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Official development blog for the PARANOIA roleplaying game. No description is available at your security clearance. The Computer is your friend.

Saturday, September 05, 2009

PARANOIA in the real world: Chemical neurowarfare 

Ryan Sager of True/Slant's Neuroworld blog summarizes a Nature editorial about weaponized drugs that decrease aggression and increase trust:
Imagine a future where the Iranian regime didn’t need to spend weeks in the streets beating, killing, and jailing protesters to put down the reform movement. Imagine in this future that the beatings would be replaced with something gentler, but ultimately more sinister: non-lethal, weaponized drugs designed to decrease aggression and increase trust.
From the unsigned Nature opinion piece, "Biologists napping while work militarized":
In my opinion, all use of novel non-lethal agents such as fentanyl for law enforcement should be prohibited, or at least heavily restricted. If, instead, we sit on our hands we must accept that new incapacitating agents are just the beginning. We will be, as the British Medical Association concluded in its 2007 study, The Use of Drugs as Weapons, “knowingly moving towards the top of a ’slippery slope’ at the bottom of which is the spectre of ‘militarization’ of biology” including “intentional manipulation of peoples’ emotions, memories, immune responses or even fertility”.
Posted by: Allen Varney / 10:19 AM

Comments:
Reminds me of Lem's Futurological Congress, where law and social control was aerosol.
# posted by Blogger Ragnorakk : September 05, 2009 5:51 PM
 
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