The Psychoactive Café (2 page)

Back to the guys. Naseer was Afghani, also in the industrial
design program but focusing on immersive video-gaming. He had been a
world-class gamer as a kid, and had a computer science degree from Kabul University. He didn’t drink alcohol, didn’t date, hated the cold, didn’t like talking
to humans, and was, in general, a wet blanket. I was uncomfortable with him; I
always had the feeling that he deeply disapproved of me but, on the other hand,
he disapproved of everyone, so I wasn’t exactly singled out. He burned with
anger, with longing for justice, with grief that none of us had the social
intelligence to recognize. And his eyes were an incredible lustrous brown. On
the rare times he was relaxed, even affectionate with us, his eyes were soft
and gentle.

Chenko: Blond, skinny and ferrety, always looking around for
danger or something to eat, broad Eastern European cheekbones, high forehead
and hooded eyes. Hard to describe Chenko. He hardly ever talked about his past
except in tantalizing glimpses, like saying that Thompson was a lot like Siberia. Very private guy. I used to wonder how he could spend so much time in student pubs
and still work on his dissertation on consumer behaviour.

Xiang was a post-doctoral fellow who had joined TU a few
months before. He had two biology degrees from Tsinghua University in Beijing,
where his family lived, and a Ph.D. in neurobiology from McGill University in Montreal. He’s completely brilliant, and I had a major crush on him, not that he
seemed to notice me at all that way. We weren’t in the same research program,
but we shared the dataset; I’ll explain later. Xiang was short and broad, in
pretty good shape from table tennis, mostly serious because life is serious,
but when he smiled his whole face creased up like a laughing Buddha.

And me. I was halfway through my doctoral degree in
psychology, struggling with data analysis, and wondering what to do with my
life after graduation.  

We weren’t exactly friends. Xiang, Chenko, and Naseer played
table tennis together several times a week. It’s the way geeks stay in shape. Miguel
had just joined us that evening because he and Naseer were in the same class,
and I was there because, I’m embarrassed to say, I tagged along with Xiang whenever
I could. Boy, does that ever make me sound like a loser.

Can we go back to the conversation? Where was I?

Okay, so then Chenko suddenly said, “Xiang, how close are
you guys to market?”

Xiang hesitated. He wasn’t supposed to talk about his
project; he’d signed all kinds of confidentiality and non-disclosure agreements.
I was amazed he was even considering a response to Chenko. He looked around at
all of us, with this strange, helpless expression. Chenko watched him narrowly,
I remember his look, and then changed the subject.

“It’s funny about drug research, isn’t it? Here you are,
devoting your lives to helping people in pain. And yet your project will lead
to all kinds of suffering.”

He paused until Miguel said, “Okay, Chenko, get on with it.
We’re listening.” Xiang still had this strained look on his face but wasn’t
saying anything.

Chenko continued, “It’s completely obvious that in the next
few years the drug cartels will be able to deliver a whole range of consumable
mental states.”

Xiang said, “Drug cartels?”

Chenko went into his mini-lecture, which I’ve heard many
times since, on the similarities between Big Pharma and the Columbian drug
cartels, both of which churn out new designer drugs every season to capture
market share. The essence of it was that the capitalist system will always give
buyers what they want to pay for, if not legally, then illegally, and only the
politically disenfranchised will be jailed for it. Miguel waved his hand, like
yeah, yeah, obvious, move on. So then Chenko, who was still mainly looking at Xiang,
added, “And the most effective drugs will always be used to exploit and control
unless they are taken away from corporate control.”

Xiang said, “Why always? Why can’t new drugs be used to
benefit people?”

By this time, it was a conversation between Chenko and Xiang
with the rest of us just listening. Chenko said, “The sponsor of your research
program is Mercat, right?” Xiang nodded unhappily.

