As I descended into the basement of a high-end London restaurant this Tuesday, I was hoping, frankly, to get high.
I had been invited to a very special 鈥減sychoactive supper鈥� by chef and researcher Charles Michel and his colleagues from the University of Warwick, UK. They promised a menu of stimulating food and intellectual chat designed to highlight the folly of the , a blanket ban on legal highs in the UK that becomes law on 26 May.
A few widely used mind-altering substances, such as alcohol, caffeine and nicotine, are exempt 鈥� as is, usefully, food. So what was the logic to the exemptions? Are they deemed less harmful?
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Only if you don鈥檛 know your chemistry. As the legal ingredients in the evening鈥檚 delicious menu would try to show, food can use the same brain pathways as drugs, with similar consequences.
Sugar high
The evening begins with champagne and after two glasses I鈥檓 already feeling a buzz. Drinking alcohol is deeply entrenched in Western culture, although we are constantly reminded to drink responsibly and count our units to avoid health problems.
And rising obesity worldwide has also raised concerns about unhealthy eating, pointing a finger at foods high in fat and processed sugar. 鈥淪ugar is a drug and an unhealthy one,鈥� says Michel. Right now UK legislators are drafting a sugar tax that will apply to sugary drinks. But the new law seems to disregard its addictive nature.
Although food provides us with energy and nutrients, what we eat also affects our mood. But some active ingredients in food are now sold as pills in concentrations high enough to enhance mood 鈥� and they are perfectly legal.
Take an amino-acid called tryptophan. It is present in high amounts in such foods as cheese, red meat and turkey, and it makes you feel calm and relaxed. 鈥淭here is a natural balance in food, but I鈥檓 not sure about synthesising it, especially because we don鈥檛 know about the effect of different doses,鈥� says Michel.
It鈥檚 time for our first course: a cocoa drink inspired by the ceremonial beverage consumed by ancient Maya and Aztec civilisations. It contains 50 grams of raw cocoa, a dose high enough to create a warm, fuzzy feeling: that鈥檚 thanks to compounds such as anandamide, theobromine, caffeine and tryptophan. 鈥淪timulants in cocoa have an effect on social behaviour,鈥� says Michel. 鈥淚n rituals, the drink is thought to help people connect.鈥�
Moral munchies
Food and drugs can also affect our moral behaviour. 鈥淪mall amounts of substances can alter what we think of as a stable sense of morality,鈥� says psychologist from the University of Oxford.
She in which participants imbibed a foul-tasting protein drink containing different amounts of tryptophan. The compound is a precursor of serotonin 鈥� a neurotransmitter that contributes to well-being and happiness, so those who didn鈥檛 receive any of the amino acid had lower serotonin levels 5 hours later.
This produced a dramatic reaction to being treated unfairly when they played a series of games: people who had received lower doses of tryptophan were more likely to feel vengeful than act calmly. 鈥淚t suggests that our sense of fairness is affected by a substance we can only get in our diet,鈥� says Crockett. Luckily for our fellow diners, the bread and oil with our meal was topped up with a generous sprinkling of tryptophan extract.
And positive mood was definitely on the menu with our main course, Levodopa soup. This was made from broad beans, which contain large amounts of L-DOPA, a chemical used to treat Parkinson鈥檚 disease. 鈥淔ocussing on the pleasurable sensation could tempt people to eat healthy vegetarian food,鈥� says an optimistic Michel.
Much of the debate about legal highs centres on the fear that psychoactive substances will make people lose touch with reality and behave crazily. , a philosopher from the University of London, sets this in context.
Psychoactive substances, she says, need to be considered in terms of their effect on our ability to predict what will happen, based on information our senses received in the past. 鈥淚f your senses give you what you expect, you get a sense of reality and your own agency in the world,鈥� she says.
So for her, legal highs should be characterised by how much they mess up the brain鈥檚 predictive system. And she stresses that individual differences in coping with an altered sense of reality are key: some people may be seriously disturbed, while others are hardly affected.
Playing with perception
Our next course sets out to show this in action. We were given cotton tips dipped in a Sichuan pepper solution and asked to rub them over our lips. Within a few minutes, I feel an intense tingling that our hosts say is equivalent to a 50 hertz vibration.
Michel tells us that the sensation can be enhanced by looking at a trippy pattern on a screen. Although I am enjoying the throbbing sensation, the visual (a still of a Bridget Riley painting) doesn鈥檛 do anything for me.
Maybe the secret to getting a high from foods is mixing different ingredients. Some substances cross the blood-brain barrier to alter your perception directly, while others may need to combine with carbohydrates or proteins to have an effect.
There is not much research in this area, but Michel has been looking into psychoactive combos over the past few months. 鈥淭onight is a bit of an experiment,鈥� he says. 鈥淭he ingredients in different courses could together produce a more pleasurable experience.鈥�
When the meal is over, there is still ample wine to get through. While our menu was delightful and may well have contributed to my sanguine mood, this feels to be by far the most intoxicating substance I鈥檝e had tonight.
The whole affair can only leave you wondering whether policymakers had a few too many bottles of their favourite tipple while drafting the sorry bill that is about to become law. Either way, they might have to eat their words.
