To Earth Girl and her followers, the current friction is really a morphogenetic stress. Many people are having the same ideas at the same times because they are all connected morphogenetically. The sickness and fear results from the inability to break the fiction of individuality. But in the cyber culture world, the denizens must realize that they are all connected. Their commitment to the metatransformation of humanity has put them all into the same ''weather system.'' They must be content with never "owning'' an idea. There is no room for pride or credit.
But Earth Girl also seems to realize that her final allegiance is to herself and the Foxy Seven. Survival and ambition – however rationalized – still take precedence. By the time the Rolling Stone piece goes to press, Earth Girl has gone off to Big Heart City, another club in town, which gives her their entire basement (which was the location of Tim Leary's reception last month) to create a smart drugs lounge. There, she will be queen bee, and will never again have to put up with Heley or his mild-mannered political arrogance. Her Smart Lounge will just ''light up and live.''
Heley, meanwhile, partners with Chris, an electrical engineering student and smart nutrients chemist whose knowledge of neurochemistry is as vast as Earth Girl's knowledge of spiritual weather.
It stops raining Friday afternoon, and Chris, Heley, Preston, and Diana convene at 650 Howard Street (a club that has become the temporary home of Toon Town) to eat the free hors' d'oeuvres that the daytime bar gives out during happy hour. Having reviewed the Rolling Stone article, they now discuss strategies to keep their new and improved Smart Bar sans Earth Girl, called the Nutrient Cafe, on the cutting edge of neuro-enhancement. Mark gets on one of his articulate impassioned riffs about the smart drugs virus, as the others drink beer and nod. Not that they haven't heard all this before, but nodding generally keeps Mark from getting too worked up and pissed off. Heley's main regret is that the Smart Bar, which was supposed to be an outlet for true information about good drugs and bad drug laws, turned into a media joke.
''It's a war on information. If you're not capable of fighting the wrong information then you're not capable of fighting the machine. The point is, that if we manage to combine the subtlety of good information with the bludgeon of its media impact, we'd have had a tool against the war on drugs. What do we have at the moment? Petty hype for a bunch of multilevel marketing people who want to scam a few fucking dollars out of something that doesn't do what they say it does.
''What could have happened is that we could have gotten to a level where we could have argued the case for the complete restructuring of the drug patenting laws just on their own internal logic. Piracetam is not available in the U.S., not because of any toxicity, or any side effects, but because it's not patented. Because the company that invented it didn't patent it. At the time, it just wasn't thought of as commercially viable. The psychotropic effects of piracetam were discovered years later. Also, there's no FDA approval procedure for a nootropic drug. It has to be for Alzheimer's, or it has to be for treating strokes.''
Heley's disgust is well founded. Today, most smart drugs are not available in the United States even to victims of geriatric disease. In order for a drug to get FDA approval, a pharmaceutical company must spend millions of dollars on tests. It's worth it to these companies to do the tests only if they know they will have a patent on the medication; with piracetam, the companies know they cannot get a patent. So, instead, they race to develop substances similar to piracetam and then patent those. Meanwhile, only the underground knows of piracetam's existence, and it's in the pharmaceutical companies' best interests to keep it that way. The FDA obliges, and most doctors who know of the drug do not buck the system or risk liability by ordering unapproved substances from overseas.
In even more ludicrous cases, chemicals and nutrients like DHEA (not legal in the United States) and L-pyroglutamate (which is available at any good health store) have been studied by pharmaceutical companies and proven to enhance cognitive skills in humans. But the companies intentionally conceal these studies and instead attempt to develop variants of these chemicals that can be patented and sold more profitably. Some of these substances have even been shown to be effective in treating AIDS, but, again, since the drugs are not patentable, the studies done on them are suppressed. In one case, a scientist has been issued a court order not to reveal the results of his discoveries about DHEA. Heley believes that smart drugs, as a cultural virus, will expose how the American health-care business may be our nation's most serious health threat:
''Smart drugs is a good way of burrowing in there. The argumentation that surrounds smart drugs, the web of the cultural virus, is just a worm designed to eat into those regulatory bodies and explode them by turning the mirror back on themselves. If we can create a cogent argument we can show up their structural inadequacies. The war on drugs, for example, being this blanket war on drugs. You can advertise cigarettes and alcohol and there are all these horrible over-the-counter drugs that you can buy; painkillers in this country are pretty fucking dubious to say the least. But the thing that can't be said in American culture, because of that massive media attack, is that some drugs are good for you in some ways.
''What I object to is the smart drug argument being completely obscured. Now the FDA has a counteraction. Their counterattack has been to close the loophole which allows the importation of smart drugs. And that is the only rational piece of legislature in the entire cannon of American drug laws. And that wasn't a loophole established by the smart drugs movement; it was established by Act Up, and by AIDS activist organizations over a long period of time with sustained political pressure of an absolutely enormous magnitude. All the FDA is waiting for one public excuse for closing this, and it's gone.''
Diana rises to get more food. Heley realizes he's grandstanding a bit, and justifies himself. ''I admit that we made a mistake with this thing. It got out of hand. What we're doing now is we're actually trying to put this right. Doing this Nutrient Cafe: really straightforward. We're not hyping, we're not going do a media virus about it, but we'll provide a really good product within a certain milieu, and lots of information about it. And if we completely stay within the laws as they exist at the moment, it'll just do the fucking job without all of the bullocks.''
Diana returns with some chicken wings and joins in the conversation. ''That bar never even evolved. When we started it the whole idea was that Mark and Neysa [Earth Girl] would create these products. They knew that Durk and Sandy products were shit anyway. That's never happened. ...''
Mark defends: ''Well it's not just that they're shit; they're old. It's told and tired.''
''The only thing that's evolved down in that basement [Earth Girl's new Smart Lounge],'' Diana continues with candor, "is that there's more decorations. And there's more flash and there's more superstars. And that's not the point. There's no books down there, there's no information, there's no pamphlets, there's no nothing, and the people that designed it didn't know shit about it. Not that I do, but I'm not selling the stuff.''
Mark interrupts: ''I'm certainly not washing my hands of it, because we're all partly responsible; we instituted a lot of the processes that lead to this thing. But I find myself radically disagreeing with the way she's doing it. It's not her, it's not even the way that she's approaching it. It's the way that she's allowing it to go. It's a group thing. It's not Neysa, the owners of Big Heart City, Rolling Stone, or Lila Mellow-Whipkit. It's basically what all of them want out of it. This is a propagation of an immediate product over something which is an informational thing. How many people have ever fucking taken smart drugs since we started this? That's a measure of its failure. The people that fucking do the Smart Bar don't even use them.''