But doing so is not necessarily good for us. Ronald Siegel, the animal intoxication expert, has shown that animals who get high on plants tend to be more accident prone, more vulnerable to predators, and less likely to attend to their offspring. Intoxication is dangerous. But this only deepens the mystery: Why does the desire to alter consciousness remain powerful in the face of these perils? Or, put another way, why hasn’t this desire simply died out, a casualty of Darwinian competition: the survival of the soberest?
