What really happens when a bear takes cocaine?

Sam Kriss 24 February 2023 1:27pm GMT In 1994, a team of Nasa scientists started exploring an entirely new frontier: giving weed to spiders. Not just weed: the researchers subjected their

spiders to a large amount of psychoactive drugs. Caffeine, marijuana, amphetamine, plus chloral hydrate, a sedative, for the comedown. To carry out the important work of getting spiders

high, they’d developed an ingenious method. First you dissolve your drug of choice in a sugar solution, and then you inject it into the body of a dead fly. Tweezer the fly into a spider’s

web, and wait for the tiny predator to pounce. And then you clear away the web, and see what your spider builds next. The Nasa study was not, in fact, the first experiment with drugging

spiders; we’ve been doing this since the 1950s, with most of the early experiments spearheaded by the Swiss pharmacologist Peter Witt. (He thought his spiders could function as a kind of

grisly drug test: feed them a sample of someone’s blood, and they might tell you what substances this person’s been taking.)  Images of their intoxicated webs still circulate online, and

many of them are strangely beautiful. The spiders dosed with marijuana will tend to weave the inner part of their webs as normal, before stumbling into a comfortable stupor some time before

finishing the job. Benzedrine webs are frantic and twitchy; the spider will complete one section, before apparently darting off to start all over again somewhere else, leaving large gaps

entirely unfilled. But my favourite might be the webs spiders make on LSD. Spiders midway through a profound acid experience produce perfect, mathematically even radial spokes—but no actual

web. Just a glorious, useless sunburst. Maybe the spiders had encountered God. In Elizabeth Banks’s new film Cocaine Bear, a gang of drug-smugglers drop several bricks of coke out of a plane

over a forest in Georgia, where one of them ends up being eaten by a bear—who, given that this is a horror film, turns into a brutal, unkillable murder machine savagely mauling everyone in

the way of its next fix. But the cocaine bear is part of a surprising history of animals who’ve ended up straying into the world of pharmacology. > NASA once tested the effects of various

 drugs on spiders, > specifically the way they weave their webs > pic.twitter.com/rGMlqCZ0MA > — Latest in space 🪐 (@latestinspace) July 16, 2022 Sometimes this is deliberate, like

with Nasa’s spiders. In 1962, the University of Oklahoma decided to give LSD to an elephant. Tusko, the “prize of Oklahoma City zoo,” was injected with an enormous dose, 30 times the

necessary amount. Tusko collapsed almost immediately; within two hours he was dead. Science marches on. But sometimes, like the cocaine bear, animals are drugged by accident. Today, the

residues of prescription drugs in our wastewater are playing havoc with ocean fish. They’re all on antidepressants: maybe happier than they were before, but dizzy, lethargic, and

increasingly uninterested in sex. This is a fairly nasty history—but there’s still something magnetic about those webs. In a famous 1974 essay, appropriately titled What is it Like to Be a

Bat?, the American philosopher Thomas Nagel wondered what it was like to be a bat. He concluded that we will never actually know. We can imagine ourselves fluttering on wings of skin

stretched between our fingertips; we can imagine ourselves hanging upside down in a cave splattered with our own guano; we can even imagine ourselves snapping up insects in mid-flight—but in

all these cases, Nagel writes, we’re really just picturing ourselves briefly assuming a bat-like shape.  We’re no closer to understanding what it would be like for the bat to be a bat.

After all, bats have an entire sense, echolocation, which we lack. When someone turns into a bat in a film—which happens surprisingly often—it’s usually represented visually, with CGI

shockwaves pulsing across the screen. We can’t even imagine this irreducibly batty experience except by assimilating it to one of our own senses. A spider is much, much more distant from

human experience than a bat. Its life is even more impossible to imagine. But looking at their drugged-up webs, it’s hard not to feel some sense of what it’s like to be a spider on drugs. If

you’ve ever felt slightly dizzy after too much coffee, or tried to start three sentences at once after a noseful of speed, you will get what this spider is feeling, because you’ve felt it

too. These experiences do not come out of our own cloistered, separate existences, but from something beyond ourselves. And it’s something we have in common—because like us, our distant

animal cousins do occasionally like to deliberately get high. A few drug-taking animals can assume almost mythic proportions. In 2013, a feral pig broke into a campsite in rural Australia,

