Smart Drugs: An Interview
by NPR
NOTICE: TO ALL CONCERNED Certain text files and messages contained on this site deal with activities and devices which would be in violation of various Federal, State, and local laws if actually carried out or constructed. The webmasters of this site do not advocate the breaking of any law. Our text files and message bases are for informational purposes only. We recommend that you contact your local law enforcement officials before undertaking any project based upon any information obtained from this or any other web site. We do not guarantee that any of the information contained on this system is correct, workable, or factual. We are not responsible for, nor do we assume any liability for, damages resulting from the use of any information on this site.
January '92
NPR: If you are convinced that in the future we will indeed be watched
over by "machines of loving grace"; if you are fond of the notion that
computers and humans are essentially the same--cybernetically speaking;
if you like industrial music, cyberpunk fashion, appreciate the
potential of virtual reality, are curious about smart drugs, then you
know about the new magazine MONDO 2000. But we had a few questions, so
we phoned the editor, R.U. Sirius. He works closely with Queen Mu, listed
on the masthead as "Domineditrix" of the magazine. MONDO 2000, according
to Mr. Sirius, synthesizes information from the edge.
Sirius: We're playing the role of taking the cyberpunk avant-garde
somewhere toward the edge of the mainstream. All the
interesting stuff, all the best observations come from the edge
and slowly enter the mainstream--and there turn banal. There's
a whole bunch of small, desktop-published 'zines out there.
NPR: Mondo-zines...including GOING GAGA and BOING-BOING and 2600 and
ENTROPY...
[FYI: MONDO 2000 can be reached at 510-845-9018 or [email protected];
BOING-BOING can be reached at 818-980-2009 or [email protected]; I
don't know what 2600 is doing on this list of 'zines, but you can reach
them at [email protected].]
Sirius: Right...Yeah...great folks.
NPR: There's some criticism that the magazine may be sexist?
Sirius: Oh yeah. It's kinda weird because the magazine is completely
dominated by women. We got a letter in the current issue
objecting to certain photographs in the magazine, which the
woman said showed that I specifically have a 1950's male
subconscious. But the photographs that she was referring to were
designed and executed by women and advocated by Queen Mu. To
them, it's a positive expression of female sexual energy.
NPR: I love the title, actually, of this poem: "Can She Do the Vulcan
Mind-Meld on the Very First Date?"
Sirius: Right, by Nick Herbert. Yeah, that's an erotic invitation from
a highly-imaginitive quantum physicist.
NPR: Actually it's called "A Fringe Science Special Report".
Sirius: Right. That's a regular column. Originally, actually, the
current issue was going to be a sex issue and a gender-bender
issue and a bunch of stuff came in and we decided we better back
away from that for the moment. But there's still a bunch of
things that got written that are being included in the issue and
particularly in the columns. There's another column called "Sex
Machine--Machine Sex", which sort of goes into the eroticization
of machines in modern times and talks about Arnold
Schwartzenneger in TERMINATOR 2 and stuff like that.
NPR: You say that General Norman Schwartzkopf IS a cyberpunk...WAS a
cyberpunk--especially during the war.
Sirius: Well, he's certainly using digital, virtual reality technology
and wearing a cool uniform and sunglasses and all of that. I
mean, I'm using a degree of irony there because generally
cyberpunk sensibility is outside of the system, but it also gives
people a degree of space to have the mercenary attitude that's
necessary to survive in America today. So I sort of backpedal on
that and turn General Schwartzkopf into a cyberpunk because he
does a high-tech, digital war, quits the army, and goes off on
his own, gets himself a Hollywood agent, writes a book, denounces
the President, and goes on tour. So I think that's a
quintessential, post-modern army general there.
NPR: I need to ask you about the psychoactive drugs. Ads in the
magazine for something called Oxybliss ("Super-Oxygenated Colon
Cleanser"); there's Noro-Adreneline[?]; there Depronil[?]
("increases libido, powerful anti-depressant"). What is it...?
Sirius: <breaking in> Right, right. Well, I mean, that's an area of
exploration right now is chemical and nutrients...
self-improvement drugs, in a sense...we have sort of an ambiguous
attitude towards this. We have John Morganthaller, who, I would
say, is an advocate, doing a column on smart drugs. Then we also
have our own editor, St. Jude, writing fairly funny and ironic
commentary on these things.
