The Psychoactive Café (3 page)

We were staggered. We all knew
this was coming; there were many international research teams working on
exactly this issue, and it was only a matter of time, but it was thrilling to
be at the leading edge. Even though most breakthrough results turn out to be
flash-in-the-pans, we had enough confidence in Xiang’s skill that I, at least,
was convinced. Remember, he was working with well-tested technology; migrating
electrodes had been in use for years with very few complications to treat a
variety of brain disorders, including Parkinson’s disease and depression. Xiang
was just tweaking the software, in a manner of speaking, not coming up with new
surgical procedures.

Chenko was the first to respond.
He asked, “When will it be ready for FDA submission?

Xiang said, “It has passed the
first stage of clinical trials, and the team has requested permission to offer
the device to the control group for ethical reasons.” That meant that it
appeared to be so effective, and so safe, that it was unethical
not
to
offer it to subjects who were stuck with the placebo patch. “One problem,” Xiang
added. “Other patients are asking for it. Nurses, also. And some people on the
team.”

I said, “Hey Xiang, what do you
mean? People on your research team are asking for the implant?” He nodded. “Why?”
I asked. He shrugged. I loved it when he did that; it made him look just like
Mr. Spock.

Chenko said, “Because obviously,
it functions as a narcotic.” He looked really excited, like almost shaking,
eyes wide and staring. Xiang nodded, expressionless.

That was a big problem. The
medical ethics board was already twitchy about neural stimulation research, and
they would shut it down pronto if they thought staff might get addicted to it.
And nurses asking to try it – holy crap! If that got into the papers it could
embarrass the whole university, not to mention the project.

Not only that, but Xiang wasn’t
supposed to release any substantive information without signoffs from his
advisor, the department head, and Mercat’s VP of research. He wasn’t even
supposed to be telling us as much as this. On the other hand, he had been using
my data, which was funded by a national research grant that had open access
provisions.

Oh, I could go on for pages, but
you get my drift. We were in a severe ethical bind.

Why the bind, you ask? Why
wouldn’t Xiang just keep his mouth shut and communicate through regular
channels and continue with his research?

Because during our conversation
at the café, his unease about Mercat had come to a head. Because Chenko gave
him a compelling alternative. And because by the end of the night he had a team
to support him.

I’ll skip the long technical discussion about the device
itself and go to the part where Chenko talked us into the conspiracy.

He asked to use Xiang’s monitor. He paired it with his own
computer and pulled up a series of graphs. It was like he’d been waiting for an
opportunity to make this formal presentation.

Bear with me, okay? This is important.

Chenko’s graphs were all about the costs of the
international drug trade and the war on drugs.  Each graph showed a different
way that drugs harmed people.

He started off by displaying the number of world-wide deaths
due to drugs, including lung cancer, heart disease, suicides, drunk driving
deaths, numbers of overdoses, poisonings from adulterated samples, AIDS,
hepatitis from injection drug use and so on. He was looking at Xiang when he
showed that over four million Chinese people die from tobacco-related illnesses
every year. Four million in a single country

Then he showed the numbers of deaths from the drug trade
itself, including gang wars, shootings, arms smuggling, terrorism funded by
heroin, opium, and cocaine. He also included killings and disappearances
attributed to law enforcement death squads, many of them funded by the U.S.

Then he showed estimates for human rights violations,
organized crime, corruption, and police brutality related to the drug trade.
The graphics were interactive; we could ask for details or question an
assumption, and the answer would flower instantly as Chenko tweaked the
parameters.

Next, he pulled up a dozen case studies, only a few
sentences each, describing real people who had been devastated by the trade.
One of them was very similar to my father, and I realized that he’d probably
chosen him for that reason. At that point, I was convinced that he’d been
studying us, like customers, to manipulate us.

