Posts tagged - electroceuticals

The Drug Addiction Crisis is Your Fault

Uncle Sam PixabayBy now, everyone is convinced we are in a drug-addiction crisis, and there’s plenty of blame to go around. Such as pharmaceutical companies that invented street drugs to begin with. Bayer once touted heroin for headaches,  Abbott Labs promoted methamphetamine as a remedy for alcoholism, Sandoz invented LSD, Merc invented morphine, distributed cocaine, and invented MDMA, and Purdue convinced doctors to prescribe OxyCodone for pain by assuring them that chances of addiction were very slim. And we can blame the doctors who ignored evidence to the contrary.

We can point the finger at pharmacies that order thousands more opioids than will be needed and fill prescriptions far above what makes sense. Pharmaceutical distributors that ignore huge orders for opioids from small pharmacies, and pressure legislators to pass bills that make the DEA impotent to enforce existing rules. DEA and FDA executives who jump ship to work for big pharma at huge increases in salary so they can help build strategies to circumvent legal restrictions on their activities. Psychiatrists and physicians who take money from big pharma and go on to promote medication assisted treatment not for detoxification, but as a permanent opioid-fueled future which will benefit pharmaceutical firms and their stockholders, who put addicts on naloxone and methadone which is much harder to detox than heroin, but has the advantage of diverting money from the street drug dealer to the pharmaceutical drug dealers and their investors. The pharmaceutical companies who invent drugs to block addiction to all but their own drugs, that block death on the street and then – aping the strategies of the most venial drug pushers – raise the prices multiple times, crying that “shortages exist, you’d better hurry!” Correctional institutions who embrace medication assisted treatment to medicate inmates instead of using incarceration as a period of drying out for later life, and did anyone mention investors in big pharma stocks because wow, riches await from more and more addicts using more and more pharmaceuticals?

And there’s plenty of blame for all those judges, doctors, lawyers, psychiatrists who help close the gap between prescription drugs and street drugs. For the military exhuming the abominations of MKULTRA by experimenting on those with PTSD, trying a little of this LSD, a little of that marijuana, some wires in the brain – who knows? We might find a way to create a new and better Manchurian Candidate, make robots out of soldiers, make mass murderers out of troubled spirits. And we can blame “non-profit organizations” like the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, who are spurring interest in using drugs to swap neuroses for outright insanity, organizations who secretly channel millions to legalize marijuana, to companies like Coca-Cola which once contained cocaine for a little boost, which is now going back to its roots, putting marijuana in its product. We can blame the legislators who get swept along in this tsunami of cash and influence, passing bills and listening to drug pushers in suits who convince them that it’s all good, and “here’s a little donation for your next campaign.” Psychiatrists who contend that everyone is basically nuts, so a little drug, a little electroshock, a little wire in the brain certainly couldn’t make you any worse…

But for all the blame to hand around, what about you? Do you know people who have their kids on speed (called ADHD medication by the shrinks)? Do you have a family member who is using marijuana or drinking too much? Are you on an anti-depressant because you feel bad sometimes? Do you get drunk on the weekends to unwind, or smoke a little weed, because after all, it’s legal now? Is your aged mother on “happy pills” so she won’t complain so much about the food, the loss of independence, the minimum-wage helpers telling her what to do in her assisted living facility? Do you nod sympathetically at people who start every conversation with “I’m ADHD” or “Since I was diagnosed with PTSD,” or “I’ve been depressed for some time now.”?

So what are you doing to help make things better? Is it all too big for you? Are you just one person? Are you in agreement with those who try to make addicts poor victims of the system? Who say that addiction, mental illness, criminality is all just a brain disease, not a choice, that we are all just victims of circumstance? We should all just go down the drain together and let the greatest country the world has ever seen evaporate like bong smoke.

