Pubdate: Sat, 30 Mar 2013
Source: National Post (Canada)
Copyright: 2013 Canwest Publishing Inc.
Contact: http://drugsense.org/url/wEtbT4yU
Website: http://www.nationalpost.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/286
Author: Sarah Boesveld

THE SEDUCTIVENESS OF FUTURE 'LOVE DRUGS'

Australian couples' therapist Adam Guastella sees it all the time:
that "repetitive loop" of talking around the problem at the heart of
their marital struggle, anything to avoid facing it head-on.

"Therapists are always waiting for an 'a-ha' moment, and we try lots
of things to create [it]," said the clinical psychologist and
principal research fellow at the University of Sydney's Brain and Mind
Research Institute.

Already an internationally recognized researcher for his discovery of
how oxytocin, a neurologically driven hormone, promotes emotional
understanding in youth with autism, Dr. Guastella had read with
interest about oxytocin's recent branding as a "love hormone" and,
likely in a few years time, a "love drug" - a future life preserver
for relationships on the rocks.

And so he ran a study: Over a three-week period, 40 Australian couples
took a hit of oxytocin (or a placebo) through a nasal spray before
starting couples' therapy.

The results aren't yet published, but the data show that with the help
of oxytocin, that repetitive loop breaks - couples recall memories
with more emotion and detail, they appear more open to the other
person's perspective, the fractured bond begins to rebuild, Dr.
Guastella said.

"If we can make it so that an 'a-ha' moment occurs, it's going to save
a lot of heartbreak, a lot of hostility between couples."

It's a seductive idea - that somewhere in the near future failing
marriages and partnerships can be rescued by manipulating our brains
to keep us from falling out of love.

In Canada, 40% of marriages are expected to end in divorce before
couples reach their 30th anniversary. Across the Western world, the
divorce rate hovers around 50%.

Along with oxytocin and the related bonding hormone vasopressin,
researchers are also taking a second look at the possible therapeutic
uses for MDMA, better known as the illegal party drug ecstasy.

But could a drug really rescue us from a life of heartache? And even
if it could, should we take it?

It's a new and polarizing set of questions for ethicists who are
increasingly wrestling with the collision of technological advances
and modern values and mores - questions that were wrestled with during
a debate at the University of Manitoba this week.

The debate, titled "Love Drugs: An Ethical Way to Achieve Intimacy," 
squared on whether these drugs are a good or bad idea. Would it rob a 
relationship of its authenticity or could it help people achieve 
their relationship goals if used in a safe, controlled setting?

While proponents say some couples may even have a moral obligation to
take the drug to keep a family together, skeptics worry society has
become overly quick to medicalize personality traits or social
behaviours that have long been considered natural - for example, the
recent firestorm over the inclusion of social anxiety disorder
(shyness) and major depressive disorder (a lengthy grieving period) in
the new DSM-5, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental
Disorders, which comes out in May.

"This is the grave danger, this is what I call putting the medical
cloak on things," said Margaret Somerville, the founding director of
the Centre for Medicine, Ethics and Law at McGill University. "When we
do that, we feel much more justified in intervening. We have the
impression that medicine does good and it doesn't do harm. And I think
we've got to be very careful about that."

Creating a drug to prevent or treat relationship breakdown is
essentially medicalizing falling out of love, she said. And people can
learn a lot from heartbreak. "I think the thing here is we put a value
on the fact of love and that it's a spontaneous and natural emotion
and therefore to artificially create it or manipulate it, I think our
moral intuition is ... that there's something not quite right here," she
said.

Brian Earp, a research associate at the Oxford Uehiro Centre for
Practical Ethics who, with colleagues Anders Sandberg and Julian
Savalescu has been making an ethical case for love drugs, said he
knows the act of manipulating brain chemistry sounds like "science
fiction." But humans have been doing this for centuries, he said, and
are already doing it medically with drugs such as anti-depressants.

"When [we] drink a glass of wine at a dinner on a romantic date, we're
massively changing our brain chemistry and that may open us up to
being more gregarious with the person that we're seeing," he said.

