| Dispatch
#11: THE ALCOHOLIC MONKEYS OF ST. KITTS
Click here for print friendly version Page 3 of 4 |
|
Not wanting to condition us in any way, Frank did not tell us until afterward that the ten monkeys in Cage 33 had been screened several months ago and had not been offered alcohol since. Some were drinkers, some not. Having lived together as a group for some time, they got along pretty well. As soon as Frank left, they all approached, making contact calls. It didn't take long to pick out the dominant ones; they hadn't been together long enough for their to be a single obviously paramount alpha. Left Shoulder, as we named him, was the boldest, but not the biggest. Big doesn't mean boss, Ervin later explained. Dominance is often hereditary. LS approached with penis erect, yawning. The others, ranged along the perimeter of the cage, gazed wistfully out, occasionally directing a half-yawn at nobody in particular-- a "displaced threat." Two monkeys sat on a pole, swishing their crossed tails, meaning "buddies." A little adolescent came up to us, masturbated briskly, and licked the cum off its fingers; "hate to waste protein," Frank explained. Masturbation, he said, was basically something to do to while away the day. Another monkey caught a fly in the air with a lightning swipe of the hand and ate it. Left Thigh sodomized Right Thigh three times in the course of the morning, stepping up on the crooked back of his calves to get a better angle of thrust. I recalled the gradient of expressions for "hanging out" in northern Mexico : around Mexico City people say they are tragando cañote, "sucking cane;" in Chihuahua it becomes comiendo moscas, "eating flies;" while in northern New Mexico it is chingando la borega, fucking the sheep. On St. Kitts the expression is "liming." Liming was the main behavior Maurice and I saw over nineteen hours of observation between us. The effect of the hammond was not unlike the effect on rum on the planters of St. Kitts, described by an early chronicler named Richard Ligon : "it lays them asleep on the ground." After an hour of baseline study, Amanda brought four bottles of hammond. Four of the monkeys showed immediate interest in them, particularly Small Central Thorax, the wimpiest, scrawniest, and mangiest of the group, who clinging to the wire by all fours, with his eyes blissfully closed, sucked the spout for five minutes straight and returned for several more equally long drafts. The hooch took effect in less than half an hour : SCT was staggering and weaving like a classic drunk. After several attempts to reach the pole laid across the center of the cage, above his head just out of arm's reach, he finally made it, but soon afterward, unable to keep his balance, he fell back down to the floor. The other three drinkers, who were also omegas, lay down and slept for a few minutes; when they came to, they seemed normal. SCT was the only real "skidrow" monkey of the lot. There seemed to be a correlation between drinking and low status. None of the alphas were drinkers. One alpha, in fact, the local member of the Temperance League, apparently, shoved the spout of one of the bottles so that no one could reach it. A few mornings later, when SCT was reeling drunk again, Maurice observed several of the sober monkeys catch him and prop him up as he was about to fall. Apart from a few tiffs, we saw no violence. In fact, the alcohol seemed to produce more altruism than aggression. Maurice agreed; what we had seen supported the contention of Maragarite Duras, the author of Hiroshima Mon Amour, a severe alcoholic who claims that liquor makes you more intelligent, social, and socialistic. Ervin explained that you wouldn't expect to see changes in social organization and level of aggression for another two weeks, when the drinkers would be putting away four hundred cc's a morning. "They're not an established drinking party," he explained. "In a normal social group, aggression is a highly ritualized and controlled phenomenon," he explained. "There are a whole lot of rules about it. There's a minuet of exchanges before anyone actually comes to blows. If a subordinate male wants to encroach on the space of a dominant, to share shade, he must pay ritual respect : submit, groom-- then he can steal the mango he was after all the time. With alcohol the ritual system breaks down. A drinker will initiate an act like appeasement or sex play, then break it off. Failing to send the right signal, he is attacked, and because he has lost judgment, he attacks back, then all hell breaks loose. The same sort of breakdown of the agonistic minuet happens in bars. Take, for instance, this exchange, which actually happened a bar on the North End of Boston : Guy 1 to Guy 2: Got a smoke ? Guy 2: Sure. Hands Guy 1 unopened pack. Guy 1 peels cellophane and throws on floor. Guy 2: Pick up your trash. Guy 1 : Fuck you. Guy 2 pulls gun and blows Guy 1 away. *** Like most Frenchman, Maurice had been drinking at least three glasses of wine a day for decades. "In America, I would be considered a heavy drinker, but I am not an alcoholic," he explained. As far as most Frenchmen are concerned, there are no alcoholics in France, although France has one of the world's highest per capita consumption rates-- fourteen gallons of pure alcohol a year, compared with eight in the United States-- and one of the world's highest cirrhosis rates. Wine is part of the meal. What exactly is alcoholism ? I wondered. No gene or genes associated with it have been found yet in any species. A big mistake of popularizers, Ervin said, is that there a "gene for alcoholism," like "a gene for criminality," just waiting to be found. "Alcoholism is a complex, multifactorial disorder, heavily influenced by sociocultural factors," he explained. "It could be not one but hundreds of syndromes, some of which may have a genetic aspect. But all such genes might do anyway is to give you a susceptibility, a predisposition. Your alcoholism might never be expressed-- for instance, if you were a Muslim." There is anecdotal evidence, but no hard statistical data, Maurice remarked, of a lot of serious drinking in Russia. But how much of this drinking is biological, how much is frustration with the demoralized and oppressive poshlost of the society, and how is much due to the cold ? Extreme cold and hot climates (Brazil, for instance) produce heavy drinking, but then the Irish are no slouches, either. Maurice, Frank, and Roberta were part of a multidisciplinary team studying alcoholism in northern Ontario, whose males are dramatically more prone to the disease than southern Ontarians, perhaps because many of them are rowdy, anti-social, heavy-drinking, frontier types, like the sort who gravitate to the Yukon or Alaska. There is a strong correlation between alcoholism and high scores on a sixty-point questionnaire devised fifteen years ago by the neuropsychiatrist Marvin Zuckerman to identify "sensation-seeking" behavior. Zuckerman-positives, who abound in North Ontario, seek out adventure, danger, and constant stimulation, and tend to drink a lot. There is also a correlation between alcoholism and depression, which is caused, according to the latest thinking, by a malfunction of the dopamine, seratonin, and norepinephrine receptors. Depressives are drawn to alcohol for the initial short-term spike in these chemical neurotransmitters, but alcohol, like marijuana, is a depressive, and its chronic effect is to desensitize the receptors, and to make you more depressed.