Sex, Drugs and Chocolate: The Science of Pleasure

13 4-MTA

14 LSD

15 Methylphenidate (Ritalin)

16 Anabolic steroids

17 GHB

18 Ecstasy

19 Alkyl nitrites

20 Khat

One striking feature of this list is how poorly it correlates with the current legal classification of the same drugs. In fact, statistically speaking, there was no significant correlation at all between the rank ordering according to harmfulness and the classification according to current UK legislation (the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971).

In the UK, illegal drugs are divided into three classes (A, B and C) according to the severity of the penalties incurred for possession or dealing. The highest category, Class A, includes heroin and cocaine, which were also judged by the experts to be the most harmful drugs. However, Class A also includes LSD and ecstasy, which were judged to be among the least harmful. In the UK, you can be sent to prison for up to seven years for possessing a Class A drug and imprisoned for life if convicted of supplying it.

Alcohol and tobacco, which are legal and unclassified, were assessed to be more harmful than several illegal drugs including cannabis, LSD and ecstasy. If recreational drugs were reclassified according to this evidence-based index of harm, then alcohol would be a Class A drug and tobacco would be Class B. I should stress that I am not trying to imply that making alcohol and tobacco illegal would be either desirable or feasible. The point is simply that the current legal framework has little solid basis in scientific evidence or rational analysis. When measured in terms of the harm they cause, there is currently no clear distinction between legal and illegal drugs.

For its part, the UK parliamentary committee concluded that there are serious inconsistencies in the legal system for classifying drugs and in the processes by which governments tackle drug use. The committee found no convincing evidence to support the belief that legal penalties deter people from using recreational drugs. It called for a more objective and evidence-based approach which takes better account of the actual harm caused by drugs and places less emphasis on ‘knee-jerk responses to media storms’.

Similar conclusions were reached by the RSA Commission on Illegal Drugs, following their own two-year study. Their report, which was published in 2007, concluded that ‘the harmless use of illegal drugs is possible, indeed common’. The Commission found that UK drugs laws were driven more by ‘moral panic’ than rational debate. It proposed scrapping the current classification scheme and replacing it with a framework based on harm. The underlying aim should be to regulate the use of drugs in order to prevent harm, rather than trying to prohibit them altogether. The Commission’s chair, Professor Anthony King, called for ‘less foaming at the mouth and more thinking’. I’ll drink to that.

FIVE And Chocolate (#ulink_41d4b1e1-2999-5964-affb-759feff0486a)

I adore simple pleasures. They are the last refuge of the complex.

OSCAR WILDE, A Woman of No Importance (1894)

Why do we like it? (#ulink_9338ad61-6870-5c56-a1a1-dfbe8bed2c5f)

As worldly pleasures go, chocolate may seem modest and unassuming in comparison with, say, multiple orgasms or pharma-diving. But the most intense pleasures are not always the best in the long run.

Chocolate has much to say in its favour. Even if it does not stir the strongest passions, except in the most devoted chocophile, it is a dependable source of pleasure which can be dipped into by almost anyone at almost any time. Chocolate is redolent of childhood. It embodies a mild, unthreatening form of hedonism – although in times past its sinful connotations led religious authorities to regard it with suspicion. Few chemical pleasures are cheaper. And, as we shall see, it can be good for your health.

Chocolate clearly has universal appeal, with consumption in the developed world continuing to grow. We eat it ourselves and we present it to others as gifts. The box of chocolates has become the conventional token of gratitude. According to one study, nurses in British hospitals eat an average of five chocolates a day each, courtesy of their grateful patients, with some nurses developing a twenty-a-day habit.

Opinions differ as to which nation eats the most. The British like to think of themselves as the world’s greatest chocolate-eaters. However, credible statistics put Switzerland at the head of the global league table, followed by Austria, Ireland and Germany. A great deal depends, of course, on what is meant by ‘chocolate’. Headline figures are often distorted by the inclusion of ersatz sugary confectioneries masquerading under the name of chocolate. The inhabitants of the UK each consume an average of 10 kilograms of ‘chocolate’ a year, although much of what they eat would not be regarded as proper chocolate in some other countries.

Real chocolate, of the kind that gets the connoisseur’s juices flowing, is made from pure cacao solids, a little cacao butter and a modest amount of sugar. (Cacao is often referred to as ‘cocoa’, but this leads to confusion between the bean and the chocolaty drink of the same name. I shall therefore stick to ‘cacao’ when referring to the plant and its products.) The cacao bean grows on a species of tree called Theobroma cacao; the first word literally meaning ‘the food of the gods’, from the Greek theo for god and broma for food.

