Slashdot Mirror
Vaccinated Against Vices?
Smoke Me A Kipper writes "The Independent is reporting that the latest UK government sponsored quango, charged with looking at the problems of drug abuse, is to recommend a national anti-addiction 'vaccination' scheme. Apparantly, trials are already in progress. No details as to whether it would be mandatory. Personally I find such an idea utterly shocking - what happens when you find yourself injured in later life and morphine based painkillers no longer work? I wouldn't be surprised to find existing phamaceutical companies excited by this, having to replace cheap drugs with something new, which they can patent and control."
While this would be a good thing to give to, say, former drug addicts and such, I don't see why children need to be involved. Besides, whose to say it won't have harmful side effects that aren't seen until later?
If people want to "vaccinate" themselves from drugs that they deem harmful, that's fine by me. However, even though I choose to abstain from drug use, I'd definitely not want to vaccinate myself. By vaccinating yourself, you're basically saything that your will is too weak to be able to avoid these 'vices'. And that might be fine for some people. As long as parents don't start vaccinating their children before they kids can think for themselves, and schools public schools don't require them alongside the other vaccines.
Free iPod!eBay o
The Two Commandments for the Molecular Age
Thou shalt not alter the consciousness of thy fellow men.
Thou shalt not prevent thy fellow man from altering his or her own consciousness.
...it modulates ion channels which you would have to somehow remove...and then you would have serious issues. I haven't RTFA'd though to see exactly what they're proposing
Devon
Drug abuse is a sign of other social problems, it is a symptom of greater problems. Simply attacking the symptom wont help anything. Also this vaccine would take away any last shreds of personal responsibility in the matter, entrusting big brother to look after you and know which receptors in your brain shouldn't be binded to.
Instead of taking care of making heroin or morphine non-addictive, they should start with nicotine and alcohol, both of which are a lot cheaper than any other drugs and cause ravages in the population.
So while they think about far-fetched solutions to hard drug abuses, *I* have to keep struggling not to light a cigarette again, despite the tremendous cravings I have regularly, even afters years of quitting, so I don't have to go back see my lung specialist again.
But I guess fighting alcohol and tobacco abuse would remove an easy source of income for the government eh? Cheap lying bastards, I can't think a a worse bunch of hypocrits than those who profit from the sale of alcohol and tobacco and pretend to fight the addiction too...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
What the fuck, vaccinating against drugs? What next, mandatory chemical castration? This is ridiculous. I'm already fed up enough with the endless war on drugs and now this. When will governments get it into their heads that prohibition doesn't stop anything. If you want to go do drugs fine. If you want to tell me not to do drugs, fine. Then to alter someone elses free will accordingly so? What if suddenly I told one of these anti-drug fanatics that something they enjoy doing is now illegal, no matter how "innocent" it seems. I don't think these people really care about the effects their actions have in the long run, as long as they have the delusion that they're in a safer place or what not.
You're all going to die, and so are your kids. Get over it.
If you don't want someone to copy something, don't give it to anyone.
That's like saying that somebody who knows he can't die won't do normally life-threatening things. People sometimes throw themselves off buildings because they were told by higher powers that they would fly (usually drug induced dreams, or the likes). I say that they just create a "cure" for the addictions, something that will get rid of them. You can't undo the damage, but, if people realize the mistake they've made, at least they'd have the ability to stop.
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
-Arthur C. Clarke
Yes. Every form of bad human behavior becomes a "disease". The first thing the authorities do is coddle the "victim" of said disease until the "disease" turns into a plague. After that, they come up with treatments that will permanently change
his behavior.
This is the mindset of the modern left, those legions of enlightened "social democrats" that rule Europe and struggle to hang onto power in North America. Their welfare state took away personal responsibility and was eventually found wanting. In fact, it is headed for a collapse, and the entrenched political mainstream will do anything to prop it up a little while longer. Their next big project is to take away people's freedom. This includes privacy, speech, religion, anonymity, association, everything. It didn't start just two days ago, but it began in earnest just a few years ago. Get ready.
It's the usual quick-fix mentality. Instead of asking what problems cause people to turn to drugs (mental disease, poverty, social problems, etc.), a syringe is supposed to fix it. It's the same quick fix mentality that dominates so much of politics, and it's not going to work.