Well, grow a pair why don’t you? Do something useful. Someone says. “I’ve got ADHD,” you can retort, “Who gave you that idea?” Someone says “I’m on an anti-depressant,” you can reply “What can you do to handle the situation that’s depressing you?” Someone says “marijuana is legal now, so it’s fine,” you say “So now the government has your best interests – and the taxes on weed – at heart?” Be blunt, invalidate those stupid ideas and self-victimization. Stigma is a good thing – it might help deter a kid thinking about drinking, or using meth or shooting up. Might keep him or her from ending up as a shit-stained twist of laundry in an alley somewhere, or a numbed-out methadone or pharmaceutical junkie for the rest of his or her life.

Do you vote a straight Democratic or Republican ticket, because you’re too lazy to read the voter guide? Or just not vote because there’s nothing you can do about it? Find out who’s taking money from big pharma, from the American Psychiatric Association, from the American Medical Association, the PACs and special interests and vote against them. Vote for those you think might not be in step with a stupider society.

Support religion and spiritual awareness and don’t fall for the efforts to pit one group against another. Support groups that help families, that repair marriages, that support kids and adoption and good education and a prosperous future – and beware of the “everybody-will-agree-with-this” PR and feel-good empty words of the campaign trail. Evaluate the politically correct movements to see if they lead to a better life and a better society, if they do, join, and if they don’t, oppose them even if you get hammered for it on social media.

There’s an old statement to the effect that “You get the government you deserve.” Look at what we’re getting and take some responsibility for it. It’s up to you not to your neighbors or your representatives. The left, the right, the middle, all political stripes have their own agendas, their own railroad tracks leading to their own little utopias. Do you want to travel with them? They make it easy, and they will appeal to your stupider self that thinks life consists of food, sleep and sex, and getting high can handle the rest, all funded by insurance, by taxes on “the fat-cat one percent” or the tiny fines on multi-billion-dollar drug firms.

So what can you do? Join up with effective organizations fighting stupidity and drug-induced dreaming not doing. Check out Foundation for a Drug-Free World, the Citizens Commission on Human Rights and other effective anti-drug and anti-stupidity groups. Sure, the organizations I mentioned above are related to the Church of Scientology, and all the crap you’ve heard about Scientology? It’s a measure of just how effective these organizations are in enlightening people on the drug and psychiatric agenda. Those lies and smears in the media? A badge of honor. If they were ineffective, they would be ignored by the psych-drug-media cartel, or perhaps even supported by it.

OK, so this mess is not all your fault, but if everyone woke up and went into action, this drugged-up country could reboot and get back to some basic principles. There are 21 of those principles, and here’s a link to them. Good luck.

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The Medicalizing of America

Photo by Benjamin Combs on Unsplash

Photo by Benjamin Combs on Unsplash

I’ve been plowing through news feeds for a few months now, and the issues I’m interested in – which focus on the spreading influence of BigPharma, psychiatry and the medication of America – have sort of settled into a number of issues. Here are some of the more prominent ones:

1.   The marketing of psychedelic drugs to cure most everything from depression to crime. The Military is pushing it, as well as anonymous donations to the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS). LSD is good for you, magic mushrooms are a spiritual tonic, and taking psychedelic trips will make you a good person, empty the prisons, and you can tune in, turn on and drop out like last time.

2.   Along with number 1 above, is the first official admission that anti-depressants are no more effective than placebos and have wildly variant effects on individuals. One in six Americans takes an antidepressant, and about $150 billion is spent per year on such medications and related costs. So BigPharma will take a huge hit unless alternatives such as psychedelics and electroceuticals take hold.

3.   Electroceuticals, the implanting of electrical devices into the brain to deliver electricity or drugs, are back – back from MKULTRA where they were covertly tested on unwitting subjects along with other stuff like LSD as a way to brainwash people and control their behavior. This time it’s out in the open – credit Wikileaks and the revelations about NSA spying for that – under cover of “this will help you.” Might be of some use in Parkinson’s disease, but now the claims are that it cures everything, and BigPharma, like GlaxoSmithKline and the military are funding research in microshocking brains directly or through magnetic stimulation. Electroshock of the type seen in “One Flew Over the Cukoo’s Nest” is also back, with the FDA recently lowering the risk factor so children can have their brains zapped too.

