Why would they be miserable? Embarrassed by the respectable high-class animals looking down on them for being junkies? Full of regret that they were too high to write that novel, or to travel to a foreign country? Both our plans have the same result: improved quality of life for animals, while still killing them against their wishes. Why not go with the cheaper option?
I want to lessen and limit suffering. If that is what you want as well I doubt your idea here is going to work as it seems like you have a very naive concept of drugs. People who are high, especially when they use drugs frequently, are not constantly enjoying that high or somehow consciously removed from their miserable situation.
Apart from that, I think a key fact about industry farming isn't that we are not able to figure out ways to lessen the suffering of animals. Even relatively cheap options like giving them more room to live is something that is dismissed by the industry after all. I think, the general problem here is a cultural ignorance towards the plight for a multitude of reasons. I think, it's worth more changing this with grand incentives and causing a shift to happen than to find creative solutions that reward greed over suffering.
The question - and this is where we seem to differ - is if we want to live in a world where we accept concepts like gestation crates and want to work around that or where we think that this is beneath us and our values.
Since you seem to have a very simplistic darwinistic approach to life as a "high-class" animal, I'm not really sure we could ever meet anywhere in the middle here.
Farm animals don't have long lives. It's likely possible to continuously escalate the dose such that they'd never have to suffer. If not, wireheading can bypass problems with tolerance.
It looks like our real disagreement is "perfect is the enemy of good". If you don't want animals to be killed for food, then animal suffering is actually a good thing, because animal suffering helps convince people not to farm them. I'm working on the assumption that humans are going to continue killing animals like they've always done, and therefore it's better to reduce suffering with the most effective methods available. If animals are going to be farmed anyway, I'd rather they have access to an unlimited supply of recreational drugs (or equivalent brain modification technology). Animals don't care about the top of Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
I was not arguing for prolonging the suffering of animals as some method to make people turn away from animal products. I'm not really sure where you seem to have read that in my comment. I don't think that's a fruitful strategy at all and I've never advocated for that.
Some farm animals are killed after a few months, others like dairy cows are used for multiple years. Also, the animal psyche is not that simplistic. Yes, they might not care about the the upper levels of Maslow's model, but they're not stuck on the first one either. Therefore, throwing mind altering drugs at the problem seems like a naive and hardly effective substitute for me for the reasons I've stated earlier.
I think, there are cheap solutions that can improve the lives of these animals today, e.g. more space. But as I argued in my initial comment, I think a cultural shift is necessary (similar to smoking) and this is why I think factory farming needs to be forbidden in the long-term, meat taxes need to be introduced, meat prices need to be raised, government incentives for alternative food products need to be given, etc.
