Greg Beato on Creating Cash Awards for Safer Highs

“Dream with me for a moment,”
psychopharmacologist Ronald K. Siegel wrote in his 1989 magnum
opus, Intoxication. “What would be wrong if we had
perfectly safe intoxicants?” In Siegel’s estimation, the desire to
alter one’s consciousness is a “fourth drive,” a “natural part of
our biology” that influences human behavior as much as hunger,
thirst, and sex.

And if we can’t suppress our desire to get high any more
effectively than we can suppress our desire for breakfast, we
should be trying to develop the safest intoxicants possible, Greg
Beato argues. Imagine if, instead of trying to thwart the
entrepreneurs behind products like “Bomb Marley Jungle Juice” and
“AK-47 Cherry Popper,” the federal government tried to actively
incentivize them, by offering a billion-dollar prize to the first
manufacturer who successfully produces the kind of safely
domesticated mood enhancer that Dr. Siegel envisioned 25 years
ago. 

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