It has long been a fascinating puzzle to scientists: Why did our apelike ancestors come down from the trees and develop brains many times larger than they actually needed? Many theories have been discussed, most of which revolve around social cooperation; big brains would have helped our ancestors develop language, make better tools, plan hunting strategies, and pass on complex culture to the next generation.

By Brian Vastag for Scientific America

SAN JOSE, California—Michael Bledsoe’s story begins like that of many other Iraqi war veterans. In 2007, he was chasing insurgents through Anbar province when a roadside bomb exploded, breaking Bledsoe’s back and both his feet. A former Army Ranger working as a securitycontractor, Bledsoe soon knew his high-paying military career was over.

Back home, Bledsoe (not his real name) felt angry almost constantly. Nightmares haunted him. He withdrew and became isolated. “It was a serious sense of loss,” he says. His psychiatrist quickly diagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

Despite months of talk therapy, the nightmares continued, and Bledsoe grew desperate. Then “something almost miraculous” happened, he says. An online search brought him to a unique study of the banned drug MDMA (3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine), well known as the street drug ecstasy. The 21-patient study, sponsored by the nonprofit Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), launched in 2004 as the first U.S. clinical trial of a psychedelic drug in 35 years.

After several bond-building sessions with psychiatrist and study leader Michael Mithoefer and a co-therapist, Bledsoe swallowed a white tablet, donned eyeshades and reclined in Mithoefer’s comfortable Charleston, S.C., office. Over the next eight hours, Bledsoe revisited the explosion and recounted the trauma to Mithoefer. After two more MDMA-assisted psychotherapy sessions, Bledsoe says his PTSD symptoms were “completely eliminated.”

This weekend at a MAPS-sponsored meeting here, Mithoefer reported similar results for nearly all of the trial’s participants. After two or three MDMA sessions, patients who received MDMA experienced huge drops in symptoms as measured by a standard PTSD scale. At baseline, study patients had an average Clinician-Administered PTSD Scale (CAPS) score of 79, but after MDMA-assisted therapy, CAPS scores dropped to 23.4 in the 13-person MDMA group, whereas an eight-person placebo group averaged a score of 60. (Later, seven of eight placebo patients chose to receive MDMA as well.)

The improvements appeared to endure, Mithoefer reported. After an average of 3.5 years, 13 of 16 patients remaining in contact with the researchers no longer met the criteria for PTSD.  However, two of the patients “clearly relapsed,” Mithoefer says. In addition, many of the patients returned to using antidepressants and other psychoactive medications, though the total number of prescriptions in the group was much lower than before.

Julie Holland, a psychiatrist in New York City who used to work at the James J. Peters VA Medical Center in the Bronx, says the data “look really great. It’s amazing that when patients are done with therapy, they don’t meet criteria for PTSD. I’ve never even seen that. It’s a very big deal.” If MDMA were legal, Holland added, she would “absolutely” use it in her practice.

Brain-imaging studies in healthy volunteers show that MDMA quiets the amygdala, an almond-shaped structure deep in the brain that some researchers call a “fear center” due to its central role in triggering strong negative emotions. MDMA also releases a flood of the brain messengers serotonin and dopamine while increasing blood levels of the hormones oxytocin and prolactin, which promote social bonding. This potent mix diminishes fear and defensiveness and boosts empathy and the desire to connect with others, says Holland, so “the therapy work goes faster and deeper.”

Veterans suffer very high rates of PTSD, according to surveys. One 2004 study in The New England Journal of Medicine estimated that up to 18 percent of Iraqi and Afghanistan combat veterans experience the disorder. “This is our way of trying to contribute to our moral obligations to our veterans,” says MAPS founder and executive director Rick Doblin. He added that the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs has rejected overtures from MAPS to work together on five separate occasions.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has been friendlier to the group. This month, the agency granted MAPS permission to continue testing MDMA in 16 additional veterans with PTSD. But the road to full FDA approval is long and expensive, and Doblin anticipates five to 10 years of additional trials. He envisions eventually building a network of psychedelic therapy centers.

A dedicated network of therapists experimented with MDMA-assisted psychotherapy in the 1970s and 1980s before the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration banned the drug in 1985. The next year, Doblin launched MAPS to revive psychedelic research, a movement that’s now gaining steam. A dozen human studies of MDMA, LSD, a powerful African drug called ibogaine and psilocybin, from so-called “magic mushrooms,” are now under way, testing the once-stigmatized drugs as treatments for not only PTSD, but also cluster headaches and addiction, as well as anxiety and depression in cancer patients.

Charles Grob, a psychiatrist at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center, dosed 12 end-stage cancer patients with psilocybin to test whether the experience could ease anxiety and help the patients cope with their diagnosis. Grob did not present his data, which are under review for publication, at the San Jose meeting, but the buzz on the results is positive. Grob and his co-investigators did offer snippets of letters and reactions from study patients. One said, “It feels like healing.” Similar studies of psilocybin in the terminally ill are now launching at New York University in New York City and Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

However, the going has been slow, with Doblin carefully dotting every regulatory “i” to prevent a second backlash against psychedelics. “This isn’t the ’60s,” he says. “We’ve learned the lessons of that era, and now we’re trying to integrate ourselves into science, into medicine, into society.”

At the San Jose meeting, dubbed “Psychedelic Science in the 21st Century,” that integration was in full swing. Eleven hundred therapists, physicians, basic researchers and psychedelics enthusiasts gathered for three days of scientific and cultural talks, visionary art shows and late-night celebrations. The unlikely mix found conservatively dressed researchers from prestigious universities mingling with the heavily tattooed and the green haired.

As for Bledsoe, he’s now a true believer. His MDMA sessions were “an almost sacred experience, a very special and uplifting experience,” he says. After the therapy, he vacationed in Jamaica, began dating a local woman and bought a house on the island. “I’m happy and well adjusted now,” he says. “It’s a good fairy-tale ending. As soon as we get some little Bob Marley kids it’ll be even better.”

From AlterNet, by Paul Armentano

For several years I have postulated that marijuana is not, in the strict sense of the word, an intoxicant.

As I wrote in the book Marijuana Is Safer: So Why Are We Driving People to Drink? (Chelsea Green, 2009), the word ‘intoxicant’ is derived from the Latin noun toxicum (poison). It’s an appropriate term for alcohol, as ethanol (the psychoactive ingredient in booze) in moderate to high doses is toxic (read: poisonous) to healthy cells and organs.

Of course, booze is hardly the only commonly ingested intoxicant. Take the over-the-counter painkiller acetaminophen (Tylenol). According to the Merck online medical library, acetaminophen poisoning and overdose is “common,” and can result in gastroenteritis (inflammation of the gastrointestinal tract) “within hours” and hepatotoxicity (liver damage) “within one to three days after ingestion.” In fact, less than one year ago the U.S. Food and Drug Administration called for tougher standards and warnings governing the drug’s use because “recent studies indicate that unintentional and intentional overdoses leading to severe hepatotoxicity continue to occur.”

By contrast, the therapeutically active components in marijuana — the cannabinoids — appear to be remarkably non-toxic to healthy cells and organs. This notable lack of toxicity is arguably because cannabinoids mimic compounds our bodies naturally produce — so-called endocannabinoids — that are pivotal for maintaining proper health and homeostasis.

In fact, in recent years scientists have discovered that the production of endocannabinoids (and their interaction with the cannabinoid receptors located throughout the body) play a key role in the regulation of proper appetite, anxiety control, blood pressure, bone mass, reproduction, and motor coordination, among other biological functions.

Just how important is this system in maintaining our health? Here’s a clue: In studies of mice genetically bred to lack a proper endocannabinoid system the most common result is premature death.

Armed with these findings, a handful of scientists have speculated that the root cause of certain disease conditions — including migraine, fibromyalgia, irritable bowel syndrome, and other functional conditions alleviated by clinical cannabis — may be an underlying endocannabinoid deficiency.

Now, much to my pleasant surprise, Fox News Health columnist Chris Kilham has weighed in on this important theory.

Are You Cannabis Deficient?
via Fox News

If the idea of having a marijuana deficiency sounds laughable to you, a growing body of science points at exactly such a possibility.

… [Endocannabinoids] also play a role in proper appetite, feelings of pleasure and well-being, and memory. Interestingly, cannabis also affects these same functions. Cannabis has been used successfully to treat migraine, fibromyalgia, irritable bowel syndrome and glaucoma. So here is the seventy-four thousand dollar question. Does cannabis simply relieve these diseases to varying degrees, or is cannabis actually a medical replacement in cases of deficient [endocannabinoids]?

… The idea of clinical cannabinoid deficiency opens the door to cannabis consumption as an effective medical approach to relief of various types of pain, restoration of appetite in cases in which appetite is compromised, improved visual health in cases of glaucoma, and improved sense of well being among patients suffering from a broad variety of mood disorders. As state and local laws mutate and change in favor of greater tolerance, perhaps cannabis will find it’s proper place in the home medicine chest.

Perhaps. Or maybe at the very least society will cease classifying cannabis as a ‘toxic’ substance when its more appropriate role would appear to be more like that of a supplement.

What isn’t popularly known is that at high enough doses the dissociative drug DXM causes subjective paranormal effects similar to those of ketamine, such as out-of-body experiences (OBEs), near-death experiences, a loss of the sense of causality, a sense of presence, encounters with entities, and the occasional experience of extra-sensory perception (White, 1997, Price & Lebel, 2000). These reports were also corroborated by a recent survey on paranormal experience with psychoactive drugs that I conducted with Dr. Marios Kittenis of the University of Edinburgh. We found that several of our survey respondents acknowledged having experiences of clairvoyance, psychokinesis, OBEs, mystical-type experiences, and telepathy in particular (Luke & Kittenis, 2005). Several respondents also independently reported using DXM with others for the explicit purpose of having group telepathic experiences, which they believed to be real and recurrent.

DXM remains a legal drug at the present time, and with increasing numbers of people taking it for non-medical purposes the prevalence of subjective paranormal experiences occurring amongst the public due to this drug must be becoming quite considerable, though no statistics are currently available. Furthermore, no research to date has tested the possibility that these reported telepathic and other experiences with DXM might actually be genuine. Previous research testing the efficacy of psychedelic agents in the production of ESP, mostly conducted throughout the 1960’s with psilocybin and LSD, showed some promising results, despite frequently using novice trippers (Luke, 2005). By the same token, however, much of this research also needed much better controls but certainly encouraged the idea that these drugs may be able to induce genuine psychic experiences, as claimed by shamans across continents and since antiquity. The latest such research project of this kind, using psilocybin and cannabis, was conducted with seemingly adequate controls at the University of Amsterdam by Prof. Dick Bierman and generated very interesting results, partially supporting the apparent efficacy of these substances in stimulating legitimate psychic (i.e., telepathic, clairvoyant or precognitive) phenomena (Bierman, 1998). Further research is certainly begging at this time.

David Luke

(Thanks to James Kent at DoseNation.com for reporting on the SAMHSA paper)

References

Bierman, D. J. (1998, October). The effects of THC and psilocybin on paranormal phenomena. Paper presented at Psychoactivity: A Multidisciplinary Conference on Plants, Shamanism, and States of Consciousness, Amsterdam.

