Changing minds

A government think-tank’s attempt to peer 20 years into the future and gauge the role drugs will play in society attracted plenty of attention from the national press last week.

Drug use, treatment and control are arguably some of the biggest issues facing the nation, and the Office of Science & Technology’s Foresight report was an ambitious bid to predict some of the dilemmas we may face in a range of possible ‘drug futures’.

Inevitably, most of the headlines focused on the more exotic scenarios envisaged by the 50 scientists, engineers, psychologists and other experts who contributed to the Drug Futures 2025 study.

These ranged from the emergence of a new breed of performance enhancing drugs that could become as commonplace as coffee, to a vaccine against addiction.

The bulk of the Foresight report reads like a beginner’s guide to the world of drugs — legal, illegal, recreational, addictive, benign and dangerous. But within this pharmacological extravaganza lies evidence of the growing role physical technologies are expected to play in the understanding and treatment of drug use and addiction.