JOHNNY CAN'T READ, BUT HE DOES SIT QUIETLY IN THE CORNER...:

The Altered Human Is Already Here (JAMES GORMAN, 4/06/04, NY Times)

Over the past half century, health-conscious, well-insured, educated people in the United States and in other wealthy countries have come to take being medicated for granted.

More people shift to the pill-taking life every year, to the delight of pharmaceutical manufacturers. Indeed, drug sales suggest how willing people are to pursue better living through chemistry.

Last year retail drug sales worldwide were $317 billion. In the United States alone, consumers spent $163 billion on drugs. In North America, the use of drugs that affect the central nervous system, antidepressants and others, increased 17 percent. No group has escaped. Last week the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that 10 million children took prescription medication for three months or longer in 2002, and preschoolers, another study found, are now the fastest growing group of children receiving antidepressants.

This is a social change on the same order as the advent of computers, but one that is taking place inside the human body. Just 50 years ago, according to a report by IMS Health, a company that tracks the pharmaceutical industry, the two biggest-selling over-the-counter drugs were Bufferin and Geritol. The prescription drug business was tiny. In 1954, according to IMS, Johnson & Johnson had $204 million in revenue. Now it is about $36 billion. In 1954, Merck took in $1.5 million in drug sales; in 2002, that figure was $52 billion.

To look at it in another way, Americans take so many drugs that some researchers — Dr. Christian G. Daughton of the Environmental Protection Agency's National Exposure Research Laboratory in Las Vegas, for example — are worried about the effects on the environment. What does it mean if the sewers run rich with Zoloft? Or to be more precise, what might happen to fish eggs if the rivers soak up waste water with discarded and excreted pharmaceuticals and personal care products, like shampoo?

No one has the answer yet, but the idea that what runs through our collective bloodstream is a potential environmental hazard makes you look at your medicine cabinet in a different way.

In short, while the Six Million Dollar Man is still a fantasy, Pharmaceutical Man is already here, and largely unnoticed.

This is a story rife with all of the problems that such a medicinalized culture entails, from the manufactured disparity between rich and poor to the use of drugs for social control to the inevitable costs when everyone begins demanding such things and on and on. People seem to think that conservative critics of bioengineering are solely concerned with the idea of tampering with Creation, but the political implications of these things are profound irrespective of one's religious mores. A society that pats itself on the back for doing away with slavery and Jim Crow but then allows parents to use drugs to make their children pliant is in deep denial about itself.

MORE:
-REVIEW: of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (James Bowman, April 9, 2004)

Here, just for the record, are the lines from Alexander Pope's Eloisa to Abelard from which a new movie takes its title:

How happy is the blameless Vestal's lot!
The world forgetting, by the world forgot.
Eternal sun-shine of the spotless mind!
Each pray'r accepted, and each wish resigned.

Generally speaking, it has not been deemed worthy of comment by those who have written about the movie that the phrase Pope applied to the untroubled conscience of a nun - the Vestal virgin, though a pagan Roman phenomenon, was often used a prototype for the various orders of Roman Catholic sisters like Eloisa's - is applied in the movie to a ghastly new therapeutic technique for washing out of the brain all memories of a sexual "relationship" gone bad., so that the subject, or patient, can make a completely fresh start with someone new. Charlie Kaufman, who wrote the screenplay of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind with the director, Michel Gondry, must have known that the word "spotless" as used by "Pope Alexander," as the dippy Mary (Kirsten Dunst) puts it, meant "without moral stain." It had to be, then, with a certain sense of irony that they chose to make the phrase mean something quite unimaginable to Pope: namely an antiseptic consciousness unspotted with m! emories and so capable of living entirely in the present.

Kaufman and Gondry are agin it, by the way. What a relief! In the best tradition of the more literary sorts of science fiction - see, for instance, that recent pair of Spielbergian book-ends, Artificial Intelligence: A.I. (2001) and Minority Report (2002) drawn from the works of Brian Aldiss and Philip K. Dick respectively - scientists who mess with your mind invariably claim to have your best interests at heart and are invariably up to no good. But there is a moral dimension to the new film, hinted at in the quotation from Pope, that goes well beyond the ponderous pieties of A.I. and Minority Report. We've known since Frankenstein - the book, not the movie - that it is a very bad idea to play God with human life. If you remember that Mary Shelley's subtitle was "The Modern Prometheus" the lesson goes all the way back to the ancient Greeks. What is less clear is the point at which therapy becomes presumption upon the divine purpose.

In other words, maybe eradicating bad memories, assuming it were possible, would be more like burning out cancerous cells than it would be like creating artificial consciousness or manipulating minds to produce guaranteed moral outcomes.

Indeed, aren't such effeorts generally attempts to evade morality rather than to achieve moral ends?

Posted by Orrin Judd at April 9, 2004 4:20 PM