UN World Drug Report
http://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/world_drug_report.html
UN World Drug Report 2006
Some 200 million people, or 5 percent of the global population age 15-64, have used illicit drugs at least once in the last 12 months. Among this population are people from almost every country on earth. More people are involved in the production and trafficking of illicit drugs and still more are touched by the devastating social and economic costs of this problem. Partially a consequence of its pervasiveness and partially a consequence of the illicit and hidden nature of the problem, reliable analysis and statistics on the production, trafficking and use of illicit drugs are rare.
The World Drug Report 2006 endeavours to fill this gap. It provides one of the most comprehensive overviews of illicit drug trends at the international level. In addition, it presents a special thematic chapter on cannabis, by far the most widely produced, trafficked and used drug in the world. The analysis of trends, some going back 10 years or more, is presented in Volume 1. Detailed statistics are presented in Volume 2. Taken together, these volumes provide the most up-to-date view of today's illicit drug situation.
Volume 1
Contents Preface Explanatory notes Executive Summary Chapter 1. Trends in World Drug Markets 1.1. The evolution of the world drug problem 1.2. The outlook for world drug markets 1.3 Opium / Heroin market 1.4 Coca / Cocaine market 1.5 Cannabis market 1.6 Amphetamine-type stimulants Chapter 2. Cannabis: Why we should care 2.1. Introduction 2.2. The world's biggest drug market is growing and uncharted cannabis is produced in their countries, and their other 2.3. The emergence of 'new cannabis' and the reassessment of health risks 2.4. Conclusion Annex 1 - The plant and the drug Annex 2 - Estimating yield Annex 3 - Estimating individual consumption
Volume 2
Chapter 3. Production 3.1. Opium / Heroin 3.2. Coca / Cocaine 3.3. Cannabis 3.4. Amphetamine-type stimulants 3.5. Other Drugs Chapter 4. Seizures 4.1 Opiates: Seizures, 1998-2003 4.2 Cocaine: Seizures, 1998-2003 4.3 Cannabis: Seizures, 1998-2003 4.4 Amphetamine-type stimulants: Seizures, 1998-2003
Chapter 5. Prices 5.1. Opiates: Whole, street prices and purity levels 5.2. Cocaine: Wholesale, street prices and purity levels 5.3. Cannabis: Wholesale, street prices and purity levels 5.4. ATS: Wholesale, street prices and purity levels Chapter 6. Consumption 6.1. Annual Prevalence of drug abuse 6.2. Treatment demand Chapter 7. Methodology


Mand. Minimums
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/23/AR2006062301261.html
Undo This Legacy of Len Bias's Death
By Eric E. Sterling and Julie Stewart Saturday, June 24, 2006; A21 Washington Post

When Len Bias, the basketball star, overdosed on cocaine 20 years ago, Len Bias, the symbol, was born. To many he symbolized the corruption of college athletics -- stars whose academic performance is poor, if not irrelevant, but who are essential to bringing in donations and other revenue. To others, he became the object lesson: Cocaine is dangerous, don't do it, you can die. For yet others, Bias symbolizes the danger that arises when a powerful symbol overwhelms careful judgment about what ought to be the law.
Immediately after Bias's death, the speaker of the House of Representatives, Thomas P. "Tip" O'Neill Jr., from the Boston area (where Bias had just signed with the Celtics), issued a demand to his fellow Democrats for anti-drug legislation. Senior congressional staffers began meeting regularly in the speaker's conference room as practically every committee in the House wrote Len Bias-inspired legislation attacking the drug problem. News conferences around the Capitol featured members of Congress extolling their efforts to clamp down on cocaine and crack.
One result was the innocuous-sounding Narcotics Penalties and Enforcement Act, which became the first element of the enormous Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, hurried to the floor a little over two months after Bias's death. But the effect of the penalties and enforcement legislation was to put back into federal law the kind of clumsy mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenses that had been done away with 16 years before. And there they remain, 20 years and several hundred thousand defendants later.
