Word: siegel
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...Government has declared total war on illegal drugs. But is it a battle that can ever be won? No, according to a new book by Ronald K. Siegel, a research psychopharmacologist at the UCLA School of Medicine. In Intoxication: Life in Pursuit of Artificial Paradise (Dutton; $19.95), Siegel argues that the war is doomed because it is against man's own nature. His controversial contention: humanity's pursuit of happiness through chemicals -- whether ; caffeine, nicotine, alcohol, opium, marijuana or cocaine -- is a universal and inescapable fact of life...
...Siegel, a scientific consultant on the nature of drug addiction to two presidential commissions, the National Institute on Drug Abuse and the World Health Organization, is not the first expert to conclude that the desire to alter one's state of consciousness is a drive as elemental as hunger, thirst and sex. But he takes the argument a radical step further by proposing that society would be best served if it accepted the inevitability of intoxication and launched an all-out effort to invent less damaging, nonaddictive substitutes for alcohol and the popular illicit drugs...
...attempt to prove his point, Siegel presents exhaustive evidence of the quest for intoxication throughout history and throughout the animal kingdom. In many cases, humans and animals have shared the same drugs. Hawkmoths, for example, fly erratically after drinking the nectar of datura flowers. The Aztecs used the same plant as a pain-killer, and British soldiers in Jamestown who made a salad of its leaves became intoxicated for eleven days...
...least one reporter picked up the scent early on. In December 1986 Joan Jacobson, a housing reporter for the Baltimore Evening Sun, received a tip: Rhode Island developer Judith Siegel was throwing James Watt's name around HUD offices in Baltimore in connection with a low-income-housing rehabilitation project that Siegel wanted to develop in Essex, Md. Like any good reporter, Jacobson started asking questions. Why would the former Interior Secretary, now a Wyoming-based businessman and a professed enemy of Big Government, be involved in such a project? Jacobson started combing every public file on the 312-unit...
...turned out, Jacobson's source was right. Watt had received a $300,000 consulting fee from Siegel for making eight telephone calls and holding a 30- minute meeting with HUD Secretary Samuel Pierce to ease the way for the project. Siegel claims she does not recall talking with Jacobson in 1987. "You think I'm going to risk five, six or seven hundred thousand dollars talking to somebody on the Baltimore ((Evening)) Sun?" asks the developer today. Local housing officials, curious about Watt's involvement, were cheering Jacobson along. "I wanted her to find the facts," says Maryland community-development...