The Guilt-free Soldier (The Devil Pill)

[Dover]

Ran across this story I'd saved and wondered if these pills are now in use.
Seems to me that all the med-scientists need to do is clone Republicans to get the same effect.


The Guilt-Free Soldier
by Erik Baard
January 22 - 28, 2003

A soldier faces a drab cluster of buildings off a broken highway, where the enemy is encamped among civilians. Local farmers and their families are routinely forced to fill the basements and shacks, acting as human shields for weapons that threaten the lives of other civilians, the soldier's comrades, and his cause in this messy 21st-century war.

There will be no surgical strikes tonight. The artillery this soldier can unleash with a single command to his mobile computer will bring flames and screaming, deafening blasts and unforgettably acrid air. The ground around him will be littered with the broken bodies of women and children, and he'll have to walk right through. Every value he learned as a boy tells him to back down, to return to base and find another way of routing the enemy. Or, he reasons, he could complete the task and rush back to start popping pills that can, over the course of two weeks, immunize him against a lifetime of crushing remorse. He draws one last clean breath and fires.

Pills like those won't be available to the troops heading off for possible war with Iraq, but the prospect of a soul absolved by meds remains very real. Feelings of guilt and regret travel neural pathways in a manner that mimics the tracings of ingrained fear, so a prophylactic against one could guard against the other. Several current lines of research, some federally funded, show strong promise for this.

At the University of California at Irvine, experiments in rats indicate that the brain's hormonal reactions to fear can be inhibited, softening the formation of memories and the emotions they evoke. At New York University, researchers are mastering the means of short-circuiting the very wiring of primal fear. At Columbia University one Nobel laureate's lab has discovered the gene behind a fear-inhibiting protein, uncovering a vision of "fight or flight" at the molecular level. In Puerto Rico, at the Ponce School of Medicine, scientists are discovering ways to help the brain unlearn fear and inhibitions by stimulating it with magnets. And at Harvard University, survivors of car accidents are already swallowing propranolol pills, in the first human trials of that common cardiac drug as a means to nip the effects of trauma in the bud...cont'd

http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0304/baard.php

Also a very interesting site: http://www.defensetech.org/archives/2003_01.html

[ElsewheresDaughter]

1. i read somewhere that some of our GIs in Iraq are given Ecstasy & Amphetam

to create "super killer soldiers" ..i don't know if this is true or not but i can believe it since i do know that US Air Force has admitted to giving pilots "go go pills" (amphetamine)

[htuttle]

2. I saw an episode of Star Trek TNG about something like this

It ended very poorly. Bad Idea.

[MatrixEscape]

3. Does anyone ever

feel like they are actually just having a bad dream as they read more and more stuff along these lines?

I have to pinch myself as things get so Brave New World so quickly that it's giving me rug burns as it passes by.

And I am by no means a Luddite. The rate of acceleration is so high that it is rather tiring as well as suggestive.

[donsu]

4. the criminal bushgang has plans to examine every american's

mental health - young to old, and to apply the proper medicine for each person.

no joke

[Blue_Tires]

5. more Vietnam redux

Vietnam was a dream training ground for thousands of CIA/Army Intel 'experiments'in interrogation, covert warfare, and ramping up grunt aggression, and i see the tradition continues

[undergroundpanther]

6. I wrote an article about this last year

http://www.unknownnews.net/031208a-up.html



The elites apparently want a society of servants without a conscience, obeying orders, without fear or self-interest and with no side effects that are costly impediments like post-traumatic stress disorder (PSTD) or remorse.

Is it because we have a conscience that this life hurts us so?

Or is it because something inside us, something just out of our perception does not want us to know who we are...

[giant_robot]

7. Wouldn't it make more sense to develop a pill that

GIVES you a conscience, then hand them out to everyone inside the beltway?

[proud patriot]

8. I would think since guilt and fear travel the same pathway

that this pill would actually harm troops abilty
to stay alive . Fear can be a good thing in battle.
I'm not talking about paralyzing fear , but the kind
of fear that makes you keep your head down when bullets
are flying .