Instead of some people sedating their problems and imposing health care costs on everybody else, which is bad enough, you are going to have the same people doing something else self-destructive and probably even more destructive to others.
And for that quick fix, you risk several deaths a year from medical mistakes (wrong injection, infection, etc.) during vaccination, as well as unknown long-term consequences and the possibility that important future drugs won't work.
Worse case scenario, the immune system eaither mis-learns or mutates its defences, and starts attacking the bodys own chemicals. The body produces small ammounts of morphine to regulate pain. Heroin addicts take so much that the body attems to regulate by producing less morphine. When a heroin adic goes through withdrawl, his body essentiall has no natural morhine in it, hence constant pain. If the immune system was trained to destroy morphine, then the recipient could be in a perminent withdrawl. Nicotine mimics a natural nuro-transmitter in the brain. I would hate to see what would happen if a autoimmune reaction against that nuro-transmitter happened.
Complex systems react unpredicably when disrupted. We don't know enough abou the human body to interfear with it in this way.
This is rather remarkable in that there is no discussion of the risks of such a treatment. Drugs generally work by either mimicking neurotransmitters themselves, mimicking their precursors, or by mimicking other chemicals that cause a release of neurotransmitters. This is true of both recreational drugs and prescription drugs like Prozac or Zoloft.
Cocaine, for instance, is known to work by effecting a massive release of dopamine into the brain, which is then reuptaken quickly, providing the high. Alcohol similarly effects a release of GABA (among other neurotransmitters), while GHB is actually a precursor to GABA itself and is converted thus in the brain.
It would seem to me that messing with the pathways through which any given drug actually works, unless it is almost impossibly specific, would mess with the normal operation of the brain. What's to say that a "vaccine" designed to prevent cocaine's method of activity won't prevent or at least diminish all such activity in the brain? Parkinson's Disease is caused at least partially by screwy dopamine levels in the brain. Who knows if injecting people with a virus that prevents rushes of dopamine won't affect the normal rushes of dopamine that occur during life, like after a particularly good orgasm or a 10K-run?
It just sounds like fucking with neurotransmitters, especially on a genetic level, is a recipe for disaster.
There is a good article about it here. Here are a few choice quotes.
"And, sure enough, in the late 30s and early 40s, in five really flamboyant murder trials, the defendant's sole defense was that he -- or, in the most famous of them, she -- was not guilty by reason of insanity for having used marijuana prior to the commission of the crime."
"Doctor, when you used the drug, what happened?" "After two puffs on a marijuana cigarette, I was turned into a bat."
"You know what the women testified? In Newark they testified, and I quote, "After two puffs on a marijuana cigarette my incisor teeth grew six inches long and dripped with blood."
2004, and the madness still hasn't ended. Now we might even start vaccinating people so that they don't try out these demonic drugs. Jeez, someone get me off this damn planet.
Call me too far left if you want, but protection from euphoria? That's a worrying precedent. Maybe I'm being too Timothy Leary here, but if people want to try something on their own bodies, they should be allowed to - drugs or no drugs, why should the goverment or a corporate entity have the power to give us 'protection from euphoria';
From dictionary.com Drugs or no drugs, is this something we want to be protected from? It's my body, I should be allowed to put whatever I want into it, but next time I want to be 'protected from a feeling of great happiness or well-being' acheived in a non-government-licenced way, I'll call them up.
Meanwhile, I'll go back to watching the world slowly march towards 1984.
Dealing with lawyers would be a lot less tedious if they all looked like Casey Novak.
I watched Equilibrium again this weekend. How long until governments want us all like little sheep, not feeling emotions, tracking our every movement, communication, meeting, just going to work, and enjoying the state proscribed and approved entertainment?
Download, I, er mean rent this film and watch it.
Get your own free personal location tracker
Two comments:
1. For 30+ years we have been wrestling with the consequences of simple Cigarettes! We have corporations hiding health info, playing with nicotine amounts, and a ton of cancer patients and billion dollar lawsuits. All for a drug which by all accounts is potentially deadly after long-term use but is comparatively benign. Unlike, say alcohol, coke, or heroin, it does not cause intoxication and cigarette addiction is very unlikely to cause you to lose your job and family.