NPR: Are these drugs all organic? Or are they synthesized, as LSD was?
Sirius: No. A lot of them are chemical. They're drugs, they're not
plants. The one that I use is something called Pericedin[?] and it
comes in little pills. It's definitely a drug. Tests that were run
in Europe were reported to the FDA and one of the commentators for
the FDA said they weren't gonna bother to test it because it was so
non-toxic that you could eat a houseful of the stuff.
NPR: What do you use Perecedin for?
Sirius: I use it for memory focus...speed up the synaptic flow, that sort
of thing. I ran out a couple of weeks ago--can you tell? [Note:
You CAN, if you listen to the interview...<grin>]
NPR: How can you be suggesting that an answer for the '90's--or the
direction that people should look toward in the future--is just a
whole 'nother bunch of drugs?
Sirius: Well, I'm not suggesting that there are any answers for anything
really. MONDO is an experimenter's magazine. It's reporting also
on the edge of modern culture and what facinates people on the
edge. So I wouldn't be suggesting that this is the ultimate
solution. MONDO is not like a "movement" magazine advocating a
bright, bright future and saying all these things are going to be
wonderful. MONDO is full of dark visions and just puts out those
visions for people to see and to contemplate.
NPR: From KQED in San Francisco: R.U. Sirius, the editor of MONDO 2000,
a quarterly published from Berkeley.
NPR: To find out more about the smart drug scene, which seems to be
blossoming in San Francisco, we sent reporter John Reeger[?] to
a party in the Bay area.
J.R.: DV8, a popular south-of-market nightclub, has a nice unreality to
it tonight. Over in the corner, patrons throng the smart bar,
sipping intelligence-boosting amino acids, while out on the
darkened dance floor colored spotlights capture four figures in
full face helmets and gunfighter crouches--each doing a
slow-motion pantomime inside a cage of electric harnesses. They're
hunting each other--inside the computer--and we've all got a ticket.
Instructor: Alright. Everyone listen up now, because you've probably never
played this before and you wanna win.
J.R.: This is a virtual reality game, the very latest in cybernetic
recreation.
Instructor: O.K. When these four people exit the units, you wanna climb
in, take the helmet, lift it up, place it onto your head, hold
this bar back to fit it to your head, and then turn this knob.
That will bring it into focus. This trigger allows you to fire
your weapon. Take very careful aim and pull the trigger.
J.R.: We're killing each other, is that the basic concept?
Instructor: That's basically the concept. You will see each other--you
will each be the color...
J.R.: Meanwhile, at the smart bar, Barbara Lou presides over a table full
of laboratory equipment and German hand-blenders. She's a svelte
26-year-old with flamboyant eye makeup and a shaved head dressed in
a seductively-tailored nurse's uniform mixing up brain chemicals.
Barb: I have a Mind-Mix, which has a gram of choline and 800 milligrams of
phenylaline. All of my drinks have a phenylaline kicker. The first
time somebody tries it I want them to feel it. The next one is
Body-Batch. That has six grams of argenine, which stimulates your
growth hormone.
J.R.: Now I'm about as anxious to let some cyberpunk in a nurse's outfit
stimulate my pituitary gland as I am to take nutritional advice from
an East German weightlifter, and I tried to voice my concern: "you
ever had anybody drink one of these drinks, swell up, clutch their
throats, and keel over?"
Barb: No, never.
J.R.: O.K. I ordered the Mind-Mix.
Patron: Is it working? Do you feel something?
J.R.: Do you know anything about this stuff?
Patron: No, man, I'm very skeptical actually.
Vox Pops:
"You know what it tastes like? It tastes like chewing vitamin C tablets."
"I like it. It makes you lucid."
Renny: We're now in 1965 San Francisco again. There's sort of a cyberpunk
youth culture emerging in San Francisco and I would think--from the
kind of media attention it's getting--it's going to transpose itself
into every borough and burg in America in the next 5-10 years.
J.R.: This is Mark Renny[?], South of Market's own self-styled
"trendsurfer." Renny has ridden the smart-drug wave all the way to
Donahue and Larry King Live. He and his partner run Smart Products,
selling nutritional supplements by mail-order and supplying drink
mixes to smart bars like Barbara Lou's. Renny is a ten-year smart
drug user, but he's not looking for transcendence--that WAS the
sixties, this is the nineties.
