The Government has declared total war on illegal drugs. But is it a battle that can ever be won? No, according to a new book by Ronald K. Siegel, a research psychopharmacologist at the UCLA School of Medicine. In Intoxication: Life in Pursuit of Artificial Paradise (Dutton; $19.95), Siegel argues that the war is doomed because it is against man's own nature. His controversial contention: humanity's pursuit of happiness through chemicals -- whether ; caffeine, nicotine, alcohol, opium, marijuana or cocaine -- is a universal and inescapable fact of life.
Siegel, a scientific consultant on the nature of drug addiction to...