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Non-Tech : Illegal Drugs and the War Against: Potential Profits? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Grainne who wrote (6)	4/24/1998 3:18:00 PM
From: LoLoLoLita	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 40

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: --------------------------------------------------------- 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] ------------------------------------------------------------ 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