Renny: I noticed as I was reaching forty, I was getting very depressed; I
wasn't keeping up. At four'o'clock in the afternoon I'd have to tell
my secretary: "Tell them I'm not here." I would lie on the floor.
And what I've noticed: I feel great; I'm much more productive; I'm
much sharper; my brain is clearer; I can remember things that I was
starting to forget. I'd call up information, I'd always have to
listen to the damn recording twice; and now I have to listen once
again, like I always did.
So if you take Hydergine, if you take some of these free-form amino
acids, the choline drinks, etc., what you're talking about is 5%
increase in cognitive enhancement, say, but 5%--if anybody knows
anything about sports--that is the edge.
[FYI: Smart Products can be reached at 1-800-858-6520. Ask for their
free (obviously promotional) newsletter.]
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Morganthaller: It's a very nineties thing. We're talking about
performance-enhancement drugs. They're really a
whole class of Puritan work-ethic drugs, if you will.
J.R.: Smart drugs are hot. John Morganthaller and his colleague Ward
Dean wrote the book, SMART DRUGS AND NUTRIENTS: HOW TO IMPROVE
YOUR MEMORY AND INCREASE YOUR INTELLIGENCE USING THE LATEST
DISCOVERIES IN NEUROSCIENCE. Based on a computer search of millions
of abstracts in the National Library of Medicine, the book document
25 or 30 different substances that have been shown in human or animal
studies to improve memory, learning, concentration, or IQ--from
coffee and vitamin supplements to European pharmaceuticals.
Prominent among the pharmaceuticals is Peracitam, widely prescribed in
Europe under such brand names as NormaBrain, StimuCortex, and
CerebroForte. Another is hydergine, which Mark Renny mentioned, an
ergot derivative, like LSD, discovered by Sandoz in the forties. It's
one of the most popular drugs in the United States for the treatment
of senility. The twist is, that Morganthaller's book is for healthy
people seeking that new Grail: cognitive enhancement. A group that,
he says, is diverse and growing.
Morganthaller: I estimate 100,000 people or so in the U.S. are using some
kind of smart drug or smart nutrient on a daily basis. We
sell the book by mail-order, so we're in direct contact with a
lot of our readers. And it's not just the cyberpunk crowd;
it's also high school kids, career professionals, yuppies,
elderly people...everybody is using these.
J.R.: But, is it legal? Well...yes. The nutritional supplements that Renny
and Barbara Lou sell occur naturally in foods and you can get them at
health food stores. As for the pharmaceutical smart drugs, U.S. law
permits individuals to import drugs which are approved in other
countries for their personal use. Many AIDS patients are doing just
that. Drugs approved for use in this country may be marketed only for
their approved uses, but physicians are free to prescribe those drugs
for other uses. The FDA considers this freedom an important source of
therapeutic innovation. In this somewhat libertarian legal
environment, private experimentation with smart drugs has taken root.
And Morganthaller's book clearly aims to be useful to the
experimenters. It contains an appendix of applicable laws, a
directory of mail-order sources, and a return mail card to request a
list of interested physicians. And Morganthaller, who pursues his own
smart drug regimen, is utterly sanguine about the risks.
Morganthaller: In general, most of these smart drugs are less of a problem
than coffee in terms of side effects or contraindications.
So, with many of them, I think they should be freely
available. It should be an over-the-counter drug.
[Note: Morganthaller & Dean's SMART DRUGS & NUTRIENTS was reviewed in a
recent issue of the WHOLE EARTH REVIEW.]
Vox Pops:
"We all know that alcohol is the dumb drug. So why not have an alternative,
to have smart drugs? I think that we should have access to take smart drugs,
dumb drugs...any kind of drugs."
J.R.: But are the drugs we want to take doing what we want them to do?
Especially when what we want them to do is make us smart instead of
dumb? And how did the mental performance drink of the nineties work
on me, hard-boiled journalist? Well, I lost the virtual reality game,
but I did find myself unusually wakeful and alert and that night I
dreamt, in fitful sleep, that my home loan had been denied. I'm John
Reeger.
NPR: Incidentally, after the interview smart bar operator Barbara Lou
confessed that her Mind-Mix contains one other ingredient--caffeine
--which might account for our reporter's wakefulness.
[Note: Caffeine is usually taken with phenylanine; they work together.]
|