Americans get off on war. Or at least we get off on declaring war, not necessarily on peoples or nations, but on things, concepts, even strategies of war. The War on Terror is only the latest American crusade against a thing. Lyndon Johnson proclaimed a War on Poverty four decades ago. And when hippies started smoking, snorting and shooting every psychoactive substance they could get their hands on, Richard Nixon declared “all out, global war on the drug menace.”

Now, sidestepping the semantic rabbit hole of what waging war on a technique, a condition, or a group of substances really means, the last thirty-five years of biochemistry research should make us rethink our bellicose urges, especially when it comes to the War on Drugs. As it turns out, our bodies themselves are veritable Afghanistans and Columbias. When some President stands with his chest puffed out and throws down the gauntlet against a given social or geopolitical scourge, he’s probably stoned on so-called endogenous opioids as strong as any dime bag of White China he could slam into his veins. And when his audience leaps to their feet to cheer in approval, they too are most likely as high as Sherpas on top of K2.

In the early 70s, right around the time Tricky Dick launched The War on Drugs, scientist Candace Pert discovered that opiates such as morphine and heroin attach to specific receptors in the brain. In other words, our bodies are more or less outfitted at birth for getting high. Pert also found groups of molecules in the body called “neuropeptides.” Like morphine introduced externally, these internally generated substances, such as endorphins, dopamines, and serotonins, travel through our bodily fluids until they bind to receptors like keys sliding into corresponding locks. At any given moment, cataracts of these neuropeptides are pouring through our veins, the neuropeptides binding to receptor sites. The result? Those things Morris Albert likes to sing about…feelings.

A threatening situation floods us with epinephrine, otherwise known as adrenaline, to give us energy and make us alert. But at the same time, it opens the dam on endogenous opioids such as endorphins and enkephalins to keep us calm and numb our pain. Could we all be tripping on this organic speedball when we declare a “war” on something? And, what’s more, are we now addicted to it? Look at Bill O’Reilly yammering on about a War on Christmas. Or the left’s proclamations about a Republican War on Science. Politics aside, are we just ginning up antipathies to feed our biochemical yen?

Scientists have isolated a specific endogenous compound called beta-endorphin. Large quantities of the morphine-like substance flow through the veins of mothers and their newborn children, especially during breastfeeding. Its calming effects allow them to feel at peace, safe in each other’s arms. Without it, some scientists speculate, newborns would not bond as strongly with their mothers, or vice-versa. If that’s the case, the most important aspect of the nuclear family, the mother-child bond, depends on what could be seen pejoratively as nothing more than a relationship between two junkies. (Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Nancy Reagan—and all the rest of you “Family Values”-preaching, anti-drug crusaders!) Of course, there’s a difference between an addict copping on the streets of Skid Row and cherubic infants tripping on a naturally occurring substance with their mothers. But maybe if we stopped binging on cocktails of epinephrine and endorphins by declaring “war” on people like that junkie, we could see that he’s probably trying, in vain, to recapture some portion of that peace and security he felt—or missed—in his own mother’s arms.

Other research has focused on self-damaging behaviors such as cutting or remaining in abusive relationships. Often, battered women describe a strange calmness that comes over them at the moment their partners attack them. Children who are sexually or physically abused frequently become abusers themselves. What traps people in such tragic cycles will always be a mystery; but, again, these actions and behaviors release adrenaline and endogenous narcotics into our bloodstream—the same self-grown speedball we thrill to when we declare “war” on one thing after another. Is this national compulsion any healthier than the shut-in teenager clutching a razor with trembling hands, slicing up his own arms? Nixon’s War on Drugs has sucked up trillions of dollars and immured untold millions of our brothers, sisters, fathers and mothers in the nation’s prisons. Meanwhile, a whitewater torrent of drugs still pours through our borders and into our lungs, our noses, and our veins. And what about Bush’s War on Terror? Last year, the United States’ Senate actually debated the merits of torture. In November, Newt Gingrich, his heart no doubt aflutter with the endorphin-adrenaline admixture, told an audience gathered to celebrate the first amendment that we should begin to curtail free speech.

Somebody page Dr. Phil. It’s time for an intervention.

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JB Powell lives in San Francisco. His novel, The Republic, is available from Livingston Press or at Amazon.