Congress wanted to send several messages by again enacting mandatory minimums: to the Justice Department to be more focused on high-level traffickers; to major traffickers that the new penalties would destroy them; to the voters that members of Congress could fight crime as vigorously as the police and prosecutors. But Congress garbled the message. Instead of targeting large-scale traffickers, it established low-level drug quantities to trigger lengthy mandatory minimum prison terms: five grams (the weight of five packets of artificial sweetener), 50 grams (the weight of a candy bar), 500 grams (the weight of two cups of sugar) or 5,000 grams (the weight of a lunchbox of cocaine). Large-scale traffickers organize shipments of drugs totaling tons -- many millions of grams -- filling tractor-trailers, airplanes and fishing boats.
The Justice Department has compounded the problem by focusing on countless low-level offenders. The U.S. Sentencing Commission reports that only 15 percent of federal cocaine traffickers can be classified as high-level. Seventy percent are low-level. One-third of all federal cocaine cases involve an average of 52 grams, a candy bar-sized quantity of cocaine, resulting in an average sentence of almost nine years in prison without parole.
Not surprisingly, the federal prison population has exploded. From 1954 to 1976, it fluctuated between 20,000 and 24,000. By 1986 it had grown to 36,000. Today it exceeds 190,000 prisoners, up 527 percent in 20 years. More than half this population is made up of drug offenders, most of whom are serving sentences created in the weeks after Len Bias died.
Sadly, the nation's drug abuse situation is not much better after 20 years. Teenagers are using very dangerous drugs at twice the rate they did in the 1980s. The price of cocaine is much lower and the purity much higher, which tells us that the traffickers have become more efficient.
There is a trickle of hope that mandatory sentences as a legacy of Bias's death might come to an end. A handful of conservative members of the House Judiciary Committee have begun to question the wisdom of current mandatory minimum sentencing laws, and some vote against them. The first round of mandatory minimums for drug offenses, enacted in 1951, was repealed almost 20 years later, with bipartisan support. Among those who backed repeal was George H.W. Bush, then a congressman from Texas. With his son in the White House, this would be a good time for history to repeat itself, and for this sad legacy of Len Bias's death to finally end.
Eric E. Sterling, counsel to the House Judiciary Committee from 1979 to 1989, is president of the Criminal Justice Policy Foundation. Julie Stewart is president of Families Against Mandatory Minimums.


drug scare films
http://www.somethingweird.com/>
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Classroom Scare Films V01: Drug Horrors! Weed, Up Pills Down Pills, Boozers, Keep Off the Grass, Drugs and the Nervous System, Heroin!
During the Great White Suburban Drug Scare of the late sixties / early seventies, parents, educators, and corporate sponsors banded together in an effort to scare American teens away from getting high. It might be argued that the weird and often hysterical propaganda films that emerged from this era created more drug abuse than they prevented.
Nevertheless, here's a handful of Classroom Scare Films from a groovy by-gone era that will fascinate and entertain you from beginning to end...
This VOLUME begins with Weed (color), a non-biased look at marijuana, complete with timelapse footage of cannabis poking out of the soil and springing forth.
Following is Ups / Downs (color) which is all about the wonders of amphetamines and barbiturates. The interview about the drugs' effects with the Adam Duritz/Robert Heges stand-in offers nothing more than a drug-addled mumble, but watch for the Monty Python-esque animation and the scene in which scientists give speed to a spider to see what sort of wacky web it will weave.
Boozers and Users (color), an all-inclusive booze-nicotine-pot rant is next, with a leisure-suited narrator introducing such elements as a Marcia Brady-like teenage alkie raiding Mom's purse for apple wine money, an amph addict that looks exactly like Nick Cage in Con Air, and a debate on pot's addictive nature between two stereotypical black construction workers: Man, I hear that marijuana can really mess up yo' head!
Hemp is again explored and deplored in Keep off the Grass (color), in which a bald father tries to dissuade his son from lighting up. But all the artists and writers use it! the little boy says in defense. Dad asks him to read all the facts, handing him a special issue of Life, to which the son scoffs, Aw, man, establishment propaganda? To get the true facts, the kid tags along with stoner buddy Mack, who takes him on a tour of a garden pot party, a head shop, and the residence of a psychedelic poster artist named Waco.
The effects of household drugs on the brain are painstakingly explained in Drugs and the Nervous System (color) through crappy, line-drawing cartoons. During the section on aspirin, a boy is shown rolling in bed, his face all a-flush with sweat, leading us to believe that either aspirin really works or he's just had the best self-sex of his life.
