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

in northern Europe, it was usually alcohol. In his history of wine, Hugh Johnson acknowledges that ‘it was not the subtle bouquet of wine, or a lingering aftertaste of violets and raspberries, that first caught the attention of our ancestors. It was, I’m afraid, its effect.’ The nineteenth-century French gastronome Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin was of a similar opinion:

      All men, even those it is customary to call savages, have been so tormented by this craving for strong drinks, that they have always managed to obtain them, however limited the extent of their knowledge. They have turned the milk of their domestic animals sour, or extracted juice from various fruits and roots which they suspected of containing the elements of fermentation; and wherever human society has existed, we find that men were provided with strong liquors, which they used at their feasts, sacrifices, marriages, or funerals, in short on all occasions of merry-making or solemnity.

      The particular connection between intoxication and public festivities to which Brillat-Savarin alludes has equally deep roots. For thousands of years, people have used alcohol and other intoxicating drugs for religious or ritualistic reasons and to help them celebrate.

      The ancient relationship between ritual and drugs is exemplified by the Eleusinian Mysteries. These culturally important ceremonies were held in Greece for almost two thousand years, from around 1500 BC until AD 400. Thousands of people attended the periodic celebrations at a temple in Eleusis, west of Athens, in which the participants drank from a sacramental cup holding a drink called kykeon. Contemporary accounts make it clear that kykeon contained a hallucinogenic substance, which historians and scientists have concluded was probably ergot.⁷ Whatever the active ingredients were, the resulting intoxication was a crucial part of the ceremony. Sophocles, Aristotle, Plato and several Roman emperors were among those who took part in what Homer described as a blissful experience.

      Intoxication was such a central element in life that most ancient civilisations had their own gods of intoxication. The Egyptians had Hathor the wine god, who took the form of a bull. The ancient Greeks, and later the Romans, had Dionysus the god of drunkenness and celebration. At the time of Plato and Aristotle, in the fourth century BC, the rites of Dionysus were the most widely practised of all religious ceremonies. The celebrations lasted for days and involved drinking large amounts of wine. The Romans enthusiastically embraced the cult of Dionysus, whom they also referred to as Bacchus. The rites known as Bacchanalia became so scandalous that in 186 BC the Senate banned them. They continued nonetheless. It is very hard to prevent people from seeking pleasure.

      What these ceremonies and religious rituals had in common, aside from great fun, was an underlying belief that drug-induced intoxication was a mystical state which enabled humans to experience a glimpse of the divine and commune with the gods. Drunkenness and other forms of intoxication were regarded as a form of ecstasy, in which the soul became partly separated from the body. This belief in the spiritual and mystical aspects of intoxication fell away with the emergence of Christianity and Islam, which taught that intoxication was inimical to true spirituality and must therefore be shunned.⁸ Drunkenness came to be viewed not as a god-given state, but as a shameful surrender to animal instincts. We shall return in chapter 13 to the uneasy relationship between the world’s main monotheistic religions and the pursuit of pleasure.

      Despite the hardening of religious disapproval, drunken rituals continued to play a significant part in communal life in many parts of the world. In medieval England, villages held festivals in which revellers were expected to drink themselves into oblivion for days at a time. Judging by any English town centre on a Friday or Saturday night, not much has changed. Alcohol-induced oblivion has clearly retained its mass appeal. For many present-day drinkers, the prime objective of a good night out is still to get completely smashed (or annihilated, arseholed, bladdered, blitzed, blootered, bombed, bowsered, canned, guttered, hammered, lashed, legless, mullahed, obliterated, paralytic, pie-eyed, pissed, plastered, rat-arsed, scuttered, shit-faced, slaughtered, sloshed, sozzled, stewed, stinking, thrashed, trolleyed or wrecked, to use just some of the synonyms). The fact that the English language has well over a hundred different words to convey the concept of ‘drunk’ says something about our deep attachment to this state.⁹

      Not all cultures regard alcohol as primarily a tool for getting steaming drunk. In many parts of Europe the predominant drinking culture is one of extracting maximum pleasure from that warm, buzzy state that lies roughly midway between stone-cold sober and out of your skull. For instance, several million people congregate each year at the Munich Oktoberfest, the world’s most popular annual festival, where they consume many millions of litres of foaming beer and countless kilometres of sausage. Drunkenness certainly does occur, but getting drunk is not the main reason why most people go there. The aim of most Oktoberfest revellers is to achieve a state of Gemütlichkeit, for which the nearest English translation is something like ‘a state of feeling snug, cosy and pleasant’. The legendary Soho drinker Jeffrey Bernard wrote that he had never really enjoyed being drunk; it was the process of getting there that appealed to him – particularly the halfway stage, which in his case was invariably short-lived. Other languages have words to signify this pleasant intermediate state. In Danish it is hygge; in Spanish it is la chispa. But English-speakers have little in their vocabulary to cover the extensive territory between the two extremes of sober and legless.

      We like alcohol and other recreational drugs because they make us feel nice. But we are also drawn to them because they make us feel different. The kick of intoxication is not only about feeling good: it can also be about taking a holiday from normality and temporarily seeing life from an altered perspective. As Louis Lewin put it, ‘A man must sometimes take a rest from his memory.’

      Recreational drugs have long been used for stimulating creativity. The nineteenth century witnessed a vogue for experimenting with psychoactive drugs as tools for exploring the inner workings of the mind and unleashing its creative potential. Among the many intellectuals to pursue this approach was Charles Baudelaire, who was inspired by the drug-fuelled works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Thomas De Quincey to write Les Paradis Artificiels (Artificial Paradises). In it, Baudelaire relates how he and his friends used opium and hashish to help them break into unexplored realms of the human imagination and view the world in novel ways. Their goal was nothing less than to ‘conquer Paradise at a stroke’. Baudelaire died in 1867, ruined by his drug use and addicted to opium. The artistic tradition of using drugs to aid creativity continued in the next century. Among the best-known products are Aldous Huxley’s book The Doors of Perception and its sequel Heaven and Hell. They were woven from Huxley’s own experiences in the 1950s with mescaline, a hallucinogen derived from the peyote cactus.¹⁰

      Alcohol is also capable of stimulating creativity, up to a point. The ranks of creative writers and poets have famously been stuffed with boozers too numerous to mention. However, one piece of research suggests that alcohol may in fact be more effective at enhancing the creativity of individuals who are normally uncreative. Researchers found that a moderately large dose of alcohol improved the verbal creativity of men and women who were not very creative when sober, but tended to impair the performance of those who did well when sober. One way in which alcohol clearly does assist creativity is by reducing social inhibitions and releasing the shackles of conventionality. As William James observed, ‘Sobriety diminishes, discriminates, and says no; drunkenness expands, unites and says yes. It is in fact the greatest votary of the Yes function in man.’

      Humanity’s longstanding attraction to drunkenness and other altered states of consciousness has led some scientists to conclude that it is deeply ingrained in our biological makeup. Indeed, the American psycho-pharmacologist Ronald K. Siegel has argued that the desire for intoxication is one of four basic drives governing human behaviour – the others being hunger, thirst and sex.¹¹ Siegel’s research on how drugs affect humans and other animals convinced him that an ‘intoxication drive’ is a primary motivational force. The function of this drive, he believes, is to help maintain mental health through self-medication. According to