Luke, D. P., & Kittenis, M. (2005). A preliminary survey of paranormal experiences with psychoactive drugs. Journal of Parapsychology, 69 (2), 305-327.

Luke, D. P. (2005). Paranormal phenomena and psychoactive drugs: Fifty-years of research Bulletin of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, 15 (3), 15-16.

Price, L. H., & Lebel, J. (2000). Dextromethorphan-induced psychosis. American Journal of Psychiatry, 157 (2), 304.

White, W. E. (1997). Altered states and paranormal experiences. In W. E. White, The Dextromethorphan FAQ: Answers to frequently asked questions about DXM, (version 4). Retrieved April 2, 2002, from http://www.erowid.org/chemical/dxm/faq/dxm_paranormal.shtml

When I was growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, painkillers were kept in a glass bottle in the bathroom medicine cabinet. When you had a headache, you would wait until you got home and then open the dusty bottle and shake out two pills: round, powdery discs with bevelled edges and a bisect line – a groove cut into the pill so that you could snap it in half for a reduced dose. You’d swallow the pills, either aspirin or paracetamol, with a glass of water. They felt uncomfortably large in the throat and had a bitter taste. The bottle, which contained 50 pills, hung around for months, even years.

Now, when I feel a headache coming on, I pat my pockets to see if I have any painkillers on me. The time between pain and treatment has shrunk to almost nothing. These days, the pills do not come in bottles, but in blister-packs in bright, shiny boxes. When I leave the house, I sometimes run through a checklist – keys, wallet, phone, painkillers. The packets, some of which are plastic and shaped like mobile phones, are cheerful and glossy; elegant enough to put on a table in a restaurant, they look like lifestyle accessories. You take them with you when you leave the house, partly for convenience and partly because you know that, if you leave them lying around, someone else will pocket them.

Painkillers are no longer hard to swallow; the pills have smooth edges, and some have a glossy coating of hard sugar, like Smarties or M&M’s. Some of them are mint- or lemon-flavoured. If your throat objects to tablets, you can take caplets, which are longer and thinner, or “liquid capsules”, which are soft and gelatinous, like vitamin pills, or powder, which is poured from a sachet into a glass of water. You could conceivably take a painkiller while you were out jogging, or running for the bus.

Painkillers are also more widely available than they used to be. We have been able to buy aspirin and paracetamol over the counter for some time now, but in 1996 restrictions on the sale of ibuprofen – the newest, raciest painkiller – were relaxed, making it available in supermarkets, newsagents and corner shops, as well as from the pharmacist. This was part of an NHS drive to save money by taking pressure off doctors and pharmacists; as citizens, we have been taught to be self-medicating when it comes to pain. The change came about after Galpharm, a British pharmaceutical company, made a successful application to the Medicines Control Agency for a licence to have ibuprofen moved from the pharmacy to the “general sales list”. After that, painkiller advertising, marketing and packaging moved into a different league.

Inevitably, we are also spending more on painkillers than ever. I’d buy them as a matter of course, with my groceries. I found myself wanting to buy smart painkillers, in the same way that I might buy smart jeans or decent coffee. For me, and for many people I spoke to, the temptation is to catch headaches early, nip them in the bud. We have become enthusiastic self-medicators. In 1997, according to the market research firm Euromonitor, the British painkiller market was worth £309m. In 2001, it was worth £398m. In other words, it grew by almost 30% in just four years, probably the biggest hike since the German company Bayer opened the first US aspirin factory in 1903. Euromonitor predicts more growth: by 2006, it estimates that the market will be worth £483m.

Recently, I found myself in someone’s house with a slight headache. No problem, he said. He had stocked up on painkillers – he thought he had four packets, a total of 48 pills. But he couldn’t find them; the packets had all gone. Three people were living in the house. “I just bought them a couple of days ago,” he said. That was the moment I decided to write this article.

How do you decide what type of headache you have? Is it an Anadin Extra headache, or an Anadin Ultra headache? Is it a Nurofen headache, or a Nurofen Plus headache? Can you cure it with tablets, or do you need liquid capsules?

In an ordinary shop, you can buy three basic types of painkiller – aspirin, which has been around for a century; paracetamol, which emerged as a popular alternative after the war; or ibuprofen, which was invented in the early 1960s and has been a pharmacy medicine since 1983. Ibuprofen is slightly gentler on your stomach than aspirin, but it does not thin your blood to the same extent.

Aspirin and ibuprofen reduce pain, fever and inflammation, while paracetamol reduces only pain and fever. Paracetamol is gentle on the stomach, but can damage the liver if you take too many. Paracetamol is also the suicide drug; you can die a painful death by knocking back as few as 25. (For this reason, the government has taken steps to reduce packet sizes; since 1998, you have been able to buy packets of no more than 16 in supermarkets, or 32 in pharmacies – though there is nothing to stop you from going to more than one shop. The multibillion-dollar paracetamol industry in the US has thus far resisted all attempts by the Food and Drug Administration to reduce packet size.) Aspirin and ibuprofen are potentially less harmful: most people would survive a cry-for-help dose of around 50 aspirins, or even 100 ibuprofen tablets.

When it comes to headaches, ibuprofen is my drug of choice. (I’m not alone: according to Euromonitor, ibuprofen now has 31% of the market, and is growing exponentially. Aspirin has a 7% share, and paracetamol 13%; the rest of the market is made up of combination painkillers.) I also, I have noticed, have strong brand loyalty. When I go to the supermarket, my eye is drawn to the row of shiny silver packs with a chevron and a target design – Nurofen. Nurofen claims to be “targeted pain relief”.

Targeting a headache costs me around 20p a shot. On one level, I am aware that the active ingredient in a single Nurofen tablet, 200mg of ibuprofen, is exactly the same as that in a single Anadin ibuprofen tablet, or an Anadin Ultra, a Hedex ibuprofen, a Cuprofen or, for that matter, a generic own-brand ibuprofen tablet from Safeway, Sainsbury’s or Tesco. On another level, Nurofen’s targeting promise appeals to me. It feels hi-tech, almost environmentally sound. It makes me think of stealth bombers dropping smart bombs down the chimney of the building they want to destroy, with minimum collateral damage.

Are our headaches getting worse, or do we just think they are? I went to see Dr Raj Munglani, a consultant in pain management, in his office at Nuffield hospital in Cambridge, to find out what he thought. Munglani is a pleasant-looking man in middle age who drives a top-of-the-range Volvo between his home in a village outside Cambridge and the various hospitals in East Anglia where he practises.

Munglani believes that our society tolerates less pain than ever before. Modern life requires you to be pain-free; there just isn’t time to lie around waiting for a headache to go. Young people are more impatient than older people; when they feel pain, they want something done about it, immediately. Generally speaking, the younger the consumer, the stronger the painkiller they are marketed: Anadin Original is pitched at people over 45, Anadin Extra at people between 25 and 55, and Anadin Ultra at people between 19 and 32. Of course, there is a limit to this sliding scale: Nurofen for Children (six months and over) contains 100mg of Nurofen, half the adult dose.

Is any of this surprising? We live in an age of quick fixes. These days, we expect everything to get faster – cars, lifts, food. When we suffer psychological distress, we take Prozac and Seroxat. More people are having their wisdom teeth extracted under general anaesthetic. Caesarean section is on the increase. Half a century of the NHS has softened us up, and the sheer success of modern medicine has made pain something of an anomaly. We work out, we take vitamins: we can’t really be doing with headaches. We see pain not as a symptom – an alarm system to warn us of illness – but more as an illness in itself. When the alarm comes on, we just want it turned off.

Our parents and grandparents “worked through” their pain; they gritted it out. God, it was said, would never give you a pain you couldn’t bear. In those days, pain had a moral, even a religious dimension. Pope John Paul II has said “suffering contains, as it were, an appeal to man’s moral greatness and spiritual maturity” – but today few of us want to be martyrs. Look at the ads on TV, and on buses and trains in any major city: painkillers will get you back to work, help you keep your job, deal with the kids; with painkillers, you can cope.

I had a slight hangover the day I visited Munglani, which seemed to be getting worse. I’d nearly missed my train, and found myself repeatedly clenching my jaw in the taxi. I’d planned to buy some Nurofen before I got on the train, but had run out of time.

Munglani explained the anatomy of my headache. The alcohol I had drunk had dehydrated the inside of my skull. Consequently, the dura, the Cellophane-like membrane that encases my brain, was no longer fully supported. Cells inside my skull were being traumatised, and had responded by releasing tiny amounts of arachidonic acid; this acid, having seeped out of my cells, had turned into a set of chemical compounds called prostaglandins. And these prostaglandins were hurting me; they were telling nerve endings in my head to tell my brain that my cells were traumatised. My brain, in turn, was trying to get my attention, and succeeding. I was in pain. It felt as if something inside my head was being gently pulled away from my skull, which it was.

When you take aspirin, or paracetamol, or ibuprofen, the drug works by deactivating a chemical called prostaglandin H synthetase, the catalyst that turns arachidonic acid into prostaglandins. So even though your cells are still traumatised, your brain is no longer aware of the trauma. Your brain is being fooled. This process was discovered in aspirin in the 1970s by John Vane, a scientist working at the Wellcome Foundation, who went on to win the Nobel Prize in 1982. (Aspirin was first synthesised in Germany in 1899, and so had been on the market for more than 70 years before anybody knew how it worked.)

“Pain,” said Munglani, “is what the patient says it is.” All sorts of things can make you feel headachey, including muscle contractions on the scalp or the back of the neck, dehydration from drinking too much alcohol or caffeine, staring at your computer screen for too long, looking at bright lights, colds and flu, grinding your teeth, anxiety at the prospect of getting a headache. Sometimes, prostaglandins are produced when there is no apparent trauma. You might feel pain because something has subtly altered the balance of your brain chemistry, or simply because your mood has changed; you might be producing an uneven amount of serotonin or dopamine.

You might, most worryingly, have a headache because you take too many painkillers, a condition known as “medication overuse headache”. A study published in the British Medical Journal last October found that “daily or near-daily headache is at epidemic levels, affecting up to 5% of some populations, and chronic overuse of headache drugs may account for half of this phenomenon”. Low doses daily appeared to carry greater risks than larger doses weekly.

Of course, most pharmaceutical research is sponsored by pharmaceutical companies, which are understandably reluctant to explore the negatives. But what research there is suggests that analgesics, when used frequently, chronically reduce levels of serotonin, and increase levels of pain-signalling molecules. Earlier this year, the New York Times reported that a German study had found that even a two-week course of Tylenol (an American brand of paracetamol) “causes a drop in serotonin-receptor density in rat brains”, an effect that is reversed when the rats are taken off the painkillers. If you keep fooling your brain into not feeling pain, your body will eventually fight back and make you feel more pain. And then you’ll want more painkillers; it’s a vicious circle.