4.   Legalization of marijuana began with medical marijuana and transitioned to what we all knew it was for — to get high. Liberal billionaires such as George Soros funded state legalization efforts even though Democrats have mostly stayed silent and let the potheads carry the ball. Liberals want the tax money for social programs, conservatives want the tax money for war, and so opposition has been wimpy. With THC at over 30 percent – up from 3 percent in the 1960s – marijuana induced paranoia and mental illness is on the rise which will be a windfall for the shrinks. Meanwhile, BigPharma is gearing up to produce marijuana, LSD, and so forth. They’ll drop the prices to squeeze out the competition, then control the formerly-illicit-but-now-FDA-approved drug market.

5.   On the tail of marijuana legalization are other measures to mainstream hard drugs through “harm reduction” “decriminalization” and outright legalization. Turns out marijuana was a “gateway drug” and the marketing always starts with “The war on drugs has been lost,” which is a lie. Just turns out that drugs are big money and government wants in on the trillion-dollar BigPharma economy. If it really heats up like it did in Colombia, BigPharma and lots of Pablo Escobar lookalikes will end up running the United States. Some states are going to use the tax money for drug treatment programs which leads to number 6:

6.   “Medication Assisted Treatment” is now being heavily promoted as a treatment for addictions of all kinds: opioid addiction, sex addiction, videogame addiction, food addiction, ad infinitum. And while most of these addictions don’t exist, the psychs say addiction is a chronic brain disease and there’s no cure so addicts must be put on other drugs like methodone, which are paid for by medical insurance, and maintained on those drugs for the rest of their lives. So BigPharma, — which controls the FDA and will soon control Congress, the POTUS, political PACs and so on – will control the solution to the problem of addiction.

7.   The polarization of politics, fights of religious freedom vs. gender equity, and other nasty infighting will most likely be resolved when the parties stirring it up are uncovered, but in the meantime, the stirring up is most likely a distraction to pull attention away from the medicalizing of America and the growth of BigPharma, the psychs and the economic systems fueling it.

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Electricity and the Deep Brain Stimulation Medicine Show

brainMedicine shows of decades gone by promised their snake oil could cure everything and promoted dangerous drugs like opium to calm children and cocaine for toothache. Asthma cigarettes promised relief from asthma, bad breath, hay fever, bronchial irritation, colds, canker sores, and “all diseases of the throat.” Bayer sold heroin for aches and pains, and amphetamines and tapeworm larvae were sold as weight-loss remedies.

Electricity is the modern snake oil, but electricity and people don’t mix very well, which is why parents tell kids not to stick a butter knife in the light socket.

When I was a kid, growing up on a dairy, we took our city cousins down to the electric fence and have them touch it. It was fun to see them get shocked. My brother and I always tried to get them to pee on the fence but the cousins always got suspicious when they saw the looks on our faces and we never got any takers. The point is we knew electricity hurt, was punishing and even cows avoided it. I wish to apologize to my cousins and anyone who fell for our electricity trick, and bring up a kind of electricity that is supposed to be good for you.

Today something called deep brain stimulation is supposed to cure all kinds of things such as:

Sexual predation
Memory Loss
Tourette’s Syndrome
Gambing
Autism
Parkinson’s Disease
Epilepsy and Movement Disorders
Depression
Anxiety

Now if all this turns out to be today’s snake oil — and IMHO it is — and all else fails, psychiatrists can just just pour the juice to the head the old fashioned way, shock the hell out of the person and roll the dice, after all, this isn’t rocket science. Hey, you may roll a seven, or the guy could – like Ernest Hemingway did after 15 electroshocks – put a shotgun in his mouth and blow the top of his head off. Certainly ended his mental issues.