Then at the darkest end of the drug spectrum is the gritty docudrama Scag (color). Spend a day in the depressing lives of Toni and Robby, two strung-out junkies from different sides of the tracks, who candidly explain how they got where they are. You feel like selling your own mother, and would... if someone would buy her.
From 16mm devil's-weed prints.
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Classroom Scare Films V03: More Drug Horrors! People vs. Pot, The Trip Back, Marijuana Driving and You, Smoky Joe's High Ride, No Smoking, Marijuana the Hidden Danger.
You no doubt remember sitting in grade school, struggling to stay awake as the rickety film projector unspooled one of many god-awful educational shorts the library owned, full of good intentions but bad fashions, with the message always overshadowed by the amateurish acting and the decades-old decor. Now you can recreate those warm memories from the comfort of your own couch with Something Weird Video's extensive and exclusive line of Classroom Scare Films! Wacky tobaccy is targeted as Public Enemy No. 1 in this uproarious collection of six films from the decadent sixties to the just-say-no eighties.
The People vs. Pot (b&w) has its own jaunty theme song, sung by a Neil Diamond soundalike: Pot! Pot! Gimme some pot! Forget what you are, you can be what you're not! Pretty soon, you've got servicemen in hypnotic trances, choking on their own vomit.
Following is The Trip Back (color), a sermon delivered by a fiftyish ex-dope fiend/whore who happens to be the most annoying Jewish princess ever committed to film. Her tirade to an auditorium of visibly frightened school children seems like one long run-on sentence in which she tries to convince the kids she was fly, ridicules those who dare question her generalizations, and addresses some of the crowd as you Negro girls.
Smoky Joe's Highride (color) is about a new video game, the object of which is to get the toke-taking hero and his carpool of pals across town without killing pedestrians. Making extensive use of animation, this is like Reefer Madness for the Pac-Man crowd.
In a series of testimonials by clean-cut, drug-addled teens in NYC, The Losers (b&w) start out by sniffing glue and smoking pot, move on to bennies and mainlining smack, and eventually end up in prison or the mental hospital. And the biggest lesson: never, ever put Mr. Rat in a glass cage slathered with airplane glue, he won't be very much fun to play with later.
In No Smoking (color), an omniscient voice warns viewers not to suck on those little paper incinerators. Look for the most laughable crotchety-old-man-catches-couch-on-fire-with-cigarette sequence in cinema history.
Lastly, Marijuana: The Hidden Danger (color) is a man-on-the-street type of news story, filmed at a time in America when men sported Steve Rubell haircuts and everything was brown. See the crazed Rhesus monkeys!
From 16mm pot-headed prints.
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Classroom Scare Films V05: Even More Drug Horrors! Marijuana, Narcotics - The Inside Story, Focus on Heroin, Thinking About Drinking, The PCP Story!
Awwwwww, freak out! Noted Percocet hound SONNY BONO, replete in shiny orange suit, dishes about Marijuana (color) and how its user are cooler than those square and unhip alcoholics. Still, the film illustrates the downsides to grass, such as seeing yourself in a mirror with a spooky monster mask, careening off a cliff, or in the case of one Nigerian pusher executed. You also see a monkey taking bong hits in a lab, which is, quite frankly, priceless.
But Narcotics: The Inside Story (color) almost goes one better by showing you a bunch of rats hopped-up on pills, which is far more entertaining than watching the CGI antics of Stuart Little; followed by happy-go-lucky teenagers enjoying a seemingly unrelated beach blanket barbecue featuring a rather milquetoast volleyball game and weenie roast.
A sleepy, sweater-clad DAVID HARTMAN narrates Focus on Heroin (color), which addresses that nagging argument that milk leads to heroin use. (Huh?!) After playing a quick round of Spot the Addict, he takes us to the ghetto to rap with some dudes jonesin' for smack.
If you're Thinking About Drinking (color), this little film makes it all the more attractive with appealing Colorform-type illustrations. The narrator offers up this fun fact: It takes less alcohol to affect smaller people. Translation: Drink up, fatties!
The PCP Story (color) interviews several (ab)users, all of whom look like Aerosmith roadies. One snaggle-toothed chick says she likes the drug because, I can laugh and be goofy. At least it doesn't make her look like Eric Stoltz from Mask, as one user who is interviewed during his trip. He's asked how he feels; he answers with a smile, I'm being photographed!