drank 18 beers, tore through the bins, got in a fight with a cow, and then fell asleep under a tree. For this feat, the pig briefly became a kind of folk hero; the Australians, who tend to

do this sort of thing, named him “Swino”. (There was something close to a moment of national mourning a month later, when Swino was found dead by a roadside after having been hit by a

truck.) But animals are very capable of getting drunk without resorting to our leftovers. In Scandinavia, elk will glut themselves on fermenting apples in the autumn, and then occasionally

stagger into towns to cause trouble. In 2004, a drunken elk stole a bicycle from a garden in Norway, tottering off with the dented frame hanging around its neck. The next year, an entire

party of them surrounded an old people’s home near Malmö, apparently challenging the octogenarians inside to a fight.  In 2011, a Swedish elk got stuck in a tree and had to be rescued by the

fire service; the same year, a group of highly wasted cervids had an impromptu threesome in a middle-aged marketing manager’s back garden. In 2013, another elk attempted to lock horns with

the swing in a children’s playground before getting its antlers stuck in the ropes, and only freeing itself after having dragged the entire frame 250 metres from where it stood. Do these elk

know that the overripe apples they’re eating are going to do something to their tiny antlered minds? Chances are that they do. Remarkably different animals all seem to deliberately seek out

altered mental states. Further north in Scandinavia, reindeer have a particular taste for fly agaric mushrooms, which are powerful hallucinogens. (They’re also toxic to humans, so Sámi

shamans would traditionally filter out some of the less welcome active ingredients by preparing a mushroom feast for their herds and then drinking the reindeer urine.) Dolphins, too, have

been filmed gently nibbling at pufferfish and passing them to one another: when threatened, pufferfish secrete a neurotoxin that has narcotic effects in small doses. Afterwards, the dolphins

floated lazily just below the water’s surface with their noses pointed skywards, apparently mesmerised by their own reflections. At points, the urge to anthropomorphise is almost

unbearable. In 2012, a study found that fruit flies that had failed to find a mating partner were significantly more likely to choose a nutrient feed containing alcohol. Even the tiniest

specks of life still need to drink away their pain. But why do animals take drugs? It’s still lightly controversial among scientists to imagine that animals might do things simply for fun.

As the anthropologist David Graeber once observed, “an analysis of animal behaviour is not considered scientific unless the animal is assumed, at least tacitly, to be operating according to

the same means/end calculations that one would apply to economic transactions”. This is why BBC documentaries will solemnly inform you that whales leap joyously out of the surface of the

ocean purely so they can take an extra-long breath of air, or that chimpanzees who cannibalise their enemies are just trying to get some useful protein. But the animals that deliberately

drug themselves are clearly doing it for the sheer pleasure of experiencing the world and themselves in a different way. Intoxication is a kind of free play: a dangerous play, sometimes even

fatal, but still a sheer excess for its own sake. And, whether it’s glorious or grisly, so is biological life. There’s a somewhat contested hypothesis, the “stoned ape theory”, that argues

that human consciousness is itself a product of animal drug-taking. In the furthest reaches of our species’ history, a period of rapid climate change caused wide-scale desertification in

Africa, forcing our proto-human ancestors out of the dense forests and into the plains. There, we might have followed the herds of roaming cattle—and where there are cattle, there will

usually be mushrooms. According to the theory, hallucinogenic mushrooms produced the sudden, unexplained explosion in cognitive ability that’s brought us to today. Before, we were slightly

canny apes; afterwards, we were decorating our bodies and burying our dead and painting vast flowing herds on every cave. There’s a link holding together the animal and human worlds, and

it’s drugs. Somehow, pointing towards the golden thread that links human consciousness to the sacred world of nature hasn’t saved Cocaine Bear from some fairly terrible reviews. The CGI bear

is janky and ridiculous, the human characters are bland, and the film spends more time loudly announcing its own comically overblown premise than actually doing anything enjoyable with it.

It’s a piece of sheer excess, existing for no good reason at all, and never quite living up to its promise. Just like drugs, then. Or life. Cocaine Bear is based on a true story. In 1985,

drug-smugglers really did drop a duffel bag full of cocaine out of a plane, and it really was found by a bear who ended up ingesting a powerful quantity of the stuff. But the real-life

cocaine bear didn’t go on a killing spree. It very quickly died.