The messages of our old and new displays nevertheless remain ihe same: I'm strong and superior. Even lo lake drugs only once or Iwice, I musl be slrong enough lo gel pasl ihe burning, choking sensation of my firsl puff on a cigarette, or to gel pasl ihe misery of my firsl hangover. To do ii chronically and remain alive and heallhy, I musl be superior (so I imagine). Il is a message to our rivals, our peers, our prospective males—and lo ourselves. The smoker's kiss may lasle awful, and the drinker may be impotenl in bed, bul he or she slill hopes lo impress peers or allracl mates by the implicil message of superiorily.
Alas, ihe message may be valid for birds, bul for us il is a false one. Like so many animal instincts in us, this one has become maladaptive in modern human society. If you can still walk after drinking a bottle of whisky, it may prove thai you have high levels of liver alcohol dehydrogenase, bul il implies no superiority in olher respects. If you have not developed lung cancer after chronically smoking several packs of cigarettes daily, you may have a gene for resistance to lung cancer, but thai gene does nol convey intelligence, business acumen, or the ability to creale happiness for your spouse and children.
It is true that animals with only brief lives and courtships have no alternative except to develop quick indicators, since prospective mates don't have enough time to measure each other's real quality. But we, with our long lives and courtships and business associations, have ample time to scrutinize each other's worth. We need not rely on superficial, misleading indicators. Drug abuse is a classic instance of a once-useful instinct—the reliance on handicap signals—that has turned foul in us. It is that old instinct to which the tobacco and whisky companies are directing their clever, obscene advertisements. If we legalized cocaine, the drug lords too would soon have advertisements appealing to the same instinct. You can easily picture it: the photo of the cowboy on his horse, or the suave man and the attractive maiden, above the tastefully displayed packet of white powder.
Now, let's test my theory by jumping from Western Industrialized Society to the other side of the world. Drug abuse did not begin with the Industrial Revolution. Tobacco was a native American Indian crop, native alcoholic beverages are widespread in the world, and cocaine and opium came to us from other societies. The oldest preserved code of laws, that of the Babylonian king Hammurabi (1792-50 BC), already contained a section regulating drinking houses. Hence my theory, if it is valid, should apply to other societies as well. As an instance of its cross-cultural explanatory power, I shall cite a practice you may not have heard of- kung-fu kerosene drinking. I learned of this practice when I was working in Indonesia with a wonderful young biologist named Ardy Irwanto. Ardy and I had come to like and admire each other, and to look out for each other's well-being. At one point, when we reached a troubled area and I expressed concern about dangerous people we might encounter, Ardy assured me, 'No problem, Jared. I have kung-fu grade eight. He explained that he practised the Oriental martial art of kung-fu and had reached a high level of proficiency, such that he could single-handedly fight off a group of eight attackers. To illustrate, Ardy showed me a scar in his back stemming from an attack by eight ruffians. One had knifed him, whereupon Ardy broke the arms of two and the skull of a third and the remainder fled. I had nothing to fear in Ardy's company, he told me.
One evening at our campsite, Ardy walked with his drinking cup up to our jerrycans. As usual, we had two cans: a blue one for water, and a red one for kerosene for our pressure lamp. To my horror, I watched Ardy pour from the red jerry can and raise the cup to his lips. Remembering an awful moment during a mountaineering expedition when I had taken a sip of kerosene by mistake and spent all the next day coughing it back up, I screamed to Ardy to stop. But he raised his hand and said calmly, 'No problem, Jared. I have kung-fu grade eight.
Ardy explained that kung-fu gave him strength, which he and his fellow kung-fu masters tested each month by drinking a cup of kerosene. Without kung-fu, of course, kerosene would make a weaker person sick. Heaven forbid that I, Jared, for instance, should try it. But it did him, Ardy, no harm, because he had kung-fu. He calmly retired to his tent to sip his kerosene and emerged the next morning, happy and healthy as usual.
I cannot believe that kerosene did Ardy no harm. I wish that he could have found a less damaging way to make periodic tests of his preparedness. But for him and his kung-fu associates, it served as an indicator of their strength and their advanced level of kung-fu. Only a really robust person could get through that test. Kerosene drinking illustrates the handicap theory of toxic chemical use, in a form as startlingly repellent to us as our cigarettes and alcohol horrified Ardy. In my last example, I shall generalize my theory further by extending its application to the past—in this case, to the civilization of Mayan Indians that flourished in Central America one or two thousand years ago. Archaeologists have been fascinated by Mayan success at creating an advanced society in the middle of tropical rainforest. Many Mayan achievements, such as their calendar, writing, astronomical knowledge, and agricultural practices, are now understood to varying degrees. However, archaeologists were long puzzled by slender tubes of unknown purpose that they kept finding in Mayan excavations.
The tubes' function finally became clear with the discovery of painted vases showing scenes of the tubes' use: to administer intoxicating enemas. The vases depict a high-status figure, evidently a priest or a prince, receiving a ceremonial enema in the presence of other people. The enema tube is shown as connected to a bag of a frothy beer-like beverage—probably containing either alcohol or hallucinogens or both, as suggested by practices of other Indian groups. Many Central and South
American Indian tribes formerly practised similar ritual enemas when first encountered by European explorers, and some still do so today. The substances known to be administered range from alcohol (made by fermenting agave sap or a tree bark) to tobacco, peyote, LSD derivatives, and mushroom-derived hallucinogens. Thus, the ritual enema is similar to our consumption of intoxicants by mouth, but there are four reasons why an enema constitutes a more effective and valid indicator of strength than does drinking.
Firstly, it is possible to relapse into solitary drinking and thus to lose all opportunity for signalling one's high status to others. However, it is more difficult for a solitary person to administer the same beverage to himself or herself unassisted as an enema. An enema encourages one to enlist associates and thereby automatically creates an occasion for self-advertisement. Secondly, more strength is required to handle alcohol as an enema than as a drink, since the alcohol goes directly into the intestine and thence to the bloodstream, and it is not first diluted with food in the stomach. Thirdly, drugs absorbed from the small intestine after ingestion by mouth pass first to the liver, where many drugs are detoxified before they can reach the brain and other sensitive organs. But drugs absorbed from the rectum after an enema bypass the liver. Finally, nausea may limit one's intake of drinks but not of enemas. Hence an enema seems to me a more convincing advertisement of superiority than are our whisky advertisements. I recommend this concept to an ambitious public relations firm competing for the account of one of the large distilleries. Let's now step back and summarize the perspective on chemical abuse that I have suggested. Although frequent self-destruction by chemicals may be unique to humans, I see it as fitting into a broad pattern of animal behaviour and thus as having innumerable animal precedents. All animals have had to evolve signals for quickly communicating messages to other animals. If the signals were ones that any individual animal could master or acquire, they would lend themselves to rampant cheating and hence to disbelief. To be valid and believable, a signal must be one that guarantees the honesty of the signaller, by entailing a cost, risk, or burden that only superior individuals can afford. Many animal signals that would otherwise strike us as counterproductive—such as stotting by gazelles, or costly structures and risky displays with which males court females—can be understood in this light.