Drugs and control

During our last lesson, we talked about drugs. I found this lesson very interesting, especially when we talked about the relationship between drugs and intellectuals at the beginning of the 20th century, like Aldous Huxley. In his most famous work Brave New World, in which society lives apparently an age of prosperity and stability (some kind of futuristic utopia) a drug called soma plays a fundamental role to avoid self-consciousness and guarrantee the eternal stability of the system. Soma is the perfect drug: It permits you to take holidays away from your stressful life and you never suffer any kind of hang-over, physical and psychological effects. Soma is so important in this society that workers earn it instead of money. With the control of people by this drug, the absolute government of the utopia does not have to worry about rebellious thoughts. In the lesson, we can see how governments tried to realise Huxley “utopia” (we can call it distopia, probably it is more correct) and tried to find the perfect drug to manipulate population (well, they do not find it at the end, but TV could be effective in the same way). We saw some experiments in british soldiers with LSD ( Lysergic Acid Diethylamide) and we could read about how some soldiers of Vietnam war claimed for drugs to endure that hell.