A VACCINE FOR VICE

Nearly everyone likes a magic bullet.

One can only describe penicillin, polio vaccine, and insulin for diabetics as medications that have changed peoples’ lives. For the most part, antidepressants used with psychotherapy are another tool that has had a major impact on humans.

Now comes a vaccine for vice. This is part of the beginning of the next society that should follow the global information. It is called the Bio-technical society and it promises (on balance) to improve the everyday life of humans, animals, plants, and the efficiencies of machines. As this is being written, it is also the thrust of the new budget to bring biotech companies to Iowa (perhaps in a special session.)

In a recent article in U.S. NEWS & WORLD REPORT (4/28/2003:54) early studies have been able to stop heroin highs in monkeys, an animal with very similar genes to us. Clinical trials are now being applied to cocaine and heroin users. In other words, biochemically a “high” does not register with the brain

Looking into the future, one can conjecture that addictions and habituations may be relieved or preempted by a drug. For millions of people around the world, this would be miraculous. One can only imagine the careers of David England, former president of

DMACC or Larry Eustachy, coach of the Iowa State basketball team. The first alledgedly used an illegal drug and the second abused a legal drug. This new medication could help save or reduce the pain to the individual and his or her job, family, and the greater society. In spite of some of the reservations listed below this, on a balance must be considered a social improvement for the common good.

Here are the shortcomings of the drug.

It depends on how it is used and the motive for the application of the drug to the individual. There is the law of unintended consequences that emerges in just about every euphoric vision.

If the medication “works” what do you think tobacco companies, alcoholic beverage corporations, and for that matter coffee, soda, and sugar companies will feel about the medication? How about organized crime and drug cartels? Perhaps they can improve sales because users know that there is a medication available to help reduce the horrific withdrawal and craving that follows with the use of the vaccine for vice. Did penicillin ultimately destroy common diseases only to make these ailments stronger and more potent in the years after it’s discovery?

In the most secular sense, billions become mildly to wildly euphoric from prayer, meditation, self-hypnosis, and even television and video games. How might this change our world if medications impinge on natural biochemical processes?

Further, there may be entire institutions dramatically modified because of the drug. Most now agree that the early stages of romance are “exciting.” It is also “fun” to watch sports, movies, and related. What happens when and if a vaccine is given to all of us in childhood?   Do we become the Prozac nation that was predicted, but did not occur at the magnitude once described?

So what should we do when Nabi and Xenova corporations introduce this drug? If political groups try to kill it, the battle against drugs and related will probably continue to increase. IF it blunts what society defines as pro-social activities, what will become of us?

The jury is out. However, we may find that we face a new set of problems that are more manageable than the previous ones. We now face a pandemic in the world that if allowed to spread will kill more than the flu of the early 20^th century. Would you like to have a drug that could prevent or cure the disease? The biotech society will like other changes in society, divide us and unite for reasons not entirely clear at the time.

Joel C. Snell is professor emeritus at Kirkwood College and Research Fellow for the Arlington Institute of Arlington, Virginia, a futurist think tank.  Snell would also like to thank Mitchell E. Marsh, Pharm.D. and Clinical Pharmacist for St. Elizabeth Regional Medical Center, Lincoln, Nebraska. Snell also teaches Sociology-Medical by distance learning for Kirkwood.