Ronald Siegel, a leading authority on psychoactive substances has died. An expert on paranoia and addiction, Siegel believed that in every human being nested a desire to get high. He was 76.
So began a career devoted to studying and observing the cultural extremes of drug use. He lectured across the country, served on presidential commissions and translated books on the subject that never before had been available in the U.S., including the German classic “Priestess of Morphine: The Lost Writings of Marie-Madeleine in the Time of Nazis” and “Keef: A Story of Intoxication, Love and Death.
While doing post-doctoral work at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, Siegel had been taught that humans are the only animals that deliberately intoxicate themselves. But, now he wondered Siegel said his own experiments with drugs — chewing coca leaves in Peru, for instance — was limited and, besides, he said, he never had any difficulty finding volunteers to experiment with drugs. His own drug of choice was coffee.Cocaine, he said, is the most seductive drug on Earth and, more than marijuana, served as a gateway to the explosion of narcotic use in the U.S. that followed in the second half of the 20th century.
“The fact we once had drunks and addicts as president is not to say we made a poor choice in our candidates,” he said. “It’s just that they are representative of us.”
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