Animals and Psychedelics
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9
The Lazarus Fly: A New Hypothesis
The curious relationship of certain moths to the flowers of the datura plant led me to reevaluate the singular behavior of the common housefly (Musca domestica) when presented with fly agaric, or Amanita muscaria (Samorini 1999). So long has this relationship been remarked on, that the very name of the mushroom derives from the Latin word for fly, musca. Another common name for the fungus is fly-killer, since the insects that are so enticed by its cap fall “stone dead” after tasting it. For centuries, in fact, people have scattered fly agaric caps on their windowsills as an insecticide. To enhance their effect, they were often crushed and mixed in with a little milk or sugar; this not only attracted a larger number of flies but induced them to consume a greater quantity of the intoxicating substance. It appears that many flies perished from a simple case of overdose.
In fact, the victims of fly agaric all appear to have died, lying perfectly stiff on their backs with their legs folded up in the air. In reality, however, they have not died at all; if you leave them alone, you can come back in an hour or a day to find, surprisingly, that they have flown away. Of course, usually the “dead” flies are swept up and thrown out—or those that have woken up and flown off are replaced by others, indistinguishable from the first, who have come along later, become intoxicated, and fallen into a swoon—so the fact that they rise from the dead and go about their business has escaped general notice. Thus, popular belief has it that fly agaric is a fatal poison to flies. Yet even in centuries past there were mycologists and entomologists who realized that flies that had tasted the mushroom were only in a state of lethargy and who counseled people who used it as an insecticide to gather up the stupefied insects and throw them into the fire (examples are the French mycologists J. J. Paulet, writing in 1793, and F. S. Cordier, writing in 1870).
An attentive observer can watch the whole process of “death” and “resurrection.” First, the flies perch on the cuticle of the mushroom cap and lick its surface. After five to twenty minutes some of them begin to manifest the symptoms of intoxication: their flight becomes erratic and uncoordinated; they stop buzzing and flitting around, and their movements slow down; then their wings begin to quiver and their legs to shake; and finally, they roll over onto their backs or one side with their legs in the air, completely immobile. If touched lightly with a pencil, some may react by sluggishly moving their legs while others remain unperturbed in their position. With the help of a magnifying glass, it is possible to observe the peristaltic movement of their bodies, however—clear proof that they are not dead. After a period of time that may vary from thirty minutes to fifty hours, the flies wake up. Shortly afterward they begin to engage in their normal activities and fly off as if nothing had happened.
Not all flies that come into contact with Amanita muscaria are equally intoxicated. Inebriation may depend on the length of time a given insect is exposed to the surface of the mushroom and seems to comprise different levels of intensity and manifestation, from unusually frenetic flight to the most complete catalepsy.
During the last half of the 1960’s some collaborators of the great French mycologist Roger Heim—one of the founding fathers of modern ethnomycology and a pioneer in the study of hallucinogenic mushrooms—undertook some experimental research at the Museum of Natural History in Paris, where Heim was director, on the relationship between the common housefly and fly agaric (Bazanté 1965–66; Locquin-Linard 1965–67). The purpose of their study was to determine the mushroom’s level of toxicity for the fly, which tells us little about the relationship of the two in a natural state. The experimenters’ conditions were contrived, as they forced a certain number of flies to live in the restricted quarters of a petri dish in direct and prolonged contact with the fly agaric or a liquid extract of it. As a result, they observed a high mortality rate in the intoxicated insects. This may have been due to the phenomenon of overdose induced by the conditions of the experiment, or even—as was suggested by the researchers themselves—to the production by the mushroom of carbon dioxide, which kills flies by asphyxiation.
In the course of the same studies it was determined that the active principles of the mushroom affect the nervous, rather than the muscular, system of the insects and that they become intoxicated not only by the spores of fly agaric but also by those of Amanita pantherina, a very similar mushroom characterized by the same active principles and hallucinogenic properties as Amanita muscaria.
Other researchers (Bowden, Drysdale, and Mogey 1965) have shown that the flies’ resuscitation begins with a return of movement, first to the legs and then to the wings. They have also discovered that the most actively intoxicant part of the fly agaric mushroom is the yellowish flesh directly beneath the red cuticle of its cap where the isoxazolic alkaloids that have proven hallucinogenic to human beings are located. At one time it was thought that the intoxicating agent for both flies and humans was the muscarine in fly agaric, but when pure muscarine was fed to the insects, they had no reaction to it at all. Demonstrably, the same alkaloids provide the “high” for both species.
There must be a reason, not attributable to random chance, for the flies’ strange behavior. It is hardly likely that they should always have been attracted to and intoxicated by fly agaric—generally without dying from it—by sheer accident. We should keep in mind the philosophical maxim that chance, or rather what we consider to be chance, is usually nothing but a measure of our ignorance; when we are unable to identify cause and effect in events we observe, we tend to justify them by turning to the concept of random occurrence.
