Psychic pleasures forbidden

When not getting us into a pickle over Europe, Her Majesty’s Government has been having a go at peripheral drugs, that is to say recreational drugs other than alcohol, nicotine, sugar and caffeine, with the Psychoactive Substances Act 2016 (Chapter 2). I have no idea what happened to chapter 1.

The idea seems to be that you have medicines which are OK. Food is OK. The aforementioned traditional drugs are OK. Then you have controlled substances like marijuana or khat which are not OK. Anything else that can be said to have a psychoactive effect is not OK, with the big change being the catch-all wording of the new act. No need to go to the bother of putting every new substance that someone comes up with on the list of controlled substances, they are all illegal by virtue of what they do.

I expect the lawyers will do well over the years out of litigation about what exactly a psychoactive effect is. I am sure that one could argue that having a stimulating or depressing effect on the central nervous system is a quite narrow test, with something that has a stimulating or depressing effect on just some small part of the central nervous system not counting at all. Burden of proof on the Crown to prove that it is some big part. And what about just turning some small part of the central nervous system off, not usually what one would call depressing? And what about this natural & organic food additive – absolutely essential for the enhancement of flavour?

Another angle might be that one does not need to use drugs at all – with my being prompted here by reference 1, a bit of work which suggests there may be better ways to deal with depression than dope. So, I could go to a clinic and get them to stick some small electrodes into various special places in my brain. Wireless connection to a gadget in my pocket, and whenever I feel like a blast, press the green button. I would be able to tune the gadget to deliver the sort of blast that I like, it all being a question of which neurons to stimulate for the purpose. The blast will, of course, for reasons of health and safety, time out after a suitable number of seconds. The only catch might be that I would not be able to get this done on the NHS, and might not be able to get it done in the UK at all. I might have to go to Gibraltar or to the British Virgin Islands where they are a bit more relaxed about such matters.

Going further, one might get an even better result by implanting some artificial neurons in the brain, and then using the electrodes to fire them up. One would need to take advice about whether the artificial neurons constituted, for the purposes of the act, a psychoactive substance. On the face of it not, but we all know how lawyers can twist things when there is a fee to be had.

And then a bit of lateral thinking. What about the machines sold by the likes of the people at reference 2. Completely non-invasive, with the catch presently being that such machines cannot deliver to places deep inside the brain. But maybe that will come. Can we look forward to another piece of legislation to ban psychoactive machines?

And to close, a leaf out of the luvvies exemption from the smoking rule, whereby one can smoke on the stage of any bona fide theatrical production or rehearsal. One could cook up all kinds of medical trials which require lots of volunteers to try out interesting new substances - with medicines being one of the exemptions from the present act.

Reference 1: Dysregulation of Prefrontal Cortex-Mediated Slow-Evolving Limbic Dynamics Drives Stress-Induced Emotional Pathology - Rainbo Hultman, Stephen D. Mague, Qiang Li, Brittany M. Katz, Nadine Michel, Lizhen Lin, Joyce Wang, Lisa K. David, Cameron Blount, Rithi Chandy, David Carlson, Kyle Ulrich, Lawrence Carin, David Dunson, Sunil Kumar, Karl Deisseroth, Scott D. Moore, Kafui Dziras – 2016. A report of work done with public money and now freely available to the public – upon payment of a modest fee to cover postage and packing.

Reference 2: http://www.mindmachines.com/.