On the near horizon are a slew of new pharmaceuticals we call memory
management drugs. Some of these aim to improve memory safely. Others are
designed to help dim or to erase the memories that haunt people suffering
post-traumatic stress disorder.
This is a misstatement, from what I just read. It's not about preventing the memories, it is about reducing the *effects* of the memories.
Some of these drugs are available now. Take a drug like propranolol, a beta blocker used to control high blood pressure. It was found that people who take this drug within six hours or so of a traumatic event have a reduced recall of that event. People are talking about giving propranolol to emergency response teams before they go into horrific scenes such as plane crashes. Others have talked about giving it to soldiers after a gruesome battle.
I couldn't find any phrases like "reduced recall" in reading a few articles about this. Instead, they reported that the likelihood or severity of PTSD was reduced. There's quite a difference between having a memory of a traumatic event and having those memories interfere with life. Believe me, I know (which is why I dug into this a bit just now).
> Yes, that application may well be, so long as people are given the
choice. But we are concerned about the idea of emergency room personnel automatically giving it to trauma victims. For instance, a victim of violent crime may not necessarily want to remember what happened, but may want to testify. Emergency room doctors might think it would be great to have a drug to give victims that would blank out horrible memories; but they might also overlook the complexities of why somebody would want to retain the integrity of their memory. It has to be the person's choice.
Again "blank out" seems a great exaggeration. And there are already drugs that will suppress memory of an event, but they're nothing that a person would take before going into battle, etc.
The CCLE has no problem with brain fingerprinting so long as it's
voluntary, as in the Slaughter case. Our concern is that law enforcement
agents will seek to use it coercively. Such compelled use ought to be
forbidden, because it would pierce one of the most private and intimate
human spheres: our own memory.
And how does this support coercion, since it's not legal to coerce a polygraph?
The victims
would be unable to distinguish whether those sounds or voices had an
external or internal source.
Not that I favor this... but it seems to me that simply by moving in and out of the "stream" of sound, one could easily figure out that it's not coming from inside one's head.
It's clear that by manipulating the brain you can change thought, and because your thoughts are central to who you are, and because freedom of thought is necessary for all our other freedoms, it ought to be the case that the individual, as opposed to the government, has the ultimate control over matters of the mind. Without freedom of thought, what freedom remains?
Hey, we should ban the most widely abused central nervous stimulant, which manipulates the brains of hundreds of millions of people every day. After all, television clearly is an obstacle to freedom of thought.
-- Nick Arnett Director, Business Intelligence Services LiveWorld Inc. Phone/fax: (408) 551-0427 [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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