I m b e c i l i t y
Some drugs dull, stupefy and sedate. Others sharpen, animate and intensify.
        After taking soma, one can apparently drift pleasantly off to sleep. Bernard Marx, for instance, takes four tablets of soma to pass away a long plane journey to the Reservation in New Mexico. When they arrive at the Reservation, Bernard's companion, Lenina, swallows half a gramme of soma when she begins to tire of the Warden's lecture, "with the result that she could now sit, serenely not listening, thinking of nothing at all". Such a response suggests the user's sensibilities are numbed rather than heightened. In BNW, people resort to soma when they feel depressed, angry or have intrusive negative thoughts. They take it because their lives, like society itself, are empty of spirituality or higher meaning. Soma keeps the population comfortable with their lot.

        Soma also shows physiological tolerance. Linda, the Savage's mother, takes too much: up to twenty grammes a day. Taken in excess, soma acts as a respiratory depressant. Linda eventually dies of an overdose. This again suggests that Huxley models soma more on opiates than the sort of clinically valuable mood-brightener which subverts the hedonic treadmill of negative feedback mechanisms in the CNS. The parallel to be drawn with opiates is admittedly far from exact. Unlike soma, good old-fashioned heroin is bad news for your sex life. But like soma, it won't sharpen your wits.

        Even today, the idea that chemically-driven happiness must dull and pacify is demonstrably false. Mood-boosting psychostimulants are likely to heighten awareness. They increase self-assertiveness. On some indices, and in low doses, stimulants can improve intellectual performance. Combat-troops on both sides in World War Two, for instance, were regularly given amphetamines. This didn't make them nicer or gentler or dumber. Dopaminergic power-drugs tend to increase willpower, wakefulness and action. "Serenics", by contrast, have been researched by the military and the pharmaceutical industry. They may indeed exert a quiescent effect - ideally on the enemy. But variants could also be used on, or by, one's own troops to induce fearlessness.

        A second and less warlike corrective to the dumb-and-docile stereotype is provided by so-called manic-depressives. One reason that many victims of bipolar disorder, notably those who experience the euphoric sub-type of (hypo-)mania, skip out on their lithium is that when "euthymic" they can still partially recall just how wonderfully intense and euphoric life can be in its manic phase. Life on lithium is flatter. For it's the havoc wrought on the lives of others which makes the uncontrolled exuberance of frank mania so disastrous. Depressed or nominally euthymic people are easier for the authorities to control than exuberant life-lovers.

        Thus one of the tasks facing a mature fusion of biological psychiatry and psychogenetic medicine will be to deliver enriched well-being and lucid intelligence to anyone who wants it without running the risk of triggering ungovernable mania. MDMA(ecstasy) briefly offers a glimpse of what full-blooded mental health might be like. Like soma, it induces both happiness and serenity. Unlike soma, it is neurotoxic. But used sparingly, it can also be profound, empathetic and soulfully intense.

        Drugs which commonly induce dysphoria, on the other hand, are truly sinister instruments of social control. They are far more likely to induce the "infantile decorum" demanded of BNW utopians than euphoriants. The major tranquillisers, including the archetypal "chemical cosh" chlorpromazine (Largactil), subdue their victims by acting as dopamine antagonists. At high dosages, willpower is blunted, affect is flattened, and mood is typically depressed. The subject becomes sedated. Intellectual acuity is dulled. They are a widely-used tool in some penal systems.

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