Why do we love chocolate so much? Its immediate appeal obviously hinges on the combination of rich flavours and sensual texture. Real chocolate melts at around body temperature, unleashing the complex flavours and aromas of several hundred chemical components of cacao. The flavours released by good chocolate can take several minutes to unfurl and develop fully. Chewing it curtails this process, rather like gulping good wine without pausing to savour it. The way to realise the full pleasure-giving potential of quality chocolate is to let it dissolve slowly in your mouth. Aficionados exhale through the nose, to maximise their appreciation of the bouquet, but you might find this makes you giggle. The simple advice is: suck, don’t chew.

We can enjoy the smooth texture and mellow flavour of chocolate to their best effect thanks to a Swiss chocolatier named Rodolphe Lindt who, in the late nineteenth century, developed the production technique known as conching – so called because the machine resembled in shape a giant conch shell. Conching entails rolling and smearing the molten chocolate while subjecting it to a stream of warm air. This blends the ingredients and releases unwanted volatile components. Serious chocolate undergoes several days of conching before it is ready. Before the invention of conching, chocolate was grainy and bitter.

Chocolate injects a dose of well-being into almost any occasion. Even pregnancy can benefit. Researchers at the University of Helsinki found that pregnant women who ate chocolate every day felt more positive and less stressed, both during pregnancy and six months after giving birth. The chocolate-eating mothers also made more positive assessments of their six-month-old offspring, probably because they felt more relaxed themselves.

In the comforting world of fiction, chocolate has even more wondrous properties. As any devotee of Harry Potter will know, chocolate is the best remedy for a young wizard who has just had a close encounter with a life-sapping Dementor of Azkaban. However, its sensual connotations can also provoke fictional disapproval. In Joanne Harris’s novel Chocolat, trouble erupts in a small French town after a chocolaterie opens. The town’s priest, who prefers ‘the harsh, clean world of the Old Testament’, fears the corrupting influence it will have on the pious residents. Chocolate epitomises physical pleasure and, as far as the priest is concerned, physical pleasure is ‘the crack into which the devil sends his roots’.

Eating pleasant-tasting food of any sort can lift mood, and chocolate is one of the best at doing this. Chocolate’s lasting associations with the better bits of childhood probably reinforce these pleasures. But at least some small fraction of its visceral appeal lies in its psychoactive constituents. Chocolate contains a number of substances with mild psychoactive properties. Foremost among these are the stimulants caffeine and its close chemical relative theobromine. A cup of cocoa may contain up to 25 milligrams of caffeine, about a third as much as a cup of instant coffee. Properly conducted laboratory experiments, of the double-blind, placebo-controlled variety, have demonstrated that the quantities of caffeine and theobromine contained in 50 grams of dark chocolate are sufficient to produce measurable improvements in people’s reaction times, their ability to process visual information and their subjective feeling of energy. White ‘chocolate’, which contains little or no cacao solids, has no such effect. Another substance found in chocolate is the element magnesium. According to one speculative hypothesis, chocolate might make some individuals feel better in the long run by correcting a magnesium deficiency in their diet.

Chocolate contains tiny amounts of a psychoactive substance called anandamide, which also happens to be one of the neurotransmitters used within the brain for signalling between nerve cells. Anandamide activates the same type of receptors in the brain that respond to cannabis. This might account for the widespread belief among cannabis-users that chocolate enhances the effects of their drug – although it has to be said that the amounts of anandamide in chocolate are so small as to make this doubtful. The fact that chocolate contains cannabis-like chemicals has even been used as a legal defence. In one case, a man who had been accused of smoking cannabis claimed that the test results were misleading because he had recently eaten a lot of chocolate. Laboratory tests cast doubt on the credibility of this defence and he was convicted.

Despite being a pleasurable pick-me-up, chocolate is not the reliable antidepressant that some devotees claim it to be. Eating chocolate engenders different emotional responses, ranging from unalloyed pleasure to extreme guilt. After reviewing the evidence, one group of academics concluded that chocolate is not very effective at alleviating low mood or depression, beyond the short-lived fix of pleasure. In fact, individuals who eat chocolate with the specific aim of lifting their mood may end up worse off, prolonging their gloom. This could also have something to do with the fact that people who eat chocolate for emotional comfort (along with most of the population of the UK) usually turn to milk chocolate, which contains smaller concentrations of the key ingredients.

Where does it come from? (#ulink_d2afc399-bede-58ae-966a-9046360f30d2)

The origins of the word ‘chocolate’ are, if anything, more controversial than the origins of the substance itself. However, there is general agreement that both hail from tropical America. One theory has it that ‘chocolate’ derives from the Nahuatl word xocolatl (or chocolatl), meaning, well, chocolate. Another theory is that ‘chocolate’ derives from cacahuatl, meaning ‘cacao water’, but that the Spanish swapped the ‘caca’ for ‘choco’ because of the unfortunate similarity with the Spanish slang caca, meaning shit. ‘Shit water’ was not a great name for a new product which in those days came in the form of a lumpy, viscous, dark-brown liquid.

