a type of lemur from Madagascar. They're they're
so cool looking and they're really cute. Um that well,
(04:38):
it's in the eye to beholder. I think I think
they're cute. Some people don't agree. Wait, hold on google,
Google search. They 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
(05:00):
delete that they used to tap on tree trunks with
to find hollow parts. And then when they found a
hollow part, they gouge 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
(05:21):
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 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
(05:42):
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 you know, is that really
how the intoxication manifests while the animals only have access
to alcohol when they come across naturally fermenting sugars or
(06:05):
I guess research teams we 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 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
(06:28):
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, 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
(07:05):
name is David Natheimer, a psychiatrist and 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
(07:26):
the UK he's also known for controversy. He 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,
(07:47):
there's almost no class of drugs that I haven't studied
in humans, and humans use a branch of drugs. I
mean almost no human doesn't take any doctor, tea, coffee, alcohol, tobacco.
The world'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 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 animal experience.
(08:34):
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 our work
(08:56):
day minds. Alcohol has been used in military purposes people
before they fight, because the alcohol damnfroms down the favorite bonse.
The reason alcohol is a popular has been so popular
for so many thousands of years is a really good drug.
It gets in fast and gets in the brain fast.
You know, it's reliable in terms of what you get.
(09:16):
The effect is those related. My 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
(09:39):
metal goblet held by a priest at Catholic mass. Communal
drinking is often a rite of passage socially and 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
(10:00):
other things, mid Doory whiskey and Bailey's Irish Cream. 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 wearing fact, pretty much
(10:22):
all vertebrates, gabba calms the brain. Another neurotransmitter 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 a tight rope.
Too much glutamate and you become hyper excited, and then
you end up getting anxious or having a seizure, and
(10:47):
so gaba protects you against that, but too much gabba
you fall asleep and then you get eaten by 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
(11:09):
and Total Boss, Dorothy Parker, I like 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,
(11:31):
First you take a drink, then the drink 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
(11:51):
the road to the supermarket. He'd buy two liters of
strong cider, which is about two weeks worth of alcohol,
and the just sit there all day and drink 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
(12:14):
using toxic ins because it feels like they 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 liver,
(12:34):
in your heart, and your bloveless is accential alcohol is
like playing a piano with boxing glove song. 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
(12:58):
not done yet, but in the meantime he's created 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's it's called Centia, and it's
made of herbs and a combination that will give you
(13:20):
an effect like a low dose of alcohol, like 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.
(13:42):
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
the exhale. It has a little bit of pepper in
it Christmas ee, you know, has that sort of clothy
aspects to it. And then in a few moments, I
hope you'll feel that is beginning to have the other
(14:04):
effects of all, not just the mouth effects, but also
the brain effects. I admit that I didn't really feel
a buzz after drinking Centia. I didn't go in very
hard though, because I was afraid to munk 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
(14:25):
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
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. Fantastic to welcome were the Vienna
(14:50):
in London. The Vienna, if you haven't had a chance
to visit, feels policial, marble staircases, super high ceilings and
display cases that are the cleanest glass I have ever seen.
And I know glass is clear, but this was like
clearer than the air around it. It's just it's just
really so clean. Angela's display features rows of drinking vessels
(15:14):
from heavy metal chalices too delicate Venetian glass. The idea
of the drink display was here was much more about
what are the concepts behind drink? In particular, how did
it conn 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,
(15:35):
drinking was not an off hour's indulgence. It was a
pre wreck for civic engagement. One of the 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
(15:56):
have a drink with them to prove that. If you're
going to go to church, then you're going to drink wine.
There's also a long history of competitive social drinking, like
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
(16:19):
actually a peg peg tankards. I didn't know the 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
(16:44):
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 off.
Then it can turn into a competition, of course, because
they will say, let's see you drink three pegs in
(17:05):
one go. Let's see you drink right, 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 tankard. This emphasis on drinking together
and ensuring that everyone drinks their share goes back thousands
of years. The phrase in vino veritas is often credited
(17:29):
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 have said if they weren't drunk,
(17:51):
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, So in present day Iran,
(18:15):
what is the what is the legal position on intoxican
irnly is quite easy. Everything is illegal, even beyond intoxication.
You know, 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 and Enemies. I am an academic
(18:40):
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 Midleast in particular. Mazi 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 laws on the boulevard. Total
(19:01):
prohibition is not the reality of life in Iran. Life
under the law. It's far more 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 it elsewhere.
It's easier to order, you know, a little bag of
(19:25):
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
(19:45):
simply lounge and linger in a bar, 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
(20:06):
a person who is in charge of pouring whatever alcoholic
drink is available. They call him soggy or you know,
men or women could be so there is also the
name for dealer, by the way, and he puts the
drink for everyone, making sure that everyone drinks, and people
tend to drink in the go, not seeping, you know,
(20:27):
Russian way, But gentlemen, everyone's drunk. Usually, prohibition 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,
(20:51):
but Mazzi says they often do so with an ulterior motive.
In Iran and around the world, drug violations provide the
state with a pretel next 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
(21:14):
it arrived, you know, in the Ottoman Empire. The whole
culture of coffee drinking started around this new substance, 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
(21:38):
many of his colleagues. You know, in academia, you would
struggle to find anyone who supports prohibition because you know,
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 aboard? Is it just because it's just
(22:00):
an abject failure and there's nothing interesting to say about it. Yeah,
And so it's funny that prohibition has been a total
failure in Iran, you know. Equally as a really little kid,
I remember seeing a public service announcement on TV, a
(22:20):
warning about the grave dangers of marijuana, which was prohibited
then across the US. I ran from the living room
television set 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.
(22:42):
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 of him differently, and I told him yes,
according to the after school TV programming, he was a
moral hazard and a total deviance. But being my dad,
he also made the rules about bedtime and dinner menus,
(23:04):
so I didn't really have a light to stand on.
Prohibition might not be too effective, but it does say
something about 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 then those drives are varied. When you're
(23:28):
living Iran, a lot of people have the feeling that
they are basically 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 dimension of your everyday life.
(23:51):
But you're connected, like the people are being high in California,
you're being high in Tehran. It's a mimicking act. We
use drugs to feel connected to each other. From communion
cup to kegstand we all do use drugs. We do
because fundamentally we try to feel better in the world.
(24:15):
Some of them are legal, some of them are illegal,
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
(24:35):
particular in toxicans we choose can also send messages about
how 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 teas, or for utility.
(24:56):
Some Irish whiskeys are shunned by Catholics and some shunned
by contestants. 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
(25:18):
Katie's dad's booze. It curdled like maybe a product of
mixing red wine 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
(25:40):
change the settings in my head. Intoxicants might not help
us hunt or escape being hunted, but the desire for them.
This 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,
(26:03):
tava or water from the tap. I am lifting a
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 Mesa.
(26:25):
Find me online at Dessa on Instagram and Dessa Darling
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
(26:46):
people next time. On deeply Human, we're asking why are
you supposed to love only one person at a time.
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