Mercat may be having trouble now but, at the time of this
conversation, it was hugely powerful. One of the top three pharma companies after
the last round of mergers, Mercat was investing heavily in brain implant
research. As a way to cut R&D costs, it was funding university programs
like TU’s instead of expanding their own research labs. In return, it demanded total
ownership over the intellectual property that came out of its funded research.
Researchers are always starving for funds, and so far Mercat was successfully
imposing its IP conditions, but they were increasingly onerous. For example, to
get access to my neurological data, I had to sign contracts that gave anything
I found to Mercat for its exclusive use. It just wasn’t fair, given that ninety
percent of the research was funded by governments and the unpaid labour of
graduate students.

That may have been bad enough, but there was more. Not only
was Mercat supplying lethal injection drugs to China, the Philippines,
Guatemala, and the US, it had just come out in WikiLeaks that they were knowingly
supplying coma drugs for illegal organ farms in India and Thailand. I knew Xiang
was upset about it because it was one of the big topics of conversation in the
labs, how they were going to use our results.

Anyway, Chenko must have noticed that Miguel and Naseer were
getting bored because he suddenly said, “Hey guys, this affects you too.”

“How’s that?” asked Miguel. “We’re just engineers, man.”

“Oh, yeah? So tell me, what would your countries be like if
you eliminated the trade in narcotics?”

Naseer made a noise partway between a laugh and a snort.
“You mean if they won the war on drugs? Like that would ever happen.”

Chenko said, “No, not win the war. End the war. Stop it
dead. What would Afghanistan be like if the market for opium dried up?” He
looked at Miguel. “Or the market in cocaine in Columbia?”

I was watching Xiang – he was looking really upset – and stopped
listening to Chenko for a few minutes. When I tuned back in, they were arguing
about narcotics.

The way Miguel and Naseer were talking, their countries were
essentially in civil wars because of the international drug trade. The Taliban
was still in power, after years and years of ineffective military occupations
by all and sundry, with their weapons financed by heroin sales to the Western
world. Columbia was overrun by criminal gangs and even more violent
paramilitary troops supported by the U.S. government’s war on drugs.

They were both angry. Miguel was saying that Chenko was
talking garbage, that nothing would stop the cocaine trade. And Naseer was shaking
his fists and hissing that drug users were responsible for his homeland's
devastation, that spoiled rich Europeans and Americans bought emotional states
like consumer goods and treated the developing world as a factory staffed with
prison labour. I noticed that people at the other tables were staring at us.

“Hey, a teeny bit judgmental, don’t you think?” I said to Naseer.
He and Miguel both had that tight-lipped religious expression, like evildoers
deserved what happened to them, and we needed to protect innocent victims. Naseer
was Muslim, and Miguel was Catholic, but except for the fact that Miguel drank liquor,
had girlfriends, and never went to church and… actually, they were pretty different,
except for their views on drugs and virtual reality.

 Chenko held up his hands and said, “Just stop, okay? What
I’m trying to say is that if we could figure out a way to deliver an equivalent
of heroin, or cocaine, that’s freely available to everyone, we would eliminate
the drug trade. Immediately.”  

Well, I had mixed feelings about that idea. The reason I got
into brain research in the first place was related to drugs. When I was
sixteen, my dad died of lung cancer. For years he tried to quit smoking, for
years our family watched him struggle with this stupid, stupid addiction. He
would drop it for a few months, and then start it up again. He knew it was
killing him, but he just couldn’t seem to kick whatever it was that tobacco
gave him.

It took him two long, painful years to die. The only drugs
that reduced his pain to levels that allowed him to function at all were heroin
and, when he was on chemo, marijuana for the nausea. But most of the time we
couldn’t get either because of the hysteria around illegal drugs. So there was
no problem letting him have the most deadly drug in the world – tobacco, which
killed millions of people a year – but he couldn’t get a steady supply of pain
meds because they might be bad for him.  He would moan in agony all night. I
could hear him through the walls; it kept me awake, crying in my bedroom.