(#litres_trial_promo)

For most of its long history chocolate has been drunk, not eaten. Chocolate was invented more than three thousand years ago by the Olmec people in what is now Mexico. It was they who first domesticated the cacao tree and they who came up with the inspired idea of transforming its beans into a nutritious, if rather bitter, drink. Archaeological evidence shows that the inhabitants of present-day Honduras were drinking a chocolate beverage around 1150 BC. The drink was made from fermented cacao pulp, which suggests that this early prototype of chocolate might have been a spin-off from attempts to make alcohol. The Olmec were predecessors of the Maya, and it was the Maya who really developed the use of chocolate. Hundreds of years later, the Maya were using chocolate in most of their meals, both as a drink and as an ingredient in their cooking. The drink was flavoured with ingredients such as chilli, honey or vanilla and was often consumed hot. The Aztecs may not have invented chocolate, but they did give it great prominence in their culture, using it in religious ceremonies. They even used cacao beans as a form of currency – a rare example of money that really did grow on trees.

Chocolate did not reach Europe until the sixteenth century. It arrived, in tiny amounts and to minimal acclaim, with returning Spanish conquistadors. To begin with, no one paid much attention to this unappealing substance, although there was great interest in the travellers’ tales of how the Aztecs worshipped it. Hernando Cortés, the first of the conquistadors, had sent back thrilling reports of chocolate being served in golden goblets in the court of the emperor Motecuhzoma (‘Montezuma’) and of how this ‘divine’ drink enabled a man to walk all day without food. Despite their initial distaste for this strange and bitter beverage, the Spanish invaders quickly realised its commercial potential. The first European consumers of chocolate were Spanish monks and nuns who had picked up the habit in New Spain, as Mexico was then known. By the late sixteenth century, the Spanish were importing cacao from New Spain in significant quantities.

The early days of chocolate provide yet another illustration of how religious and secular authorities instinctively frown upon sensual pleasure. Chocolate the nutritious beverage was regarded as wholesome and respectable, whereas chocolate the delicious drink was regarded as faintly sinful. The age-old tendency to view any new source of pleasure with suspicion is a theme we shall return to in chapter 13.

The Catholic Church was initially uncertain about how to classify this exotic new substance. Was chocolate a foodstuff and therefore to be avoided during Lent? Was it a mind-altering drug and therefore to be banned altogether? Or was it a medicine and therefore to be lauded? In 1569, Pope Pius V ruled that as long as chocolate was consumed only as a bitter drink made with water, it was a restorative and could therefore be consumed during Lent. A relatively liberal attitude towards chocolate was convenient, in view of the huge profits the authorities were already making from it. The moral and religious status of chocolate nonetheless remained controversial. In 1636, the Jesuit-trained scholar Antonio de León Pinelo published a book on the subject, entitled The Moral Question of Whether Chocolate Violates the Ecclesiastic Fast. Despite permissive decrees from a succession of popes, more puritanical clerics continued in their efforts to suppress chocolate. In 1616 a Catholic committee condemned chocolate as a ‘damnable agent of necromancers and sorcerers’ and in 1650 the Jesuits in New Spain tried unsuccessfully to prevent its members from using the stuff. The wheel eventually came full circle, however. With the advent of commercial production techniques in the nineteenth century, chocolate Easter eggs and Christmas gifts became a symbol of Christian festivals.

The Spanish monopoly on cacao delayed the spread of chocolate to the rest of Europe, until the Dutch East India Company started importing its own cacao. Chocolate, the drink, eventually took off in Europe during the same period when coffee and tea became all the rage. Chocolate, the costliest of the three new beverages, reached England in the 1650s and was soon being consumed socially in the fashionable coffee houses of London. Samuel Pepys was an early adopter. He mentions chocolate frequently in his diary – as here, for instance, in his entry for 24 April 1661:

Waked in the morning with my head in a sad taking through the last night’s drink, which I am very sorry for. So rise and went out with Mr. Creed to drink our morning draught, which he did give me in Chocolate to settle my stomach.

The chocolate of those days was a spicy drink flavoured with additives such as aniseed, ginger, pepper, cinnamon or vanilla. Its strong flavour made it an ideal vehicle for administering poison. When the composer Henry Purcell died in 1695, there were rumours that he had been killed by poisoned chocolate.

By the eighteenth century, chocolate-drinking was firmly embedded in European society, even if it was still regarded as a trifle decadent. Casanova was a chocolate connoisseur who drank it for breakfast every morning and frequently shared it with acquaintances and lovers. He is said to have preferred chocolate to champagne. Which brings us to the Marquis de Sade.