Imagine this as a business proposition. You buy a cardboard tub of fluffy white powder for around £100. Then you turn the powder into a quarter of a million pills, which you sell at 10p per pill. Every cardboard tub you buy makes you a profit of £24,900. The powder is pure ibuprofen. The pills are painkillers. The company is Boots, which owns a subsidiary called Crookes Healthcare, which manufactures Nurofen. Sounds good, doesn’t it? Of course, there are overheads – you have to invent the drug, spend years on expensive clinical trials, build a factory, and hire people to make the pills, tell the public about the pills, and design the packs so they look attractive on the shelves. “It takes 10 years and £200m to get a new drug accepted,” said Dr James Walmsley, a senior medical adviser to Boots. Even so, it’s clearly worth it. (I asked two Boots employees how much the company would pay for a 50kg tub of ibuprofen. “About £100,” they agreed. Later, a press officer emailed me to say she couldn’t officially comment on the cost.)

Boots’ head office, and the factory that makes many of its painkillers, are on a campus that lies a few miles outside Nottingham. Every day, trucks full of raw ingredients arrive at one end of the factory, and trucks leave the other end with the finished product – tens of thousands of cardboard packs, destined for 90 countries. This is D-95, one of the biggest painkiller factories in Britain, working 24 hours a day. If you’ve ever popped a Nurofen tablet, or a Nurofen caplet, or a Nurofen Plus, or a Nurofen liquid capsule, or a Boots own-brand generic ibuprofen tablet (the active ingredient is the same), or a Boots own-brand aspirin or paracetamol tablet, the pill you swallowed will have been made here. This is Headache Central.

“Six hundred people work here,” said Catherine McGrath, who described herself as “shift manager, analgesics”. She explained that the factory works seasonally, making cold remedies in the autumn to meet winter demand, and hayfever remedies in the spring. Headaches are a year-round phenomenon. “There’s a constant demand for painkillers,” McGrath told me.

Before the fluffy white powder becomes a hard, glossy pill, it must go through many different stages. First, it is mixed with “excipients”, ingredients that have no painkilling role. Each Nurofen pill, for instance, contains 200mg of ibuprofen, but also maize starch, sucrose, calcium sulphate, stearic acid and shellac. These things hold it together, bulk it out, make it taste nice and help it disintegrate when it reaches the stomach.

If you swallow a Nurofen tablet, Boots’ employees will have mixed it, granulated it, sieved it in a colander the size of a dining table, dried it using a contraption like a hand-drier in a public loo, but 20ft tall, blown it upwards into a series of giant “socks”, milled it in a vast grinding machine, “pinched” it to remove excess air, punched it into the shape of a pill, weighed it, checked it for metal deposits, coated it in sugar 16 times until the edges are smooth, printed it with a logo on an old-fashioned printing press, blister-packed it and boxed it in an attractive box.

The factory is large and sterile, like a setting in a JG Ballard novel – big, barn-like spaces, dull, neutral colours, large rooms full of vats. The thing that gets you is the scale. This is about making millions and millions of pills – to cure tension headaches in France, migraines in Germany, hangovers in Holland, Belgium, Denmark, Sweden. Naturally, after a few hours in this environment, a headache started creeping up on me. I patted my pockets. Nothing. It is not possible to take a pill in the factory itself.

McGrath and I watched hundreds of ibuprofen caplets pouring down chutes. “Lovely and slinky,” she said, “nice to go down your throat.”

Stewart Adams, the inventor of ibuprofen, lives modestly in a compact modern house on the outskirts of Nottingham. On the sideboard in his living room there is a silver Nurofen pack, cast in metal, with the names of the first Nurofen advertisers on the back. He won an OBE for services to science in 1987, and his name is on the ibuprofen patent. But Adams has derived no great material reward from his invention – no house in the country, not even a lifetime supply of painkillers. When he gets a headache, he goes to the corner shop just like the rest of us.

A sprightly, talkative 79, Adams came upon ibuprofen when he was working as a research scientist for Boots in the late 1950s, looking for a drug to reduce inflammation in patients with rheumatoid arthritis. Looking back on his career, he says he was “very disappointed”. He had found a headache remedy that was more potent than aspirin, with fewer side-effects – but he hadn’t found a cure for rheumatoid arthritis.

His operation was very small – “a man and a boy”. Typically, his research budget was between £4,000 and £5,000 a year. Adams discovered that aspirin reduced the swelling caused by ultraviolet light on the skin. Working with an organic chemist called John Nicholson, he began looking for aspirin-like compounds that might have fewer side-effects on arthritic patients. “It was a bit hit and miss,” he told me. (This was long before John Vane had discovered how aspirin worked.)

“We weren’t as clearcut in our thinking as we might have been,” said Adams. He and Nicholson looked at hundreds of chemical compounds. They put several drugs through clinical trials, testing them on arthritic patients. One drug produced a nasty rash in a large percentage of the patients; another produced a rash in a smaller, but still significant, percentage. A third, ibufenac, an acetic acid, caused jaundice. “We had to sit back and have another rethink,” said Adams.

During this long process of trial and error, Adams synthesised a version of ibufenac that was not an acetic acid but a proprionic acid – ie, related to propane rather than vinegar. He assumed it would be toxic but, surprisingly, it wasn’t: it had a short half-life in the tissues. It was like aspirin, only you could take more of it. Adams and his colleagues began taking the compound, ibuprofen, when they got headaches. “We knew it was analgesic, because we were taking it well before it got on the market,” he says. He remembers making a speech at a conference after a few drinks the night before, having dealt with his hangover by taking 600mg of this new drug he had invented.

When Boots patented ibuprofen in 1962, Adams could have had little idea what he had invented – an analgesic that would compete with aspirin; a drug that, once its control had passed into the hands of the marketing men, would change the way we consume painkillers for ever. For the rest of his career, Adams continued with his efforts to find a cure for rheumatoid arthritis, without success (although ibuprofen has important uses in its treatment). Holding the original patent in his hands, Adams said, laughing, “We didn’t get anything. I think, in fact, we were supposed to be given a pound for signing away our signatures, but we didn’t even get that.”

Now that painkillers exist in a no man’s land between medicine and product, they don’t need someone to prescribe them – they need someone to market them. Don Williams, the man currently responsible for the design of the Nurofen pack, works in Notting Hill, west London. His office is just what you’d expect – minimal furnishings, varnished, blond-wood floors. In the upstairs lobby there is a shopping trolley full of products designed by his company, Packaging Innovations Global: Double Velvet loo paper, Head & Shoulders shampoo, Pot Noodle – and Nurofen. A former session guitarist from Middlesbrough, Williams is tall and slim, with wonderfully tasteful casual clothes and a fashionably shaved head. “That’s our philosophy,” Williams said, looking at the trolley. “That’s what we believe in. Getting things in trolleys. At the end of the day, that’s what we’re paid for.”

Packaging Innovations began designing Nurofen packs about five years ago. “There are very few brand icons that visually communicate what they actually do,” Williams said. The target design is “directly related to the brand promise”. Two years ago, the Brand Council, an advertising industry panel, named Nurofen as one of 100 British “superbrands”, one that “offers consumers significant emotional and/or physical advantage over its competitors that (consciously or subconsciously) customers want, recognise and are willing to pay a premium for”.

One of Williams’ innovations was to place the target in the centre of the pack, with a chevron radiating out to the sides. He also wanted more of the silver foil on the packs to be visible. Consumers, he told me, are visually literate – they see the pack design before they read the words. When he took over the design of Benson & Hedges’ cigarette packs, Williams made sure that every pack was gold, even the packs containing low-tar cigarettes, which had previously been silver. “We believe that brand identities should be recognised at a distance,” he said, “even through half-closed eyes, or sub-optimal conditions, or in peripheral vision.” In supermarkets, says Williams, “We want a blocking effect on the shelf. The chevron links all the packs together, so you get a wave effect.” As I left, he said, “I get more kicks out of seeing a pack in a bin than on a shelf.”

Are we taking more painkillers than we should? Dr Timothy Steiner, a dry, precise man and consultant physiologist at Charing Cross hospital in London, thinks so. He believes that one in 30 people suffer chronic daily headaches as a result of painkiller overuse. So what constitutes overuse? In a paper on headaches published in the British Medical Journal last year, Steiner wrote that it was hard to generalise, although “the regular intake of three or more analgesic tablets daily on more than two days a week are suggested arbitrary limits”. He won’t quite say that “medication overuse headache” is something the pharmaceutical industry is reluctant to explore. What he does say is that when the Proprietary Association of Great Britain (PAGB), which represents the pharmaceutical companies that make over-the-counter medicines, set up a working party to investigate the possibility that painkillers might be causing headaches, the working party was disbanded. That was in July 2000. Steiner looks at me as if to say: this is a fact; you can make of it what you will.

I later spoke to Sheila Kelly, executive director of the PAGB, to get the industry perspective. Does she think the market is growing too fast? Kelly said she had figures only up to 1997. She doesn’t say so, but that is the year when the market really began to take off, the beginning of the big painkiller push. Kelly believes that “medication overuse headache” has been confused with some cases of migraine. “It’s not the analgesics that cause the headaches,” she said. “These people have a propensity towards migraine. It’s a coincidence. It’s become a non-issue, I think.”

Sitting behind his desk in his neat office, Steiner disagrees: he thinks that “medication overuse headache” is a “huge public health issue”. He explains the cycle: “Over-consumption of painkillers leads to aggravation of the headache condition. Headaches and analgesic use become more frequent, one driving the other. Patients, instead of taking painkillers for the headache they’ve got, take painkillers for the headache they fear they’re going to get.

“If painkillers reduce the sensitivity of pain pathways, there is likely to be, over time, a physiological compensation for that, which results in those pathways becoming more sensitive, leading to the requirement for more analgesia. Pain pathways are there for a good reason. They’re there to protect us from causing injury to ourselves.”

Once these compensating mechanisms come into effect, says Steiner, “people begin to look for something stronger”. They might go for codeine, an opioid drug related to morphine that can be bought over the counter in pharmacies, though not in supermarkets. Nurofen Plus contains codeine, as do Solpadeine, Panadeine and Co-codamol. “Once codeine is there as well,” says Steiner, “not only are you taking something that will cause chronic daily headache, but something that can be addictive.”

Steiner, by the way, says he finds the notion that Nurofen “targets” pain “an interesting claim”. If there is targeting, he says, “It’s not a process that the drug is responsible for. It’s a process that the body is responsible for.”

Robert, a 34-year-old writer, has been addicted to painkillers for 10 years. Typically, he takes 24 Solpadeine tablets – a mixture of paracetamol, codeine and caffeine – a day. Yesterday, he tells me, he took three packets: 36 pills. This is, of course, an extreme case of overuse, and Robert’s doctors have warned him that he risks permanent damage to his liver. Without painkillers, he feels “just awful. You just feel terrible. You go cold turkey. You feel like crap.”

Taking painkillers, he says, “has become ingrained in my day, my routine”. He remembers how it started. He had bad headaches, and his mother suggested Solpadeine. You might remember an ad for Solpadeine in which a man puts two cartridges into a shotgun, one representing paracetamol and one representing codeine, and blasts a clay pigeon, which represents the pain. “Bang! Instant relief!” says Robert. “It worked. I also noticed a slight chemical shift in my body. I wasn’t high, but it felt very calming, very good. I can’t say I rushed out and robbed some grannies. But I kept taking the tablets.” When his headaches came back, they were worse than ever. That was when he began to take the tablets pre-emptively.