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Deep Brain Stimulation, LSD and Other Fake Cure-Alls

greed pixabayMaybe you’ve noticed lately that “scientific research shows” that electricity and LSD cures almost everything. There are many factors pushing this stupidity, among which are:

  1. Pharmaceutical company miracle cures such as antidepressants and antipsychotic drugs don’t cure anything and don’t work any better than placebos.
  2. Those miracle cures have side effects such as mass shootings and suicide.
  3. Those miracle cures are being replaced by generics thus threatening the $1 trillion (with a T) BigPharma revenues.
  4. Scientific research” isn’t very scientific, as it is influenced by vested interests which either show that BigPharma works or are quietly disposed of, and can’t be replicated when done objectively.
  5. So BigPharma, loaded with jewels and treasure, is hopping off the sinking USS Antidepressant, and onto the luxury yacht “PsychoWire” powered by deep brain stimulation and psychedelics.

First, Deep Brain Stimulation

Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) puts electrodes into the brain at various places. When the current is turned on, fingers tap, legs jerk, faces twitch, a charging bull screeches to a stop. Supposedly, depression departs, autism and anxiety evaporate, Parkinson’s stops and such diseases as diabetes, asthma, COPD, arthritis, heart conditions, and gastrointestinal diseases are cured. One variety called “electroceuticals” is pioneered by GlaxoSmithKline, the same company that in 2012 paid $3 billion to the Department of Justice for fraud, phony research studies and pushing drugs off label for kids even though those drugs increased suicides in kids. Nice ethical company has your best interests at heart, let them put some wires in your head, right? Oh and the $3 billion was small change. Right after their $3 billion payout, their stock went up, didn’t even make a dent in the stock price. So they can cheat, steal etc. and even if they’re caught, so what?

  1. Deep brain stimulation was already used in the CIA’s MKULTRA mind-control project in the 1950s. That was secret, but even though CIA Director Richard Helms tried to burn all records of the project, he missed some and the project was exposed. The military was worried about North Korean brainwashing and secretly funded research to keep up with the communists. Today the military is funding electroceutical research this time out in front of God and everybody, because it is camouflaged as help for PTSD, crazy people, etc. But hey, it’s the military, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
  2. There’s another kind of electrical stimulation of the brain called Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) kind of a little sister to implanting wires in the head. It has the advantage of being non-invasive, meaning it’s stealthy and doesn’t require the operator to drill through the skull which can sometimes be detected by the person. So it could be hooked up to a doorframe and magnetically stimulate the brains of anybody coming through the door. Make you buy BigPharma stock, or vote to raise taxes for psychiatric research.
  3. And then of course there’s the nuclear option when it comes to electricity and brains, just give the person electroshock, roll the dice and maybe the person will be so stunned he’ll forget to be nuts, or he might – as Ernest Hemingway did after 15 electroshocks – go home and put a shotgun in his mouth and blow his head off. These days they give muscle relaxants so not so many teeth or spines are broken. It’s a kindler-gentler type of electroshock but it causes brain damage and that – like suicide – brings on many changes.

And Then There’s Psychedelics

Have you noticed the promotion of psychedelics recently? Since most Baby Boomer druggies can’t remember the 1960s, many have forgotten – except in vivid flashbacks – the downside of dropping acid and lots of other psychedelic concoctions. Little things like hallucinations and going nuts for a while or forever, and “scorched brain syndrome.”

Timothy Leary told us to “turn on, tune in and drop out,” but later said that LSD got into the public arena and was abused. Poor guy, he had it all figured out that it would only be used by PhDs and above, and then the unwashed masses got hold of it and used it to hallucinate. The CIA used it to drive soldiers crazy and to suicide, and stupid people who grew up watching Superman thought they could fly off tall buildings wearing meat bodies.

