Sex, Drugs and Chocolate: The Science of Pleasure. Paul Martin

illegal drug is cannabis, which has been tried by 40 per cent of young British adults. Next in popularity comes amyl nitrite, used at least once by 12 per cent of young adults, followed by amphetamines (11 per cent), cocaine powder (11 per cent), ecstasy (10 per cent) and magic mushrooms (8 per cent), with heroin trailing at 0.5 per cent.² The consumption of drugs is relatively common among school-age children: almost half of all fifteen-year-olds in England say they have taken an illicit drug at least once, and one in twelve claims to use them at least once a month. Comparable patterns are seen in other countries, although the UK appears towards the top end of most international league tables of drug use.

      Illegal recreational drugs are cheaper now than they ever have been and most of them are getting cheaper, which is further evidence that efforts to curb their use by suppressing the supply have not succeeded. A line of cocaine or an ecstasy tablet now costs little more than a cappuccino. And, of course, the use of legal drugs is vastly greater. Nine out of ten adults have used alcohol at some time, one in four is a smoker and virtually everyone consumes caffeine every day.

How does it feel?

      You, dear reader, will have had your own experiences with recreational drugs – certainly with caffeine, probably with alcohol and conceivably with one or two more besides. Or perhaps not. Each drug is different and each individual responds differently to them. The subjective experience depends on the social situation in which the drug is taken, the expectations of the user, their past experience with that drug, and so on. The effects may be blissful, they may be indifferent or they may be dreadful.

      The sensations generated by a recreational drug have two main components: the immediate effect (the ‘rush’) and the feeling of pleasure or euphoria that develops more slowly, perhaps over a period of hours (the ‘high’). The faster a drug hits the brain, the bigger the rush. The quickest way of getting a drug into the brain is to inject it, smoke it or snort it. Drugs taken by these rapid-uptake routes, such as heroin, cocaine and nicotine, tend to be more addictive than if they are absorbed more gradually.

      Over the centuries, articulate drug-users have recorded their experiences for posterity, offering those who have never been there a vicarious sense of how it feels.³ Heroin is said to produce an orgasmic rush of pleasure followed by a warm afterglow. Those who have taken it intravenously often describe the sensation using terms like pleasure, excitement, warmth and relaxation. One former addict wrote of how his whole body quivered with pleasure and ‘tiny needles’ danced on his skin. Another felt so good she had to share the experience by talking as she had never talked before. For the rock musician David Crosby, heroin felt like a big, warm blanket. Robert Louis Stevenson, the author of children’s favourites Treasure Island and Kidnapped, recalled the first of his many encounters with opium in these glowing terms:

      A day of extraordinary happiness; and when I went to bed there was something almost terrifying in the pleasures that besieged me in the darkness. Wonderful tremors filled me; my head swam in the most delirious but enjoyable manner; and the bed softly oscillated with me, like a boat in a very gentle ripple.

      Cannabis, the most widely consumed illegal drug, leaves most users with a calming, relaxing sense of unwinding. Cocaine produces a very different reaction, which is often described as a sharp lift followed rapidly by a strong desire for more. The writer Stuart Walton has described how the first snort delivers a ‘cosy low-voltage buzz of electricity’, but the pleasure is fleeting, making cocaine the perfect self-marketing product.

      The psychoactive drug experience can also be ghastly. William S. Burroughs, in his heavily autobiographical novel Junky, paints a revolting picture of trying peyote, the hallucinogenic Mexican cactus. He swallows the lump of peyote with great difficulty, washing it down with tea and gagging on it several times. Ten minutes later he begins to feel sick. Convulsive spasms rack his body but he is unable to vomit. Finally, the drug comes back up, ‘solid like a ball of hair’, clogging his throat. It is, writes Burroughs, as horrible a sensation as he ever stood still for. His face swells up and he is unable to sleep.

      One state that no recreational drug is capable of producing by itself is happiness, as distinct from pleasure. We will return to the relationship between pleasure and happiness in chapter 8.

Recent history: the last few thousand years

      Most of what we know about humanity’s consumption of recreational drugs is confined to the relatively recent past, spanning a mere few thousand years of history. Opium was used by people living in southern Mesopotamia (present-day Iraq) more than five thousand years ago. The language of that region, Sumerian, denoted the opium poppy as ‘the plant of joy’. Opium was even more familiar to the ancient Greeks and Egyptians, who took it orally and rectally as a sedative and to alleviate pain. The Greeks were aware of opium’s potential to create addiction, and in the fifth century BC the great physician Hippocrates was criticised for giving too much of it to his patients. Homer’s Odyssey, written in the seventh or eighth century BC, refers to a potion called nepenthe (literally, ‘one that chases away sorrow’) which Helen of Troy used to banish grief. Historians believe that nepenthe was probably made by dissolving opium in alcohol.

      Imperial Rome was a hotbed of opium consumption. The emperor and philosopher Marcus Aurelius, who ruled during the second century AD, was a regular user. According to the physician Galen, the emperor habitually started his day with a portion of opium the size of a bean, dissolved in warm wine. A census carried out in the city of Rome in AD 312 catalogued 793 separate retail outlets from which opium could be bought. Between them, these opium shops generated 15 per cent of all tax revenues – one of countless examples of the age-old relationship between recreational drugs and lucrative taxation.

      Cannabis, or hemp, was cultivated in China six thousand years ago and was being consumed in Egypt and Greece more than three thousand years ago. The women of Thebes in ancient Egypt were famous for making a hemp-based potion which rivalled nepenthe in its ability to banish sorrow. Cannabis may also have been the pharmacological secret behind the Oracle of Delphi, which was probably established in the eighth century BC. The priestess who presided over the Oracle would sit over a hole in the ground, from which wafted the miraculous fumes that enabled her to deliver her prophecies. Some historians believe that these inspirational fumes were generated by burning a narcotic herb, probably hemp. In the fifth century BC the historian Herodotus recorded the recreational use of cannabis by the Scythian people, who lived on the northern shores of the Black Sea:

      There is a plant growing in their country called cannabis, which closely resembles flax.… The Scythians take cannabis seeds, crawl in under the felt blankets, and throw the seeds on to the glowing stones. The seeds then emit dense smoke and fumes, much more than any vapour-bath in Greece. The Scythians shriek with delight at the fumes.

      Cannabis was used by the Romans, both recreationally and as a medicine. Galen describes how it was customary in the Roman world to give hemp seed to guests at banquets, to promote ‘hilarity and enjoyment’.

      The use of cannabis in Britain is of more recent vintage. Even so, it can be traced back several centuries. Hemp was listed in The English Physitian, a medical text written in 1652 by the botanist and physician Nicholas Culpeper, where it appears among a dizzying array of exotically-named plants including Clowns Woundwort, Stinking Gladwin, Rupture-wort, Spleen-wort, Melancholy-thistle, Bastard Rhubarb, Blites, Loosestrife and (my favourite) Arsesmart. Hemp was widely used as a remedy for aches and pains. In his 1653 tome The Complete Herbal, Culpeper wrote:

      The seed of Hemp consumes wind, and by too much use thereof disperses it so much that it dries up the natural seed for procreation; yet, being boiled in milk and taken, helps such as have a hot dry cough.… The emulsion or decoction of the seed eases the cholic, and allays the troublesome humours in the bowels, and stays bleeding at the mouth, nose or other places … It is held very good to kill the worms in men or beasts;