The Blue Pill

Photo is of a sign at 1/18/03 protest in San Francisco, taken from sfindymedia.com, ©2002 Chateau Bizarre

The U.S. military has been developing drugs to make better soldiers for many years. There are the pills that speed up the heart rate and blood pressure, kick in adrenaline and other natural body "fight or flight" mechanisms so that strength is increased and pain is numbed. There is already the routine use of "go pills" (uppers) for pilots. The new potential "super soldier" drugs have been written about in two recent articles. One in the Village Voice, "The Guilt Free Soldier" (1/22/03 by Erik Baard). The second in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, (9/9/02 by Carol Smith). Both drugs being tested are also used to treat high blood pressure. In these trials, for the soldier, they are meant to deaden, to separate the human emotional chemical experience from the concrete acts involved in combat and other trauma. From the Village Voice article, "...at Harvard University, survivors of car accidents are already swallowing propranolol pills, in the first human trials of that common cardiac drug as a means to nip the effects of trauma in the bud." "It's the morning-after pill for just about anything that produces regret, remorse, pain, or guilt," says Dr. Leon Kass, chairman of the President's Council on Bioethics, who emphasizes that he's speaking as an individual and not on behalf of the council. Barry Romo, a national coordinator for Vietnam Veterans Against the War, Inc. [Not affiliated with VVAWAI.-Ed.] is even more blunt. "That's the devil pill," he says. "That's the monster pill, the anti-morality pill. That's the pill that can make men and women do anything and think they can get away with it. Even if it doesn't work, what's scary is that a young soldier could believe it will." Read the articles online. We say TAKE THE RED PILL! Numbing is not a solution for the horrors of war.