OK, so that was then. Today we also have stupid people – who exist in every generation – telling us that LSD, Ahuasca, DMT and other psychedelic substances can cure addictionPTSDdepression,   anxietyeating disorders,smoking, OCDcrime, toe fungus, warts,  and every other mental illness formerly treated by pharmaceuticals which have proven ineffective or for which the patents have expired.

But using LSD, for example on those with mental illness can make things worse, according to some sources Stupid people in academia — there are such people, after all Leary was a Harvard professor –  in the military, medicine, psychiatry and government seem to have decided that psychedelics, electroshock and mental health pharmaceuticals are useful, at least to the extent that “we don’t know why they are troubled, and we don’t know what these treatments do, so we’ll just roll the dice, blast their brains  with electricity or pickle them with drugs and see what happens. After all, this isn’t rocket science.”

So a bunch of states have legalized marijuana for medical use, and eight states have legalized it for recreational use. And as evidence it is truly a “gateway drug” small amounts of hard drugs have now been decriminalized in Oregon – stuff like  LSD, heroin, methamphetamine, etc, and initiatives are under way in California  and Oregon to legalize psychedelic mushrooms.

Now the The Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies  (MAPS) is also trying to legalize psychedelics and marijuana, and other stupid people are already hard at work on legislation to legalize bad trips and drug-induced psychosis. With all these extravagant claims for psychedelics, these magical mystery cures, one might be advised to consider where these wild claims are coming from and who stands to profit from a nation on drugs.

After all, most of the studies, that all these reports of wonderfulness depend on, can’t be reproduced, meaning they are either sloppy or influenced by their funding to get a specific result. So look for yourself and don’t go dropping acid to cheer up, because you may end up stuck in Nightmare Town with a lot of burnouts from the 1960s.

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Military Mind Control Chips — What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

Soldier PixabayThe U.S. military is testing mind control chips on humans. The chips can supposedly sense a mood disorder and “shock the brain” back into normalcy. Might be somewhat useful, since the Army is now accepting mental cases as soldiers. Take unstable people, give them weapons, teach them to kill, expose them to the stress of combat, shock their brains a few times — what could possibly go wrong?

The last time the U.S. did something as psychotic as this, was in a project called MKULTRA. You may have heard of it. Killed an elephant with LSD, drove a guy named Olsen to suicide, implanted electrodes in veterans’ brains to control their bodies, all kinds of crazy experimentation. The purpose, according to the U.S. Supreme Court, was mind control, and here we go again, down the rabbit hole.

This just in: The FDA has opened the door to screwing around with LSD and other psychedelics, the Army is filling soldiers with speed, and is experimenting with genetics to engineer supersoldiers.

So picture unstable drugged-up soldiers with electronics in their heads wielding superweapons. It’s like some really bad sci-fi story, only this is real.

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Could the Guys With Tinfoil on their Heads be Right?

crazy pixabayHey, maybe the guys with tinfoil on their heads are right! We discovered recently that the NSA was tapping our phones, reading our e-mails and using facial identification and license plate cameras to track our whereabouts. And now for those who object to that and are labeled paranoid by the headshrinkers, there’s a new Abilify pill that reports in from the stomach.

I guess it’s for those guys who can hide pills under their tongues and it’s too much trouble for junior headshrinkers to get out the tongue depressor and go looking. As could be expected, however, worries surfaced that Abilify patients who may be paranoid for some reason might get worse knowing that there’s a little pill in their stomach reporting in saying something like”I’ve been swallowed.”

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188 Electrodes + Juice = Hallucinations

SkullIf you like hallucinations, this is the treatment for you. Implant 188 electrodes in your brain, turn on the juice and you too could see phantom faces on everything.  But don’t drive while hallucinating, as it’s better to see reality through the windshield. More screwing around with brains and electricity, don’t try this at home, or anywhere else.

