The Psychoactive Café

By Paula Cartwright

"It would have been developed anyway. Our little team just sped it up by a couple of years.”

On an isolated campus in the far North, researchers develop a device that triggers instant euphoria by stimulating the brain’s pleasure centers. Once it’s in the wild, there will be no more need for narcotics and no way to control the spread of addiction.

Their goal: To end the war on drugs

• Language: English
• Publisher: Paula Cartwright
• Release date: Jun 8, 2011
• ISBN: 9780986960901

Paula Cartwright

Paula Cartwright is the pen name of a Canadian psychologist who works in government policy, research and social services.

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The Psychoactive Café

By Paula Cartwright

Copyright 2011 by Paula Cartwright

ISBN 978-0-9869609-0-1 Smashwords Edition

Edited by Lynn O'Dell (Red Adept Reviews)

Cover design by gesecolor.com

Published by Staffordshire MSI June 2011

Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be resold or distributed to other people. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, then please purchase your own copy at the ebook retailer of your choice. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Discover other books by this author at www.paulacartwright.com

Chapter One

From the ‘End of the Drug Wars’ Oral History Project.

The following interview with Julie Davis, a member of the original Vice development team, has been edited for clarity.

Before we start, I just want to point out that the device, in some form, would have been developed anyway. Our little team just sped it up by a couple of years.

For me, it began in the Psychoactive Café, the most popular pub on campus. The PA Café was founded by Psychology students to show movies when the university was established thirty years ago. In those days, movie nights were still big social events, especially in winter. The café has kept up with the times and doesn’t exactly show movies anymore.

It was winter, February, the worst part of the year in northern Manitoba. The five of us were grad students – me, Chenko, Naseer, Miguel and Xiang. I was the only one born in Canada, which was totally normal at Thompson University. Few Canadian students wanted to go to university in the sub-arctic, and foreign students didn’t know what they were getting into.

Chenko was a Canadian citizen, but had spent most of his life in Russia; at least, I think so. His family immigrated here when he was a teenager. The rest of us were used to warmer climates – Toronto, where I come from, is subtropical compared to northern Canada – and we were having a hard time dealing with the cold and the dark, especially Naseer and Miguel. We’d been lured with money and equipment. TU was trying to make a name for itself by investing in bright young scientists, and it was building a reputation for ground-breaking research on pain management. My faculty advisor was studying how meditation techniques could manage chronic pain, and my dissertation….

Oh, well, I’ll get into that later.

I remember our conversation vividly. We were talking about how to improve the PA. It was located in a former lab space in a concrete basement, and despite that unpromising location had become a major destination for the entire university. It had been tweaked over the decades by generations of psych majors and engineering students.

The acoustic tiles had been ripped out of the ceiling and replaced by a sound-deadening fabric that changed colours with the lighting, from pearly gray to light blue to the darkest indigo. The lights were invisible, hidden behind the ceiling, and could be adjusted to mimic different times of day. There was some kind of projection system that could add drifting clouds and, since the last upgrade, convincing stars, probably LEDs liberated from a research project.

The space was divided into several big rooms by movable floor-to-ceiling dividers and doorways covered with thick curtains. Each room was located in a different part of the world. The one we were in during that conversation was in Switzerland, in the mountains. The room was big enough for seven or eight tables, and the place was crowded.

I was looking out the fake window – a huge high-definition screen synchronized with three other windows, one on each wall, each facing a different direction. The guys usually sat where they could see the dramatic crags and peaks; I preferred the meadow view. I could see the wind ruffling the grass and the spring flowers, and the sunlight moving on the mountains. It was kind of cheesy because the dividers were made out of cubicle fabric, and they ended abruptly at the fake sky above our heads. The illusion wasn’t great, but it sure beat looking at the snow in the dark under fluorescent lights. This time of year we could go days without seeing the real sun, going into the lab before dawn and coming out long after the sun had set.

We had checked the other rooms before settling on this one. There was the ever-popular Caribbean island, the spaceship view-deck favoured by the engineers, and an African savannah complete with giraffes in the distance.

In the old days, the PA had scenic posters on the walls surrounded by fake curtains tacked onto the partitions. A couple of years ago, in a major upgrade, it started using