For years, says Robert, he felt desperate and alone. He felt like a “freak”. A couple of years ago, he started surfing the internet, desperate for help, and found, to his surprise, that hundreds of people were posting messages on websites, such as over-count.org.uk. They make salutary reading. Every story is almost exactly the same. People take painkillers because they feel pain. At first, they feel better. But then they start to feel more pain than they felt before. Sometimes, they start by taking ibuprofen, or aspirin, or paracetamol. But the real problem is almost always that they are addicted to codeine.

“Even as I write this, I have tears streaming down my face,” writes one addict. “I am willing to try anything to get rid of these tablets,” says another. “All my veins are hot and rushing,” writes a third. “It’s lush. But it’s not worth it. I don’t want this addiction any more. I don’t want to spend all my money on analgesia. ”

As Steiner says, “There is a lack of education about what painkillers are. They are medicines, which have effects that are wanted, and a variety of unwanted effects.” These unwanted effects can include gastrointestinal bleeding, stomach ulcers, kidney and liver failure. Taking a painkiller might also encourage you to exercise when you shouldn’t, aggravating existing injuries. In 2000, a report published by scientists working in Oxford and Geneva estimated that 2,000 people a year were dying in Britain as a consequence of long-term painkiller misuse; Andrew Moore of the Oxford chronic pain clinic, who co-authored the report, estimated that side-effects and treatment arising from long-term prescription aspirin and ibuprofen use were costing the NHS between £170m and £250m a year.

Steiner believes that, while the medical establishment is beginning to understand the problems of painkiller overuse, there is a lack of awareness among GPs. “That’s right,” says Robert. “The medical establishment doesn’t have a proper system to deal with painkiller addiction. It’s not like heroin -if you’re addicted to an illegal drug, you can enter a detox programme. But if you’re addicted to a legal drug, it’s different. It’s harder for them to admit that a legal drug can be so addictive.”

The only method, says Steiner, is withdrawal. If you want to check into a detox clinic, as former painkiller addicts Matthew Perry and Winona Ryder did, you’ll almost certainly have to pay for it yourself. Cold turkey is the only answer. “My experience,” says Steiner, “is that people who try to taper off usually fail.”

Before I started researching this article, I took several painkillers a day – sometimes four, sometimes six. Sometimes eight or 10. This was before I stopped drinking. I would knock back three or four first thing in the morning, to deal with my hangover, which had not been entirely knocked out by the two or three I had taken the night before. I remember the fuzzy, headachey dash to the corner shop when I woke up with no painkillers, and the painkillers I took in the evening before going to the pub, when I was beginning to feel better.

Was I harming myself? Probably. Might I have ended up like Robert? It’s difficult to say. With painkillers, as with other drugs, everybody is affected differently. Why did I take so many painkillers? Partly, of course, because they reduced pain – but, more worryingly, I took them because I liked them. I take them only occasionally now.

This is what happens when a medicine becomes a product. It begins to seem more attractive, more desirable. It comes, almost literally, with a spoonful of sugar. In a sense, the marketing man becomes the doctor. As the late pain expert Patrick Wall wrote, “A crucial component in all analgesics, no matter how they work, is the patient’s belief that it works.” Nurofen works for me partly because I believe it does.

What does the future hold? More painkillers. More pain pathways becoming desensitised. Packaging that looks more and more attractive. New pill shapes. Faster-acting pills. And then what? A big marketing push in the developing world, domestic advertising restrictions, health warnings appearing on packets. There may come a time when people will be wearing patches to wean themselves off painkillers, or chewing low-dose ibuprofen gum – and what a marketing opportunity that would be.

Drugs & the Internet are inextricably and symbiotically entwined. Indeed, the very origins of the Internet are bound up with the exuberant experimentation with psychedelic drugs that took place in Silicon Valley from the 1960s onwards. The use of both psychedelic drugs and the Internet can be conceptualized as attempts to augment human capacity, as technologies through which minds can be opened and society reformed.

As testament to the significance of psychedelic drug use amongst many of the Silicon Valley pioneers, Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple Computers, maintains that taking LSD was one of the two or three most important things he has ever done. Jobs is far from being alone in attesting that LSD can help human thought processing, particularly in tackling the challenges of computing: ‘Experienced and intelligent trippers are often characterized by a fluid sense of perception, and a sensitivity to … “The pattern that connects” – just the kind of mental gymnastics that come in handy when you’re crafting the giddy complexities of information space’ (Davis, 1998: 170). The Internet is a system with the hippies’ fingerprints all over it, with the psychedelicized counterculture’s scorn for centralized authority providing the philosophical foundations of the leaderless Internet.

Just as drugs have helped to propagate computers, so computers have helped to promulgate drugs. Indeed, no sooner had ARPAnet – the precursor to the Internet – been invented, than it was co-opted in the service of drug commerce by Stanford students with their MIT counterparts: ‘Before Amazon, before eBay, the seminal act of e-commerce was a drug deal. The students used the network to quietly arrange the sale of an undetermined amount of marijuana’ (Markoff, 2005: 109). This trade was the first of many, as the Internet is a medium through which ‘white’, ‘grey’ and ‘black’ drug markets flourish, with the boundaries between these markets shifting and amorphous, fluid and arbitrary.

The ‘white’ market in psychoactive substances that are legally available in the West – alcohol and tobacco – turns grey, as the restrictions on their advertisement, such as marketeering targeted at the young, seemingly dissolve online. When it comes to taking advantage of the advertising opportunities presented by new media, the alcohol industry is no slouch: this is a world, after all, where alcopops have Facebook entries, along with signed-up friends.

There also exists a burgeoning grey market in drugs sold through online pharmacies, a smattering of which are legitimate, whilst the rest operate without the bother of genuine prescriptions, those magic pieces of paper that transubstantiate the molecule from drug to medicine. The Internet creates a global village, leaving people free to obtain ‘prescription’ medicines from countries with markedly different drug laws. Cyberpharmacists are drug dealers for the Internet age, supplying pharmaceutical, recreational and ‘lifestyle’ drugs.

The driver behind this latter, the lifestyle drug market, seems to be a reluctance to accept not having the sexual prowess of the most virile person on the planet, not being as happy as the most joyous individual, nor as thin as Cheryl from Girls Aloud. Thus, drugs developed for impotence transmogrify into pills for sexual enhancement, Prozac is swallowed by people hoping for a smoother come down from Ecstasy, whilst Ritalin is diverted to become an appetite suppressant. Paradoxically, potentially lethal growth hormones are sold as the fountain of youth, the key to longevity. Whilst Google acts as an ‘external memory prosthesis’ (Pesce as quoted in Sirius, 2006: 218), drugs that enhance our memories, developed to tackle Alzheimers, bleed into enhancing cognition in the healthy: ‘[P]sychoactive drugs can be revisioned as simply another technology for change, as citizens of the postmodern world reject one of life’s “givens” after another’ (Lenson, 1995: 187). Interestingly, the drug-taking here is often more about conformity than it is rebellion.

Probably the most dangerous aspect of the online pharmaceutical trade is the understandable yet insidious assumption – the result of a life-time’s indoctrination with false distinctions – that prescription drugs (even when purchased off-label) are inherently safer than street drugs: in reality, of course, ‘the risk for overdose and dependence derives from the potency of the drug, the mindset of the person using it, and the environment in which they are ingesting – not the source of the drug or its brand name’ (Harvard Law School, 2006: 13).

So-called ‘legal highs’ are also ostensibly a branch of the online ‘white’ market in drugs, though they, too, have a tendency to morph into the ‘grey’. The substances sold as ‘legal highs’ are unregulated by default rather than design, through an inability of the would-be prohibitionists to keep up with the countless psychoactive substances, whether ‘natural’, ‘synthesized’, or somewhere in between. Even discounting human intervention, the planet pushes out psychedelics in a plethora of different forms, too multitudinous to be swept under the purview of prohibition.

Plants previously ingested by indigenous tribes in remote locations are being gathered up by the long tentacles of the Internet, delivered globally in vacuum-packed parcels. Illustrative of this phenomenon is ayahuasca, a brew traditionally used in shamanic rituals along the Amazon, made from combining two plants: whilst the primary psychoactive constituent – DMT – is a Class A drug in the UK, the relevant plants themselves are not covered by the Misuse of Drugs Act and are widely sold through online ‘legal high’ shops.

What are the consequences of these vines having been rent from the ritual, of the fact that anyone with Internet access can now become their own shaman? Despite ayahuasca losing its meaning as a ‘diagnostic tool and force for healing’ as it travels out of the Amazon along the web, it still does not fit easily into established Occidental paradigms of drug use; indeed, the radical shifts in world-view frequently precipitated by drinking the brew pose ‘a challenge to modern Western drug policies and laws, which are premised on a rationalist/positivist ontology that constructs the psychoactive substances essentially as chemicals and their effects as simply mechanistic’ (Tupper, 2008: 300).

Experience has shown that clamping down on one type of ‘legal high’ achieves little save to stimulate interest in replacements. As has been poetically pointed out, ‘our law is a machine law, a gridwork, clockwork law, and it is obviously unable to contain the fluidity of the organic’ (Wilson, 1996).

It is not just organic substances that the law seems unable to contain: ‘Advances in technology that enable tiny changes to be made to the molecular structure of substances … have blurred the distinction between licit and illicit manufacture’ (INCB, 2009: 10). This has led to the creation of an online ‘grey’ market in euphemistically named ‘research chemicals’, hallucinogenic analogues that skate the perimeters of legality, due to their similarities to (but essential differences from) regulated substances. As the US Drug Enforcement Agency have commented, ‘the formulation of analogues is like a drug dealer’s magic trick meant to fool law enforcement’ (DEA, 2004).

Meant to, and, indeed, sometimes doing exactly that, with some such websites serving thousands of customers and clandestine chemists racking up fortunes over prolonged periods before being discovered. As with organic substances, would-be prohibitors can be conceptualised as doing little more than chasing their tails here: tweaking the chemical compound – with the aid of computers – produces a drug different enough to evade the regulations, and on it goes, ad infinitum. Alongside being fruitless, this rigmarole of prohibition is potentially dangerous: it results in people using novel substances about which little is known.

There is also a thriving online market that is more incontrovertibly ‘black’. Drug forums transform into street corners, and you can even access a helpful ‘crack dealer locator service’ online: ‘the fluidity of cyberspace is ideally suited for illicit drug transactions’ (Stetina et al, 2008) and ‘the new trade is thriving … filling up the stash boxes of users who want the same convenience buying their weed that they have purchasing books and CDs at Amazon’ (Goldberg, 1999). Indeed, an interesting cyber-twist in the tale is that – just as with Amazon – the Internet fosters communities of users who rate drug dealers and their performance online. Will the sheer force of consumer demand, in combination with the ‘unpoliceability’ of the Internet, be the unmaking of global prohibition?