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The Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation Railroad

robot pixabayYou take 200 depressed people, implant wires into their brains. Half of the implants you charge with electricity, half you don’t, to get a good control group. Results? A flop, but some people want to keep the implants after the test. Why? Well, as studies have established, depressed people feel better when people ask them how they feel, with a live person running their fingers through those wires in the head. Ethics aside, the big question is – who will pay for these implants, the follow ups, the flashlight batteries, and after the subject’s demise the autopsy, brain slicing and microscopy?

The patients won’t be paying, because as psychiatry transitions from pharmaceuticals that don’t work to implants that won’t work (electroceuticals they are called) bigpharma needs trillion-dollar revenues to overcome generic drug competition, expiring patents, the gradually rising specter of drug side effects such as mass murder, and basically, the fact that popular drugs like antidepressants don’t work, or work only because of “the placebo effect.” And to fund this transition we’re talking big money, that can only come from Medicare, the Veterans Administration, insurance companies or best of all, a single-payer health care system that operates on “from each according to ability, to each according to need.”

This is the beginning, IMHO, of a drive to get deep brain implants, and their cousins, “transcranial magnetic stimulation” paid for not as freaky science experiments but as legitimate treatments for mental and physical disorders. And that means some big bucks, in the “Trillion-with-a-T” range. In exchange, perhaps we can one day plug into our computers and learn to play the piano or dance the tethered tango.

In the meantime, to get us accustomed to the idea, we’re already implanting RFID dog-tracking chips in people for their own good and to give them immediate access to buy stuff from the snack machine, login to computers and use pay toilets. It’s like those spy movies where the guy — to get off the grid — must dig a tracking chip out of his arm with a steak knife.

First to get the implants will be guys with big federal government pockets. Veterans with VA benefits and PTSD, most likely, on lifetime subscription plans paid for by adding to our Chinese debt. Anyway, we’re being railroaded down the track of bad ideas fueled by good sci-fi movies. And – I have to do this – as the Borg always said, “resistance is futile.

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An Open Letter to Dr. Joshua Gordon, Director NIMH

Dr. Joshua Gordon
Director, National Institute of Mental Health
25 Oct. 2017

Dear Dr. Gordon,

I was encouraged by something you said in an interview with the Washington Post recently:

“All these off-label uses of any of our psychiatric medications result from desperation on the part of both patients and physicians who don’t know what else to do for their patients . . . The evidence for any of them is nonexistent or minimal. But we don’t have good alternatives. We don’t have evidence-based treatments that really do the job. So that means that people turn to whatever can help them in a symptomatic way . . . It’s a problem that’s borne out of the fact that our treatments just don’t work, or don’t work well, for a substantial fraction of our patients.”

Many people have decried the use of antidepressants, for example, as studies show them being only slightly more efficacious than placebos, increasing the incidence of “suicidality,” significantly increasing the risk of death, and when taken by pregnant women, increasing the incidence of mental illness in their children. And while most of these studies were fairly recent, pharmaceutical companies have for some time not been reporting negative effects of their products.

Research does show that simple measures such as cutting sugar from the diet, and engaging in exercise do help reduce depression, have few side effects and cost patients or the treasury little to nothing.

I hope you will have the interest and ability help transition the psychiatric profession back to talk therapy, and off the money train of harmful, ineffective and expensive pharmaceuticals. Your own agency found that simple postcards and phone calls reduced the risk of suicide in patients as effectively as other more harmful treatments.

Also it seems that as pharmaceuticals become less popular, psychiatry is reverting to “electroceuticals” psychedelics and electroconvulsive therapy. I say reverting, because in the 1960s the MKULTRA project investigated these same methods as mind control techniques. Electroceuticals, for example, as developed by Dr. Jose Manuel Rodriguez Delgado for MKULTRA were then called “Stimoceivers” and “Chemitrodes.” Please look elsewhere for remedies.

Thanks, and good luck on your new post.

