Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization

by Edward Slingerland

The psychologists Christian Müller and Gunter Schumann make two important points in their review article on “drug instrumentalization,” or the rational, strategic use of chemical intoxicants to achieve specific, desirable outcomes.130 The first is that, despite justified concerns about alcoholism and drug addiction, the vast majority of psychoactive drug users, across the world and through all age groups, are not addicts, and are at very low risk of becoming addicts.131 Most people use intoxicants simply as tools for creating desired short-term psychological shifts, in the same way they use coffee to wake up and focus, or a silly TV show in the evening to decompress from a hard day at work. The authors further argue that modern, industrialized societies involve a much higher density and variety of social “microenvironments,” to which people are constantly required to adapt, than traditional agricultural, or pre-agricultural, societies. We work from home, collaborate online, network over meals and at receptions, wedge exercise or a stolen moment with our children in between a conference call and a team brainstorming session. Psychoactives—not only pure stimulants like coffee and nicotine, but intoxicants like alcohol and cannabis—might therefore be even more important for us today than they have been historically.