Perhaps, but it is arguably the use of the web as an information source that may offer the greatest challenge to the paradigm of prohibition. There is a plethora of incredibly diverse drug information websites, showing the many what only the few used to know: namely, that portals to the psychedelic state are ubiquitous, found in the most unlikely to the most mundane of places. All it takes is the click of a mouse to find directions to the best sites for fungi-foraging, advice regarding which ornamental cacti to chow down on from the local garden centre, and instructions on how to extract psychedelic milk from toads. Drug prohibitionists could no more seal these egresses than harvest the moon.

One of the most respected online drug information sources – particularly amongst psychedelic drug users – is Erowid: this site is the first port of call for most psychonauts before they embark on an adventure with a new substance.  Erowid is famous for its ‘trip reports’: information imparted horizontally from fellow travelers with direct experience is accorded far greater weight than the (often moralistic) dry pronouncements on drug effects handed down vertically from on-high. A participatory culture, where users generate their own content, is creating a collective intelligence about drugs, far superior to the propaganda of yesteryear. It is unsurprising that an approach to imparting knowledge that presents people with as full a picture as possible, letting them balance pleasures against risks, has greater successes. The human survival instinct is strong: by definition, hedonists truly love life and want to continue living it.

Drugs themselves are reconstituted online. To illustrate, rather than being viewed as a menace to society, drugs might be constructed as religious sacraments or as therapeutics. In this latter category, the work of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) is paramount: on their website psychedelic drugs are (re)configured as psychotherapeutic tools. MAPS sponsor MDMA assisted psychotherapy in the treatment of post traumatic stress disorder in, for instance, victims of sexual trauma, with promising results. This offers an alternative construction of MDMA, alongside liquifying the boundaries between controlled drugs and therapeutics.

Further, the essential contributions that psychedelics can make more broadly in society are regularly detailed in MAPS’s online journal. A recent such missive had the relationship between psychedelics and ecology as its overarching theme: ‘The essence of the mystical experience is a sense of unity woven within the multiplicity … This common bond can generate respect and appreciation for the environment, for caretaking and wonder’ (Doblin, 2009: 2). Given the looming ecological crisis, there is a strong argument that anything which helps reveal humanity’s essential inner-connectedness with our environment should be embraced rather than sanctioned.

As well as acting as a conduit for information, the Internet provides a sense of community that can be difficult to find offline, particularly for those involved in relatively obscure psychedelic drug use and/or domiciled in remote locations. Whilst old-style communities could be experienced as stifling, virtual commune-ities of like-minded souls with shared ideals can form. This virtual haven has many names, one of which is the entheosphere, a mind-space concerned with entheogens, psychedelic drugs that are ingested with a view to consciousness expansion, to spiritual enlightenment.

Immediately a shift in language is apparent, reflecting the fact that the entheosphere allows for alternative discourses on drugs and the meanings ascribed to them. In being given a voice, drug-takers have exposed the fallacy that they are not sufficiently drug aware, that, if they only knew the facts, they would stop. Rather, many know exactly what it is that they are getting themselves into; in short, the decision to expand one’s consciousness is likely to be a conscious choice.

In this alternative discourse … ‘[d]rugs can take one closer to truth, can reveal, through hedonistic self-exploration, the real, authentic self, buried beneath capitalism and social convention’ (Moore, 2007: 357). Drug-takers can construct their own identities, after many years of being silenced whilst others weaved negative depictions around them. What is revealed is that psychedelic culture is about so much more than the drugs, which are best understood as catalysts to alternative states of consciousness: the insights, life-style changes, art-works and music generated by such ontological shifts create an entire way of life, both within and beyond the entheosphere.

To conclude, the Internet is a bottom-up technology, heralding a new way of doing things, and a new world, where top-down systems of regulation – such as prohibition – are losing their power. Birthed as a military technology, will the Internet bring an end to the ‘War on (Some People who use Some) Drugs’? This possibility has not gone unnoticed, with the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, referring to the Internet as a ‘weapon of mass destruction’ (UNODC, 2009: 3). Whilst this organization still clings to the belief that this time-bomb can be defused by smothering it with cyber controls, an alternative reading sees the Internet as the death knell of global prohibition. The Internet is as beautifully and anarchically impossible to govern as psychedelic drug use itself, with both throwing up similar questions about the acceptable reach of State control and concomitant restrictions on cognitive liberty:

‘[The] notion of cognitive liberty … says that you own your own body, you own your own brain, you have freedom of thought – so why don’t we have the legal right to use psychedelics? These are the same issues that are occurring in technology. What represents our freedom? What represents what the government is allowed to regulate, and for what reason?’ (Herbert as quoted in Reiman, 2008: 19-20).

The dismantlement of global prohibition is likely to be just one of many breakthroughs precipitated by this technology, with the possibility that it may even have implications for human evolution itself. Just as psychedelic philosopher Terence McKenna saw plant-based hallucinogens as having been pivotal in the development of anthropoid awareness in the past, so the Internet looks set to generate exponential expansions of human consciousness in the future. Consciousness can be envisioned as an emergent property of neurons chattering, the Internet as an emergent property of our collective consciousness, and global consciousness as an emergent property of the Internet. The Internet is engendering global consciousness through bringing us together as a swarm of humans: just as bees use ‘waggle dances’ to communicate information, so the human swarm has the Internet via which to share memes and dreams. The need for a global consciousness has never been greater than in our current (changing) climate.

References

DEA (2004) ‘DEA Announces Arrests of Website Operators Selling Illegal Designer Drugs’, News Release, 22nd July, URL (consulted June 2009): http://www.usdoj.gov/dea/pubs/pressrel/ pr072204.html.

Davis, E. (1998) Techgnosis. New York: Three Rivers Press.

Doblin, R. (2009) ‘From the Desk of Rick Doblin PhD’ MAPS Bulletin XIX(1): 2.

Goldberg, M. (1999) ‘World. Wide. Weed.’ Metro, July 22nd, URL (consulted June 2009): http://www.metroactive.com/papers/metro/07.22.99/cover/ marijuana-9929.html.

Harvard Law School (2006) The Internet and Adolescent Non-Medical Use of Prescription Drugs, URL (consulted June, 2009): http://www.law.harvard.edu/programs/criminal-justice/kinsnida.pdf.

INCB (2009a) Report of the International Narcotics Control Board for 2008. New York: United Nations.

Lenson, D. (1995) On Drugs. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press.

Markoff, J. (2005) What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry. London: Penguin Books.

Moore, D. (2007) ‘Erasing Pleasure from Public Discourse on Illicit Drugs: On the Creation and Reproduction of an Absence’ International Journal of Drug Policy 19(5): 353-358.

Reiman, L. (2008) ‘An Interview with Kevin Herbert’ MAPS Bulletin XVIII(1) 19-21.

Sirius, R. U. (2006) True Mutations. California: Pollinator Press.

Stetina, B. U., Jagsch, R., Schramel, C., Maman, T. L., and Kryspin-Exner, I. (2008) ‘Exploring Hidden Populations: Recreational Drug Users’ Cyberpsychology: Journal of Psychosocial Research on Cyberspace 2(1): article 1, URL (consulted June 2009):  http://cyberpsychology.eu/view.php?cisloclanku=2008060201&article=1.

Tupper, K. (2008) ‘The Globalization of Ayahuasca: Harm Reduction or Benefit Maximization?’ International Journal of Drug Policy 19: 297-303.

UNODC (2009) World Drug Report 2009. New York: United Nations.

Wilson, P. (1996) ‘Cybernetics and Entheogenics: From Cyberspace to Neurospace’, paper presented at ‘Next Five Minutes’ Conference, Amsterdam, January, URL (consulted June 2009): http:// www.hermetic.com/bey/pw-neurospc.html.12

A similar gene tweak might boost human brainpower too, but scientists warn that there is such a thing as being too smart for your own good.

For years scientifically smartened rats have skittered through movies and books such as Flowers for Algernon and The Secret of NIMH. But Hobbie-J is anything but fiction.

The lab rat can remember objects three times longer than her smartest kin, the study says. Thanks largely to this memory boost, she’s also much better at solving complex tasks, such as traveling through mazes using only partial clues to find rewards—a key method for measuring rat intelligence.

Intelligent Redesign

When Hobbie-J was still an embryo, a team led by Joe Z. Tsien at the Medical College of Georgia injected her with genetic material that caused the overexpression of the gene NR2B, which helps control the rate at which brain cells communicate.

The change allowed Hobbie’s brain cells to communicate for a whisker of a second longer than those of normal rats. This, the researchers believe, is why she’s much smarter than the average rat.

Dangerous Minds?

Years earlier Tsien and colleagues had given a similar brain boost to a mouse named Doogie, after TV whiz kid Doogie Howser, M.D.

Like the rats of NIMH—”NIMH” being shorthand for the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health—Hobbie-J and Doogie were given intelligence in hopes that the experiments would lead to cures for human brain disorders.

“NR2B functioned as a switch to improve learning and memory skills in Doogie, and it is showing the same results in Hobbie-J,” Tsien said via email.

“This suggests that using drugs to target this gene may help to resolve disorders like dementia and Alzheimer’s disease,” he added.

Neuroscientist Guosong Liu, who worked on the Doogie project, said: “The research is all very exciting, because it raises the possibility for us to potentially enhance memory in humans, and that is exactly where my lab is going.”

But there are two major challenges ahead, said Liu, of Tsinghua University in Beijing and the University of Texas, who was not involved in the new study.

First, because genetically modifying human embryos is not considered ethical, doctors would have to find a way to amplify NR2B expression using drugs instead, he said.

Second, mega-memory could be a major burden, even a nightmare, Liu said.

“There is a reason we forget,” he said. “We are supposed to leave our bad experiences behind, so they do not haunt us.”

For this reason, if a drug does become available for human use, Liu said he would only advocate its use in people suffering from significant mental problems such as Alzheimer’s disease.

“The danger of extending memory in healthy people could be considerable” Liu said.

Findings published October 19 in the online journal PLoS ONE.

Because of her work on emotions, Dr. Pert was featured in the film, What the Bleep Do We Know, and frequently speaks on the role of emotions in the mind-body. Pert’s work helped shift the paradigm from “emotions as neuroscience” to “emotions as biology.” In her new book, Everything You Need to Know to Feel Go(o)d, she’s taking the science of feeling a step further to present “emotions as physics.”

This article was written by Joshua Freedman from The Human Architect magazine. An audio interview accompanies this article at www.6seconds.org/pod/

Emotions, Pert explains, are not simply chemicals in the brain. They are electrochemical signals that affect the chemistry and electricity of every cell in the body. The body’s electrical state is modulated by emotions, changing the world within the body. In turn, Pert finds emotional states affect the world outside the body.

“I’ve always kind of known that the energy you emanate from within attracts the situations and people that you need,” Pert explains. “I’ve always known that but wasn’t quite walking my talk. You would have thought I could have figured this out by now. But it’s really only in the last few months since the book came out that I’ve been able to really live this.”

