Could Mind Control End Crime?

July 6, 2021

Today we travel to a future where we start putting devices in people’s brains to reduce crime.

Guests:

Stephen Kinzer, a journalist and author of Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control.
Dr. Shaun Patel, a neuroscientist at Harvard Medical School.
Dr. Steph Griffiths and Dr. Jarkko Jalava, co-authors of The Myth of The Born Criminal: Psychopathy, Neurobiology, and the Creation of the Modern Degenerate.
Dr. Liat Ben-Moshe, an assistant professor at the University of Illinois Chicago and author of Decarcerating Disability: Deinstitutionalization and Prison Abolition.
Dr. Hank Greely, director of the Center for Law and the Biosciences at Stanford University.
Dr. Apryl Alexander, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Denver.
Elliott Fukui, a community organizer and facilitator.
Dhruv Mehrotra, a data reporter at Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting.

Voice Actors:

Further Reading:

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Flash Forward is hosted by Rose Eveleth and produced by Julia Llinas Goodman. The intro music is by Asura and the outtro music is by Hussalonia. The episode art is by Mattie Lubchansky. The voices from the future this episode were provided by

If you want to suggest a future we should take on, send us a note on Twitter, Facebook or by email at info@flashforwardpod.com. We love hearing your ideas! And if you think you’ve spotted one of the little references I’ve hidden in the episode, email us there too. If you’re right, I’ll send you something cool.

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That’s all for this future, come back next time and we’ll travel to a new one.

FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW

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FLASH FORWARD
S7E07 – “Could Mind Control End Crime?”

ROSE EVELETH:
Hey everybody, before we go to today’s show, I want to just give you a super quick PSA about advertisements on Flash Forward. I talk on this show a lot about privacy and understanding who has your data and how they’re using it. So, I just wanted to be fully transparent with you all about the ways in which ads on this show get picked, and why you might hear what you hear, and a couple of little changes.

So, there are two kinds of ads on Flash Forward. The first is what’s called a Host Read, which is just, you know, when you hear me read an ad for something. You’re used to them, you’ve heard them, and usually I then say something like, “Go to SponsorWebsite.com/FlashForward.” By going to that link, that is how the sponsor knows that you came from this podcast, Flash Forward, and that is how they measure success.

But it’s probably not surprising to find out that that is not a great measure, because if you are anything like me, you often forget the full URL, and later you’re like, “Oh, wait. Where did I hear about that company? Which podcast was it?” So you just go to, like, the regular website.

So now, more and more advertisers are asking us to include some kind of little tracking pixel on these host-read ads. I’m not going to go into the details of how this works, but if you go to FlashForwardPod.com/Support, I will put a little bit more information and some links to explain it. But the basic gist is that there’s a little tag attached to the episode, and when you access it, it helps advertisers find out if you actually went to their website after listening to Flash Forward or not.

Now, I only accept this kind of advertiser, this kind of tracking, if I am convinced that they are abiding by all the standards and that they take privacy seriously, but I also believe that it is very important for you, the listener, to know that this is happening. Obviously, it’s not just happening on Flash Forward. It’s probably happening on lots of other podcasts that you listen to. But if there is an ad like this in the episode, I will always put a little note in the show notes with a link to explain how it works. You can always find that information in the show notes for any episode that has an ad like that.

Okay, that’s probably more than you really wanted to know about ads, but you all know that I like to overthink pretty much everything, so I wanted to let you know.

On with the show!

[Flash Forward intro music – “Whispering Through” by Asura, an electronic, rhythm-heavy piece]

Hello and welcome to Flash Forward! I’m Rose and I am your host. Flash Forward is a show about the future. Every episode we take on a specific possible, or sometimes not-quite-so-possible future scenario. We always start every episode with a little field trip into the future to check out what is going on, and then we teleport back to today to talk to experts about how that world that we just heard might actually go down. Got it? Great!

Just a quick note, this episode is a pretty heavy one and it mentions prison, violent crime, forced sterilization, and pedophilia.

Today we are starting in the year 2057.

FICTION SKETCH BEGINS

[door opens, lawyer walks in and sits down]

JESSICA BROLEY (Public Defender):
(sighs, exhausted) Okay, so do you understand what just happened?

ADRIAN YATES:
(defensive) Yeah. I’m not stupid. I’m going to prison for something I didn’t do. Thanks a lot.

JESSICA:
It’s more complicated than that, actually. You have a choice.

ADRIAN:
(sarcastic) Okay. Well, I choose not to go to jail.

JESSICA:
(ignoring the snark) Did you understand what the judge said about your clinical sentencing option? (pause) The thing about “12 years or clinical intervention”?

ADRIAN:
Uh, no. I mean after the ‘jail’ part I kind of blacked out for a little bit.

JESSICA:
So, you have a choice. You can serve 12 years in federal prison. Or you can sign up for a new, experimental procedure.

ADRIAN:
(interrupts) Yeah, that. I’ll do that.

JESSICA:
You don’t even know what it is yet.

ADRIAN:
I mean, it’s not prison? So yeah… I’ll take that.

JESSICA:
Can I at least explain to you what it is?

ADRIAN:
Fine.

JESSICA:
It’s new, and it’s only been tried on a handful of people so far. The judge thought you’d be a good candidate because you’re young and don’t have any preexisting conditions. It involves implanting a device inside your brain that would track your movements, thoughts, and behavior, and manipulate it.

ADRIAN:
How long do I have to have it in for?

JESSICA:
For this trial program, six months to a year.

ADRIAN:
I’ll do it.

JESSICA:
Seriously? It’s an experimental brain implant. I can’t stress that enough.

ADRIAN:
One year is way less than 12.

JESSICA:
But you don’t know what the long-term impacts might be.

ADRIAN:
(frustrated) Oh, and there are no long-term impacts of 12 years in prison?

[phone buzzes]

JESSICA:
(taking a call) Jessica Broley. Yes. Okay. Where is she? Now?? Yeah, give me 20 minutes. Okay. Thanks. (sighs)

(to Adrian) I have to go see another client. Please take this paperwork and look at it? It describes the procedure. You have forty-five minutes to decide. As your counsel, I would advise you to be very, very cautious about this option. There’s still a lot we don’t know about how it works, or who would even be controlling the technology, and how they’ll be manipulating your brain.

ADRIAN:
It’s not like I have any great options.

JESSICA:
This is true. You don’t. And I’m sorry for that. [phone buzzes]

Okay, I have to go. Call me when you decide. They’re legally obligated to let you use the phone here.

