Your Military on Drugs, or Tyranny is Therapeutic

Last month, the Los Angeles Times ran an interesting story on how the Feds aren't as anti-drug as they would have us believe:

The Pentagon spends $20 million per year exploring ways to "expand available memory" and build "sleep-resistant circuitry" in the brain. Among its aims: to develop stimulants capable of keeping soldiers awake, alert and effective for as long as seven days straight. The armed forces have taken leading roles in testing modafinil and donepezil as performance enhancers for pilots and soldiers.

Admittedly, $20 million annually to "expand available memory" and build "sleep-resistant circuitry" in soldiers' brains pales in comparison to the President's New Freedom Commission on Mental Health -- to see that every child has the opportunity to become regular customers of select PhRMA companies, among other purposes.

Surely adolescent mental health treatment will have the same confidentiality implications as adolescent contraceptive services. I look forward to the next generation of anti-drug ads: "Parents, trust us to ensure that your child is properly medicated... just make sure they stay away from marijuana, because that will show up on their drug test at school."

Aldous Huxley wrote a nice little essay called "Chemical Persuasion" in Brave New World Revisited where notes the potential dangers of state-sponsored drugging of more and more of the populace. Here is an excerpt:

That a dictator could, if he so desired, make use of [psychotropic] drugs for political purposes is obvious. He could ensure himself against political unrest by changing the chemistry of his subjects' brains and so making content with their servile condition. He could use tranquilizers to calm the excited, stimulants to arouse enthusiasm in the indifferent, halluciants to distract the attention of the wretched from their miseries. But how, it may be asked, will the dictator get his subjects to take the pillls that will make them think, feel and behave in the ways he finds desirable? In all probablility it will be enough merely to make the pills available....

[P]harmacology, biochemistry and neurology are on the march, and we can be quite sure that, in the course of the next few years, new and better chemical methods for increasing suggestibility and lowering psychological resistance will be discovered. Like everything else, these discoveries may be used well or badly. They may help the psychiatrist in his battle against mental illness, or they may help the dictator in his battle against freedom. More probably (since science is divinely impartial) they will both enslave and make free, heal and at the same time destroy.