I asked Pert to explain how emotions have such a powerful effect. “We’re not just little hunks of meat. We’re vibrating like a tuning fork — we send out a vibration to other people. We broadcast and receive. Thus the emotions orchestrate the interactions among all our organs and systems to control that.”

As Pert explained in her earlier book, Molecules of Emotion, neurotransmitters called peptides carry emotional messages. “As our feelings change, this mixture of peptides travels throughout your body and your brain. And they’re literally changing the chemistry of every cell in your body.”

This is all mainstream science, but it doesn’t explain how one person’s emotions can affect another person and the larger world. “You’re still thinking about this as chemistry,” Pert chides. “Of course it is chemistry, but it’s also physics and vibrations.” Neurotransmitters are chemicals, but they carry an electrical charge. The electrical signals in our brains and bodies affect the way cells interact and function.

Electrochemical messages are passed between brain cells. Similar signals are passed to every cell in the body. Each is studded with “receptor sites,” a kind of “mail box” for these electrochemical messengers.

“You have receptors on every cell in your body. They actually are little mini electrical pumps.” When the receptor is activated by a matching “molecule of emotion” the receptor passes a charge into the cell changing the cell’s electrical frequency as well as its chemistry.

Pert says that just as our individual cells carry an electrical charge, so does the body as a whole. Like an electromagnet generating a field, Pert says that people have a positive charge above their heads and a negative charge below. “So we’re actually sending out various electrical signals – vibrations.”

“We’re all familiar with one kind of vibration: When we talk, we send a vibration through the air that someone else perceives as sound. As I explain in the book, we’re also sending out other kinds of vibrations. It’s a basic law of physics that when you are close to an energy source it has a greater effect and that diminishes as you move further away. But when you are far away there is no effect.”

“It’s not something you can say in 25 words or less. It is a whole new paradigm shift that basically leads you to realize you’re not alone. You are connected to everybody else. Your emotions are key. And you are leaving a wake, changing the world around you in a huge way.”

Pert’s earlier book, Molecules of Emotion, is part science, part autobiography as she tells the story of her process of discovery and learning. Everything You Need to Know to Feel Go(o)d follows a similar vein, with the stories of personal growth and scientific discovery woven together. Pert said that one theme of the book is her relationship with her son Brandon and the challenge of being a mother while driven to complete the work on the AIDS drug she invented called Peptide “T.”

Brandon happened to call during our interview with wonderful news about a new job. Pert offers this as an example of how an emotional change affects other people.

“In a way, Brandon was a kind of victim of my work, of me putting Peptide “T” ahead of him. He recently graduated from Cal Arts and this has been going on since he was in the first grade. I remember going into his second grade classroom to talk about how to cure AIDS.”

The molecules of emotion, a kind of neuropeptide, change the chemistry and electricity of every cell in the body and mind. Feelings literally alter the electrical frequencies generated by our bodies producing a nonverbal communication.

Perhaps all scientists who break new ground have to be driven, even obsessed with their work. For much of her career Pert struggled to balance the drive to discover with her genuine wish to be a good parent and partner, which led her to try and be controlling at home.

In the last few years working on the book and meeting wonderful coaches and people involved in personal growth, Pert says she’s turned a corner. “I learned to just be more in balance with the kids, all three of them. And I hope I’ve stopped being a typical overbearing Jewish mother.” As a result, Pert says, she and Brandon have been able to communicate in a way that enabled him to ask for help finding the new job.

Pert says her biggest change came from practicing the ideas she writes about. “I was waiting for the book to come out. In a way I thought that the whole world would change when the book came out. Everyone got to read it and they would get it. They would understand about Peptide “T” and they would change.”

Yet for years Pert has been espousing that real change comes from the inside out – that the goal isn’t convincing others, but fully living the idea. “I’m just completing that step. It’s still a journey and I need to keep growing, but this is a major leap. Maybe it’s just what happens with a book. I wrote about how I wanted to be, so it became like the future talking back to me. So the book came out and now, finally, I am the person I was pretending to be when I started writing.”

The book’s title, Everything You Need to Know to Feel Go(o)d, makes an implicit link between feeling good and connecting to God. Pert admits this is an unusual view for a hardcore scientist. “I’m mad at all these rabid atheist scientists who write books where they’re calling God a delusion. Any good scientist knows that it’s almost impossible to disprove anything. You can only prove something.” At the same time, Pert acknowledges that as a scientist, the metaphysical makes her uneasy.

“My ‘scientific persona’ is very strictly logical. So I do question the supernatural. It makes that part of me twinge. Yet in working on this AIDS vaccine, both worlds came together, my scientific world, and a world where amazing things happen. It’s just impossible to think that it is an accident that I was able to make this invention. It’s just totally amazing to me. I still can’t get over the miracle of it.”

At a neurological level, Pert continues, the feeling of being connected with God, of feeling blessed, is an important part of the brain. “Blessing and bliss come from the same root. We are hard wired to be in bliss. It’s normal and it’s natural. There is a straight evolutionary argument for this function — any creature that could not experience bliss would have just died and become extinct 200 million years ago.”

The “bliss response” is closely connected to Pert’s original work on the opiate receptor. Just as the receptors for other neuropeptides trigger a cellular response, opiate receptors pick up the presence of a neurotransmitter for euphoria. The naturally occurring “bliss chemicals” are called endorphins, and they are released in the brain and body in response to emotional states and to physical activities (including exercise and nursing).

Pert says the way endorphins work is evidence of bliss as an evolutionary necessity. “That’s why endorphins are such highly conserved molecules. It’s the same in simple one-celled creatures and in humans. In the new book I talk about the evolution of the opiate receptor and how it’s in our frontal cortex, the most advanced part of our brains.”

The prefrontal cortex is responsible for complex, evaluative decisions. This part of the brain is loaded with opiate receptors – so structurally, our most sophisticated reasoning is linked to bliss.

“It’s like we’re designed to make choices around pleasure. The very highest, most intelligent part of our brain is drenched in receptors to make us use pleasure as a criterion for our decisions. So it’s okay to feel good – God is good.”

While it’s clear that the “bliss receptors” are centered in the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that makes evaluative and complex decisions, there isn’t a clear reason.

“Scientists can never ask why. They can only ask ‘what’ and ‘how.’ But we know that the vibration in these receptors mediates, or leads, to the whole organism feeling bliss. And then I talk in the book about how that endorphin vibration is really the bliss of union and divine union.”

So when we create that kind of resonance internally, we are in line with that divine self. True bliss represents an optimal state of functioning. “This state is the natural function, but our society interferes. You don’t have to teach this to native peoples. Most of us have lost touch with that reality. Most of us seem to be locked in a grim struggle constantly rushing off to the next thing. So while it may be natural to be in bliss, we have to learn again to feel our natural state of bliss, to feel the spiritual nature of everything around us, every moment. This doesn’t have to do with church. It doesn’t have to do with whether you were bad or good. It’s about feeling good.”

Faced with an uphill struggle to finish the Peptide “T”-based vaccine, test it, and get it manufactured, Pert is committed to sticking with acting from that bliss of goodness. It is leading to great improvements in her family and personal life as well as her work with AIDS. Just after our interview Pert released an important two page précis at the request of the Global Aids Alliance outlining a path to cure AIDS, a breakthrough opportunity. Why now? “I’m into trust and surrender, believing that God is just not going to give me this enormous invention without giving me the wherewithal to carry it through.”

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Working independently and alone, the fruits of his labour are only now beginning to reach a wider audience through the recent publication of ‘Left in the Dark’, despite the major practical and philosophical implications initial reaction has been exceptionally favourable. Tony is now focused on bringing this modern translation of very ancient wisdom into mainstream culture in the hope that it may help provide a way out of the self-imposed madness we currently mistake as normality.

The following article was written exclusively for Brainwaving:

Consciousness and the Direction of Structure

The molecular origins of our species wide insanity
The fundamental causality of our self inflicted suffering

By Tony Wright (pdf version)

Solving the mystery of human evolution using Darwin’s basic theory required no more than a simple reinterpretation of existing data and the application of basic biological principles. The same approach simultaneously resolves several other major enigmas in disciplines rarely considered within the same context. By following in the footsteps of William of Ockham, the path of least resistance leads to a simple, coherent and elegant explanation for our unique physiological traits and sheds much needed light on the state of our mind.

Your ability to read and understand this article, your perception, state of mind and sense of self is directly related to the co-ordinated real time variations in structure and cascading flood of chemical and electrical chain reactions in your brain. That is not to say your consciousness is the structure, rather one facilitates the other. Forget for now the so-called hard problem, how does consciousness arise or emerge from a large glob of fatty stuff, or the esoteric realms of physics where the nature of matter and energy is indeterminate. Let us begin with a model based on the concept of structure, in this case the microstructure and molecular arrangement of our brain as an understanding at this level may shed light on some of the more esoteric mysteries.
A single brain cell is more complex by many orders than anything most of us have ever imagined, a comparison with the best of our technology would be laughable. Sub atomic, atomic and molecular engineering of extraordinary elegance, a whole dynamic ecosystem in constant yet precisely orchestrated flux.

These diagrams (borrowed from Wikipedia) provide some concept of the scale, complexity and the engineering marvel that we are when compared to the best of our technological innovation. However they fail to do justice to the dynamic reality and wonders of bio-molecular engineering, more on that later.

Take around 100 billion or so of these supremely advanced organic machines and organise them into a coherent interconnected and self-regulating whole and we have the human brain. It manages its biological support systems, processes and translates sensory input into something comprehensible and appears to give rise to or at least facilitate a sense of ‘I’. The correlation between structure and function is very good, the tiniest change in its structure can and usually does result in major changes in our sense of who or what we are. From congenital defects in the developmental process to minor accidents as small as a pinprick through to the use of appropriately termed mind altering molecules the result is always the same, micro change in structure, macro change in consciousness. So for this model to develop we will assume the brain acts like a lens for our sense of self or consciousness. The arrangement of the molecular architecture directly relates to its resolution or the quality of consciousness in the same way the design and structural integrity of a telescope lens and mirror relates to its ability to resolve light and the sharpness of the image it produces.
If we take the lens analogy as read it would be useful to look at its design and how it evolved and developed. Not quite the current paradigm re human evolution rather a modern translation of an earlier paradigm when somewhat circuitously the theory outlined below predicts the archaic traditions on which it is based would be more accurate than much of what is currently in vogue. So sit back and enjoy the ride and lets see if it correlates with the world you inhabit or whether it offers any practical insights as to where we go next….

Expansion

During the latter stages of its evolution the human brain was on a rapid and accelerating curve of expansion. This exceptionally rare phenomenon was the by-product of an increasingly symbiotic and co-evolutionary relationship with flowering plants that resulted in the emergence of a number of unusual traits. These traits were the direct consequence of a heavily and progressively modified transcription environment at all stages of growth and development. Rather than selective adaptation working on DNA mutation the primary mechanism was a form of genetic engineering or more accurately epigenetic engineering. The increasing dependence on a bio-chemically complex diet, very rich in transcription altering, endocrine disrupting and neuro-active flavonoids drove the expansion of the brain. As the brain enlarged and its fuel requirement disproportionally increased the expansion cocktail was liberally laced with simple sugars. In order meet its appetite for fuel it was compelled to ingest an ever-greater amount of the chemicals that were responsible for its growth in the first place.

