Tobacco, Alcohol, and Drugs - the Imitators of Light

Consistent with this hypothesis, other very strong risk factors for chronic illnesses; such as smoking, turn out to be a way of simulating still more light exposure – nicotine, alcohol, cocaine, heroin and many other drugs act on our light system, mimicking the effects of still more light. Therefore, they make us feel better in the short run; for at least a while they help mask the deleterious effects of too much light: but these drugs also make us much more vulnerable to chronic illnesses such as heart disease in the long run. This is inevitable because their effects on our hormonal systems are the equivalent of still more light and even less darkness. So they bring even greater risks of chronic disease as we continue to use them.

Believe it or not, light is psychoactive. It's not merely “like a drug”, in fact the best way to put the case is probably to say that light is the mother of almost all the drugs we abuse. Mescalin and heroin are able to boost light-like neurotransmitter and hormone effects well past the levels natural light can; but they only work, and we only like them, because they imitate the effect of light, within our brains. So it's no wonder that we like to keep artificial lights on after the sun sets: light “keeps the party going” – for the moment, that is. In the longer run, exposing ourselves to unnaturally long periods of light has much less pleasant effects. Notably, we become depressed, if for no other reason than that serotonin, the principle feel-good neurotransmitter (that heroin mimics), is only made in the darkness although it is only active in the light. Almost everyone in industrialized countries is now exhibiting addictive behavior, just by keeping the lights on and our moods and serotonin levels momentarily higher. Unfortunately, without sufficiently long nights to make plentiful amounts of serotonin (etc, etc) in; depression is the likely result. You genetic inheritance, nutrition, and other environmental factors (such as second-hand smoke) may determine whether this is a low-grade ennui or acute psychotic depression, but you will be affected. No-one truly gets “used to” excess amounts of light. We may become innured to the damage it's doing, but since most moderns never experience natural nights, we simply have no idea of how we should be feeling. By adulthood, a bit of down seems like up to us.

This, in fact, is what is setting up our populations for nicotine, alcohol, and drug abuse. By the time many of our youngsters reach their teens they have had decades of too much exposure to light, so they are already in serotonin deficit with metabolisms that are inefficient. They are all too often, fatigued, mildly depressed, and in no mood to get to bed early and rise with the sun. Drugs that seem to eliminate this ennui are tremendously attractive – in the short run, they seem to reverse the deleterious effects of growing up under too much light, but in the long run, they actually multiply the damage many times over (as the risk factors for, say, smoking, show.)

I know the idea of light as a drug, or light as the cause of countless millions of premature deaths and more disability must sound perfectly insane to most people, today. We love light! (But then, who doesn't like their favorite drugs, or is happy to have a finger pointed at them?) That light might be physically harmful seemed perfectly impossible to myself as well, only a couple of years ago. Hell, what could be more benign than light? You flick a light on, you flick a light off – what's the big deal? What could that do to us? Yet we are now rapidly approaching the point in history when not believing that long days under artificial lights profoundly affects the way our bodies work, in the face of mounting clinical, laboratory and epidemiological evidence of those effects, is crazier still – whether any of us want to believe the bad news about artificial light or not. A couple of centuries from now, and who knows, perhaps only a couple of decades from now: believing that you can reduce your daily period of darkness without suffering any effects from doing so will seem just as insane to most of us as deciding that you personally don't have to breathe oxygen, or eat any food and can still remain in perfect health.