ADRIAN:
Okay. See you never.

[door closes]

FICTION SKETCH END

ROSE:
Okay, so today, like I said, we’re going to get kind of dark. Darker than usual on this show. We are talking about mind control, and specifically how brain manipulation might interface with the legal system. Could you sentence someone to prison via their brains? Could you “reform” someone using mind control? What if, instead of physically incarcerating someone, you simply monitor their thoughts?

Mind control is something that comes up in dystopian science fiction a lot, and usually it’s villains who are controlling the minds of their victims. Probably the most famous example of using mind control as criminal punishment is A Clockwork Orange. But the idea that someone could actually take control of your mind and force you to do, or not do, things is one of those ideas that really captures the imagination. Because it forces us to grapple with questions of free will, of how much control we really have over our choices, and of how much power we are willing to hand over to another person or system.

In real life, probably the most famous mind control experiments are the ones performed by a man named Sidney Gottlieb.

STEPHEN KINZER:
This guy named Sidney Gottlieb was the Poisoner-in-Chief. And he made the poisons that the CIA needed all during the ‘50s and early ‘60s. But I discovered Gottlieb had done something incredible before he even got to the poison job. He was running the CIA mind control project, MK-Ultra.

ROSE:
This is Stephen Kinzer, a journalist and the author of Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control. Now, you have probably heard of MK-Ultra. I know that before reading Stephen’s book, I had kind of a vague idea that it was this weird, misguided CIA program that involved using LSD to try and control people’s minds. But what I didn’t realize is just how terrible and big MK-Ultra actually was.

In the late 1940s, the US government became convinced that the Chinese and the Soviets were on the verge of figuring out mind control.

STEPHEN:
Soon, the communists would be able, perhaps, to seize control of the minds of people all over the world. And then a prize for that breakthrough would be nothing less than global mastery.

ROSE:
It perhaps will not shock you to learn that they were incorrect. But that didn’t stop the CIA from deciding that they had to make their own attempt at this whole idea. And to run the project, they hired this chemist, Sidney Gottlieb.

STEPHEN:
Now, under normal circumstances, if you and I were supervising someone whose work we thought might involve horrific things, we would want to supervise that person especially carefully. But at the CIA, it’s the opposite. That’s the kind of person you don’t want to supervise at all. You want to let that person go completely on their own.

You don’t get any reports from them. “Don’t tell me anything.” And then, later on, you can always say, “Well, I had no idea that one crazy guy was running so far off the rails.” So essentially, the CIA told Gottlieb, “Find out if there’s something in this mind control idea. And whatever you do, it’s fine. And we won’t ask you. Don’t tell us what you’re doing.”

ROSE:
And what Gottlieb wound up doing was indeed the kind of horrific stuff that the CIA would like for nobody to know about or remember.

STEPHEN:
So, Gottlieb began with a basic premise that if you wanted to figure out how to implant a new mind into someone’s brain, the first thing you had to do was find a way to destroy the mind that was in there. So he set out very methodically to find and test ways to destroy a human mind, and a human body, and a human soul.

ROSE:
If that sounds dark… it very much is. And in fact, Gottlieb didn’t reinvent the wheel here. Unfortunately, there already were plenty of experts around the world on methods of destroying the human mind, body, and soul. The US government had hired many of them after World War II, and Gottlieb built on their work.

STEPHEN:
We brought in Nazi scientists and their Japanese counterparts to teach us how to devastate human minds and spirits.

ROSE:
MK-Ultra went about that destruction in a variety of ways, including things like physical torture. But the most famous way was by giving people LSD. And not just, like, a fun little dose of LSD. In 1953, Gottlieb got the CIA to purchase the entire world supply of LSD.

STEPHEN:
I came across, for example, one experiment that was conducted at the federal prison in Lexington, Kentucky, under Gottlieb’s auspices. In this experiment, seven African American inmates were placed in a cell and fed triple and quadruple doses of LSD every day for 77 days without being told what it was or what was happening to them.

ROSE:
Now, for people who weren’t incarcerated, Gottlieb’s LSD experiments were a lot more gentle. And this is maybe what you’ve heard about MK-Ultra, the fact that it introduced LSD, in small doses, through universities around the world, to a whole lot of famous people.

STEPHEN:
So, who were among the first volunteers to walk in the door in California, where this project first began, to try this new substance, LSD? Well, one of them was Ken Kesey, who later went on to write that classic One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Another of the first experimenters was Robert Hunter, the lyricist for the Grateful Dead. Another one was Allen Ginsberg, the radical poet. So, these are the people through whom LSD entered into the American mainstream.

ROSE:
The universities who did this work, doing experiments to see what small doses of LSD might do to the brain, mostly didn’t know that they were being funded by the CIA. And it doesn’t take a genius to see the difference between who got fun doses of LSD and who got doses that were aimed at destroying their minds.

And really, we don’t know the extent of MK-Ultra. We don’t know how many prisoners were killed, or abused, or left with debilitating neurological damage from these experiments because Gottlieb and the outgoing director of the CIA at the time, Richard Helms, destroyed all the records of MK-Ultra they could find. What little we do know comes from records they missed, or prisoners here and there who were able to survive, including a famous Boston gangster named Whitey Bulger, who was sent to a federal prison in Atlanta in 1956.

STEPHEN:
Certain prisoners would be brought in and asked if they could participate in a program to test a drug that was intended to find a cure for schizophrenia. So, Whitey Bulger volunteered with the idea that it would get him better treatment in prison. And he wound up being fed doses of LSD over more than a year. He writes in his diary about the horrors of it, and he never got over it. He’s never been able to sleep with the lights off ever since then for the rest of his life. He talked about his nightmares and how he was afraid to say anything about what he was seeing, because then, he said, “I thought I would never get out. They would never let me out.” So he wrote about this as a devastating experience.

And if you multiply that times the number of prison inmates who must have been subjected to these projects of coercive drug administration and administration of attendant torments, you have a shattering sense of how helpless those prisoners were and how predatory the CIA was in feeling that it had the right to use them as human guinea pigs, regardless of what the outcome would have been for them.

ROSE:
Ultimately, Gottlieb was forced to admit that he couldn’t actually seize control of the minds of his targets, that mind control via torture and drugs simply won’t work.

STEPHEN:
There is no realistic… That was the word he used. There’s no realistic or reliable technique to try to seize control of a person’s mind.