Now considering everything you know about the tobacco companies and all that has come out in the past 30+ years, you really want a "more enlightened" policy leading to [insert Cigarettes company] brand heroin, cocaine, or crack? Only for 18+, of course....
2. From the article's poster:
I wouldn't be surprised to find existing phamaceutical companies excited by this, having to replace cheap drugs with something new, which they can patent and control.
Come on, enough with the tired "big bad evil phamaceutical company" conspiracy theory crap. For being so incredibly evil and selfish, they sure have cured a whole bunch of different diseases the past 50+ years. The way your talk, its like you think the companies are introducing viruses just to make cures for them. I wonder if you will change your thinking if you ever have, God forbid, cancer, heart disease, or fertility problems. Probably not...
Just because they don't give away their hard-earned discoveries for free doesn't make them evil. If you don't like it, don't use their discoveries! You can get 1970's era drugs real cheap generically. Good luck surviving.
Brian Ellenberger
Brave people don't mod down, they reply. True cowards use overrated.
You can't vaccinate against morphine ... it modulates ion channels which you would have to somehow remove
...and then you would have serious issues.
Yes you can. You can produce antibodies that bind the active parts of the appropriate drugs, or that bind to the receptors in ways that block them without activating them. These will reduce or eliminate the effect of the drug on the receptor.
Absolutely:
For starters, if it blocks the drugs, what do you want to bet that you'll also block the effects of the natural compounds. Then those vaccinated will be something like a drug addict in withdrawal FOR THE REST OF THEIR LIVES. Everything would HURT. Just sitting around would hurt. Exercise would hurt more. Painkillers wouldn't work.
Imagine one of these kids in highschool - the worst of "whiny wimps" just sitting there. Sports would be agony. And that's before the unimunized jocks start beating on him to watch him squirm.
Then there are the feedback mechanisms modulating the number of receptors, production of neurotransmitters, and production of antibodies. The reduced performance of the neurotransmitter-receptor system will result in the increase in the number of receptors (already known to be part of the addiction mechanism) and/or the increase in the production of the neurotransmitter.
But with antibodies to naturally produced protiens, this could produce more stimulation of the immune system: More antibodies against the receptors. Inflamation (of the BRAIN!) in the affected sites. Possible immune cascade from the inflamation causing the production of antibodies to OTHER self-antigens, and a runaway autoimmune disease akin to a cross between Graves and Lupus.
Then there's the question of what this will do to other behavior. It's making a MAJOR change to the internal reward pathways of the brain. How will these people do in school? On the job? How will they respond to advertising? Political propaganda? Religious indoctrination?
There are indications that psycopathy is the result of a failure in an emotional pathway, leading to both loss of guilt feelings and risk-taking in an attempt to achieve any feeling at all. Is THIS the pathway in question? Will an "immunization" program raise the incidence of psychopathy from about 1% of the population to the bulk of it? Will we have a generation of used car salesmen, confidence men, gangsters, death-squad members, and political dictators?
Or is it NOT the same pathway, but one that produces some OTHER pathology when it fails? Will we find ourselves with a generation of some OTHER, formerly-rare, pathological stereotype as the bulk
of our population?
Fooling around with something as basic as the reward hardware of the mind is NOT something you can do and expect no undesirable side-effects.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
That's something that bothers me though.. Someone in love goes through some incredibly wonderful highs, that are analogous to drug addiction and/or mental illness. But it's GREAT! Would someone immunized against a coke/heroin high grow up with a sort of 'yeah whatever' attitude towards love? And if they figure out that's why all their relationships have fallen apart after a couple weeks, will they be able to sue the government for basically wrecking their life?
"Childhood immunisation would provide adults with protection from the euphoria that is experienced by users".
"Meanwhile, experts at the Scripps Research Institute in San Diego, California, have developed a super-virus, harmless to humans, which produces proteins that can block or reduce the effects of cocaine."
"The Ministry of Love is developing a simple operation that reduces the drive towards dangerous sex acts by eliminating the risk of orgasm."
One of those sentences is not in the article.
I'm astounded. What has anyone of these children done to deserve forced-injection with anything? Manditory vaccination is something we do for communicable diseases, not lifestyle choices!
We have trouble convincing even at-risk first responders to accept vaccination against things like anthrax that some one might actually try to kill them with. And these people want to force vaccinate everyone against cocaine, beer and cigarettes? Insane.
