Drugged Future?

Are the tranquilizers and newer "psychic energizers" only the harbingers of a parade of drugs that will cure a wide variety of man's emotional disorders, increase and prolong his mental efficiency, perhaps decrease his need for sleep? This teaser from the psychochemist's dream world was presented last week by New York's Dr. Nathan S. Kline to a Chicago meeting of the American Pharmaceutical Manufacturers' Association. Eventually, said Dr. Kline, modifications of existing drugs, and others still to be discovered, should lead to progress in these areas:

HARDENING OF BRAIN ARTERIES and resulting mental deterioration in the aged. (This now causes 30% of admissions to New York's state hospitals and a vast number of milder, nonhospitalized cases.) Drugs could help by improving circulation in the brain, preventing extension of areas damaged by sclerosis, or stimulating the brain's repair mechanisms. Effective drugs for these purposes might outsell anything now on the market.

IMPAIRMENT OF MEMORY. Just as some hypnotics (like thiopental sodium) now used in psychiatry facilitate the recall of painful, repressed memories, it should be possible to find drugs to enable a wideawake subject to recall in detail precisely what he wants to.

DRUG ADDICTION. Iproniazid (TIME, Dec. 16) has already proved valuable in some cases of drug addiction, by relieving the depression which led to use of narcotics; it may help similarly in cases of alcoholism associated with depression.

EXTRASENSORY PERCEPTION : If there is anything to telepathy (which Dr. Kline did not concede), "the possibilities of [developing] a drug which will bring about 'heightened awareness' should not be overlooked/'

EXCESSIVE SLEEPFULNESS. "There are individuals who are obsessed by sleep, devoting a disproportionate amount of time to it ... One can only speculate as to why sleep is necessary at all, since no one as yet has demonstrated a biochemical or physiological explanation." A side effect of psychic energizers is that most patients find that they need only four or five hours' sleep a night; some have gone this way for a year with no fatigue. Dr. Kline tried iproniazid himself, found he could do two days' work in one. A good question, he said, is "what the world would do with a daily increase of six or eight billion man-hours of time, which would result if two billion people saved three or four hours of sleep every night."

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