ROSE:
Gottlieb then went on to become the chief pharmacist for the CIA, and you can read more about him in Stephen’s book. And you’re going to hear, actually, a lot more of our conversation about the strange and contradictory life of Sidney Gottlieb on the bonus podcast this week. In fact, the bonus podcast this week is absolutely stuffed with stuff because I did a lot of overreporting for this episode. So, this is a great time to join the Patreon and become a supporter, because this bonus podcast is going to be full of interesting things.

Okay, so MK-Ultra didn’t work, but I wanted to know, today, with modern neuroscience, could we actually control someone’s mind the way that Sidney Gottlieb wanted to? I sort of expected the answer to be the same one that Gottlieb came to: No, not reliably at least. But then I talked to Dr. Shaun Patel.

DR. SHAUN PATEL:
I think today is an interesting point in history where, you know, we have enough understanding to be dangerous.

ROSE:
Shaun works at Harvard Medical School where he studies the brain, and specifically he works on figuring out how we can interface with the three-pound meatball in our skulls better than we currently do.

There are a lot of reasons that it’s hard to do stuff to the brain. There’s the blood-brain barrier, which is basically like a gate at the door of our brains that keeps most compounds out. There’s also the fact that the brain is encased in our skulls and is pretty hard to access without, you know, brain surgery. But the biggest challenge when it comes to figuring out how to plug into our brains is that we really do not know how they work.

SHAUN:
Because we don’t understand the brain’s language. We call that the neural code. So you can think of it as some decipherable code and we haven’t yet unlocked it.

ROSE:
We know a little bit. We know that certain neurons seem to represent certain things. We know how the brain processes images like faces. But there is still a ton of stuff that scientists really do not understand about how, exactly, our brains function.

So when we think about neurotechnology, the idea of neuro-electronics, devices that you might implant in your brain to make it do certain things, there are some huge unanswered questions about just how you would do that and how well it would work.

That said, we do know that you can put an electrical thing in the brain and have it change someone’s behavior.

SHAUN:
The technology is called deep brain stimulation. And what that is, is an electrode. So you can think of, kind of, a straight wire. It’s probably about a millimeter or so in diameter.

So the doctors go in, they put this electrode in your brain, and it produces electrical impulses. Today, deep brain stimulation is used to treat things like Parkinson’s, epilepsy, and obsessive-compulsive disorder. And for some people, it works really well.

SHAUN:
Even with this rudimentary thing, it is the most incredibly amazing experience to see this very short or three or four-hour procedure while the patient is awake. And instantly, almost, when they turn the stimulator on, a person regains control of their movement after years of the disease.

ROSE:
But Shaun is the first to admit that they have a long way to go before we can really talk about the high-tech implants that you heard about in the intro.

SHAUN:
All of this has been done with this relatively rudimentary probe, and though it’s very effective in its therapeutic applications, it’s likely not the most ideal interface for the brain. And so the question then becomes, how do you build a better one?

ROSE:
And the people working on answering that question call this new field ‘electroceuticals’.

SHAUN:
The hypothesis with electroceuticals, as it’s dubbed, is that if you can understand the code and you can interface the brain appropriately, then you can directly modulate activity to attenuate symptoms, or reduce symptoms, or provide therapy.

ROSE:
There are a lot of ifs in that statement, right? If you can understand the code. If you can interface with the brain appropriately. One big question, Shaun says, is about where to put these future electrodes. What parts of the brain are the best to “plug into”? Again, we don’t really know yet.

We’ve talked about brain-computer interfaces on this show a little bit before, and there are lots of people working on this problem from a variety of angles. Shaun and doctors are hoping to help patients to have better treatment options. Elon Musk has his Neuralink, which, as far as I can tell, hasn’t actually broken new research ground but has certainly got a lot of incredible press!

And I thought that when I asked Shaun about this whole “using brain interfaces for evil mind control” thing he’d be like, “Oh yeah, that’s not really realistic.” But that is, in fact, not what he said.

SHAUN:
I think it’s very realistic. I think, you know, with any technology step, the opportunity for bad actors and malicious behavior certainly exists. And so, the real answer to that question is: How well can we control the brain in the first place, right? Then it’s a matter of who has access to that control.

ROSE:
Now, there is a key detail to this whole setup that is definitely worth talking about. For this to happen in the context of the intro you heard, you would probably have to force someone to get brain surgery.

And maybe that sounds far-fetched to you. But remember, MK-Ultra was able to feed extremely high doses of LSD to incarcerated people without their knowledge and consent. And that kind of experimentation did not stop with the end of MK-Ultra. Incarcerated people today are still subjected to medical procedures, interventions, and technologies against their will.

DR. STEPH GRIFFITHS:
There was a facility called the Oak Ridge facility. A court decision established many of the treatments at the Oak Ridge facility as qualifying as being torture. One of the things that they did was use psychedelics without consent.

ROSE:
And we are going to talk about that when we come back.

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FICTION SKETCH BEGINS

[door opens and closes]

SCIENTIST:
(friendly) Hello there.

ADRIAN YATES:
(nervous) Hi.

SCIENTIST:
Adrian Yates?

ADRIAN:
Yep.

SCIENTIST:
(cheery) Excellent, we always like to confirm we’ve got the right person before we do brain surgery!

Okay, so let’s go over a few things. First, please confirm that you understand that (speeding through) Brain Better works in partnership with federal correctional facilities to provide neural interfaces, and as part of that partnership, we will collect, store, and distribute biological samples and associated data from your device. Participating in this program is voluntary. If you decide to be in the program, you are free to stop at any time. We may keep and use information that we collected about you while you were in the program.

Sound good?

ADRIAN:
Uh, sure.

SCIENTIST:
Great! Okay, so let me look here at your file. So, our assessments suggest that you’ve got a few locations of interest in there that we might want to tinker with. Now, since this is an early beta program we’re still training our algorithms. The cool thing is that you get to help us!

So what we’re going to do is install tiny implants in a few different spots in your brain. At first, those implants are going to monitor your brain activity. Using our app, we’ll check in with you throughout the day so you can report how you’re feeling.

The crucial piece here is honesty. We need to know if your brain is betraying you and making you do bad things so we can fix it! So if you have the urge to do something bad, make sure to note it in the app so we can tie brain signals to your impulses. And remember, this is for posterity, so be honest. Make sense?

ADRIAN:
So you want me to narc on myself when I am tempted to do something “bad”?

SCIENTIST:
Yep! That way we can start training your brain to not do those bad things.

ADRIAN:
What counts as something bad?

SCIENTIST:
Anything you might get into trouble for.

