Given the potentially enormous costs, and apparent lack of benefits, to impairing our cognitive control, why do humans still like to get intoxicated? Why is the labor-intensive practice of converting wholesome grains and delicious fruit into bitter, low-dose neurotoxins, or seeking out intoxicating plants in the local biome, so ubiquitous across cultures and geographic regions? It should puzzle us more than it does that one of the greatest foci of human ingenuity and concentrated effort over the past millennia has been the problem of how to get drunk.