New structure

The tumour like proliferation of the new brain, the neo-cortex, increasingly freed from the constraints of specialised differentiation and survival related function took a quantum leap in its development. It had acquired highly advanced cognitive abilities and begun acting as an executive layer with built in automatic enhancing capabilities for earlier more primitive neural structures. It had also reached sufficient complexity to experience self recognition, not the self we ‘think’ we are today, rather a self we would now describe as something wholly other. In addition and related to its self recognition capacity its experience of itself could be described in terms of rapture, a perpetual sense of profound wonder and intense sensual joy.

Contraction

Then around two hundred thousand years ago the rapid expansion of our brain abruptly stalled and turned to contraction. The huge reduction and near loss of the wet tropical forests during the driest period of the last ice age pulled the plug on the fomenting cauldron of chemicals that had been responsible for re-designing, re-organising and re-engineering the evolutionary development of our brain. When the last of our lineage were ejected from the forests womb like protection that had hot housed our evolution, the neural system it had nurtured was exposed to the kinds of hostile ecological and biochemical environments it had not encountered for millions of years. The physiological traits that had emerged and were dependent on a heavily modified transcription environment inevitably began to regress.

Catastrophic failure

Since that time our brain has suffered a progressive and catastrophic failure in its development, massive loss of its structural integrity at a molecular and cellular level and near total loss of the most complex biochemical cocktail in evolutionary history essential for its optimum function. Archaic genetic specialisation asymmetrically encoded between the cerebral hemispheres resulted in the predisposition of one side of the brain to fail more quickly than the other. Paradoxically as the developmental retardation progressed the more retarded side assumed control, its greater loss of function and the associated psychology of fear provided the drive to dominate. Finally as sex steroids such as testosterone are fundamental in brain development and the evolutionary effect of flavonoids significantly modified their activity the severity of the symptoms is gender related with males exhibiting a more extreme spectrum of symptoms than females.

Ancient treatment

Our ancestors being significantly more functional than we are, were acutely aware of their predicament. They developed a number of ingenious practices and techniques in an attempt to treat the emerging symptoms of their neurodegenerative disease and slow its rate of progression. Through the insight of their minds alone they achieved a high science of consciousness now largely forgotten and dismissed as the mythological ramblings of our ‘primitive’ forebears. They were faced with a condition so insidious it is difficult for us to imagine, symptoms include the inability to accurately perceive reality and a progressive blindness to the nature and severity of the condition itself. Ultimately their best efforts failed, though the relics of their treatments can offer a powerful insight into the specific nature of the condition when considered within a neurological framework.

The lights went out, there is no one home

From the most advanced consciousness system this side of the Milky Way the human brain has been reduced to a zombie like state, unable to recognise itself, paralysed by a profound sense of paranoia, plagued by deeply rooted psychosis and driven to control anything beyond its rapidly diminishing experiential capacity. In the most recent and severe period of degeneration, what we now refer to as recorded history (a necessary response to the failure of our eidetic memory) it has created a world in its own demented image. The stratification of society along neurodegenerative lines resulted in the emergence of hierarchical and patriarchal structures that reward delusion and dysfunction with power and control. This has further accelerated our plunge into a culture dominated by fear where the least functional members of society inevitably end up creating a world that reflects their underlying dysfunction. Ironically labelled civilisation, built on foundations of deep psychosis, devoid of reality, empathy or any sense of beingness, a living hell where only the deluded sense of being in control at any cost provides temporary respite from the self inflicted nightmare.

Examples of catastrophic structural failure
Design and development, real time function, build quality

1 Congenital development and design specification: The earliest phase of neural development is the most crucial, the highly sensitive neural cells are at their most responsive and plastic. The foundations for lifelong neural structure, organisation and function are laid down during specific developmental windows in the first few weeks and months of our life. While our brain maintains much more plasticity much later in life than previously thought the way the brain develops during these key windows is a very significant factor in permanently shaping its functional parameters.
The design for this period of development is locked in the DNA blueprint and like all blueprints it needs to be read. A major part of this mechanism is hormonal, the translation of the genetic blueprint into molecular and neurological structure depends on the complex interaction of many hormonally active chemicals. These chemicals play a direct role in dictating the timing and duration of the developmental windows as well as what happens at a structural level within each window.
Recent research has identified a number of chemicals that are known to interfere with this natural process. Generally termed endocrine disrupters they can alter the period of developmental windows and what happens during those windows by interfering with the activity of hormones integral to or by acting directly on the transcription process.
Chemicals found in plastics or pesticide residues have been identified as potentially dangerous endocrine disrupters and recommendations to limit their effect particularly during early development have been implemented.
Interestingly enough flavonoids have also been designated endocrine disrupters and the potentially harmful effects of flavonoids in Soya infant formula have been the subject of serious investigation.
So while the design for our brain and all aspects of our physical form are encoded in the genetic blueprint the final structure is dictated by the precise cocktail of chemicals in the developmental environment.
A powerful mix of endocrine disrupting flavonoids was known to be an integral part of our transcription environment for many millions of years. They influenced the molecular and cellular structure of our brain so inevitably altered our state of mind. Those designer drugs are now almost entirely absent during our neural development, the consequence cannot be anything other than the congenital malformation of our brain.

2 Microtubules: Generally considered part of the cells skeleton these supremely delicate and complex structures are increasingly associated with cognition and intelligence particularly in neural cells where they are especially abundant, some theories even suggest a central role in higher consciousness. Either way like most biological structures, their precise design and molecular arrangement, is dictated by DNA. However they display a very high level of plasticity in response to their biochemical environment, an excellent example of real time hormonal and chemical effect on the transcription, configuration and functionality of structures directly related to cognition and consciousness. For example a minor change in the cellular concentration of the neuro-active hormone melatonin will radically alter the structure of these extraordinary intelligence-related machines. Is it any wonder that the near total loss of the complex and hormonally active chemicals present and essential during the evolution and development of our brain has left the most delicate and hormonally sensitive parts of our consciousness system twisted and distorted literally out of all recognition.

3 Super structure: A major structural and functional component in the central, peripheral and enteric nervous system as well as cell membranes are fatty acids. A class of highly volatile, incredibly delicate, long-chain molecules that are extremely susceptible to oxidative degeneration. In nature they are always very heavily protected, wrapped up and immersed in a cocktail of powerful anti-oxidants which is very handy and no accident. Retaining them in their protective matrix at a molecular level until they are assimilated and incorporated into the neural and cellular structures is absolutely essential to prevent damage. The expansion of the human brain to its colossal proportions presents a major engineering headache in simply protecting such a volatile mass from rapid degeneration. To meet this requirement biological pumps maintain a concentration of vitamin C in the brain to a level 100 times higher than that of blood. In addition the pineal gland pumps out the neuro-active hormone melatonin, as an antioxidant it is around 50 times more effective than vitamin C. As yet an unrecognised part of the evolutionary equation are the powerful antioxidant activities of flavonoids. Increasingly studied in isolation or as part of our typical dietary intake and slowly creeping into nutritional recommendations or offered as supplements they also have more protective action than vitamin C. Here is the paradox, flavonoids were known to be present along with the more familiar protective vitamins as part of our evolutionary diet at levels at least 20 times higher than what is currently considered normal. A perpetual flood of 1000s of anti-oxidant compounds present 24/7 from conception to death. This constant immersion in a highly protective chemical soup was absolutely essential to prevent the most complex feat of molecular engineering we know, constructed from some of the most delicate and highly volatile molecules we know, from structural and functional degeneration. As a bonus some groups of flavonoids also elevate the production of melatonin by stimulating the activity of the pineal. Check it out for yourself, our nearest living relatives the forest dwelling apes currently, today and everyday flood their system with at least 20 times more of these antioxidants than we do and we have a proportionally much larger and therefore more vulnerable brain. Now we have lost virtually all that protection, at least a 95% deficiency, in fact its more like 98% and it’s the reason why it takes a while for the implications to sink in… In addition we are chronically deficient in fatty acids the raw construction materials for the neural systems super structure, finally we tend to separate them from their natural protection, then heat them to extremely high temperatures in oxygen before incorporating them into the structural integrity of our brain.
Now pay attention, you might have to read this again and again and again to begin to understand the catastrophic failure at a molecular level this represents. Not only is it profoundly shocking, it certainly should be, your ability to assimilate this information is seriously compromised by severe neurodegenerative dementia, whatever your age. What we currently define as dementia and Alzheimer’s are simply the inevitable and extreme ends of a spectrum of life long neuro-degeneration due to the near total loss of functional and protective biochemistry.

How would our ‘advanced’ engineering fare in similar circumstances?

Applying these principles to modern feats of engineering can provide a basic understanding regarding the impact of minute changes in basic specification. For example instructing the research and development team at a major engineering corporation to add 1% to the blueprints design dimensions, to reduce the quality of the construction materials by 5% and to vary the fuel quality or power supply by 10%.
If you applied these specification changes to some of the most advanced technology the human mind has created then you begin to get the idea. Take any of the following examples of ‘advanced’ engineering, Concorde, The Northrop Grumman B-2 Stealth bomber, The Space Shuttle, The large Hadron Collider or The Hubble Telescope. Such a change in specifications would likely render their construction impossible, even if construction were possible the idea that they would work would be reasonable grounds for being institutionalised. Apply the same parameters to more basic technology such as your car or personal computer and the outcome would be the same. You might just get away with building or at least shoehorning your car together, it might even start but would you drive it if you knew about the changes in specification?
Everyday life and death decisions are made on behalf of millions of people based on the untested presumption that the most complex piece of engineering we know is even remotely functional. You might think that the basic scientific protocol of never presuming your primary instrument of investigation is working would be applied to the one piece of equipment we use for absolutely everything. Perhaps its flawless performance throughout recent history has provided us with the confidence to ignore what would be considered ’bad science’ in any other context.

The accepted evidence for the structural basis of our
insanity is staring us in the face, as might be expected
we fail to recognise its profound significance.

1
Our own sex hormones retard the development
of the dominant side of our brain!

+

1
Our flavonoid rich ancestral diet inhibited the action
of our sex hormones during the evolution of our brain!

=

The complexities of the human brain are so far beyond our current thinking we really have no idea how it works. What we do know is that our own sex steroids such as testosterone play a major role in all aspects of neural development. In addition through testosterone’s conversion to estradiol via the enzyme aromatase it is also responsible for the masculinization of the brain. Strangely enough this ‘normal’ process is known to retard its development in the uterus by modifying the way DNA is transcribed, in turn changing its molecular and cellular structure with testosterone referred to as a neuro-toxin. Cambridge based researcher Professor Simon Baron-Cohen, building on findings dating back 20 years or more has concluded that the ‘normal’ male brain is simply at one end of the spectrum of ASD due to the effects of hormonal retardation. Of course the reference point for normal is based on the presumption that the activity of our sex hormones is normal.