(Although I don’t find this to be the case with cannabis.) Addiction may be an attempt to get back to the original excited state. There is also anecdotal evidence, but no good studies, either, of heavy drinking among Native Americans. One drunk Navajo is said to die of exposure every day on the Navajo reservation. Asians-- Japanese, Tibetans, and some Native Americans--do have a proven congenital reaction to alcohol : they flush. The flushes are very uncomfortable, like menopausal hot flushes, and are often accompanied by nausea and dizziness. One would expect that native American alcoholics are pushed by their genes, but how much of their drinking is attributable to cultural degradation (defeat is particularly hard on the males of the defeated culture; world-wide, there are three times as many male alcoholics in subjugated or formerly subjugated societies), how much to the cultural value many tribes attach to alternate states of consciousness ? Native Americans themselves complain that they were deliberately addicted to "firewater" by early traders, the way the Chinese were addicted to opium by the British East India Company. Indians drink to get drunk. So do Russians. So do I, every once in a while. When I drink, and I’m not much of a juicer, my liver being shot, having had hepatitis and malaria two times, I keep drinking. Why else drink unless you’re going to get drunk ? This makes me an alcoholic, according to the current, rather lame definition of the disease. In the absence of actual genes, alcoholism is defined functionally, as drinking to the point where you are no longer in control, where you're unable to stop although you have become physically, economically, or socially impaired because of alcohol : you have cirrhosis, you've lost your job, your family is disintegrating. This definition includes the need to get smashed periodically, whether it is the binge drinker who ties one on every nine months and is a sober, responsible citizen the rest of the time; people like Winston Churchill, who started his day with a shot of brandy and by evening was famously, vituperatively drunk; and four American Nobel prize winners who are alcoholics. Alcoholism seems to be the occupational hazard of writers, particularly, who need substances that will turn off the machine or grease their mental wheels. The most reliable substance, the old standby, is booze. At this point there is no definition of alcoholism in monkeys, but Maurice said that if Small Central Thorax kept drinking the way he had been for twenty days, and you took away his hammond and he started having violent withdrawal symptoms (another aspect of the disease whose neurochemistry is not well understood), you could safely conclude that he was an alcoholic. The important thing, he emphasized, was to realize that the difference between organic and functional psychosis is artificial. There are two languages, one neurobiological and the other psychosocial, for describing the same phenomenon. "You can say clinical depression, or low serotonin level. The problem with the overspecialized scientists of today is that too few of them are bilingual." But ultimately, he added, everything is organic : "since there is an underlying brain, nothing happens without mixed-brain concomitants." This was the point Ervin was trying to make in a book on the biology of violence that he published in l970, which was attacked by leftist intellectuals who "thought that I was trying to do away with Che Guevaras of this world, that I was saying was that there was no legitimate cause for anger, such as social injustice, because it was purely biological," he explained. "But what I was saying was that each of us has a well-oiled attack mechanism that is under varying degrees of control, and our anger, whatever triggers it, is accompanied by specific, measurable changes in brain chemistry. And in fact, just as everybody was saying that violence couldn't possibly be genetic-- this is hot off the press-- a Dutch librarian assembled a three-hundred-year pedigree dripping with murderers, rapists, and arsonists who have been found to share a defective NMAO gene. For the first time a gene associated with impulsive criminal violence has been isolated and sequenced." Ervin went to his blackboard and at the top he wrote BEHAVIOR, then just below it he drew four boxes representing MOTIVATIONAL STATES, which he labeled TASTE, ANTI-ANXIETY, ANTI-DEPRESSANT, and CRAVING (ADDICTION). Then at the bottom of the board he wrote GENE. "The puzzle of the system is how do you get from the gene, which makes a protein molecule, typically an enzyme, to the states? There may be several paths. There could be a single defective gene, or several disorders. We'd be willing to argue that every alcoholic family has a different genetic lesion. You can have your error on any one of twenty points down the line. Even a single mutation of the right kind can disrupt complex function like intelligence. What happens at one enzyme, if you knock it out or slightly increase or decrease its activity, can reverberate throughout the system. It's like what happens in the rain forest if you pull out the monkeys." Turning to his caged monkeys, he continued: "Let's say you have identified a hundred excess drinkers, who meet all the criteria. The first thing you do is check their pedigrees to see if they are family-history-positive or sporadic. A sporadic alcoholic could have suffered an accidental lesion prenatally-- at fertilization, formation of the egg, or meiosis-- or because of disease at any time. There is no strong unifying hypothesis, you can't find a unifying pathophysiology, so the sporadics are irrelevant to research, and you concentrate on the familial alcoholics. Are the family histories identical ? No. Some pedigrees have only male alcoholics, others both sexes. If you limit yourself to one pedigree, you can be reasonably sure that if there is a biological disorder, it's the same one. If the pedigree is male-limited, it seems unlikely that it's multiple-gene disorder. More likely it's a single-gene error." |