Best,

Wayne Edward Hanson
wehanson@aol.com

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What’s Wrong with Mixing Electricity and Brains?

Danger pixabayMost people are familiar with movies about drugs, hypnosis, electroshock and so forth that are used to manipulate and control human beings. But they’re science fiction, right? Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, The Terminal Man, The Matrix, Total Recall, The Manchurian Candidate all feture stories about mental manipulation and control.

A little closer to reality One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest showed how electroconvulsive therapy can be used to control and suppress human beings. It was filmed at the Oregon State Hospital in Salem, and created a wave of revulsion against electroshock that continues today, and is one obstacle  that electroshock advocates must hurdle.

You may be surprised to discover that there are electroshock advocates who are still zapping brains. Most people think the practice died out in the early 1960s, back when author Ernest Hemingway had 15 electroshock treatments, went home, put a shotgun in his mouth and blew the top of his head off.

But psychiatrists are still putting electrodes on the sides of people’s heads and shooting current through their brains. About 100,000 people per year endure the process. Those advocates  make it seem nicer these days, they put the patient to sleep first, and inject them with muscle relaxant so that they don’t break so many teeth and bones from spasms and contractions. Some even load up the body with insulin to make it go into convulsions. It has the advantage of reducing the electric bill, just an overdose of insulin and presto, you have a dazed and confused person who doesn’t seem so crazy.

Electricity even when used with good intentions often  ends up in the heavy hands of control. We’ve used jolts of electricity as punishment in many ways. Electric cattle fences, cattle prods, tasers, electric shock collars for dogs, etc. Ivar Lovaas, a UCLA professor who died in 2010 began putting autistic kids barefooted on electrical wires. He’d turn on the current until they did something non-autistic, then he’d turn off the current. On off, on off,like a light switch  over and over to condition the dog – or children rather – to act less autistic. Slaps, yelling, etc. were also used but electricity was the centerpiece.

And now, with the advance of technology, we’ve got subtle and not so subtle ways of using electricity to control others. Surveillance technology from closed circuit cameras to electronic ankle bracelets, GPS monitoring of cell phone locations, etc. But perhaps the most intrusive new technology is putting wires in people’s brains in something the  psychs call deep brain stimulation. This electrical stimulation of the brain – like electroshock – has its own 1950s bad example.

In the early 1950, it was a secret government project called MKULTRA – don’t worry, this is not “tinfoil on head”  stuff – here’s a document from the Supreme Court describing the program: “Between 1953 and 1966,” said the Supreme Court, “the Central Intelligence Agency financed a wide-ranging project, code-named MKULTRA, concerned with ‘the research and development of chemical, biological, and radiological materials capable of employment in clandestine operations to control human behavior.’” One project in MKULTRA was controlling the human mind with chemical and electrical brain implants. It was spurred by the Cold War and the idea was to figure out how to control the enemy’s minds and save money on bullets.

Since the project was bound to create outrage if discovered, it was kept secret for a while and when it was exposed, the CIA Director destroyed most of the records. But enough data leaked out that it was pretty big news.

Since secret government projects often appear on Wikileaks,  this time around — in my opinion — a project similar to MKULTRA  is being conducted in the open, albeit under cover of how electricity, wired into the brain, can  cure brain diseases, epilepsy, speed up learning and so forth. It’s funded by the Department of Defense. Sound familiar? The keyword is “electroceuticals,” a combination of “electricity” and “pharmaceuticals.” And DARPA the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is funding it.

Another idea is to control minds with wireless electricity, so much less messy. There could be little emitters all up and down the streets making everyone very passive, or happy or normal. But that sounds like science fiction again.

So when you hear about these marvelous new techniques in which electricity makes athletes stronger, makse students smarter, makes epilepsy disappear, stops compulsions and obsessions, and cures all sorts of intractable diseases — just stop a minute and remember that this stuff can be — and probably will be — used for some new and exotic flavor of mind control.

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