How did I feel about that? That’s an interesting question.
Let me think…. I can’t say I ever took it personally. He never pretended to be
friends with us. He was always too guarded for that.  And yes, he did
manipulate us, but everyone tries to manipulate people for their own ends. At
least he used accurate data, and I don’t think he ever lied to us. Cherry-picked
the research, yes, but flat-out lied, no.

His case studies were all true; I checked later. They
included stories about individuals – a guy dying of lung cancer from cigarettes
in his fifties, a woman and her children killed by a drunk driver; children
gunned down in a fight between drug dealers – but they also included whole
communities - neighbourhoods in the U.S. contaminated by prison culture because
of young men spending their formative years in jail, cities overrun by
murderous drug gangs in Mexico, the regions controlled by the Columbian cartels,
and on and on until we were stunned.

That lecture changed my life. It was like I’d been viewing
drugs through a keyhole, blinded by conventional assumptions, accepting that brutal
law enforcement would solve the problem instead of looking at it analytically.
Embarrassing, really. I already knew that illegal narcotics killed a only a
tiny number of people compared to tobacco and alcohol, but I hadn’t really
questioned why some people were thrown into jail for being addicted while
others, like my father, got medical treatment. Why wasn’t Dad jailed? Why did
he get sympathy while other people with equally harmful and stupid addictions lost
their liberty and families and jobs? What was the sense in that?

And Chenko went relentlessly on, showing slide after damning
slide.

After an hour or so of this, my mind started wandering. It
was all very well to talk about eliminating drugs, but what would we do about
the ones that are embedded into cultures? Like alcohol. Wine is part of the
Christian religion. Jesus turned water into wine, and Catholics drink it as
part of communion. And what would Brits do without pubs? Tobacco is another
one. Its psychoactive properties might be replicable in another safer form, but
smoking is also a big social activity, especially in places like China, and it’s even involved in religious practices for native groups. Colas and Red Bull,
and coffee were not a problem because they’re legal and hardly ever kill
anyone, except maybe from sugar overdoses and tooth decay. 

I started paying attention again when Chenko rhetorically asked,
“So who benefits from drugs and the war on drugs? Who is all of this death and
destruction for?” He paused dramatically while we retrieved the previous couple
of minutes out of cache memory to orient ourselves.

Miguel, rolling his eyes, went along with it. “Well, I don’t
know, Chenko. Who does it benefit?”

Turns out that that, despite the billions of dollars spent
on the control and enforcement of psychoactive drugs, the health benefits weren’t
clear at all.

Actually, I’ll spare you the details; you can look at the
current graphs on Chenko’s site. To summarize, the only clear beneficiaries of
the sale and control of drugs were, big surprise, the dealers – cigarette
companies, cartels, whatever. That part was obvious. What wasn’t obvious to us
before his Big Talk was the total absence of high quality evidence that brutal drug
enforcement promotes health. I know there’s controversy about that, and plenty
of people still say that jailing addicts is good for them, but I haven’t seen
any convincing data. Thankfully, it’s a moot point now. 

Finally, Chenko talked about the potential of Xiang’s
device. He proposed to eliminate the drug trade and save millions of lives a
year – millions! – by replacing illegal and addictive drugs with a safe
alternative, and making that alternative so cheap and ubiquitous that there’d
be no market incentive for organized crime.

You know, it’s hard to capture the thrill and terror of that
evening. It sounds so dry and intellectual as I’m describing it, but it was
like looking down and realizing we were on the edge of a cliff. Like Chenko
said, we were in the position of the actor in the trolley problem. Do you know
about that? It’s one of the basic ethical dilemmas. Imagine that a runaway
trolley is heading towards five people who will all be killed unless you act. You
can save them all if you push a switch that diverts the trolley onto a
different track which has only one person on it, but if you push that switch,
the single person will be killed. What is your responsibility?

As soon as you are given the information and the switch, you
are morally liable. Whether you push the switch and one person dies, or don’t
push the switch and five people die, you have to live with your decision.
Somehow, Chenko had managed to put the four of us on that switch, seeing the
trolley come down the track and seeing the people who were in its way.

