The Psychoactive Café (7 page)

By the end of the second year,
you could buy devices with a medical prescription for addictions, PTSD, and
compulsive disorders at a
retail
cost of less than two thousand dollars, including training and medical
follow-up. Astounding speed to market, mostly because of the illegal
competition. Cost of the pirate version seems to have stabilized at around five
hundred dollars.

There was a whole other
dissemination pattern in the developing world. At first, users stuck with
minimally-processed, locally-grown products – opium, cocaine, alcohol,
marijuana – that were easily available and cheap. Over time, the device made
inroads. Cross-border drug traffic plunged, because once you’re transporting
illegal substances across national boundaries, the overheads go up dramatically,
and the cost of the device becomes cheaper than illegal drugs. Also, whenever cross-border
traffic was disrupted, users switched to the device in droves and never
switched back.

By the second year, elites in
the developing countries had switched to the Vice, and then it became a status
symbol. No wealthy family was without at least one member who used it legally,
mostly for weight control. In fact, that turned out to be the killer app. Women
will happily risk their lives to lose twenty pounds, and the device is extraordinarily
effective for that purpose. Too effective, in fact.

Anorexia is being called an
epidemic these days. I predict that in five years, it will go down
significantly, once thinness isn’t associated with wealth anymore. It will just
mean someone who’s too poor to eat, or who doesn’t have self-control with the device.

Indigenous psychoactive drugs
are still popular as an element of cultural heritage – wine in France, coca leaves in Bolivia, tobacco in aboriginal communities – but not as the thing
you do to get smashed.

It's funny to see the struggles
of organized-crime networks trying to figure out how to respond to disruptive
technology. Criminal networks in the former Soviet bloc grabbed the technology
earliest, having less tradition to slow them down, and being more tech savvy. The
American syndicates are apparently pushing the noble traditions of opium and
how tough guys use horse, not implants, but just like when digital music
replaced vinyl or whatever, die-hard traditionalists aren't numerous enough to
support a global industry.

It will be a while before the global
market is saturated, and until then, organized crime will still be big players.
After that, I bet international crime-networks will shrink dramatically. Prostitution
can't be lucrative enough to keep them in business, and border checks are
tougher now without drugs and weapons to absorb customs inspections. Okay, so I'm
optimistic. I told you to talk to someone else about the global impacts.

One thing that surprised me was
the impact on consumer goods. It turned out that the same thirty-second whoosh
that killed a cigarette craving also killed a must-buy-those-shoes craving. The
longing created by the marketing industry was eliminated by a thirty-second
ramp-up of A to enhance desire and excitement, followed by a two-minute B
experience to emulate the intense pleasure of having bought the item.

Some economists are predicting
the end of the world as we know it. The economies of the entire world, it turns
out, were based on convincing more and more people to consume more and more
goods and services. Well, maybe everyone else knew that, but I didn’t. I still
think it’s stupid. From my perspective, marketing is all about luring people
into debt by using every sneaky trick known to brain science. What's so bad
about letting poor people enjoy the rush of craving followed by satiation for
free, just by pressing a pre-set? Why should rich people have all the fun of
retail therapy?

For the same reason, property
crime is falling wherever the device reaches a critical mass. It's common to
have a temporary rise in crime while drug users finance the implant. Once they have
the device, they don’t need to steal for euphoria.

I suppose I’m making it sound all
rosy, aren’t I? Like I’m ignoring the people on the other track, the ones who
were sacrificed when we pressed the trolley switch.

Okay, let’s talk about the negatives.

First, the personal:

I had a tough time resisting the
device after launch, when Xiang and I were kicked out of the university and arrested
for theft. We stayed out of jail, and Xiang wasn’t deported, thanks to my Mom’s
lawyer, but the notoriety and hatred were really hard to deal with.

Xiang managed to get a job in a
biomedical start-up that wanted instant publicity, and I sort of collapsed.
While he focused on work and ignored the news media, I went into a two-month
slump from exhaustion, anxiety, and guilt. We crashed at my mother’s house in Toronto until I got better, and then we moved into a small two-bedroom near the University of Toronto.

I skirted the edges of
dependence. Xiang and my mom kept a close eye on me. He convinced me to accept
settings that kept me sober most of the time until I had enough energy to take
control of my life again, and then he helped me wean myself off.

During those weeks, I got
insight into the allure of addiction. It’s so hard to say no when ecstasy is
just behind the curtain. All I have to do is stretch out my hand and twitch it
aside. Whoosh, all my wishes are granted.

Fortunately, the illusion isn’t
perfect. It can’t give me the full sensation of learning something new, talking
to Xiang, or walking down Bloor Street. It can sure enhance those experiences,
though. Several times a day, I turn on my favourite channel, a low A with a
tiny hint of B, and allow myself to bask in well-being while I work. I know I’m
lucky in that my life is filled with good things - a husband, a family, a nice
place to live, books, friends. Without those things, it would be difficult to
resist.

While the court case was
dragging on, and after I was mostly recovered from my depression, our lawyer
recommended that I volunteer at a substance abuse program to show that I was a
scientist, not a drug dealer. I’m still there, on staff. I’m helping with a
project – they don’t trust me to lead it and besides I never finished my
doctorate – to test protocols for addiction treatment using the device.

That's what we're finding.
People who enjoy their lives are mostly able to resist the device. People
without hope… they’re dropping out. Suicides are down wherever the device is
widespread because people can smother pain with euphoria, but deaths due to
self-neglect, exposure, and starvation are soaring in places without good
healthcare. This is important, actually. I almost forgot to raise this.