Rounding out this chemical collection are trailers from feature-length scare flicks, including The Pusher, Marijuana, The People Next Door, and Mary Jane, the latter starring (of all people) FABIAN. Hey, if Sonny can do it...
From 16mm drug-induced prints.
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Classroom Scare Films V07: Drugs and Beyond! Narcotics Part I: Goof Balls and Tea (1957, color), Beyond LSD (1967, color), Narcotics: Pit of Despair (1967, color), Marijuana The Great Escape (1968, color), Drug Addiction (1951, b&w)
Jonesing for some more comical tirades against mind-altering substances? Then tie one off and shoot these five shorts directly into your vein... The oddly titled Narcotics Part I: Goof Balls and Tea (1957, color) is a police science film made to show cops what happens when kids get mixed up with chemicals. The goof ball has found a friend, says the narrator as another teen falls victim to the scourge. But this little film is most notable for basically showing you how to harvest your own weed farm, step by step!
Such an explanation would have the parents of Beyond LSD (1967, color), in a tizzy. They're seated in a suburban living room, appalled at a film of what they believe is a psychedelic LSD freakout. But Dr. Wright says, Now, let's simmer down, for the film was just an innocent school dance. The doc shuns them for jumping to conclusions, as well as the way they treat their kids. We see one guy berate his son thusly: Dad: I thought I told you to get a haircut! Son: I had to study for the test! Dad: It's always something! Another parent, hearing that shooters wear long-sleeve shirts to cover tracks, sneaks into her son's bedroom at night with a flashlight! One daughter tells her mom she shouldn't knock LSD if she hasn't tried it, to which the matronly woman quips, Well, I don't need syphilis to know I don't want it! Two points for Ma!
Narcotics: Pit of Despair (1967, color) equates drugs with being every bit as deadly as a snake. It stars a young KEVIN TIGHE (the poor man's Brian Dennehy, from TV's Emergency!) as John, a chisel-featured collegian who makes the mistake of befriending Pete, the local pusher, complete with werewolf-esque goatee. Pete takes John to what is perhaps the world's only drug party with streamers and balloons. Pete uses booze and floozies to convince John to blast off to kicksville! John looks at his first joint with the same wide-eyed awe as the characters in Jurassic Park did to the sight of dinosaurs, but turns out he smokes like a pro! Pretty soon, it's goodbye, school work and hello, heroin addiction!
The young star of Marijuana The Great Escape (1968, color) suffers an ever worse fate. He's a fuzzy-headed drag racer set for his first match behind the wheel. Too bad he gets involved with dope but at least he's kind enough to bail his druggie pals out of jail with his prize money. Shunning the advice of his mentor, George continues puffing so, of course, his story is bound to end in a flaming fireball of death on the racetrack and it does! The crash does not disappoint.
Last up is Drug Addiction (1951, b&w), made in the day when jalopy rides were considered fun. Through surreal animation, we see what opiates, marijuana and cocaine do to our bodies. Through outrageous filmed footage, we then see the results namely, junkies hitting kids over the head with 2-by-4s in broad daylight! See Marty fall prey to the habit! See Marty drink pop (and glass!) from a broken bottle! See Marty cut his mouth all up and have a good laugh about it! See Marty rush into the corner store to let loose a dose of drug-induced diarrhea!
From 16mm high-and-headed-to-hell prints.
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Classroom Scare Films V08: Drugs are Bad! Drug Abuse: The Chemical Tomb, Goof Balls and Tea, Drugs: Use or Abuse, Narcotics and Kids, The Seekers,
We've warned you before and we'll warn you again: Drugs are Bad! Need proof? Check out this 8th Volume of Classroom Scare Films and just say no!
Drug Abuse: The Chemical Tomb (color): Hippies dance barefoot while bongs and sitars blare on the soundtrack, and normal American youth are turned into deranged, chemically-fueled addicts. Yup, they're The Turned-On People who risk placing their psyche in peril. Ether, bennies, airplane glue, paint thinner, yellow jackets, red devils, blood reds, rainbows, hashish, acid, and pot - all explained by a Dr. JOHN T. BURROUGHS, Director of Narcotics Education for the Los Angeles District Attorney's Youth Advisory Council. Scary says, Tomb raiders!