ADRIAN:
But what if I’m confident I won’t get in trouble?

SCIENTIST:
(confused) Um, can you give me an example?

ADRIAN:
So like, speeding. If I’m tempted to speed, which is technically something I could get pulled over for, do I pull out my app and note that?

SCIENTIST:
Oh, no you should not use the app while driving. That is very dangerous.

ADRIAN:
(frustrated) Okay, but you know what I mean. What if it’s something everybody does and gets away with? Like rolling through a red light on my bike? Or streaming a football game without having cable? Or jaywalking? Or do I only report it when it’s an impulse related to my actual case?

SCIENTIST:
(seems stumped) Hmm, nobody has asked that before. You know what? I’d say, play it safe and report everything you think might be worth reporting. In the app, you can say what it was you wanted to do and how strong the impulse was.

ADRIAN:
Okay.

SCIENTIST:
Then, for phase two, once we learn the patterns that make you want to do bad things, we turn them off. Easy-peasy!

ADRIAN:
So I’ll never be able to speed again.

SCIENTIST:
Not quite. You’ll never want to speed again.

ADRIAN:
And how long is phase two?

SCIENTIST:
Good question. We’re not sure yet. Some brains seem to be more plastic and predictable than others.

ADRIAN:
And what happens if I want to stop doing the brain control thing?

SCIENTIST:
Oh, well you can just tell us and we’ll remove the implants. But it does mean that you’ll have to opt back into traditional incarceration.

ADRIAN:
So… go to prison.

SCIENTIST:
I’m not actually privy to your case details so, I don’t know. But if that’s what you were sentenced to, yes.

ADRIAN:
You guys aren’t going to make me do weird stuff though, right? Like, you’re not going to use the app to make me dance or something?

SCIENTIST:
Right now, we’re only approved to suppress ideas and impulses. We can’t make you want to do anything more than what’s already in your head, at least at the moment.

ADRIAN:
But that could change?

SCIENTIST:
Possibly!

ADRIAN:
(heavy sigh) Okay. Let’s just get this over with.

SCIENTIST:
Great! Lean your head back here and hold still, please.

[sound of rubber gloves, machines starting, medical tools…]

FICTION SKETCH ENDS

ROSE:
So, in this future we’re exploring today, this brain implant is trying to detect and suppress the urges and impulses that lead to criminal behavior. But is that even a real thing?

You have probably seen a lot of headlines that say things like, “Brain Scans Reveal That Criminal Minds Are Different From Yours“ or, “Brain Scans Show Why Psychopaths Don’t Feel Your Pain.” These stories assume that there is something “wrong” with the minds of people who commit crimes. And if there’s something wrong, something you can see in the brain scan, well, maybe you can go in and fix it, right?

Maybe you saw this coming, by the way, that I was setting this whole segment up, but… it is not that simple.

STEPH:
So, you’re trying to find neurobiological correlates of crime. Anyone looking at that from a kind of external objective perspective would say, “Why would you do that?” Because crime is socially defined.

ROSE:
This is Dr. Steph Griffiths, a psychologist at Okanagan College and the co-author of a book called The Myth of the Born Criminal. When we spoke, she pointed to the hundreds of thousands of people who were convicted of possession of marijuana before it was legalized in Canada. One day, they are convicted criminals. The next day, when the law changes, they’re not. There’s nothing in the brain that changes there.

STEPH:
So any time you’re looking for brain correlates of something that is socially defined and arbitrary that way, you’re going to run into a wall at some point. At that point, your responsibility, I think, scientifically, is to kind of shut the door on that. We’re not going to find anything. But the doors have been left open.

ROSE:
Take psychopaths for example. You might remember that the idea of the “psychopath test” or the “psychopath brain” was really hot a couple of years ago. There’s even a supposed one-question “psychopath quiz” that recently went viral on TikTok. But Steph and her co-author, and husband, Dr. Jarkko Jalava, argue that the science behind the idea of psychopathy is, actually, incredibly weak. And they say many researchers are just influenced by cultural beliefs about psychopaths.

DR. JARKKO JALAVA:
What they do is that they completely ignore the fact that most of the studies found nothing different between psychopaths and non-psychopaths.But where we’re so quickly and easily misled about their psychopathic brain, or the serial murder’s brain, is that we so much wish it to be there that we, sort of, turn ourselves into pretzels to make the data fit the belief.

ROSE:
There is a super interesting history of the idea of psychopathy, including an era in which researchers argued that psychopaths had goats’ eyes. Like, literally the eyes of goats.

JARKKO:
Do they really have eyes like goats? That was an actual debate. It was a great surprise, of course, to a lot of people that they don’t really have goat’s eyes.

ROSE:
We’re going to talk more about that history in the bonus podcast this week. But there is a really interesting connection between the MK-Ultra experiments you heard about earlier and the idea of psychopathy, because in at least one facility, called Oak Ridge, in Ontario, people classified as psychopaths were also given extremely high doses of LSD without their consent.

STEPH:
That’s an interesting overlap between those sorts of very intense efforts at mind control and then a population, psychopaths, who are considered to be, kind of, beyond help. So as a last resort, “Let’s try this great and desperate cure on this group of people who, you know, no one really cares about anyway because they’re totally immoral. So let’s see if we can change their brains by using these sorts of techniques.”

ROSE:
And this idea that you could scan someone’s brain, or give them a test, and learn that they’re actually a potential serial killer, it’s really alluring.

JARKKO:
We’ve always assumed folklorically that if you are evil, if you do terrible things, that you must also somehow look evil. Just think about the folkloric monsters, you know, the vampires, the werewolves, the witches, whatever. They always have some kind of a correlate in the face.

ROSE:
This is actually the root of a lot of ableism even today, this idea that if a body or a face doesn’t look “right,” there is something morally wrong with that person. Which is obviously untrue.

JARKKO:
We’ve kind of given up on the idea that there’s something physiologically different about serial murders, for example. But now we’re looking for the correlates in the brain.

ROSE:
And it’s not just psychopaths. In the 1960s and ‘70s, there were uprisings across the United States, largely led by Black activists protesting racism.

DR. LIAT BEN-MOSHE:
There were a bunch of psychiatrists that were trying to biologize the riots, basically. They were saying that this is because of a brain disorder.

ROSE:
This is Dr. Liat Ben-Moshe, a Professor of Criminology, Law, and Justice at the University of Illinois, Chicago. Liat says that in the 1970s, psychologists wondered why certain cities had uprisings and others didn’t.