We know how to treat device
addiction. It's not that hard; it's the same as the treatment for any addictive
substance. Every society uses psychoactive substances and, in every society, a
certain number of members overuse them. In every society, effective treatment
involves three steps: Harm reduction, rehab, and integration. Notably, it
doesn't involve jail. It's no different from treating people who have heart
conditions because of obesity; you don't throw them in jail because they’re
eating too much. You try to help them reduce their intake, and you treat their
heart conditions. Same exact thing.

Harm reduction is about
protecting people’s health as much as possible, whatever their level of
addiction. It used to mean things like handing out clean needles that didn’t
transmit AIDS, but that's becoming less of an issue now since the device is so
much safer than any other addictive drug. Now it means picking up homeless
people if they can't look after themselves and providing basic food and shelter
in big dormitories. Most Toronto shelters offer rehab patches that slowly
reduce the intensity and duration of the buzz until users can make their own
decisions, and some of them actually confiscate the hacked control patches that
serious junkies wear. Remember that only hacked patches will keep someone
buzzed all the time; any safe device will have hard-set maximums. Most junkies
are back on the street as soon as the weather improves, and it might take many
cycles before they're interested in reducing their use.

The second step is rehab, or
management, and that involves helping users control their settings so that they
can lead a normal life. Some people can handle occasional social use, and
others go full sober; it usually takes a period of experimentation before users
figure out how to control the device to their liking. It's pretty straightforward
to program a staged-withdrawal program, and it doesn't cost much. In the Toronto shelter system, users can apply for shared rooms, instead of the stacked
bunk-beds, if they agree to give up their hacked patches and go through a rehab
program.

The real costs are incurred in
the third step – integration. That's where we see our social failures. Helping
people on the margins get training, find jobs, and integrate into social life
is hard, and expensive. It always has been. And when they lose hope, they go
back to the device. Maybe in the future we'll be able to prevent addictions by
some clever brain-hacking, as we improve the technology, but that isn't going
to prevent hopelessness and despair. How will we deal with that?

I’m not as worried about youth as
many people seem to be. Most will spend a while living in gaming universes, and
then come out of it just as they’ve always done with recreational drugs. Young
men need the feeling of danger, and the device is safer than a lot of the
alternatives. We’ll just have to develop universes that enable them to keep
physically active and learn skills while they’re in them.

More seriously, traffic fatalities
are horrendous. Wearing the device is like having an open bottle of whisky in
your lap all the time. Northern Europeans are finally acknowledging that
private automobiles are just unsafe, period. Even if you aren’t buzzed, you
might be emotionally distraught or hungry or sneezing or distracted, and it’s
too dangerous to expose the public to unreliable humans controlling massive
death-machines. So, private cars are being banned in the major European cities in
favour of a web of public transit and computer-assisted driving. Google-cars are
finally making a profit.

A few car manufacturers have
announced plans to support security patches, like the ones that U.S. companies are using to replace corporate-drug testing for their employees. I think customized
security patches are going to be huge. And yes, I do think it's a good idea to
require them for people who are handling dangerous equipment, like drivers or
cops or machine operators, as long as it's only during work hours, or while
they’re operating the equipment. Otherwise it's an invasion of privacy, since
security patches need to be tracked online to detect tampering.

I wouldn't be surprised if integrated
security patches for driving and guns became legally required, like breathalyser
locks, at least in Europe and Canada. The U.S. is unlikely to give up the private
right to drive cars. It's a good thing that video-presence is replacing
face-to-face business meetings; telecommuting is the only thing that's keeping U.S. traffic accident rates down.

Chenko and most of the neuro-hacker
communities have provisionally accepted security patches on the condition that they’re
related to reasonable job demands and can be swapped with personal patches
outside working hours.

Chenko’s still very active, of
course. He’s in hiding, and no, I have no idea where he is; he doesn’t communicate
with us directly at all. I was very glad to see that he’s not leading the whole
neuro-hacker movement. It’s too important to be tied to one guy. He’s carved
out a role as whistleblower, reporting when the device is being used to control
people so that hackers can deal with it. A couple of months ago, it was an Arizona prison that forced all the inmates to wear pre-programmed patches with no manual
controls. Hackers managed to smuggle new patches into the prison, publish the
names, addresses, and social security numbers of everyone in the chain of
command that made that decision, and then make their lives inconvenient in
other ways for a few weeks. Very, very inconvenient.

The device has now been
disseminated so broadly that as a public health measure, and to deflect
lawsuits, Mercat has offered to make the fabrication software open-source for
non-profit use. It's even contributing funds to an international university
consortium that's being set up to maintain the root file system. Mercat will
benefit from having immediate access to the latest tech, and users benefit
because of the massive investments in making the device safer.

Not that the device is alone on
the market anymore. Dozens of labs are releasing brain appliances involving
other neural pathways. Piercing nostalgia. Sexual excitement. Cessation of
pain. Floods of empathy and love. Thrills, chills, enjoyable fear, and
overwhelming terror. Some of them are even being synchronized with video games.
So, consumer goods aren’t dead; they’re just smaller.

And when people complain that
humans are becoming divorced from the world around them, I say, “Yeah and what
about before? Food, drugs, television, pornography, you think those are
different?”

I know what they mean, though.
There are several troubling aspects about the directions of development. As
fast as the neurohacker community jailbreaks coercive security patches, governments
and corporations design new ones to control people against their will. It will
only get harder. These days, implants are incorporating genetic material, and
some early adopters already have three generations of implants embedded in
brain tissue, each doing different things. Who knows what effect that will have
long-term?

And in a few years, we’ll be
able to deactivate pain entirely, including social pains of rejection and
humiliation, and then who will choose to feel pain at all? We're reprogramming
human nature.