Animals That Do Drugs

Using drugs and narcotic substances isn’t something exclusive to humans, and it’s not that hard to find animals that do drugs in the wild. Nature has plenty of psychotropic substances to offer, and some people think that certain animals use these substances as a mere coincidence whereas others say that they use them for pleasure or evolutionary causes.

We’re all aware that cats absolutely adore catnip and can get a bit silly around the stuff, getting sexually aroused and in some cases losing their balance completely, turning into playful, drooling animals. This confusing state can last a few minutes, but what people don’t know is that there’s another plant that has the complete opposite effect, and it’s used to ward off cats and dogs. The most curious thing about all of this is that catnip can sometimes smell strangely like weed! Just like tamed cats, big cats use Banisteriopsis Caapi (known as ayahuasca) in the same way that house cats use catnip. Shamans have also historically used this plant in order to improve and hone their hunting skills and senses, and it’s thought that jaguars use it for the exact same reason.

Bats are well aware that fruit begins to ferment once it’s gone past the point of maturity and it naturally produces alcohol; they love it! Somehow, getting drunk doesn’t seem to affect their capacity to fly. Fermented fruit doesn’t just attract bats; elephants and various kinds of monkeys also partake in this animal kingdom booze up, and their favorite is the marula fruit that can have incredible alcohol levels of up to 38º!

Vervet Monkeys living in Africa are also slightly alcoholic; there’s an island in the Caribbean where these monkeys are seemingly always around the sugar cane workers, and regularly drink fermented sugar cane when they can. They even rob alcoholic drinks from tourists when they can! On this particular island you can look at the statistics involving monkeys that drink alcohol and those that don’t; the monkeys that drink alcohol have proven to be better leaders.

There’s a kind of lemur in Madagascar that uses a venomous millipede to clean itself of parasites and the like, but the substance that these millipedes secrete contains a combination of elements that give the lemur an extreme feeling of ecstasy. Cappuccino monkeys are also prone to become addicted to this substance.

Baboons like to prepare for a fight by using a certain plant that, in low dosages, can cause hallucinations that can last up to 10 hours and the effects can be felt up to 96 hours after taking it. The active ingredient in the plant sticks around in the fat cells and acts as a sort of antidepressant, similar to LSD. The theory behind why these baboons use this plant is that it increases their strength and lessens their pain receptors.

Canadian rams discovered a type of lichen that has psychotropic properties, and they rub their teeth against it to get some amazingly strong hallucinations. Apparently, reindeer in Scandinavia had a similar idea; these reindeer literally do mushrooms that they find under the snow. It’s assumed that the whole idea of Father Christmas having flying reindeer comes from a vision that the indigenous people Saami had after consuming some of these mushrooms which they would use for visions. Sometimes they would even drink the urine from the reindeers while they were under the effects of the mushrooms, getting a flying feeling as well as a sharpening of the senses.

There are plenty of animals in the ocean that do drugs too, like dolphins. On more than one occasion dolphins have been seen to act extremely strange after playing with pufferfish, a venomous animal that produces a neurotoxin that is fatal to humans but psychedelic for dolphins. The most curious thing is that this kind of behavior is almost always seen in groups of dolphins, not individual ones.

Ever since the world has existed and there have been animals, there has always been a sort of attraction for substances that can alter the psyche and it’s completely natural. It’s even been shown that some dinosaurs most likely ate a kind of grass that is closely related to LSD. With marijuana, we’ve just taken this idea and expanded it for therapeutic, medicinal and recreational use.

Author: Fabio Inga
Translation: Ciara Murphy