Goof Balls and Tea (color): Mini-version of the classic Police-Science drug feature The Narcotics Story (also available from Something Weird Video) in which enthusiastic ART GILMORE narrates the sordid story of a sweet young bobby soxer in Small Town U. S. A. who ends up as a Hooker in Heroin Hell by way of goof balls and pot, parental neglect, skilled pimps, and a jones the size of Texas: Hooked! A monkey on her back! Hop head! Junkie! And where, you ask, do those vicious drug peddlers find their innocent victims? Why, at the local soda shop, of course! Flesh for junk never looked so cool. Scary says, Often the introduction comes in the form of a goof ball!
Drugs: Use or Abuse (color): Level-headed discussion of the drug problem - a rarity in this genre - still has enough funk-fueled Sixties weirdness to jump start any dying party and make the self-respecting viewer run for his bong. Scary-looking doctors give patients good drugs: These are hands you can trust. But, uh oh, young boys get high on bright red pills, and a young man lies dead across a table after sniffing a tube of airplane glue: Can you trust these drugs?! Scary says, Use it, abuse it!
Narcotics and Kids (color): Jaw-dropping classroom terror film featuring two highhaired Sixties-style female ex-junkies who lecture a bunch of kids and answer their dumb-ass questions: Some people say that taking drugs isn't any worse than drinking, like, five martinis. Is that right? Not only do the kids range in age from 6 to 16, but one of the former druggies looks like she's had a few blood reds to ease the awkwardness of the whole scene. Whether this was real or staged is of no consequence - this is the real deal: a Classroom Scare Film with the Midas Touch. Scary says, As good as it gets!
The Seekers (color): Classic New-York absurdity follows two goofy-looking former drug abusers chatting in a variety of locations with pretentious college kids who apparently love the sound of their own voice: The whole pot scene is one big game! You experience all these funny colors! I was really scared of girls! Most amusing of all is the chain smoking that goes on throughout the film, all the while getting bummed out about death by narcotics. It's almost impossible to explain the rock-headedness of this production. Sip it and see. Scary says, They call me The Seeker, I've been searching low and high! - Scary Ed



visual high

Press release from USC, followed by URL for article ----------
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2006-06/uosc-fk062006.php
'Thirst for knowledge' may be opium craving The brain's reward for getting a concept is a shot of natural opiates

Neuroscientists have proposed a simple explanation for the pleasure of grasping a new concept: The brain is getting its fix.
The "click" of comprehension triggers a biochemical cascade that rewards the brain with a shot of natural opium-like substances, said Irving Biederman of the University of Southern California. He presents his theory in an invited article in the latest issue of American Scientist.
"While you're trying to understand a difficult theorem, it's not fun," said Biederman, professor of neuroscience in the USC College of Letters, Arts and Sciences.
"But once you get it, you just feel fabulous."
The brain's craving for a fix motivates humans to maximize the rate at which they absorb knowledge, he said.
"I think we're exquisitely tuned to this as if we're junkies, second by second."
Biederman hypothesized that knowledge addiction has strong evolutionary value because mate selection correlates closely with perceived intelligence.
Only more pressing material needs, such as hunger, can suspend the quest for knowledge, he added.
The same mechanism is involved in the aesthetic experience, Biederman said, providing a neurological explanation for the pleasure we derive from art.
"This account may provide a plausible and very simple mechanism for aesthetic and perceptual and cognitive curiosity."
Biederman's theory was inspired by a widely ignored 25-year-old finding that mu-opioid receptors – binding sites for natural opiates – increase in density along the ventral visual pathway, a part of the brain involved in image recognition and processing.
The receptors are tightly packed in the areas of the pathway linked to comprehension and interpretation of images, but sparse in areas where visual stimuli first hit the cortex.
Biederman's theory holds that the greater the neural activity in the areas rich in opioid receptors, the greater the pleasure.
In a series of functional magnetic resonance imaging trials with human volunteers exposed to a wide variety of images, Biederman's research group found that strongly preferred images prompted the greatest fMRI activity in more complex areas of the ventral visual pathway. (The data from the studies are being submitted for publication.)
Biederman also found that repeated viewing of an attractive image lessened both the rating of pleasure and the activity in the opioid-rich areas. In his article, he explains this familiar experience with a neural-network model termed "competitive learning."
In competitive learning (also known as "Neural Darwinism"), the first presentation of an image activates many neurons, some strongly and a greater number only weakly.