"We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." --The American President (20.1.2009)
Childhood immunisation would provide adults with protection from the euphoria that is experienced by users, making drugs such as heroin and cocaine pointless to take.
What an idiotic approach. The problem with drugs is not the temporary feeling of euphoria, the problem is that some of them are physically addictive and some have negative side effects. Riding a roller coaster, running a 10K, or having sex provides a temporary feeling of euphoria. Temporary feelings of euphoria are good - they are what our genes give us in return for being their host and propagation vector. The entire hedonistic meaning of life is the pursuit of temporary feelings of euphoria. Without those temporary feelings of euphoria the only reasons to go on living are religion and socialism. What will they do next? put all the children on Ritalin? Solve the physical addiction problem, eliminate the negative side effects, and promote healthy recreational use.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
Oh come on this is such a joke. Im not scared for a second that this would ever happen. There are always wackos around who come up with totally fundamentalist/totalitarian/insane ideas that you never hear about again. This country isnt as big-brother as you think, we might not have a bill of rights (but we do have the data protection act and drinking at 18), but the people here have a common sense (usually) attitude, and its always ok to dislike the government (ive yet to see a patriotic flag-waving person who thinks Blair is the greatest and we should back him all the way). One thing we do have allot of is mad scientists: Professor David Nutt, speaks for itself really.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
That's the most idiotic justification for something I've heard today. After all, neither does
- Drinking
- Smoking
- Viewing porn
- Going for a drive
- Sitting on the beach watching the sunset
- Petting a kitty
Let's get rid of 'em all!So I have no doubt this page is filled with outraged posts about this idea. However, I come at this from a little differnt angle. I don't have any problem with government mandated mind alteration so long as it really made people happier/better off (the reason that we tend to view it as so objectionable it is always imagined to produce a situation that is on the whole less pleasant). However, this is simply a BAD idea which quite likely will make things significantly less pleasent.
The suggestion of vaccinating children againt morphine or cocaine reminds me of the claims of supposed health benefits for drinking radioactive water (it was eventually banned when someone drank so much their lower jaw fell off). People are jumping over a nifty new technology they don't understand and injudisciously pushing it on the public. I don't say this lightly, I am usually quite disgusted when people cry wolf about new technologies and demand they adhere to a higher safety standard than current options. However, just as in the radioactive water example it isn't merely that we can't guarantee something isn't harmfull but we have good reason to suspect something might be harmfull.
In this example scientists are blindly screwing with important neural circutry. This is analagous to inserting random bytes into your kernel until affects the option you desire. Even if on observation in a differnt enviornment from the production one (rats instead of humans) the kernel still appeared stable you wouldn't trust it for production. Even worse people age, go through puberty etc.. unlike a computer so even a vaccine that seems fine now might manefest problems years later. Also in people we care more about just their external behavior, what if this makes people unhappy.
This is precisely what I fear. More and more evidence keeps mountaing that all sorts of everyday activities cause the same brain activity as drug use. This includes things like eating chocolate and socialization. In fact many important experiences, like the glow of love or post orgasmic bliss are caused by natural versions of illicit drugs (endorphines affect the same receptors as opiates like heroin). Most likely the same receptors these drugs target exist to give important human experiences and perhaps drug addiction is nothing more than an extreme version of desire caused by enjoyment. Quite likely if we give someone these vaccines you would permanetly impair their happiness or experience.
These drugs might be usefull for some severe addicts who desperatly want to get clean but don't have the willpower. The drug lifestyle might be doing them more harm then they risk from this vaccine. Unfortunatly, since they are quiting narcotics (or continuing) it is virtually impossible to tell if the vaccine impaired their natural enjoyment of life (feeling this way can be a sideeffect of longterm drug use). While I'm normally all for testing I'm leary of even giving *one* human test subject this vaccine unless it is their only reasonable hope. Death is one thing but being still alive and finding you can't enjoy life like you were before is simply dreadfull.
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
Speech? ask the people banned to the "First Amendment Areas" that are out of sight and the people who were arrested for wearing the wrong T-Shirts at a Bush rally.
It's not just Republicans, though--democrats are into first amendment zones, too.