LIAT:
And their answer was, “Well, this is because there’s specific people with specific brain anomalies that then caused them to ‘riot’ in particular ways.”

ROSE:
These doctors also studied brain surgery as a possible way to “cure” violence. In one case, a patient’s mother said that their procedure ruined her son’s life. But that didn’t stop them from supporting a research center that was proposed to study this whole idea at UCLA. The main proponent of this center was a UCLA researcher, Dr. Louis West, who also carried out some of the MK-Ultra LSD experiments.

LIAT:
They proposed to open the center to study exactly that, basically, how violence is a biological entity. And the story is, of course… you know, it’s a very racist story. I don’t see how you get around from that. But there was also a lot of really interesting, like, gender, and sexuality, and disability kind of dynamics into this because they proposed to also study women that, in parts of their cycle, they hypothesized, makes them more prone to violence.

ROSE:
The center was never built, in part due to pressure from activists who questioned whether this was actually a good idea. That activism also helped push the federal government to create rules about medical testing on human subjects.

And yet, still today, this idea that we could tie biology to specific “undesirable behavior” persists. And another piece of the allure of this idea, is that if we can find this thing that is broken in people who do bad things, the rest of us can say “Ah well, see? I’m not like that. I’m not a bad person like that. My brain isn’t broken like that.”

STEPH:
And the minute that we think that, we can be like them because we fail to recognize that we all have that capacity. That, to me, is what is so disturbing about that tendency. I understand where it comes from and I know that I do it too. I like to think that I’m different. But I mean, if you fall prey to that, I think then you put yourself in the position where you could be the one flipping the switch and not thinking about what you’re doing. “Because I’m different. That wouldn’t be me.” No, none of us are different.

ROSE:
There’s no brain region that determines if someone’s a good person or is going to do bad things.

DR. HANK GREELY:
We can already do prediction for violent crime pretty easily by looking at age and gender. And if you want to add some other socioeconomic factors in there, you can improve the prediction. Will neuroscience take us from 87% to 89%? Maybe. Is it going to be a Philip K. Dick short story? Probably not.

ROSE:
This is Dr. Hank Greely, the Director for the Center for Law and the Biosciences at Stanford University.

And even if there was a way to predict and manipulate certain parts of the brain to reduce someone’s likelihood of committing a crime, there is still the question of should we do that.

DR. APRYL ALEXANDER:
I often bring this up. Some of the recent research that’s coming out with pedophilia. We are seeing some fMRI studies that are showing some differences in either the structure or the function of their brains compared to neurotypical people who are not diagnosed with pedophilia.

ROSE:
This is Dr. Apryl Alexander, an Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Denver. These fMRI studies are really early and do not conclusively show that there is some clear difference between the brains of pedophiles and non-pedophiles. But Apryl will sometimes ask her students to imagine if there was.

APRYL:
What does that mean for you? You just labeled them as this heinous, awful person, but you can’t control the difference in the structure and function of your brain. So now how do you approach this person? And then, I don’t know what the future looks like. Is there a pill for that? Are we going to be doing some neurosurgery on these individuals?

ROSE:
And scientists have indeed done neurosurgery on incarcerated people thinking that it might change their behavior.

HANK:
The prefrontal lobotomy was pioneered by a Portuguese neurologist who eventually won the Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology, Egas Moniz.

ROSE:
It will not shock you to learn that not only were lobotomies not nearly as effective as Moniz claimed, they also were brutal and devastating.

HANK:
There was an American neurologist named Walter Freeman who decided there was an easier way to do it, which he started out using an ice pick and going in between a person’s eye and their nose and just kind of making a windshield wiper motion.

ROSE:
Freeman was responsible for thousands of these lobotomies over the years. And the main reason that this technique faded wasn’t because people admitted that it didn’t work, but rather because drugs like Thorazine came on the market, which were just a lot easier to administer. But just like in our intro scene, Hank says there were almost certainly cases where people were offered a lobotomy as part of a plea deal.

HANK:
What I’ve never been able to really nail down is whether there was ever a case where a judge said, “I’m going to sentence you to prison unless you get a lobotomy.” There are things that are kind of close, or where district attorneys said, you know, “If you have this procedure, then we won’t charge or we’ll drop the case.” But it never seems to have been adopted openly and broadly. I can’t believe that it didn’t happen, at least sometimes, in the US.

ROSE:
And again, this kind of physical manipulation as part of a criminal case has not actually stopped.

APRYL:
For some individuals who sexually offend, they’re already doing chemical castration. So basically, giving you a hormone, usually Depo-Provera, the birth control, to reduce your ability to get sexually aroused or to have an erection. So they’re forcing that medication on individuals. And again, we’re not sure if that 100% works. So is that fair? Is that ethical? This medication could be harmful to your body, so are you allowed to opt out of it?

ROSE:
And it’s not just pedophiles who are pushed or even forced to undergo medical procedures. In 2013, the Center for Investigative Reporting found that at least 148 inmates in California had their tubes tied without their consent between 2006 and 2010. Last year, Immigration and Customs Enforcement was accused of forcibly performing medical procedures on at least 40 immigrants in their custody, including sterilization. And individual stories of trading a medical procedure for a lighter sentence pop up all over the United States every year.

Other incarcerated people are given medications that they often don’t understand and might not need. Many of the people who are forcibly medicated in prisons have some form of disability.

ELLIOTT FUKUI:
73% of female-assigned people in state prisons and 55% of male-assigned people have at least one diagnosis, who are sitting in prisons right now. And those numbers look very similar across the federal level and in local jails.

ROSE:
This is Elliott Fukui, a community organizer and facilitator who knows firsthand how this kind of forced medication happens.

ELLIOTT:
I entered when I was 12 years old into the system. And I was in psychiatric treatment facilities, in day-treatment programs, special education, all of those spaces from the ages of 12 to 19. And as someone who survived… I do identify as a survivor of this treatment.And I am someone who has experienced forced medication. I have experienced restraint. I would say that there were points in my life where I was non-verbal because of the amount of drugs that I was placed on at such an early age.

ROSE:
There’s a lot of literature in biomedical ethics and law around whether it’s legal or ethical to force someone to take medication. And you sometimes see judges and parole boards say to someone “Okay, you can get a lighter sentence, or get out on parole, as long as you take x, y, or z medication.” And of course, when it means not staying in prison, a lot of people are going to take that option, even if it’s not actually helpful to them.