I had gone into pain control research hoping to help people
reduce their pain but, more than ten years after Dad’s death, I was getting
discouraged with my progress. I had started out focusing on hypnotic and
meditative techniques, and they seemed to work, but only after a great deal of
training. Also, they required skills and concentration that a lot of people in torment
didn’t have. So I'd taken a side-turn into measuring neural states of pleasure,
hoping to figure out how to stop the addiction to tobacco.

Anyway, Chenko had our attention then, all of us. He paused
and looked around the table.. He said to Xiang, “Shall we continue this
discussion elsewhere?”

He and Xiang locked gazes for a few seconds, and then Xiang
said, “Yes, in my apartment.” Our academic paranoia had kicked in. Who knew what
recording devices might be hidden in the café? The university was involved in
lots of research projects with market potential, and corporate espionage was
something we took for granted.

We paid and left, changing the subject to something neutral,
I can't remember what, hockey, probably, and followed Xiang to his graduate
apartment. I assumed he had cleared it of bugs, I mean small, unwanted
recording devices, not cockroaches or software glitches, but we didn't ask.

Xiang’s apartment was stark even
for the standards of neurobiology researchers. We sat on the generic
indestructible student couches that came with the apartment, covered in an
orange plaid that went out of fashion before I was born. Xiang turned his 3D
monitor so that we could all see it. Chenko got beers from the fridge and
handed them around, with lemonade for Naseer. Chenko’s grasp of private
property rights was tenuous, ironic given his research specialty, or maybe not.
Maybe a master’s degree in consumer behaviour was the right platform for whatever
he was trying to do. I was beginning to seriously wonder why he was hanging out
with us, other than for table tennis.

While we were settling in with
our drinks, Xiang asked me to give everyone the background information on his
research. Like I said, I knew a lot about his study, and his expressive English
wasn't so good, so I sometimes semi-interpreted for him.

Xiang was a post-doc working
with an international team studying severe PTSD. The clinical subjects, who had
experienced everything from torture to combat to car accidents, had run out of
other treatment options and were desperate for something that worked. They were
willing to try anything. Ethics committees were permissive since, at this level
of PTSD, suicide was a high risk.

Xiang’s particular project was
to improve the precision and control of tiny implants that delivered electrical
impulses to the brain. He was refining a new device that was already being used
successfully for intractable pain, but so far hadn’t been used for PTSD.

Xiang’s prototype, or rather his
team's prototype, consisted of three elements, the most advanced of which was a
cluster of tiny implants, delivered via a hypodermic needle, that migrated to
specific locations in the brain and attached themselves to specific nerve
bundles. The implants communicated with a control patch glued onto the back of
the subject’s head and neck – the subjects had to shave their heads where it
attached – which in turn was connected by a wire to a handheld remote and
battery pack. It was, like most early prototypes, clunky, inelegant and about
ten times bigger than it needed to be.

Xiang’s team had been working on
a device that could eliminate PTSD by suppressing surges of panic as soon as
they started. When a subject became exposed to a personal trigger, like a loud
noise or whatever, he could press a button on the remote and get a blast of instant
euphoria. Over time, the theory went, subjects could train themselves out of
PTSD by desensitizing themselves to the triggers. Early trials were promising.
The team was at the stage of making the implants more reliable and refining the
controls, and they were hoping to submit it for FDA approval as a medical
device sometime in the next two years.

Xiang touched my arm to let me
know he wanted to speak. “Now I have something to tell you,” he said.

At this point, everyone in the
world knows about the device, so I’ll be brief.

Xiang told us that his team had
developed a reliable way to control the strength of pleasurable feelings. Even
more exciting, it looked like they could independently manipulate two different
types of pleasure, which he described as being similar to desire and satiation,
respectively. And by reliable, he meant that they could program the implanted
electrodes to go to the right place for every individual based on iterative
feedback during the implanting stage. In other words, grossly simplified, he
could tell the tiny implants where to go, and when they got there, they would
check with the local nerves to ensure they were hooking up with the right ones.

Once the implants were in place,
subjects could dial in to the desired feeling and intensity after a few minutes
of training. Easier than learning a new video game.