What they have come up with has already been dubbed "the mourning after pill." Propranalol, if taken immediately following a traumatic event, can subdue a victim's stress response and so soften his or her perception of the memory. That does not mean the memory has been erased, but proponents claim that the drug can render it emotionally toothless.
If your daughter were raped, the argument goes, wouldn't you want to spare her a traumatic memory that might well ruin her life? As the mother of a 23-year old daughter, I can certainly understand the appeal of that argument. And a drug that could prevent the terrible effects of traumatic injuries in soldiers? If I were the parent of a soldier suffering from such a life-altering injury, I can imagine being similarly persuaded....
But is it moral to weaken memories of horrendous acts a person has committed? Some would say that there is no difference between offering injured soldiers penicillin to prevent an infection and giving a drug that prevents them from suffering from a posttraumatic stress injury for the rest of their lives. Others, like Leon Kass, former chairman of the President's Council on Bioethics, object to propranolol's use on the grounds that it medicates away one's conscience. "It's the morning-after pill for just about anything that produces regret, remorse, pain or guilt," he says. Barry Romo, a national coordinator for Vietnam Veterans Against the War, is even more blunt. "That's the devil pill," he says. "That's the monster pill, the anti-morality pill. That's the pill that can make men and women do anything and think they can get away with it. Even if it doesn't work, what's scary is that a young soldier could believe it will."
Isn't this amazing! Instead of resolving not to go to war unless it is absolutely necessary to protect one's family and country, our leaders go to war whenever they feel like it and then find a medication to limit the negative impact on the fighters who aren't killed.
This isn't really that surprising. We already put children in education programs they are unsuited for and then drug them because they can't sit still, because changing the educational system would not be easy.
We already overwork and stress parents out to the point they can't provide effective parenting to their children and then we call the children depressed or bipolar or hyperactive and drug them, because helping parents with social programs or economic assistance or parenting classes would not be easy.
We already have an economy that suits the aggressive and competitive and unethical so that fewer workers are needed and then when millions are laid off and become depressed we give them antidepressants, because changing the economy and making it more humane would not be easy.
Now that war has become the norm, we must find pills to limit the psychological effects of its horrors on the warriors, when the logical solution would be not to start unnecessary wars in the first place.
But that would not be easy, because it would not be very profitable.