ELLIOTT:
I hear this conversation a lot about, “if we can just get people to stay on their meds, that makes things better.” And the reality is that would presume that someone’s, you know, emotional crisis is solely a biomedical thing. The reality is, how people move in the world is not just biomedical. You can’t fix people with a pill.

ROSE:
Now, Elliott is clear that if a medication works for someone, they should absolutely take it. This is not to say that all of these drugs are inherently bad or don’t work. But it’s important that this is a choice someone actually does get to make, not something forced upon them.

ELLIOTT:
So when people try to say, “Oh, if we just give people drugs, that’s not as bad,” if you have never been forcibly medicated… You know, to not have control over what is happening to your body and your mind is one of the most disempowering, and dehumanizing, and degrading experiences you can have. And I don’t see how anyone could say that there is anything healing or safe about removing people’s bodily agency and their self-determination.

ROSE:
Even when someone leaves prison, that actually doesn’t mean they are no longer being controlled. And that’s especially true for disabled folks or anyone who the state has classified as having a mental illness. We talked in the “Votes for All” episode last year about how people with mental illness can have their rights to vote taken away. And folks can also lose control of their finances, their medical care. Look at what has been happening to Britney Spears. It’s been in the news a bunch. That happens to lots of people with disabilities. Many people with disabilities can’t even get married without losing eligibility for Medicaid and other benefits.

And this kind of state control goes beyond disabled folks. There are more than 2 million people in jails and prisons in the United States, but nearly twice as many on probation or parole. Most of those people are monitored through in-person check-ins with parole officers. But more than 100,000 people every year are tracked electronically, using ankle monitors.

Between 2005 and 2015, the number of people being electronically monitored increased by 140%. And in the past few years, other technologies have promised to continue this surveillance, but via an app rather than an ankle monitor.

DHRUV MEHROTRA:
So I’ve been looking into parole apps specifically after I had heard from a few people that an app that they had been using had landed them back in custody because they couldn’t pay their cell phone bill.

ROSE:
This is Dhruv Mehrotra, a reporter at Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting. And a while ago, Dhruv learned about this app called Guardian.

DHRUV:
The thought is that people already have phones, which, of course, they don’t. If you’re just getting out of a long sentence, you do not have a phone or you don’t know how to use a phone, right? So, yeah, this is like a cheaper alternative to ankle monitors that supposedly and allegedly works better.

ROSE:
The problem is that this app doesn’t work better. In fact, when Dhruv first looked it up on the app store, the reviews were pretty much all terrible.

DHRUV:
Every app review was just like “This app has been waking me up in the middle of the night. It’s broken. Please just put an ankle monitor on me.” It’s just, like, these terrible reviews, except for one glowing review which looked like it shared the same name as the patent attorney from the company.

ROSE:
The way the app works is that it tracks your location using your phone’s GPS. On top of that, throughout the day the phone will ring and ask you to check in, using a combination of facial and voice recognition, asking you to read a series of numbers provided by the app.

DHRUV:
In the middle of the night, their phone is buzzing, and you know, the buzz… You can hear the buzz on the app if you… So, I decompiled the app, and I looked at the audio files, and I played the audio files and it’s shrill. And so imagine this sound, 3:00 in the morning. You’re sleeping. You have work the next day, and it’s… you know, you get a message. It’s like, “Look, you are at your house. Why have you violated your parole at this hour?” And you know, you’re supposed to check in and it doesn’t work. You’re like trying to adjust the lighting to make sure the facial recognition works in the proper way or whatever it is. But it’s just incredibly anxiety-inducing because you think you’re going to go back to jail.

ROSE:
Other parolees work service jobs and said that they couldn’t abandon a customer to go read numbers into their phones.

DHRUV:
So people had lost their jobs because of the tech too.

ROSE:
And not only does this app, just, not work, it’s also way more invasive than it even appears to be on paper. When Dhruv looked at the source code and showed it to other experts, he found that the app was set up to gather way more than just face and voice data to verify where someone is. The app is actually set up to be able to record passive audio and turn on at any time without the user’s knowledge. And in some cases, depending on how your phone is set up, the Guardian app could read, modify, and even download all of the files on your device, including contacts, text messages, photos, videos, and media files.

DHRUV:
Every parolee I spoke to was aware… They maybe weren’t aware of the fine print of what exactly was being collected, but they were like, “Yeah, I know this app is collecting a bunch of shit. They think of me as their property. I’m assuming it’s just sucking everything out of me, so I’m going to operate in that way.” So everyone is sort of aware of that.

ROSE:
And they’re aware of it because they’re aware of how the system treats people who have been convicted of a crime — as not just dangerous, probably-repeat offenders, but also as a community that can’t say really no, that you can take advantage of for profit.

DHRUV:
We live in a society where two million people are incarcerated right now in jails and prison and there’s an industry around it. And you know, it’s so baked into how we think about criminal justice that the technology reflects it, right? Like, this app assumes that you’ve broken parole. That’s the assumption. That’s why it’s randomly having you check in all over the place.

ROSE:
Obviously, an app that tracks you and a brain implant that controls your thoughts are not the same thing. But I think this story is instructive for our future here because it illustrates just how little real oversight there is when it comes to the technologies being forced upon people who go through the criminal legal system.

And when I asked Stephen Kinzer, the author of Poisoner in Chief, whether he thought the CIA was still looking into mind control today, here’s what he said:

STEPHEN:
I don’t know any more than you do, but my guessis yes. It would just seem to me… I put myself in the position of a head of one of these services. Wouldn’t that be something that you’d want to experiment with? There’s all this new technology. You always can work yourself into a sense of competition and urgency. So, yeah, I do suspect.

ROSE:
So let’s get back to our brain implant idea. If you have followed tech news for a while, you know that just because there’s not a lot of good science suggesting that something might work, that does not mean that people aren’t going to try it.

HANK:
I do worry that, you know, particularly when we go through our regular mass hysteria about crime, that some legislature somewhere is going to say, “Oh, hey. Here’s a paper that came out in this journal,” not realizing that it’s one of the really bad journals “… that says this. Let’s do it.”

ROSE:
And even if you believe that this is worth investigating, that it’s worth looking into whether a brain implant might deter the worst forms of criminal behavior, there are still some big questions about how you would ethically develop and test this technology.

You can’t really do animal studies on something like whether a brain implant will keep someone from committing a crime, so you have to do this in people. And not just any people. You have to do this in a specific population.

HANK:
First, you’ve got problems of coercion. There is a special chapter of the Common Rule, through which the federal government regulates federally funded human-subjects research that deals with prisoners, because prisoners are in a situation where it’s particularly easy for them to be coerced and treated unfairly.