With repetition of the image, the connections to the strongly activated neurons grow in strength. But the strongly activated neurons inhibit their weakly activated neighbors, causing a net reduction in activity. This reduction in activity, Biederman's research shows, parallels the decline in the pleasure felt during repeated viewing.
"One advantage of competitive learning is that the inhibited neurons are now free to code for other stimulus patterns," Biederman writes.
This preference for novel concepts also has evolutionary value, he added.
"The system is essentially designed to maximize the rate at which you acquire new but interpretable [understandable] information. Once you have acquired the information, you best spend your time learning something else.
"There's this incredible selectivity that we show in real time. Without thinking about it, we pick out experiences that are richly interpretable but novel."
The theory, while currently tested only in the visual system, likely applies to other senses, Biederman said.
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http://www.americanscientist.org/template/AssetDetail/assetid/50770


No Lie MRI
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v441/n7096/full/441918a.html
Nature 441, 918-919 (22 June 2006)
Special Report Lure of lie detectors spooks ethicists

US companies are planning to profit from lie-detection technology that uses brain scans, but the move to commercialize a little-tested method is ringing ethical and scientific alarm bells. Helen Pearson reports.
Bioethicists and civil-rights activists are calling into question plans by two US companies to single out liars by sliding them into a brain scanner and searching their brains for give-away patterns of deception.
The two firms say that they will give the accused a chance to prove their innocence using a technique more accurate than the discredited polygraph. No Lie MRI will start offering services out of Philadelphia this summer. Those behind the second company, Cephos, based in Pepperell, Massachusetts, say they hope to launch their technology later this year. Likely clients include people facing criminal proceedings and US federal government agencies, some of which already use polygraphs for security screening.
Critics say that the science underlying the companies' technique is shaky and that the premature commercialization of the method raises ethical concerns about its eventual use in interrogation. This week, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) entered the debate by organizing a 20 June briefing on the issues for scientists, the public, the press and policy-makers in Washington DC.
The field of lie detection is littered with dubious devices. The polygraph relies on the idea that lying is stressful, and so measures changes in heart rate, breathing and blood pressure. But because it can be duped by countermeasures and there is little hard evidence that it actually works, it is rarely admitted as evidence in court.
Rather than relying on indirect measures of anxiety, assessing brain activity using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) goes to the very source of the lie. In one of the earliest studies, a team led by Daniel Langleben of the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, and his colleagues offered students sealed envelopes containing a playing card and $20. The students were told they could keep the money if they could conceal which card they held when questioned in an MRI machine (D. D. Langleben et al. NeuroImage 15, 727–732; 2002).
These and other studies revealed that particular spots in the brain's prefrontal cortex become more active when a person is lying. Some of these areas are thought to be involved in detecting errors and inhibiting responses, backing the idea that suppressing the truth involves additional areas of the brain to telling it.
The early studies showed that it was possible to make out subtle changes in brain activity caused by deception using pooled data from a group of subjects. But to make a useful lie detector, researchers must be able to tell whether an individual is lying; when only one person is assessed it is much harder to tease out a signal from background noise. Langleben, who advises No Lie MRI, says he is now able to tell with 88% certainty whether individuals are lying (see Nature 437, 457; 2005). A group working with Cephos, led by Andrew Kozel, now at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, makes a similar claim.
Until we sort out the scientific, technological and ethical issues, we need to proceed with extreme caution.

Thought police
Kozel and his colleagues asked 30 subjects to take either a watch or a ring, hide it in a locker and then fib about what they had hidden when they were questioned inside a scanner. Using the results of this study, the team devised a computer model that focuses on three regions of the brain and calculates whether the shift in brain activity indicates lying. When the model was tested on a second batch of 31 people, the team reported that it could pick up lies in 90% of cases (F. A. Kozel et al. Biol. Psychiatry 58, 605–613; 2005)
But critics of the technology urge restraint. "Until we sort out the scientific, technological and ethical issues, we need to proceed with extreme caution," says Judy Illes of the Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics, California.
Caught out: lie detectors that use MRI scans (bottom) capture brains in the act of deception, whereas conventional methods rely on stress-induced changes such as fluctuating pulse rates (top).
