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Many of these pioneering researchers came to the conclusion that seeking intoxication was programmed into human nature. As Weil pointed out in his 1973 book The Natural Mind , from an early age children experiment with spinning around or hyperventilating to experience mind-altering giddiness. He suggested that when we get older, this quest to alter our feelings stays with us but we pursue it chemically as well as physically.
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Siegel believes there is a strong biological drive to seek intoxication. "It's the fourth drive," he says. "After hunger, thirst and sex, there is intoxication." Whether we are seeking pleasure, stimulation, pain relief or escape, at the root of this drive, he says, is the motivation to feel "different from normal" - what has sometimes been called "a holiday from reality". Some people reach this state through travel, books, art, roller coasters, sport, religion, exploration, love, social contact or power. Others use intoxicants. "It's the same motivation," says Siegel. "We wouldn't live if we didn't seek to feel different."
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Medication with uppers and downers may be fairly easy to understand, but there are other intoxicants whose attractions are harder to fathom. These are the hallucinogens, which can't easily be explained in purely survivalist terms. Most animals actively avoid this category of intoxicant.
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Medicinal properties notwithstanding, there are other ideas to explain why people take psychedelics. Siegel found that he could persuade monkeys to voluntarily smoke the hallucinogen DMT when they were in a situation of severe sensory deprivation. He had already trained three rhesus monkeys to smoke for a reward, to study the effects of nicotine.

When he laced their smoking tubes with DMT, they briefly tried it, then avoided it. But after several days in darkness, with no stimulation, the monkeys began to smoke DMT voluntarily. They ended up grasping at and chasing non-existent objects and hiding from invisible dangers. "This was the first demonstration of a non-human primate voluntarily taking a hallucinogenic drug," Siegel says. "We share the same motivation to light up our lives with chemical glimpses of another world." Boredom it seems, will drive animals to experiment, even when the experience is not altogether pleasurable.

The same drive to seek novelty or stave off boredom could explain why people take drugs that have overwhelmingly negative effects.
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In some ways novelty-seeking is a basic behavioural drive. Literature on child development reveals that once infants are no longer sleepy, hungry or thirsty, they will explore and seek new experiences. They wriggle their limbs, put things in their mouths, touch things, taste things and bash things together.

Without this drive, they wouldn't learn anything about the world around them. Perhaps this spirit of exploration simply continues into adulthood in a different form.
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