ROSE:
If you manage to get past that, or, as has been the case historically, found a way to just ignore that part, you still have issues of the actual science. Getting a large enough population to test this on is going to be really hard, as will controlling for other variables. And Hank says that maybe the hardest part of doing this research might be political.

HANK:
Because the first time somebody who’s been treated this way does something wrong, somebody’s career is toast.

ROSE:
So given all of this, all of the evidence that looking for neurological determinant of crime is probably misguided, the challenges of doing this research, the political perils of something going wrong, and the overall ethical minefield here… Why would anybody try this? Why is this still something people think about, and propose, and write about? There are probably a million answers to that question, but Hank’s, I thought, was the most interesting.

HANK:
Prison changes people’s brains really profoundly. And if prison were a drug, or device, or a biological regulated by FDA, no way in hell it would be approved. It’s clearly both unsafe and ineffective.

Is there a fundamental difference in trying to change people’s brains to make them more law-abiding through prison versus doing it through stimulation, neurosurgery, other respects? Part of me wants to say there is, but I’m not sure.

ROSE:
So what does all of this mean? Where does this leave us? How should psychology and neuroscience interface with the criminal legal system?

JARKKO:
That’s a tough question. It’s much easier to criticize it than it is to give prescriptions.

APRYL:
That is the million-dollar question.

And we are going to try to answer it when we come back.

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This episode is supported in part by Realm.

Part podcast studio, part magical refuge, Realm is the audio entertainment company that creates original fiction podcasts, including official continuations of popular franchises like Orphan Black.

One of their latest shows is called Elixir. In this prohibition-inspired fantasy, two women from opposing sides of a ban on magic unite to solve a mystery, and of course end up falling in forbidden love. It’s like if Moulin Rouge were about lesbians, with magic, which frankly, sounds great.

The first episode of Elixir came out June 3rd, and you can catch all the new installments every Thursday wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about Elixir at Realm.fm, and be sure to listen and subscribe wherever you’re listening to Flash Forward right now.

And if you listen to the end of today’s episode, you’re going to hear a little trailer for Elixir, so stick around and check that out.

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FICTION SKETCH BEGINS

[outside a bodega, cars going by]

LEE:
Whoa, Adrian!

ADRIAN:
Hey man!

LEE:
I thought you were in prison?

ADRIAN:
No, they let me just do this weird brain punishment instead.

LEE:
… brain punishment?

ADRIAN:
Yeah, they put a thing in my brain and let me go.

LEE:
Seriously?

ADRIAN:
Yup.

LEE:
What does the thing… in your brain… do?

ADRIAN:
Theoretically, it stops me from wanting to do bad stuff.

LEE:
Does it, like, zap you?

ADRIAN:
No… or, I mean, I haven’t been zapped yet. I don’t really know how it works. I think instead it’s, like, a thought interrupter. So I don’t have the thoughts, instead of being punished for them.

LEE:
Have you tested it?

ADRIAN:
What do you mean?

LEE:
Like… Hey Adrian, wanna set some stuff on fire?

ADRIAN:
Dude, stop.

LEE:
Did your brain backfire?

ADRIAN:
No, but you’re going to get me in trouble. If I think about that stuff it gets logged and they might think the brain thing isn’t working and I’ll have to go to jail!

LEE:
Fine. But seriously, you wanna go for a ride? I got the Bugatti tuned up.

ADRIAN:
(pauses) Okay, yeah.

[montage of speeding cars, yelling, club sounds, “Whoo-hoo!!”]

[loud, annoying beeping]

ADRIAN:
(sleepy) Okay, okay, okay. I’m here, I’m here. Jesus, it’s 2am.

APP VOICE:
Hello. We detected some urges that are usually associated with criminal behavior.

ADRIAN:
No, I was asleep.

APP VOICE:
Please turn your camera on and verify your location.

ADRIAN:
I’m at home.

APP VOICE:
Please log your thoughts in the data log.

ADRIAN:
(desperate) It was a dream! It wasn’t real. It was a dream! I didn’t actually do any of that stuff.

APP VOICE:
Please log your thoughts in the data log.

ADRIAN:
Ugh!!

FICTION SKETCH ENDS

ROSE:
So, if you have listened to Flash Forward for a while, you probably know what my feelings are about prisons, which are that they should not exist. But while we work towards abolition, this episode got me really thinking about whether it’s possible for sciences like psychology, and psychiatry, and neuroscience to ethically engage in this system.

STEPH:
The justice system is adversarial. It’s binary. The decisions are binary in science; it’s about balancing probabilities and accepting a certain probability of error. So, you know that there’s always the chance that you’re wrong in psychology or in social sciences, and I don’t think that’s well-suited to the justice system where there are these really significant decisions that are made in a binary way.

JARKKO:
The kinds of things that I like about psychology, which is insights about the human psyche, is probably what we shouldn’t be doing in the criminal justice system.

ROSE:
In May, Apryl and her co-authors published a paper trying to imagine what an Abolitionist Practice of Psychology might look like.

APRYL:
As you know, we’ve had this racial reckoning after the murders of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, and a lot of us sitting down with our work and saying, “How can we do better? How can we help aid our systems that we’re working in?”

And we have this conversation in forensic psychology all the time, that even our positionally, sometimes those people who are institutionalized, or detained, or incarcerated, they think we’re part of the system. I didn’t come in this field to be part of the system. I don’t want to be a correctional officer. I don’t want to be law enforcement. I’m really there to help people. That’s part of psychology, is the helping professions.

ROSE (on call):
How do you decide when it’s worth working within a system and trying to help the people who are currently in it? And when it’s like, “No, the way to do this is just like abstain,” pull out, and be like, “We can’t participate in this anymore, in good conscience.”?

APRYL:
That is the million-dollar question. So, can I actually go in there and reform things? Or… Again, this is a system that hasn’t been working for the institution of policing. Do I need to try something else? Do I feel okay working in a privatized prison where they’re just hauling people in to keep that system going? These are very tough questions.

I think there is a space for people to go into the systems and change them. We need some of that. I’m in higher education. Higher education has its own inequities and systemic issues. But I’m here because I want to train future practitioners and I want to train future students. And having that presence as a Black woman in higher ed is important.

LIAT:
This is, you know, what abolitionists call ‘reformist versus non-reformist reforms’, right? So the reformists reform are really just there to work within the system as it is and kind of tweak it; you know, maybe make sure less people die. But it’s not to take away the system.