One problem is that there is no standard way to define what deception is or how to test it. Scientists also say that some of the statistical analyses used in the fMRI studies are questionable or give results that are perilously close to the thresholds of significance. "On individual scans it's really very difficult to judge who's lying and who's telling the truth," says Sean Spence of the University of Sheffield, UK, who was one of the first to publish on the use of MRI in the study of deception. "The studies might not stand up to scrutiny over the long term."
Another concern raised by scientists and bioethicists is that the contrived testing protocols used in the laboratory — in which subjects are told to lie — cannot necessarily be extrapolated to a real-life scenario in which imprisonment or even a death sentence could be at stake. They say there are no data about whether the technique could be beaten by countermeasures, and that data collected from healthy subjects reveal little about the mindset of someone who genuinely believes they are telling the truth or someone who is confused, delusional or a pathological liar.
"If I'm a jihadist who thinks that Americans are infidels I'll have a whole different state of mind," says Gregg Bloche, an expert in biomedical ethics and law at Georgetown University Law Center, Washington DC, and a member of the ACLU panel. "We don't know how those guys' brains are firing."
Because of these concerns, legal experts say that the technology is unlikely to pass the standards of scientific accuracy and acceptance required for it to be admissible in a US court. But even if it is not sufficiently accurate and reliable today, it may well be tomorrow, as more and more people are tested and techniques refined. That raises a second set of concerns that revolve around who should be allowed to use the technique and under what circumstances.
Bioethicists worry that fMRI lie detection could quickly pass from absolving the innocent to extracting information from the guilty — in police questioning, immigration control, insurance claims, employment screening and family disputes. Their concerns are fuelled by other emerging lie-detection technologies, such as those that measure the brain's electrical activity (see Nature 428, 692–694; 2004).

Truth be told
Particularly in the aftermath of 11 September 2001, they worry that fMRI and other devices might be misused in the hands of the military or intelligence agencies. "There's enormous pressure coming from the government for this," says bioethicist Paul Root Wolpe at the University of Pennsylvania. "There is reason to believe a lot of money and effort is going into creating these technologies."
On top of this, ethicists say there is something deeply intrusive about peering into someone's brain in search of the truth; some even liken it to mind-reading. In future, they say, a suspect might be betrayed by their prefrontal cortex before they even open their mouth — if, for example, the brain recognizes a particular photo or foreign word. "This is the first time that we have ever been able to get information directly from the brain. People find the idea extraordinarily frightening," Wolpe says.
This is the first time that we have ever been able to get information directly from the brain. No Lie MRI founder Joel Huizenga and Cephos head Steven Laken say they are aware of both the scientific limitations and the ethical concerns. Laken says that the company only plans to use the technique with people and questioning protocols that are as similar as possible to those used in the study, and that he wants to work with attorneys to iron out problems along the way. "We really want to get the science right," Laken says. "We don't want to get to court and be killed."
In terms of the ethics, they point out that the test can only be used on those who consent — because an unwilling subject could easily foil the fMRI machine by simply moving or refusing to answer the questions. (Critics counter that just declining an fMRI test could be incriminating.) No Lie MRI has a licensing agreement for the technology from the University of Pennsylvania and Langleben says he would "yank their licence" if the company overstepped ethical boundaries.
Whatever the objections, the two companies say they are already receiving numerous enquiries from people eager to prove their innocence. Huizenga says that he has eight TV shows lined up to document some of the first customers' slide into the machines. The ultimate goal, he says, is to have franchises all over the world. These would collect MRI scans and beam data to the company's computers for central analysis. The company will charge $30 per minute for the scans, which might take one hour, plus additional fees for legal assistance and developing questions.
Some researchers feel that such plans are of only limited cause for concern. "Most people who do brain imaging think this is far too soon and that this will crash and burn," says Spence. "So it's not worth getting worked up about."
But bioethicists maintain that there needs to be far greater discussion, both within and beyond the scientific community, before the technology is unleashed. Stanford law professor Hank Greely organized a March workshop on lie detection and the law and is also a member of the ACLU panel. He suggests that an impartial agency should introduce a regulatory scheme that would prevent the use of MRI for lie detection until there was sufficient evidence to conclude that it was proven safe and effective — much as the US Food and Drug Administration bars or approves a drug.
Bioethicists add that neuroscientists in particular need to flag up some of the social and legal issues if they are to avoid fMRI earning a bad label. "The scientists involved in this have an absolute obligation to shepherd this technology," Wolpe says.