"When somebody proposes a new intervention or a new drug, I think
there's a sort of instinctive reaction against it because it's
newfangled. But when you try to connect the dots between other
interventions that we've simply gotten used to, then you have to
wonder whether it's an overreaction." Oxytocin is being heavily
studied now, he said, and has been shown to have positive effects and
some negative effects.

MDMA was actually used in couples' therapy back in the 1980s before it
was regulated, he pointed out, and it only became a restricted drug
after emerging on the club scene in Austin, Texas.

Today, researchers at the John Hopkins University School of Medicine
have begun testing psilocybe, the active ingredient in magic
mushrooms, for benefits in a clinical setting.

There is also work being done to create "anti-love drugs," that will
sever an unhealthy emotional bond like the Stockholm syndrome that
emerges in abusive relationships, he writes in a soon-to-be-published
paper.

In fact, some are already being used. There are also reports of
ultra-orthodox Jewish groups giving selective serotonin reuptake
inhibitors to yeshiva students to weaken their libidos and help them
follow the faith's moral code, he said.

And there are concerns the drugs may be used for religious reasons in
conversion therapy, which attempts to "turn" a gay person straight.

"The key there is not that people should just descend into an opium
den of ecstatic manipulation of their emotions, but that [on] this
substance - which can have positive or negative effects, we don't know
yet ... we should do that research."

In a paper published last July, Mr. Earp and his colleagues argue that
the fragility of modern marriage and the high rates of divorce can be
explained by a clash of our relationship values, our evolved
psychobiological natures and our modern social, physical and
technological environment. In other words, we want to stay together
but our emotions and attractions naturally wane with time, leading to
greater rates of infidelity and unhappiness. Love drugs can fix this,
they argue, by promoting social bonding.

There may even be a moral obligation to take love drugs, they argue,
in cases in which children are involved and divorce can be avoided
(and the relationships are not abusive).

The root of the ethical argument is evolutionary, Mr. Sandberg wrote
in an email to the Post. We "suffer" from minds and bodies that
evolved for us to function in small hunter gatherer bands on the
savanna, not for a "changing, globalized, high-tech world."

"We are out of sync with our environment, yet many of the changes we
have created are good from a human perspective (long healthy lives,
plenty of culture, freedom to choose one's life path, and so on) and
we will hardly forego them."

However, other problems such as the shortness of love (humans, he
would argue, have only evolved to have romantic relationships that
last about seven to 10 years) are hard to overcome.

"So if we want to avoid the problems our biology gives us, we need to
take control over our biology where it matters."

But to Canadian bioethicist and philosophy professor Arthur Schafer,
director of the Centre for Professional and Applied Ethics at the
University of Manitoba and a participant in Wednesday's debate, it's
just another symptom already building a worrisome culture reliant on
miracle drugs.

Blaming relationship problems on some kind of neurological deficiency
is "incredibly naive" and "misconstrues the basic problem."

"If we look at why modern relationships are so challenging, it's not
basically because we've got the wrong neurochemicals or an imbalance
or a deficiency," he said.

"I think it's socioeconomic and I think in some ways it's not a bad
thing marriages are breaking up because in the past people had to
stick together and with a great deal of misery and
unhappiness."

He's also skeptical of the race to create a drug that will act as a
sort of mental and emotional marital aid. There have been no fewer
than three attempts to find a female Viagra, he said.

"You can be sure this would be a drug with blockbuster written all
over it."

His opponent in the debate, Neil McArthur, another philosophy
professor at the University of Manitoba who studies sexual ethics,
believes a love drug could genuinely help people who are deeply
unhappy and are suffering and unable to lead the lives they want.

"I think if we as a society can help people who are suffering, we have
an obligation to do that, or to try to do that. For me it really comes
down to that," he said.

While he agrees with many of the Oxford philosophers' ethical
arguments in favour of love drugs, he draws the line at stating a
moral obligation to fix a breaking bond for the children, or for the
sake of others who might get hurt.

"I'm not as convinced by those arguments. What convinces me is the
argument that we have a desire for something, which is to say a
lasting relationship.

We just can't achieve it. We're messed up. We want other people or we
just can't connect," he said.

"I think the premise has to be that you want that relationship, so
then it's a very complicated question - are you manufacturing the love
to get the relationship you want?" 
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MAP posted-by: Jo-D