These analyses stood up, by the way. As time went on, I
began worrying that Chenko had biased the results to manipulate us, so I redid
all of the key analyses using independent data sources. I never did find any
evidence of bias. On that score, he was solid.

The next day, Sunday, we met at Xiang’s
apartment to plan our strategy. We were exhausted, emotionally wrung out and,
except for Naseer, seriously hung over. Partway through the previous evening, after
we’d finished Xiang’s small collection of beer and a half-bottle of Tequila
that he’d found under the sink, Miguel had fetched two bottles of rum from his
place, and we’d finished them both. It was a dismal and sober group that
collected on the noxious orange plaid, but none of us had changed our minds.

Chenko immediately tried to take
over. He started by saying it was primarily a communications problem, not a
technical problem, but Miguel said, “No, you jerk, it’s a technical problem
and
a communications problem.” Chenko didn’t take offense. He
was
a jerk,
but fortunately he was also insensitive.

So we split up the tasks. Chenko
wanted to lead public communications, and that was fine with us. Miguel
volunteered to help him, partly because he wanted to set up his own consulting
business after graduation and was interested in learning how to market. Also,
Miguel worked mainly in video-presence, as I think I said earlier, not brain
interfaces, so he couldn’t contribute much to the technical side.

Xiang, supported by Naseer, led
technical development. Naseer's role was to simplify the design – not the
implants, but the rest of the package, the control patch, battery pack and
software – and create fabrication files for 3D nano-printers. Naseer dropped
his gaming projects completely to focus on the device.

I provided analytic support for Xiang,
checking and double-checking his calculations from various angles and probing
for weaknesses. As the weeks passed, I gradually took on the role of overall
risk assessment.

Xiang made daily progress,
refining the control mechanisms of the nano implants and modelling them – in
other words, testing them on his team’s detailed neurological models. At the
same time, Naseer was creating prototypes for the external controls, making
them smaller and more efficient with each iteration.

Every week, Xiang shared his new
software models with his official research team, who would do additional testing,
and then print new implants with the nanofabricators. I should mention that his
research team had access to hundreds of subjects supplied by Mercat, not just
the few dozen in the PTSD clinical trials. Some of the subjects were terminally-ill
patients with chronic pain who had signed
do-whatever-the-hell-you-want-just-make-it-go-away permission forms and were
clamouring to be experimented on. As far as I could tell, most of them were in India or South America where they didn’t have access to decent pain control.

Within the next few months, over
a hundred and fifty intractable-pain patients were using Xiang’s new design
with no significant side effects. All of them dramatically reduced their use of
pain meds. Remember, the device didn’t eliminate the pain signals; it just
stopped people from caring about them.

Xiang, Naseer, and I were
working twenty hours a day to refine and test the device. For the first couple
of months, we were restricted to software modelling. TU didn’t even have a
nano-fabricator that could print out Xiang’s implants; they were mostly being
printed in Argentina, in Mercat’s lab, and then couriered to the various teams
as a way for Mercat to keep control of the technology. Naseer’s department did
have a decent micro-fabricator, and he had permission to use it for his thesis
project. Without the physical implants he couldn’t create workable prototypes,
which was frustrating for all of us, but he could design the hardware and specs
and test them using virtual brains.

Then Chenko showed up with a new
nano-fabricator that must have been worth sixty thousand dollars. It was a
little one, about the size of a bar fridge, used for small-scale production and
prototyping, absolutely perfect for the project. He refused to tell us where he
got it. After a brief argument about ownership and control, we installed it in
his bedroom and set up a makeshift lab. He moved his bed to the living room.

For weeks, Xiang, Naseer, and I
would sleep for a couple of hours, then wake from sheer excitement and start
again. Every few days we’d crash and sleep for about twelve hours. We all had
teaching assistantships that cut into our time, and two of us still had classes
to attend, but everything else was kept to a minimum. I cancelled my Easter
visit to Toronto and worked right through, ignoring my mother’s protests.