The real threat to America isn't John Ashcroft--he's just a symptom of a larger disease.
What part of "shall not be infringed" is so hard to understand?
The principle reason that drugs are peddled in the manner that they are is because they are illegal. It's a very lucrative black economy the dealers have going on there. Massive amounts of untracable cash. So you try your best to get little Johnny hooked, and he keeps coming back to you like a rat to a feeder bar. By the time he gets so out of control that he is apprehended, he's too far out of his gourd to even provide applicible data about you to the authorities. All the while you're laughing all the way to the proverbial bank.
Make it legal, force clean production (like tattoo parlors, for example), and tax it. The gov't will make money, lower the SHIT out of the crime rate not by making drugs legal, but by disassociating money with drugs and I can almost guarantee the rate of addiction will go down. People like doing illegal things. Life is pretty fucking boring when you're broke, dead end job, creditors railing on your ass. People turn to relentless drug use. I blame society. I know PLENTY of people that can handle doing a few lines of coke every now and again. But they're criminals, even though they are just having a good time, on their own, and not causing problems. In this day and age, however, many people automatically assume drug use == bad person. I also know plenty of people who started drinking/smoking/other shit SIMPLY because it's illegal. So, logic says to eliminate the artificial reason. People are gonna do what they want when they want. It can't be stopped, so why not play into it and stop making people criminals?
Also, the person who mentioned "A Clockwork Orange" is dead on. Controlling behaviour is the absolute WORST way to get around problems. It's a bandaid, nothing more. Governments should strive to create a society where people won't have to turn to criminal behaviour to meet their needs. Not to make everyone a lab rat.
Slashdot is proof that Sturgeon's Law applies to mankind.
I blame society.
:)
:)
Please, tell me you're joking!
(rant mode on)
The collapse of a democratic nation begins with the abdication of responsibility. All this "Society is to blame" crap is just so much bullshit.
Every single person is responsible for where they are. Yes, shit happens. Yes, bad luck happens. Yes, there's the lure of "escape" (be it drugs, booze, sex, religion, movies, role playing, slashdot, whatever). Next thing you know, it's too hard to get up in the morning. You can't face life without a bong hit. Everything's out to get you. Why vote - it makes no difference. You're calling in the cops to discipline your child. It's never your fault.
But get this straight right now. Society is NEVER to blame. People are to blame. People who take the easy way out and don't take responsibility for where they're at.
Remember - shit doesn't just "happen" - it comes from assholes
(rant mode off - sorta
Sorry mate - not meaning to dump on you specifically - I just really hate that "Society is to blame" way of avoiding responsibility.
I left my body to science, but I'm afraid they've turned it down...
You are absolutely right about the predominant mindset in European societies (says a German). I am becoming more and more worried, since you can't even *argue* with people on these issues anymore. In their mind, mentioning any kind of freedom simply results in a deep emotion of "angst" - they behave more and more irrational.
It doesn't matter whether you're talking about welfare benefits, unreasonably high taxation, personal freedoms (as in drug (ab)use) or whatever. They will always vote for the most restrictive system, without being able to find rational arguments or prove the effectiveness of their demanded regulation.
I absolutely have no idea how to make people think for themselves again.
My favorite part was talking about "spiraling addiction."
This is pretty much directly linked to Britain's rise in amphetamine interdiction raids. Amphetamines and cocaine are often used interchangeably, depending on market rate. When they start busting more cocaine, you'll see a rise in amphetamine use, with the re-emergence of mainlining amphetamines ("speed") - on par with crack cocaine.
My other favorite part:
Perhaps it would be better to say that the cost of the drug war is 12+ bn pounds a year. The only way to know the cost of drug addiction would be to know the approximate number of addicts and the approximate yearly public cost of a legal addict.
Oh, that's right: Britain does* have those numbers. There used to be a program for distributing legal heroin to addicts in Britain, and the entire program was quite cheap. Certainly not 12 billion pounds a year: heroin maintenance wasn't even a major budget issue.
Spelling/grammar nazis welcome (English is not my first language and I am trying to improve my spelling/grammar)
I saw a standup comic who gave several good examples of irony after a few minutes' criticism directed at Alanis Morrissette. The one I recall best is,
Irony is naming an airport after the president who fired all the air traffic controllers.
Mom says my