Toxins pt 2: Can they play a positive role in emotional health?

This is a complex topic. Let's begin with the obvious: human cultures have used measured doses of toxins for various purposes since the beginning of human cultures. Various purposes range from benign mood enhancement at social gatherings to horrific chemical weapons of mass destruction, and everything in between.

I'm not going to approach the more destructive uses of toxins here, except to note we humans have an intractable innate capacity for destruction / self-destruction that Freud called the death instinct (instincts are intractable).

That unsettling innate capacity noted, I'm going to hue closely to the title topic. This is not a blog on psychology, but emotional health is certainly within the purview. Can toxic substances have a positive effect on emotional health?

We are innately attracted to certain substances because they temporarily induce euphoria, and "pleasure seeking" is one leg of the "motivational triad" that controls behavior to a predictably greater extent than conscious thought. The other two legs are "avoid pain" and "conserve energy", together they can be called the basic set of survival instincts present in all creatures. (See the book "The Pleasure Trap").

The motivational triad works quite well for creatures in the original primordial setting, as there are no circumstances occurring outside the innate "instinct envelope", in other words there are no technologically concentrated substances. There is honey (and bee stings), but no white sugar, cocoa leaves, but no cocaine. Modern humans have the innate instinct set of "primordial conditions", but live in a self-made wilderness of concentrated substances.

So how might a chemically induced pleasurable (euphoric) episode benefit emotional health? It's like a mini holiday that does not require the effort and expense of actual travel. Changes in routine and perspective can "reset" emotional condition in very positive ways. 

The important question: is it possible to gain a net benefit to health? The answer would be yes if biologically destructive impact is outweighed by gains to emotional well being. Obviously we cannot go too far down the biologically destructive path before the net effect to health is a loss. Also obviously, there is no practical way of actually measuring net gain/loss in this situation, so it comes down to personal intuition, or "listening to your body".

The notion of "intelligently measured dose" (all things in moderation) comes to play here, and as you might imagine different folks have very different interpretations as to what that is. And it becomes very easy to rationalize on this point, which is essentially one description of addiction.

So there is a layer of complexity to ignore (path to addictive behavior) or contend with (balance and moderation).

And many will argue since our bodies have a baseline toxic load to contend with (generated by continuous ongoing metabolic "house cleaning"), and since we cannot control (or even identify) all the toxins coming into our bodies from various sources, we should put known toxins into our bodies (most typically in the form of rich foods and alcohol), very moderately, if at all.