SCIENCE OF RECREATIONAL DRUGS

TELLURIDE, COLO. - Like all sometimes-great notions, this one was born
in a bar.

It was March, and a group of scientists who'd been lecturing in
Telluride decamped from their esoterica and headed out to the New
Sheridan to get a drink. There, a talkative chemist named Thomas
Cheatham started talking about drugs in this new and novel way -- about
the connections between prescription drugs, illegal drugs, natural
medicines and the chemicals your Very Own Body produces every day.

Nana Naisbitt, director of the Telluride Science Research Center, was
there that night and recalled how the conversation sparked an idea:
Bring this Cheatham guy back to Telluride, and get him to talk about
the science of drugs.

"I thought, 'Oh my God, this would be perfect for Telluride,'"
Naisbitt said. "'I believe that the desire to experience an altered
state is fundamental to the human condition. Alcohol is legal.
Cigarettes, if I ever smoke a cigarette, I reach an altered state.
There's a buzz associated with caffeine."

And more. Tonight, Cheatham is giving a free Pinhead Town Talk that
explores the chemistry and structures behind the things people snort,
smoke, drink, pop and drop, and what science and society can glean
from learning about them.

It's the Pinhead Institute's first R-rated Town Talk.

"This is gonna be a little bit racy," Naisbitt said.

But, gentle readers, the talk is not -- repeat, not -- an endorsement of
drug use.

Cheatham isn't Timothy Leary, but he's not Nancy Reagan, either. He's
an assistant professor of pharmaceutical chemistry at the University
of Utah who rails against the dangers of meth and knows that drug
abuse can wreak havoc on people's bodies and lives. But he also sees a
world to explore reaching beyond the wall of Just Say No.

Doctors in Denver are prescribing medical marijuana to patients with
cancer and AIDS. Scientists are exploring different properties of
marijuana's component chemicals to treat for anorexia or obesity.
Prescription pills like Ritalin or Adderall are practically cousins of
methamphetamine.

And in a sense, we're all drug users.

The morphine in heroin? The DMT, psilocybin and harmala alkaloids in
hallucinogens? The THC in marijuana? Different scientific studies
suggest that all of these controlled substances have correlatives in
your own 98.6-degree somatic drug lab (Andrew Weil's book "From
Chocolate to Morphine" offers a layman's overview to this idea).

"For almost every recreational drug that people abuse, there's a
natural component in our body," Cheatham said.

In recent years, a slew of scientific research has plumbed the
similarities between illegal drugs and chemicals produced in the human
body.

Some scientists and drug researchers argue that our neurotransmitters
evolved alongside -- or even with help from -- substances that will now
get you thrown in jail. The ethnobotanist Terrence McKenna advocated
what became known as the "Stoned Ape" theory of evolution, which
suggests that psychedelic mushrooms helped our primate ancestors
develop visual and linguistic functions.

Cheatham is bringing along Powerpoint slides that diagram the
structures of some of these chemicals, and he'll discuss how they work
and don't work on your body -- why smoking a joint gets you stoned
while eating a tryptophan-soaked dinner doesn't put you straight to
sleep.

"Essentially, all these drugs are being used to better understand how
neurotransmission works and how our brain is working," he said.
"There's some aspect of trying to understand how our minds work."