And non-reformists reforms are really abolitionary-type of reforms, like the vision is “We’re not going to have that system. And yes, there might not be a way for us to get from 0 to 100, on the way we have to do these things.” But the vision is always not to expand the system.

ROSE (mono):
That’s Liat Ben-Moshe again. And she pointed to a phrase coined by James Kilgore, an activist and formerly incarcerated person, called “carceral humanism.”

LIAT:
Let’s create more gender-responsive prisons. Let’s create an ankle bracelet instead of incarcerating people. And he said it’s just carceral humanism, meaning it’s more humane, but it’s not less carceral actually at all.

ROSE:
And Liat has her own disability-studies take on that same concept. Right now there are initiatives all over the US to build special prison units focused on mental illness.

LIAT:
And the idea is, we have so many people who are mentally ill in prison and jail, we should just build a mental health jail, right? Like, we should at least staff it. We should at least… and so and so on. This is completely ludicrous.

I mean, this is… It’s just kind of double oppression, really. And to do this in our name, to say that this is for treatment and this is for bettering the lives of people with mental health differences is absolutely an extremely dangerous claim and, of course, completely wrong.

ROSE:
So how does one work outside of this system? I’ve spent a lot of this episode talking about what doesn’t work, what we shouldn’t do, what isn’t ethical, or humane, or right. And whenever I do that, I always get emails from people saying “Okay, great. It’s so easy to say what we shouldn’t do, but what should we do?” Now, I don’t have all the answers there, but both Liat and Elliott Fukui talked about a different model for supporting people.

LIAT:
I think people really underestimate the power of community. It was incredibly life-altering for me to find other disabled people that were politicized as disabled. If somebody is in crisis, who better than somebody who’s been through a similar crisis to talk to?

Why not call people who have been there? Why not, you know, really fund all these… I don’t even want to call them ‘alternatives’ because they’re not alternatives; they’re just things that we’re doing anyway, they’re just not funded.

ELLIOTT:
When I turned 19, I had my last hospitalization in rural Ohio. It was super violent. I was forcibly medicated and restrained. And I decided, like, I can’t live like this anymore. I can’t go back inside. Every time I go inside, I get hella drugged. I lose my jobs. I’d have to start from scratch, right? And it was destroying my life, being in these systems.

I found this website called The Icarus Project, which is now the Fireweed Collective, which was a project started by folks with diagnoses to provide peer support. And when I realized, like, people could do this, people with the same diagnoses were living their lives outside and weren’t, you know, constantly on a cocktail of meds, and weren’t having to, like, sign their rights away, I wanted to try it. And I’ve been doing that now… I was 19 and I’m about to be 35, you know, and I haven’t been back inside.

ROSE:
This isn’t necessarily easy. Nobody is suggesting that. But when we know that the alternatives are hurting so many people, it feels like we should probably at least try something else, right?

ELLIOTT:
We really have to change the way that we relate to ourselves and each other. And it’s terribly difficult work. And I honestly don’t know how else we’re going to do it. Cultural change takes time, right? It takes a long time. And I think every single one of us actually has a lot more power than we think we do to make decisions that get us closer to care, and connection, and support, and solidarity instead of isolation, and fear, and hate. You know, actually, we all get to make those decisions every day.

[Flash Forward closing music begins – a snapping, synthy piece]

Flash Forward is hosted by me, Rose Eveleth, and produced by Julia Llinas Goodman. The intro music is by Asura and the outro music is by Hussalonia. The episode art is by Mattie Lubchansky. The voices from the future this week were played by Chelsey Coombs, Aiya Islam, and Anjali Kunapaneni.

If you want to suggest a future that we should take on, you can send a note on Twitter, Facebook, or by email at Info@FlashForwardPod.com. We do love hearing your ideas.

And if you think you’ve spotted one of the little references that I’ve hidden in the episode, you can email us there too. If you are right, I will send you something cool. If you want to discuss this episode, some other episode, or just the future in general, you can join the FB group! Just search Flash Forward Podcast on Facebook and ask to join.

And if you want to support the show, there are a couple of ways that you can do that too. Head to FlashForwardPod.com/Support for more about how to give. This week’s episode has a ton of bonus content that I could not get to in this episode. It’s already a very long episode and there’s so much I didn’t even include. So now’s a great time to become a supporter because you’ll get the newsletter, you’ll get the bonus podcast, all that good stuff.

If financial giving is not in the cards for you, that’s totally cool; I understand. You can still help the show. You can head to Apple Podcasts and leave a nice review, or you can just tell your friends about the show. Spread the word. That really does help.

That’s all for this future. Come back next time and we’ll travel to a new one.

[music fades out]

TRAILER FOR ELIXIR:

[dramatic mystery music]

LOU:
You don’t understand! You don’t see what’s really going on here!

ELSIE:
Then explain it to me, Lou. Please.

LOU:
I can’t. I… I need a clearer head. Tomorrow, we’ll talk.

[dramatic, spooky music]

1st NARRATOR:
Today had dawned, and her sister was gone. Lou didn’t keep secrets from Elsie. Something is very, very wrong. And Elsie’s only clue was this bar.

[more dramatic, forbidding music]

The Jaded Rose: Floral Culture and Botanical Specialists. A Hush Bar. Home of Locq’s biggest threat, according to her parents anyway, elixirs.

[music switches to jazzy, upbeat]

2nd NARRATOR:
Vera Reeves ran the oldest and most famous Hush Bar in Locq. She’d inherited the business, plus all its inherent risks, when the city council banned the sale of elixirs and imprisoned her father.

[prison gates slamming shut]

[upbeat jazz continues]

VERA:
Poison. Is that what you think of my life’s work?

ELSIE:
Don’t tell me elixirs are harmless. I’ve seen the dangers firsthand.

VERA:
There’s a lot of gray area between harmless and poison.

[magical, swirly sounds; music switches to mysterious and foreboding]

ELSIE:
Tell me… to leave.

2nd NARRATOR:
Elsie couldn’t think. She couldn’t breathe. This close, chest to chest, Elsie could feel the wild thrum of Vera’s heart. Her own answered.

[music transitions to sexy and jazzy]

1st NARRATOR:
Elsie was tempting, yes. She was also a mistake.

ANNOUNCER:
Realm presents Elixir, starring Ava Maag, Keylor Leigh, and Marin Miller. If you like what you hear, please follow, and share this podcast with your friends. Realm is your portal to another world. Listen away.

[music fades down]

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