science or something...

[juan]

"
Then came a big monster of an ambulance which took me from
Liverpool to Watertown and delivered me to a white-coated Army staff. A
young nurse volunteered to make me comfortable with a glass of orange
juice, to relieve my thirst, but at the bottom of the orange juice I saw an
unmistakable layer of undissolved white crystalline solids. I wasn't going
to be hoodwinked by a bunch of soldiers! The juice was obviously a
sophisticated cover-up for the administration of some dramatic sedative
or presurgical anesthetic which was expected to render me placid and
unconcerned about the medical procedures they had planned for me.

I resolved to prove my masculinity and control of the situation by
simply denying the white crystals their power. I would drink the whole
mixture down, but I would stay awake and alert. I would be wheeled into
the surgical bay as an attentive sailor who would challenge the Army
surgeons with analytical perception and penetrating questions which would
reveal to them the integrity of my mental status.

It didn't work. The drug that rested undissolved under my orange
juice was undeniably a pretty effective drug, because I succumbed to it
and went completely unconscious. I have no memory of the intravenous
Pentothal anesthetic that was administered to me for my surgery. And I
was later told of the unprecedented half-hour I required for recovery from
it.

The bone infection was surgically removed, and to this day my left
thumb is almost a half-inch shorter than my right.


.....Eventually I healed, and had to become reoriented to military reality, but in the mean-
time I had learned a couple of facts.


....The second fact was not expected at all, and it was this that
started me on my career as a psychopharmacologist. I was told that the
white "drug" which was undissolved at the bottom of my orange juice
glass, and which had finally plopped me over the line from being an
alert and defensive surgery candidate to being a comatose subject
available to any and all manipulation by the operating physician, was
nothing but undissolved sugar.

A fraction of a gram of sugar had rendered me unconscious, because I
had truly believed that it could do just that. The power of a simple placebo
to radically alter my state of consciousness impressed me deeply. 

The contribution of the mind to the observed action of a drug was certainly
real, and I decided it was possible that this contribution was a major one.
Over the intervening years, I have come to believe that the mind is the
major factor in defining a psychoactive drug's action. One has been taught
to assign the power of a drug to the drug itself, without considering the
person into whom it goes. A drug by itself can be a powder, a spoonful of
sugar, without any curative value whatsoever. But there is a personal
reality of the recipient of the drug that plays a major role in the definition
of the eventual interaction. Each of us has his own reality, and each of us
will construct his own unique drug-person relationship.
The shock of the juice led explore "