I began, then, to formulate a new hypothesis regarding the relationship in nature between fly agaric and flies, especially in light of all the other information I had been gathering on animals, including insects, that drug themselves. It is not a case, I propose, of poisoning suffered by careless flies attracted to the mushroom—a fairly inexplicable sort of intoxication, at best, since it would have to be attributed to an evolutionary “oversight” on the part of these insects—but of an act of intentionality, in which they seek the experience of becoming inebriated by the fungus. Their behavior is similar to that of the Manduca moths’ with the datura flowers: the flies are drugging themselves on fly agaric.
In nature (as opposed to a petri dish), where they can enjoy an unconstrained relationship with their drug, not all flies that perch on the mushroom and lick it fall “stone dead,” that is, into a state of catalepsy. Human beings who smoke cannabis undergo its physical and psychic effects not instantly but gradually, and these range from conditions of mental and physical stimulation (the so-called high) to ecstatic and visionary states accompanied by a physical sedation that grows ever more profound until it reaches total immobility, which may last for several hours. This variability of affect depends not only on dosage but also on individual tolerance and reaction, as well as on differing levels of personal evolution in relationship to the drug.
To return to our flies, then, it seems possible that what we have so far observed of their intoxicated behavior is only its most profound and evident extreme—the only phase of it, in fact, that is evident to us at all. It is quite probable that the many flies who come into contact with the fly agaric mushroom without falling into a state of paralysis are nonetheless experiencing various stages of inebriation.
The scientist A. Morgan wrote, after observing a fruit fly (Drosophila) under the influence of a “lick” of fly agaric: “It tried to fly away and fell in spirals onto the table where the mushrooms were set out. It remained motionless for at least a minute, seemingly dead; then it collected itself and flew off (Morgan 1995, 102).” So probably not only the common housefly but an entire group of insects—particularly those whose habitat is the undergrowth—considers fly agaric to be its own, absolutely natural paradise.
But there is more to this story. Our new hypothesis might explain, in ecological terms, the universal and age-old symbolic relationship between fly agaric and toads.
We know very little as yet about the intimate relationships between different species in their natural habitats. An example of our profound ignorance is scientists’ recent and surprising discovery about the nature of moths’ attraction to datura. In all my encounters with fly agaric in the Alpine woods, I have seen toads (Bufo bufo) in its vicinity only a couple of times. But I have to admit that I’ve never looked for them in those wide areas of underbrush scattered with “toadstools,” nor have I lingered for long among these mushrooms, which can easily disseminate more than a hundred carpophores throughout the underbrush, covering the forest floor beneath dozens of trees.
Toads eat larvae and slow-moving insects. It is difficult for them to catch flies unless the flies are moving more slowly than usual for some reason—if they are wounded, for example, or if they are drunk.
Thus it is possible to formulate the following hypothesis: Given that flies are attracted by fly agaric and that when they are intoxicated by it their movements slow down to the point of paralysis, toads may have learned this and may, when they come across one of these mushrooms, sit under or nearby it and wait for easy prey, just as the predators of the moths wait for them to fall into their mouths beneath the datura blooms.
10
Animals, Humans, and Drugs: The Why of It All
In an essay written in 1890 and entitled “Why Do Men Stupefy Themselves?” the Russian author Leo Tolstoy described human drug use as a means of escaping from the self: “The cause of the worldwide consumption ption of hashish, opium, wine, and tobacco lies not in the taste, nor in any pleasure, recreation, or mirth they afford, but simply in man’s need to hide from himself the demands of conscience (Tolstoy 1988).”
This kind of explanation has been the rallying cry of the most fundamentalist prohibitions. Although there are, without a doubt, those who drown their regrets in wine and numb themselves on the most disparate drugs to escape reality, today we know that the reasons behind the use of psychoactive substances are much more complex than this and that they are associated with the universal phenomenon of altered states of consciousness.
Drug use, like many other human behaviors, is dictated by the search for pleasure, which does not necessarily conceal within itself that need to hide from oneself attributed to it by Tolstoy; pleasure seeking is an instinctive behavior intrinsic to all humanity, and only its excesses acquire pathological characteristics. Moralistic ideologies tend to identify the search for pleasure with its pathological forms, just as they equate the phenomenon of drug use with the “drug problem.” Human beings tend to try to modify their ordinary state of consciousness by the most disparate means to experience life in other altered mental states. This atavistic human behavior can be considered a behavioral constant. It is an impulse that manifests itself in human society without distinction of race or culture; it is completely cross-cultural (Samorini 1995a).
The alteration of states of consciousness, subject of a specific science (cf. Tart 1977), aside from occurring spontaeously, can be achieved by means of a wide spectrum of techniques, which people have gradually discovered and drawn upon in the course of human history. These range from sensory deprivation, bodily mortification, meditation, and asceticism to techniques that depend on dance or the sounds of particular musical instruments to trigger states of trance and possession, and include—last but certainly not least—methods based on the use of drugs extracted from plants with psychoactive properties.
