Drug enforcement agencies around the world are battling the production, transport, and sales of drugs from the opium poppy, drugs from cannabis, drugs from coca, and synthetic drugs such as methamphetamine and designer drugs like ecstasy, MDMA.
The genetic code for making opium, cocaine, and tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) resides within the individual plant, and is recreated every time the plants reproduce and make seeds.
It is possible to make these drugs in the lab, but it is too much trouble and far too expensive, when compared with letting the plants make the drug naturally. So geneticists have discovered how to take these genes and place them in bacteria, farm animals, or other plants. This allows for covert drug synthesis across a much wider range of plants, climates, altitudes, etc.
Eventually, production of synthetic drugs such as ecstasy and methamphetamine are likely to be automated -- either by coding into genes, or by nano-sizing the synthesis in a tiny assembly line of nano-enzymes.
Just as coca, cannabis, and the poppy are able to take sunlight, water, and soil nutrients, turning them into mind altering alkaloids, so will future bio- or nano- drug factories take cheap feedstocks and energy inputs and convert them into high priced, illegal drugs -- covertly.
A nano- drug factory might fit inside a lady's handbag or a student backpack, for example, operating off batteries. A bio- drug factory might actually be implanted inside the drug user himself, producing the illicit drug only in response to a particular epigenetic command signal, such as coded laser light pulses in specific frequencies.
The problem for future drug enforcement agencies is much bigger than keeping people from getting high, however. Future drugs will make people smarter, faster, stronger, and more creative. These drugs will make people "more" than they are in some ways, and once people experience themselves as "more," they will typically not want to go back.
Combining the greater power of future drugs to facilitate a person's goals, with the increasingly covert nature of producing future drugs, will make drug enforcement exponentially more difficult -- approaching impossible.
Global societies are going through many changes. Modern civilisation (western nations plus East Asia), in particular, is experiencing an existential crisis, with unsustainably low birth rates and widespread loss of direction and purpose -- beyond desiring a life of ease -- among the young.
Such societies are vulnerable to mind-altering experiences, including drugs and cults. If these societies wish to see the dawn of the 21st century, they had best take inventory and make some hard choices.
The twin destructors of massive debt and demographic decline are only the prelude to coming attractions, for those who fail to wake up.
In dystopian sci-fi like Deus Ex, the Luddites are always psuedo-Christian inquisitors.
ReplyDeleteThere are some interesting Christian mini-cults sprinkled throughout the US, but they don't have the large draw that the Gaian psuedo-religions do. Nor the political backing or general acceptance by mainstream culture. And it's those psuedo-anarchist liberals that are killing scientists now.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21528720.200-terror-tactics-science-in-the-anarchists-cross-hairs.html?DCMP=OTC-rss&nsref=online-news
If anyone is likely to block augmentations, it's those guys. I don't think they will want to change because they don't want to admit that anything is wrong. Any inequality is social based, it's their religion. It must be the corporations causing the problems. It must be whoever has power.
Unless someone clever comes along and can market the technology properly like Steve Jobs did. He had a way of hiding the technology, giving it a human feel, that made it popular even among the 99% crowd.
The hippy subset is driven more by escapism than the desire to improve, they are usually pretty far behind the curve on these sorts of things.
Regardless, the US government operates about as far behind as an organization can be and still function.
There is a strong anti-technology undercurrent in the new age movement. Most of the leaders, the ones who can dilute there message to attract enough easily mislead groupies, have a two-faced nature. They talk about love and unity while dividing and lying. But for some reason, they see technology as ultimately being more dangerous than simply staying put at our current level. Somewhere they drew an invisible line between psychic concepts and technological ones, between inner and outer journeys.
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately, too many people lump all religion together into a generalized cult best described as “Footloosean”. But, Christ himself said He came to set people free. And, I personally judge religions based upon a Golden Rule compliance scale. Christianity, Judeism, Buddhism and Hinduism are all compliant at heart if not in practice.
ReplyDeleteIt may be time to take this scale to all cultural 'movements' and see how compliant they are with a do unto others philosophy. I submit that Anarchists, Fascists and Communists fail in that regard.