A visit to Professor David Linden's website THE COMPASS OF PLEASURE describes "David Linden's New Book That Explores How Our Brains Make Fatty Foods, Orgasm, Exercise, Marijuana, Generosity, Vodka, Learning, and Gambling Feel So Good offers this excert to promote the book.

BOB DYLAN AND SIBERIAN REINDEER AGREE: EVERYBODY MUST GET STONED

Lord Byron, the British romantic and satiric poet of the early nineteenth century, wrote, “Man, being reasonable, must get drunk; the best of life is but intoxication.” While Byron was describing the effects of alcohol, the larger truth applies to psychoactive drugs generally. Because most are derived from plant extracts (cannabis, cocaine, caffeine, ibogaine, khat, heroin, nicotine) or from simple recipes applied to plants (alcohol, amphetamine) or fungi (mescaline), they are widely available and widely used. ... Perhaps the most dramatic example of nonnutritive animal intoxication is found among domesticated reindeer. The Chuckchee people of Siberia, who are reindeer herders, consume the bright red hallucinogenic mushroom Amanita muscaria as a ritual sacrament. Their reindeer also indulge. Having discovered the mushrooms growing wild under the birch trees, they gobble them up and then stagger around in a disoriented state, twitching their heads repeatedly as they wander off from the rest of the herd for hours at a time. The active ingredient of the Amanita mushroom is ibotenic acid, a portion of which is converted in the body into another compound called muscimol—the substance that actually produces the hallucinations. What’s interesting about ibotenic acid is that only a fraction is metabolized in the body to form muscimol, while the rest—about 80 percent of that consumed—is passed in the urine. The reindeer have learned that licking ibotenic acid–laden urine will produce as much of a high as eating the mushroom itself. In fact, this drugged urine will attract reindeer from far and wide, and they will even fight over access to a particularly attractive patch of yellow snow. ... All this begs the question: Why is the use of psychoactive drugs so widespread? For simple pleasure? For brief spurts of energy? To reduce anxiety and foster relaxation and forgetting of one’s troubles? To excuse behavior that would not otherwise be socially tolerated? To stimulate creativity and explore new forms of perception? To augment ritual practice? The answer, of course, is all of the above. The psychiatrist Ronald K. Siegel holds that all creatures, from insects munching psychoactive plants to human children playing spinning games to get dizzy, have an inborn need for intoxication. He writes, “This behavior has so much force and persistence that it functions like a drive, just like our drives of hunger, thirst and sex.” Do we, in fact, have an innate drive to alter the function of our brains? And if so, why? For a subset of drugs that activate dopamine release in the brain’s mesolimbic reward circuit (heroin, cocaine, alcohol, nicotine, cannabis, amphetamine and some others), at least part of the answer seems to be “for a pleasure buzz. ”But this fails to explain the cross-species appeal of hallucinogens like LSD, mescaline and ibogaine which fail activate the pleasure circuit yet remain popular.

One thing that troubles me a little is it seems as if wild animals have more rights than we do as people. If you, or I were to go out to the forest and consume some of these same herbs, fungi, bark, and berries, for the same reasons we could face years of incarceration.

For what psychiatrist Ronald K Siegel asserts is a basic inborn need of all beings, for variety and intoxication. “This behavior has so much force and persistence that it functions like a drive, just like our drives of hunger, thirst and sex.”

Why do we as a "society" feel so threatened by this basic human drive that we will incarcerate our fellow citizens, and children, sometimes for decades for following their innate curiousity?

Is it not fairly obvious, and widely accepted that vastly more harm is done by our drug laws, than the drugs themselves? Over the last few months, we've seen a Blue Ribbon International Commission, former President Jimmy Carter, several former police chiefs, and police associations come to the same conclusion.

But, also, in the last week we've just heard reports that President Obama's Drug Czar has just sent out a new memo "clarifying" his statement of two years ago, that the federal government would not seek out and prosecute those receiving medical marijuana, or their "caregivers" if they were acting within state law.

This was interpreted to mean the licensed state medical marijuana dispensaries. Now our federal government has decided to resume raids and prosecution of licensed marijuana dispensaries in states that have passed laws legalizing medical marijuana.

Federal law trumps state laws, so the whole new and rapidly growing industry is facing new uncertainties.

How sad and stupid.

But, on the up-side, perhaps we see here a jobs stimulus programs that Republicans and Democrats could both agree on -- hiring vastly more Park Rangers to track down and arrest animals getting high on illegal intoxicants.

Think of the jobs we could create in building great numbers of new prisons to hold, hooligan animals who are getting high in the forest. And, apparently having a lot more fun than many of the rest of us are allowed to have.