Christine,
I'll have to get back to you with the citation for
correlation between drug use and income level;
but, no, there was no mention of high school.
The individuals studied were all gainfully-employed
adults.
Here is something I can find right now, from Jonathon
Ott's book "Pharmacophilia: The Natural Paradises," 1997:
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A recent article [M.T. Bardo, et al. "Psychobiology
of novelty seeking and drug seeking behavior,"
Behavioral Brain Research, 77:23-43, 1996]
explored the manifold parallels between drug-seeking
behavior and "novely-seeking," which is also thought
to activate the reward pathway of the limbic system.
In experimental animals, drugs which antagonize the
effects of dopamine inhibit both drug-seeking as well
as novelty-seeking behavior.
In test animals and human beings, "high-novelty
responders" are at once more sensitive to, and show
more interest in inebriants, and many biochemical
indices are associated with this, such as lower levels
of platelet MAO, which is though to correlate with
elevated levels of dopamine in cerebral reward circuits.
What is this novelty-seeking behavior, if not
*intelligence*--an inquiring, open attitude to the novel,
the unknown? That novelty-seeking should activate
archaic reward pathways bears witness to its evolutionary
importance, and it is not difficult to imagine how, within
a given species adapting to the constraints of its niche
in an ecosystem, high novelty-seeking behavior--or a
courageous, inquisitive, outgoing, forward-looking
attitude--should be rewarding, even confer adaptive
advantages. While curiosity perchance sometimes kills
the cat, it has undeniably served our species well;
a unique species emblematic of the premium evolution
put on intelligence. It was even conjectured by R.G.
Wasson in 1957 that the amritous alkaloids of entheogenic
plants functioned as "kairomones" for our protohuman
ancestors millenia ago, having "unlimbered the imagination
of those first men who ate them, stirred their curiosity
and speculative faculties," serving indeed as:
[A] veritable detonator to his soul, arousing in him
sentiments of awe and reverence, and gentleness
and love, to the highest pitch of which mankind
is capable, all those sentiments and virtues that
mankind has ever since regarded as the highest
attribute of his kind. It made him see what the
perishing mortal eye cannot see. [Wasson 1961]
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Yes Christine, Wasson conjectured that the ingestion of
a "psychedelic" mushroom resulted in the human discovery of
God, and thus led, ultimately, to the development of religon.
For those who never heard of him, Wasson was employed
on Wall Street, engaged in the business of private
banking, and was quite a very rich man.
David |