In a book about sex, drugs and chocolate you might have expected that an appearance by the Marquis de Sade would be in the context of violent sexual excess or drug abuse, not chocolate. In fact, Sade was another voluptuary whose hedonism happily encompassed the modest pleasures of chocolate.

Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis de Sade, the Enlightenment’s high priest of free thinking, had a voracious appetite for sweet things and adored chocolate. He ate and drank chocolate in all its many forms and used cacao butter suppositories to ease the discomfort of his haemorrhoids. On one occasion in 1768, Sade gave a ball to which he invited many guests and fed them chocolate pastilles for dessert. Unbeknown to them, the chocolate pastilles contained powdered Spanish fly, an irritant made from crushed beetles which was once favoured as an aphrodisiac. According to one (probably exaggerated) account:

All who ate them were seized by shameless ardour and lust and started the wildest excesses of love. The festival became a Roman orgy. The most modest of women could not restrain themselves. The Marquis de Sade abused his sister-in-law and then fled with her to escape the threatening penalty of death. Many persons died as the result of the excesses and many others still suffer recurrent pains.

Despite passing much of his adult life incarcerated in prisons or lunatic asylums, Sade managed to procure regular supplies of chocolate thanks to his long-suffering wife. In one of his many letters, he asked her to send him a chocolate cake iced with chocolate and ‘black inside from chocolate as the devil’s arse is black from smoke’. Among his other demands were boxes of ground chocolate, crème au chocolat, half-pound boxes of chocolate pastilles, large chocolate biscuits, vanilla pastilles au chocolat and chocolate bars. Sade was a stickler for the right sort of chocolate. While confined in the Bastille, he insisted that his wife provide him with a particular brand of chocolate from his regular supplier. Not surprisingly, the combination of imprisonment and chocolate made him very fat.

Chocolate even makes an occasional appearance in Sade’s fictional works – as, for example, in an episode in One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom, in which a ‘bawdy quartet’ of lechers are served chocolate by eight naked girls. More extreme carnality rapidly follows, as ‘no sooner had the chocolate been served than Blangis got a monstrous erection’.

Chocolate had more wholesome connotations for the upright burghers of nineteenth-century England, where the four big chocolate producers – Fry, Rowntree, Cadbury and Terry – were all run by Quakers. They championed chocolate as a nutritious alternative to the demon drink, at a time when alcohol abuse and malnutrition were rife among the working classes. The nineteenth century also saw the transformation of chocolate into its familiar modern manifestation as heavily sweetened milk chocolate. In the USA, Milton Hershey started manufacturing the distinctive form of industrial milk chocolate which Americans came to love but which most Europeans find strangely unappealing. Chocolate connoisseurs have variously described the Hershey bar as gritty or grainy in texture and tasting of cheese, sourness or barnyards. One French expert said it reminded him only of vomit.

Is it addictive? (#ulink_41dd0e22-d1da-5b70-8760-686b761b794f)

Chocolate is not addictive. The existence of thousands of websites catering for ‘chocoholics’ does not in itself prove that large swathes of humanity are suffering from genuine addiction to this substance. In any case, the sugary milk chocolate that many chocoholics claim they are unable to resist should be thought of more as a delivery vehicle for sugar and fat, rather than chocolate in the true sense. These oversweetened products give chocolate its undeserved reputation for being addictive and generating unsightly spots. Cacao-rich dark chocolate is a world away from industrial ‘chocolate’. True chocophiles are no more likely than anyone else to be fat or spotty, and they do not have an addiction.

‘Chocoholism’ is largely about sugar. Humans, in common with many other species, are predisposed to like foods that are rich in sugar and fat, because these are the foods that deliver the most calories. A liking for sweet, fatty foods is biologically normal, even though it has become a serious liability in our modern environment, where we are surrounded by unlimited quantities of the stuff. The particular sweet, fatty food that some individuals latch on to is milk chocolate. They learn to associate its taste and appearance with large, comforting doses of sugar and fat. Laboratory experiments have found that when self-proclaimed chocoholics have chocolate dangled in front of them, they become more physiologically aroused than other people, as judged by their increased heart rate and salivation. However, their response signifies only their anticipation of something sweet and pleasant, not a full-blown addiction to chocolate. We will see in chapter 12 that bingeing on sugar can, under certain circumstances, create an addiction to sugar. It is quite possible therefore that some extreme cases of chocoholism may be a form of sugar addiction.

The high sugar content of milk chocolate helps to make it one of the ultimate comfort foods. We instinctively turn to sugar when we are feeling low. Experiments have found that humans and rats become more attracted to sweet things when they are in a low mood. For instance, people work harder to obtain chocolate when they have been put in a sombre mood by depressing music; similarly, rats will work harder to obtain sugar pellets when they are depressed as a result of chronic stress. For much the same reason, some people turn to chocolate when they are feeling down.