This last is one of the most ancient of all techniques for the modification of consciousness. Archeological data confirm that it was already practiced in the Stone Age, a fact that might lead us to the conclusion that it originated in that archaic chapter of human history.
A more logical deduction, however, now that we have discovered its widespread existence in the animal kingdom, is that drug-induced alteration of consciousness preceded the origin of humans. Drugging oneself is a behavior that reaches across the entire process of animal evolution, from insects to mammals to women and men.
Today our knowledge is much greater than that avaliable to Tolstoy, at least regarding the history of drugs and the strict relationship that has always existed and continues to exist between their use and the intellectual, religious, and spiritual spheres of human activity.
The science of drugs came into being in the nineteenth century. One of its founding fathers, the Italian Paolo Mantegazza (a contemporary of Tolstoy’s but much more knowledgeable about the phenomenon than the Russian writer), intuited the universality and inevitability of this human behavior and the importance of studying it by taking a scientific approach. “All this, in a not-too-distant future, will be a great science,” he wrote in one of his voluminous treatises on drugs, adding that “the aesthetics of the nourishments of the nervous system will continue to grow indefinitely and untiringly, until no one on our planet will be able to crush it underfoot (Mantegazza 1871, 2:680; cf. Samorini 1995b).”
In his search for the reasons that drive men to drug themselves, Tolstoy observed only that which is a degeneration of this human behavior, the fruit of modern society and its conflicts. Using drugs to escape reality and one’s own conscience is not the rule but the exception, and its malignant growth is due to the widespread neurosis of modern society.
Historically speaking, the fundamental motive for using drugs springs from a desire to understand reality more fully, not to escape it. Many human cultures have placed some drug, held to be sacred, at the center of their religious paradigms, considering it the fulcrum of their systems of interpretation of various aspects of life and reality. Used under appropriate conditions—that is, in particular environmental and psychological settings—drugs induce experiences accompanied by profound emotional and intuitive states that can be illuminating and revelatory. The elaboration and interpretation of these experiences contribute to the development of both individual and societal interpretations of reality.
The search for knowledge and the search for pleasure: these are the basic motivations behind the universal human use of drugs. Inappropriate approaches to and ignorance about drugs can lead to behaviors interpretable as the need to hide from oneself, as described by Tolstoy. Yet even in these cases, which we may define as pathological, we must exercise care in the expression of judgments with purely moralistic connotations. A new theory has recently found widespread acceptance among scholars and workers in the field of addiction: the theory of self-medication. According to this hypothesis, the heroin addict could well be a person in whom the production of endorphins—opiate substances produced naturally by the body—is lower than average. This individual may be finding a solution, more or less unconsciously, to his or her neurochemical imbalance by taking an exogenous opiate: heroin.
To follow a different line of thought, human drug use might have an adaptive function in relationship to surrounding reality. In fact, some modern sociologists and anthropologists have directly denominated drugs with the term adaptogens, that is, substances that facilitate adaptation to the surrounding environment, whether that be a village of huts immersed in the Amazonian rain forest or a frustrating and neurosis-ridden Western city.
Joseph M. Fericgla, who studied the use of the hallucinogenic beverage ayahuasca among the Shuar of Ecuador, wrote: “Ethnographic data oblige us to accept that one of the ends that explicitly induce human beings to consume ayahuasca (and by extension, hallucinogens in general) exists in relation with certain cognitive processes which allow for improvement in adaptive efficacy.
In summary, we can state that ayahuasca is used traditionally to activate compensatory mechanisms of conduct, applied to self-analysis and the search for resolution to presenting conflicts, whether emotional in character or adaptive in general; it serves as an emotive accelerator with a cathartic resolution (Fericgla 1996, 5).”
In both hypotheses—self-medication, with its purely medical connotation, and adaptogenic function, with its psychological and sociological connotations—we are confronted with new interpretations of human drug use that, although not yet fully developed, are at least free of the stinging distortions of moralistic prejudice. They are scientific hypotheses.
Now, by turning our attention to the animals that drug themselves in nature, we can draw some further deductions. I will put forth, first of all, a suggestion and a further hypothesis: that natural drug-using behavior may be much more widespread in the animal world than that which we have so far discerned. In other words, it would seem that we are only at the beginning of this knowledge. And the phenomenon of animals that drug themselves becomes ever more important as it leads us to a fuller comprehension of the motivations that induce human beings to do the same.
It is difficult to reason in terms of animals’ states of consciousness. Anthropocentric as we are, we are used to negating any form of consciousness at all in other species, especially in the lower orders of animals. Orthodox scientific thought is permeated by the philosophical dogma known as behaviorism, which excludes the possibility of thought of any kind in the animal kingdom.