We also know that for the greater part of its evolution the human brain was immersed in a chemical cocktail that inhibited and diluted the action of our own sex steroids as well as the action of the enzyme aromatase. It is inevitable that the near complete loss of these inhibitory effects has radically altered the development of our brain and therefore our state of mind. The very acceptance of ‘retardation’ as normal within the context of a recently expanding brain that is now shrinking would be cause for great concern if it were a modern hi tech engineering project. These two pieces of the evolutionary jigsaw alone should set alarm bells ringing as they are well evidenced and accepted, that they don’t is a direct consequence of the hormonal retardation on our minds ability to see context. That we now build the most complex product of biological evolution from materials that have never been part of that 3 billion year process might be another. The very simple equation above should be enough on its own to initiate the kind of response when we are faced with a massive natural disaster, what is your response?

Discover how astounding you really are:
A short exercise to re-calibrate your perception

Before pondering the pictorial summary below, watch this excerpt from a recent animation that provides just a hint of the unimaginable dynamic complexity that you are (full-length version with narrative here). Do not buy into your perceptually limited mind telling you ‘this is just what happens in my cells’. Although near the cutting edge of biological animation and still a relatively crude representation of the molecular biology that you are in action, right now, it does begin to reveal what extraordinarily complex beings we are, divine poetry in molecular motion.
Watch it a couple of times and allow yourself to imagine that this is what you are, then multiply the molecular and cellular complexity and transpose that to the structures that play a major role in facilitating our sense of self, our neural cells, when watching this very simple animation.
Now imagine the aqueous environment in which all this highly sensitive and interactive molecular machinery depends on being completely flooded with extremely reactive biochemistry. The most complex biochemical cocktail in evolutionary history also produced by equally complex molecular machines in one almighty orchestrated molecular dance.
Finally once you to begin to recognise how extraordinarily complex your evolutionary process is then take a look at the simple pictorial summary below and try to see way beyond the ‘trees’ the ‘humans’ the ‘fruit’ etc and imagine a single interconnected molecular organism.
While your brain was evolving it was effectively an extension of the most complex ecosystem we know. Scale that into molecular ecology that involved the plant chemistry reading our DNA and directly modifying the evolution and development of our mind and you begin to realise that we were not and could not be fully functioning once we were chemically separated.

(pdf version of pictorial summary)

Any Change in Neural Structure or Neurochemistry Alters Consciousness

The Expansion & Degeneration of Human Consciousness, Tony Wright, ECR, Consciousness in
Science & Philosophy, Uni. Of E. Illinois, Nov. 1998.

Conclusion

Minutely modifying the molecular structure or chemical cocktail of our brain radically changes our sense of self, our psychology and behaviour, how we perceive and react to each other and the world we create and inhabit. We have recently had our brain structure and neurochemistry massively and detrimentally altered so inevitably our state of mind and sense of self has also massively and detrimentally altered. An accurate account of the catastrophic failure of our consciousness system is preserved in ancient mythology, a diagnosis of a progressive neurodegenerative condition that results in severe and all encompassing psychotic delusion. Evidence from several modern scientific disciplines supports the ancient accounts and provides compelling evidence of species wide hormonal ‘retardation’ of our brain and associated dysfunction.

Expecting to address the serious perceptual and psychological deficiencies that have resulted without addressing the underlying structural damage and neuro-chemical deficiencies is utterly futile and symptomatic of the condition itself. All that is required to restore our sanity is to repair the precise molecular structure and restore the neuro-chemical regime that is absolutely essential to perceive reality. This is already well within our reach and with a common sense approach likely to yield spectacular results within a generation. While we may be less aware than our ancestors we have the potential to mobilise the industrial scale technologies and bio-sciences we have invented and currently deploy to wage war on our selves or provide distraction with endless plastic shit. It might be fitting to turn these machines of destruction built on the broken backs and broken spirits of millions of lives and lost generations to creating something other than quiet desperation for a tiny minority and abject misery for everyone else. Even a partial fix is likely to yield a profound improvement in our mental health and bring with it the cognitive capacity to effect a complete restoration. Prioritising anything other than the immediate structural repair of our mind simply highlights how far we have fallen into the abyss of our own insanity.

It may all seem just a little challenging yet a solution would take a fraction of the colossal effort and resource wasted every single day in maintaining the unsustainable and destructive systems of control and the mindless consumer societies we all inadvertently support. Of course it would simply not be tenable to propose such a catastrophic failure if there were not an overwhelming body of evidence to support it. Aside from ‘hard’ evidence that would have to exist in the biological sciences it would require no more than reading a newspaper on any day you like to see the scale and depth of perceptual and psychological symptoms or if you are really brave just look in the mirror.

For introductory reference material click here .

This modern translation of the ancient science of the mind was brought to you courtesy of a partially retrofitted and rebuilt neural system, repeated periods of cerebral dominance reversal and the treatment of chronic and clinical deficiency in neurochemistry via frequent self medication and supplementation with neuro-chemical analogues.

For more information visit leftinthedark.org.uk
and beyond-belief.org.uk or read
‘Left in the Dark’ and find explanations
to long standing enigmas such as
‘why very big brains really do grow on trees’

Read the foreword by Dr Dennis McKenna pdf

Initial reaction to the epigenetic theory
of human evolution and its impact on
the development of our brain as proposed
by Tony Wright and presented in
‘Left in the Dark’

“A truly amazing book”
Prof. Robert Greenway (SSU)

“A revolutionary view of human evolution”
Dr Michael Winkleman (ASU)

“A stunningly innovative and challenging theory”
Dr Dennis McKenna (Heffter Research Institute)

“It adds a whole new dimension to
the task of defining ‘normal’ behaviour.”
Tim Smit (The Eden Project)

“It is an enlightening read that is timely”
Peter Bennett (Founder ReHealth)

“It will be, it must be, taken very seriously
in any discussion of human origins.”
Prof. Colin Groves (ANU)

“This courageous book deserves
careful critical attention.”
Prof. Ashok Gangadean (Global Dialogue Institute)

“Left in the Dark offers a provocative
and original answer to the most
important question of our time.”
Linda Buzzell-Saltzman (IAE)

“This is a startling book that makes us rethink the most fundamental issues of religion, psychology, and philosophy.”
Richard Heinberg (Post Carbon Institute)

Listen to this interview with Tony
on Radio New Zealand National

Watch this interview with
Tony on Conscious TV:

Join the forum discussion on this post - (1) Posts

“Little things can have a surprising impact. Take global warming. Increasingly, we’re being asked to think about our “carbon footprint,” the amount of greenhouse gas produced to do the things we do: emissions from our cars, emissions from the power plants used to generate electricity for our homes, emissions from our air travel, and so on. These kinds of activities all have the benefit of looking dirty, so it’s very easy to imagine that there’s a bunch of carbon dioxide coming out along with the soot and smoke from engines and furnaces. But the big, obvious sources of greenhouse gases aren’t the only ones out there; in fact, nearly everything we do has a carbon footprint. Take, for example, the humble cheeseburger.

Methane (CH4) doesn’t last as long as CO2 in the atmosphere, but it makes up for it by having a much stronger greenhouse impact. One unit of methane is roughly equivalent to 23 units of carbon dioxide, when it comes to trapping heat.

If you’re like me, you occasionally wonder what the bigger story is behind everyday activities and products. A couple of years ago, I wondered aloud (in my blog, Open the Future) what the carbon footprint of the more prosaic parts of our lives might be — and I used, as an example, a cheeseburger. Now, I’m no enemy of the cheeseburger; I picked the cheeseburger as my example because I like them, and I wanted to know its impact. We’re not yet at the point where it’s easy to go Google up the carbon footprint of whatever you want, and nobody else had investigated the impact of something like a burger. I knew what my task would be.

After a bit of research, I found numbers laying out the energy demands of producing burgers — not just the energy for cooking, but everything, from raising the cattle to processing the meat to growing the wheat, lettuce and tomatoes. It’s not hard to find information showing how much carbon dioxide gets emitted by various energy sources, so converting that data on energy demands to data on carbon footprints just took a bit of simple math. Adding it all up, I got a number adding up to about 4-5 pounds of carbon dioxide emitted in the lifecycle of each cheeseburger — not a huge amount, but not insignificant.

But it occurred to me that carbon dioxide isn’t the only greenhouse gas out there. There are quite a few others, but they’re either too minimal or cycle out of the atmosphere too quickly to make a big difference. All but one, that is: methane. Methane (CH4) doesn’t last as long as CO2 in the atmosphere, but it makes up for it by having a much stronger greenhouse impact. One unit of methane is roughly equivalent to 23 units of carbon dioxide, when it comes to trapping heat. Fortunately, there’s not a huge amount of methane in the atmosphere; unfortunately, one of the bigger sources of methane is cattle.

Cattle gas, to be precise, or what the US Environmental Protection Agency politely calls “enteric fermentation.”

When you run the numbers, that little footprint of around ten pounds per burger becomes almost 200 MILLION metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent, every year, from the lowly cheeseburger.

The beef industry is big business, and there are millions of steers out there, waiting to be turned into cheeseburgers. It turns out that when you take into account the methane produced by gassy cows over the several years before they get turned into burgers (and divide that methane by the number of burgers you get per cow), the carbon impact of each burger more than doubles: more than ten pounds of carbon dioxide equivalent per burger. (Because CO2 is the most common and important greenhouse gas, environmental scientists like to convert the impact of other greenhouse gases to “CO2 equivalent” levels — in this case, multiplying the amount of methane emitted by the cattle by 23, to get the CO2 equivalence.)

Okay, ten pounds or more per burger, that’s something, right? Well, maybe. Ten pounds isn’t a whole lot in comparison to the average annual carbon footprint of an American, which is about 20 tons. If you only eat one or two burgers a month, you’re not adding much to your footprint.

It turns out, though, that if you’re only eating one or two burgers a month, you’re way below average. According to a diverse array of sources, including the sober UK news journal The Economist, Americans eat on average around 3 burgers per week. Now, that’s the average — meaning, all of the burgers consumed in the US divided by all of the people. Some of us eat less than that, but some of us eat even more. When you run the numbers, that little footprint of around ten pounds per burger becomes almost 200 MILLION metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent, every year, from the lowly cheeseburger. To put that in perspective, the total annual tailpipe emissions from all of the sport utility vehicles on the road is about 150 million metric tons.

Think about that for a minute: the lifecycle impact of burgers, all added together, is greater than the tailpipe impact of SUVs, all added together.

So, does this mean that we all need to stop eating cheeseburgers?
Well, cutting down wouldn’t hurt, for health reasons alone. But the point of this little exercise isn’t to make you feel guilty — it’s to trigger a bit of a realization. Everything we do has an impact — including the things we eat — and sometimes, that impact is far greater than we might think. But if we don’t have good information, we can’t make good choices.

It’s likely that, as we become a more carbon-conscious society, we’ll get a few more surprises like this. Not all of them will make us change our behavior. What they will do, though, is give us a better recognition of the implications of our actions. And that will let us take a little bit more responsibility for what we do.

And ultimately, it’s that link — from knowledge to recognition to responsibility — that’s how we’re going to save the world.”