An Instinctual Desire to Alter Our Minds

Whether it’s drink or drugs, humans always have sought to alter their minds, even at great risk — but perhaps with great reward. This desire might go further back than humans, too. According to “A Short History of Drunkenness,” Tony Perrottet wrote for The Times, the origin of our species “comes down to our love for hooch.”

The book by Mark Forsyth says that primates that were brave enough to drop down from the trees wanted to get drunk on fermented fruit. Thus, evolution began — and it only took 10 million more years for humans to start growing barley “because we wanted booze.”

These claims sit beside many others by Mr. Forsyth that are similar in hyperbole: Wine is the reason Christianity became so popular; a ban on vodka sparked the Russian Revolution; and the first president of the United States, George Washington, won votes by offering people free alcohol.

“Every possible attitude to inebriation has been tested over the ages,” Mr. Perrottet wrote. “The only constant, perhaps, is that alcohol is a disruptive force that by its very nature defeats efforts to control it, from ancient Roman bans on the debauched Bacchic rites in the first century B.C. to the great American experiment, Prohibition.”

Prohibition ended in 1933, but American attitudes toward drinking have continued to change, and these days imbibing during work hours is nearly extinct.

“A few decades after the heyday of the notorious ‘three-martini lunch,’ ” Adam Sternbergh, an editor and novelist, wrote in The Times, “the act of ordering even one measly martini with your lunch on a workday is viewed as roughly equivalent to pulling out your heroin works and splaying them on the table between courses.”

Mr. Sternbergh also argues that the culprit behind the disappearing midday drink isn’t morality but something more dubious: productivity. “Like most highs, productivity is something you chase habitually,” he wrote, “and yet, unlike most highs, it feels terrible.”

A survey on daytime drinking habits by the Italian brewer Birra Moretti found that American workers not only don’t partake as much as their Italian counterparts, they barely take time to eat.

“This might explain how we’ve arrived at this improbable moment when microdosing LSD in order to increase workplace productivity is, in some precincts, more professionally acceptable than having a glass of wine,” Mr. Sternbergh wrote.

Indeed, psychedelic drugs have been making a comeback, even in the offices of Silicon Valley.

“Microdosing is hot,” John Williams wrote in The Times. “To microdose is to take small amounts of LSD, which generate ‘subperceptual’ effects that can improve mood, productivity and creativity.”

There’s some notion that these illegal drugs are non-addictive and easier on bodies than many other legal things that are put into them.

“Psychedelics are to drugs what the Pyramids are to architecture — majestic, ancient and a little frightening,” Tom Bissell wrote in a review of “How to Change Your Mind” by Michael Pollan. “All things considered, LSD is probably less harmful to the human body than Diet Dr Pepper.”

LSD had successfully treated alcoholism, depression and cancer patients until research was stopped in the 1970s, Mr. Pollan wrote in The Times. Recently, there has been a renaissance of studies into its possible benefits.

Mr. Pollan is so persuasive in his book about psychedelics, Mr. Bissell wrote, that he does the impossible: “He makes losing your mind sound like the sanest thing a person could do.”