Here’s a short but sweet news item proving that taking drugs is as natural in the animal kingdom as it is in the human world. In Columbia, SC a flock of cedar waxwings are reported to have collectively slammed into an office building, because they were “wasted”. Hundreds of birds were injured, many of which died. Around a hundred were treated for shock and concussion, and then released. Thirty remain in custody. The birds are said to have become intoxicated after feasting on holly berries nearby.

This reminds me of a really cool sounding book that I want to get called “Animals and Psychedelics: The Natural World and the Instinct to Alter Consciousness,” by Giorgio Samorini. The book description:

From caffeine-dependent goats to nectar addicted ants, the animal kingdom offers amazing examples of wild animals and insects seeking out and consuming the psychoactive substances in their environments. Author Giorgio Samorini explores this little-known phenomenon and suggests that, far from being confined to humans, the desire to experience altered states of consciousness is a natural drive shared by all living beings and that animals engage in these behaviors deliberately. Rejecting the Western cultural assumption that using drugs is a negative action or the result of an illness, Samorini opens our eyes to the possibility that beings who consume psychedelics–whether humans or animals–contribute to the evolution of their species by creating entirely new patterns of behavior that eventually will be adopted by other members of that species. The author’s fascinating accounts of mushroom-loving reindeer, intoxicated birds, and drunken elephants ensure that readers will never view the animal world in quite the same way again.

I’ve actually heard that thing about the reindeer doing mushrooms. Supposedly the Lapps or somebody like that would either feed the reindeer the mushrooms or notice when they were eating them. They were some kind of mushroom poisonous to humans (maybe amanita muscaria?), but not to reindeer. Supposedly, they would then drink the reindeer urine, because it still had active compounds in it, but they had been filtered and diluted enough for human ingestion.

Besides animals using drugs, I also found another thing about animals that can be used as drugs. Some of the ones they list here:

1. Bees that take nectar from the psychoactive Atropa belladonna tend to make psychoactive honey
2. “Multiple wasp stings are known to induce mildly hallucinogenic effects, such as increasing the intensity of colors and the perception of geometric forms.”
3. Unspecified California Indians used an unspecified type of ant for hallucinating.
4. A South American tribe was supposed to have taken dried “bamboo grub” which induced opium-like effects.
5. Son of a bitch! Apparently “Spanish Fly” which is an aphrodisiac is made from the wings of a beetle, called Cantharis vesicatoria
6. There’s also the puffer fish which was used in the creation of the so-called “zombi” drug. (More on that over at this post)
7. Several cultures also report a mysterious “dream fish” which is said to contain DMT. Plus there’s those frogs that produce DMT on their backs (hence the legend of toad-licking to get high)
8. Whoa, this is fucking NUTS! Apparently the dried venom glands and/or crystallized venom of the cobra and king cobra was traditionally smoked in India with cannabis. I can only imagine what kind of fucked up effects that would produce. Wow.
9. Speaking of reindeer and drinking urine, this article also claims that reindeer were regularly fed human urine, and that the human urine essentially got the reindeer drunk. Talk about a symbiotic relationship. (Oh here we go, it also talks about them and mushrooms. It’s the fly agaric mushroom.)
10. Some people also think giraffe flesh is psychedelic, and there is a tribe in Africa called the Humr that create a hallucinogenic potion from it’s liver and bone marrow.

Oh cool, apparently this info is also from a book, and I’d like to get it as well. It’s called The Encyclopedia of Psychoactive Substances.

Two other books related to this that I always mean to read are Breaking Open the Head and The Cosmic Serpent. One of them (I forget which) is supposed to have a bunch of information on an important question: how the fuck did humans find out information about all these psychoactive substances in the first place? One of the things they talk about is that shamans who were intoxicated with whatever substance would enter into a trance where the plants (or other organisms) themselves would teach or transmit information about their medicinal uses. It’s the kind of thing that seems crazy at first, but once you start really looking at the intense diversity of traditional medicinal and herbal lore, you do have to wonder if they could have ever come up with all that info just through trial and error. (And the first person who tries to debunk traditional medicine as being based on “superstition” is going to get a kick in the nuts by me.)