Party Animals: MultiCellular Organisms and Their Drugs of Choice
“The drug phenomenon is a natural phenomenon, while the drug problem is a cultural problem.”
– Giorgio Samorini
“Let us declare nature to be legitimate. All plants should be declared legal, and all animals for that matter. The notion of illegal plants and animals is obnoxious and ridiculous.”
– Terence Mckenna
“I don’t do drugs”.
Everyone’s heard this statement one time or another. By now, many people have heard the counterargument: everyone does drugs. Reality is experienced, manufactured and interpreted by the chemical soup between our ears. Everything from a morning cup of coffee to an after-dinner dessert contains molecules that meet the criteria for the term ‘drugs’. As we come to accept that drug use is as human a phenomenon as music and storytelling, we are hopefully easing toward safer attitudes towards drug users and providers. But we still have a lot to catch up on when it comes to the story of the plant-human relationship. As I learn more about it, I am coming to see that it is an ancient and fascinating one that stretches back far past our own human histories into our animal pasts.
Recently, I had the pleasure of reading a fantastic book on the subject by Giorgio Samorini, entitled ‘Animals and Psychedelics: The Natural World and the Instinct to Alter Consciousness’ that explores this topic in detail. This article contains some of my favorite examples of this phenomenon from his book, as well as some thoughts I had as a result of reading it. I have also included some additional examples of animal drug behavior I find particularly fascinating.
One psychedelic making its way to the mainstream is Ayahuasca. Most commonly, it is a combination of two plant medicines found in the Amazon. Many people marvel at the seemingly impossible odds of ancient shamans figuring out that one plant containing Dimethyltryptamine, or DMT, needed to be combined with another plant containing an MAOI (which allows DMT to enter the brain without being broken down by the MAO enzyme). Of this, Richard Evans Schultes said “one wonders how people in primitive societies, with no knowledge of chemistry or physiology, ever hit upon a solution to the activation of an alkaloid by a monoamine oxidase inhibitor. Pure experimentation? Perhaps not.”
It is indeed an astonishing feat of folk medicine, but I would like to suggest that the explanation may not be so mysterious. We mustn’t make the mistake of thinking of drug-taking, or medicine giving, as exclusively human behavior. When we expand our view to include the rest of the organism that is our planet, we can peel back the curtain on some of its most elusive mysteries. Below is a video of a jaguar eating Banisteriopsis Caapi, or Yage. This is one of the two plants commonly combined to make Ayahuasca. I’d like to suggest this may be how early peoples learned to create the brew. Could it be that by observing this behavior in Jaguars, an animal whose hunting abilities were revered by Amazonian peoples, this essential ingredient for the first-ever Ayahuasca brew was discovered?
This phenomenon is not limited to Jaguars and Yage. Long before the first selfie was taken at an Ayahuasca retreat in South America, the animal kingdom was enjoying a similar tryptamine from a very different source.
Many species of mushroom contain Psilocybin, a psychedelic that is very structurally similar to DMT. The list of animals known to deliberately partake of these mushrooms includes Siberian Reindeer, squirrels, chipmunks, caribou, dogs, goats, and even flies!
Sometimes it is other animals themselves that are the source of the chemicals we seek. For at least half a century, humans have been collecting the excretions of the Sonoran Desert Toad, inside which is another tryptamine: 5-MeO-DMT. (I highly recommend the episode ‘Hamilton’s Pharmacopeia’ for more info of Bufo Alvaris). An older and equally fascinating case of animals getting high off of other animals is that of bottlenose dolphins, enjoying the excretions of puffer fish:
Lemurs seem to use millipedes both as an insecticide and intoxicant:
One lesser-known but incredible plant medicine not yet making its way to the mainstream is Iboga, a plant found in Gabon. It is used by several local tribes for shamanic purposes and now in the west with astonishing success in treating addiction. What many people do know about Iboga is that the medicinal power of the plants was likely recognized by humans only after observing its use by gorillas. The more one studies the plant-human relationship, the more apparent it becomes that one is studying a plant-animal relationship.
Alcohol is quite popular in the animal kingdom as well. Birds, bees, bats, tree shrews, monkeys, and even elephants all enjoy the fruits of fermentation, or rather fermented fruits (and nectar in some cases).
Another class of drugs animals that are quite fond of is commonly referred to as ‘crazy grass’ or ‘locoweed’. In the case of these plants, the use of these plants by animals qualifies not only as use but as addiction. The list of animals with addictive relationships to these plant species include donkeys, horses, cows, sheep, and even hens. The bizarre effects of this class of drugs are at once horrifying and fascinating. They include behaviors like “hiding somewhere, behind boulders or among trees, in a state of profound prostration, either sitting up with its head erect and immobile or lying on the ground, its nose pointed upward and its eyes fixed and bulging”, to less dramatic but equally concerning symptoms like muscular cramps, quivering of the eyelids, and cross-eyed sky staring.
But intentional intoxication and medication are not limited to the mammalian world; ‘A bug’s life’ includes drugs as well. Several species of moth drink the nectar from the hallucinogenic/deliriant nectar of datura. Some bees have been observed returning time and time again to several kinds of orchid; upon further study it was determined that the bees were cutting scratches into the perfume-laden plants and absorbing the liquid through their hind legs, intoxicating themselves. Moths (larva) and stag beetles (as well as squirrels) enjoy the fermented sap of oak trees. A butterfly popularly known as the Jasio is known to drink to anything fermented. All these insects showed clear signs of intoxication and frequently return the sources of their preferred drugs for more.
Like animals, insect source their intoxicants not just from the plant world but from their own kind as well. One particularly striking example can be found in the incredible and bizarre world of ants. Some ants have formed a drug relationship with specific species of beetle that secrete chemicals from furry tufts on their abdomen called trichomes. Samorini quotes Siegel: “The ants may become so overwhelmed by the intoxicating nature of these secretions that they become temporarily disoriented and less sure of their footing.”
Yellow ants are particularly hardcore when it comes to their penchant for beetle secretions: “worker ants appear to become completely uninterested in their domestic tasks, instead devoting themselves exclusively, and for long periods of time, to sucking secretions from the beetles’ abdomens. The ants also raise the beetles’ larvae, cradling them in the incubating chambers constructed for those of their own species. In times of danger, when they must hastily carry the larvae to a safer place, they rescue the beetle larvae before they tend to their own. It is not rare to find hundreds of Lomechusa beetles lodged in a single ant colony, an imbalance that leads swiftly to low productivity and a ruinous decline of the colony as a whole.”
Voluntary drug use is a behavior that stretches not only past our human and proto-human ancestors but far past our mammalian ancestry as well. Animals take drugs to recreate, self-medicate, and some cases, to self-destruct. It is indeed a mistake to assume that just because something is natural, it is beneficial; but it is also a mistake to wage literal and figurative war against our most innate behaviors. As a species, we have learned to channel our natural aggression, for example, toward more moral and productive ends. There is no reason we cannot do the same with our drive for intoxication, as well as our natural desire alter our consciousness.