Let me give you an example. At the enormous civic center building in my county, a fantastic Buck Rogers type of plastic and chrome backdrop to a bad science fiction film, each visitor must pass through an electronic field that sets off an alarm if he has on him too much metal, be it keys, a watch, a pair of scissors, bomb, or .308 Winchester rifle. When the hoop pings — and it always pings for me — a uniformed policeman immediately fully searches the visitor. A sign warns that if any weapon is discovered on a visitor, it’s all over for him — and the sign also warns that if any illegal drugs are found on a visitor during this weapons search, he’s done for, too. Now, I think even you people up here in Canada are aware of the reason for this methodical weapons search of each visitor to the Marin County Civic Center — it has to do with the tragic shootout a year or so ago. But, and they officially posted notice of this, the visitor will be inspected for narcotics possession, too, and this has nothing to do with either the shootout or with any danger to the building itself or the persons within it. An electronic checkpoint legitimately set up to abort a situation in which explosives or weapons are brought into the Civic Center, has been assigned an added police function connected with the authentic issue only by the common thread of Penal Code violation. To visit the county library, which is in that building, you are subject to search — must, in fact, yield absolutely and unconditionally — for possession without the juridical protection, built into the very basis of our American civil rights system, that some clear and evident indication exist that you may be carrying narcotics before a search can be carried out against you. During the search I’ve even had the uniformed officer at the entrance examine the books and papers I was carrying, to see if they were acceptable. The next step, in the months to come, would be to have such mandatory check-points at busy intersections and at all public buildings — including banks and so forth. Once it has been established that the authorities can search you for illegal drugs because you’re returning a book to the library, I think you can see just how far the tyranny of the state can go. Once it has provided itself with an electronic hoop that registers the presence of something we all carry on us: keys, a pair of fingernail clippers, coins. The blip, rather a quaint little sound, which you set off, opens a door not leading to the county library but to possible imprisonment. It is that blip that ushers in all the rest. And how many other blips are we setting off, or our children will be setting off, in contexts that we know nothing about yet? But my optimistic point: The kids of today, having been born into this all-pervasive society, are fully aware of and take for granted the activity of such devices. One afternoon when I was parking my car on the lot before a grocery store, I started, as usual, to lock all the car doors to keep the parcels in the backseat from being stolen. “Oh, you don’t have to lock up the car,” the girl with me said. “This parking lot is under constant closed-circuit TV scan. Every car here and everyone is being watched all the time; nothing can happen.” So we went inside the store, leaving the car unlocked. And, of course, she was right; born into this society, she has learned to know such things. And — I now have a passive infrared scanning system in my own home in Santa Venetia, connected with what is called a “digital transmitting box,” which, when triggered off by the scanner, transmits a coded signal by direct line to the nearest law-enforcement agency, notifying them that intruders have entered my house. This totally self-operated electronic detection system functions whether I am home or not. It is able to discriminate between the presence of a human being and an animal. It has its own power supply. If the line leading from it is cut, grounded, or even tampered with, the signal is immediately released, or if any other part of the system is worked on. And Westinghouse will reinstall it wherever I live: I own the components for life. Eventually, Westinghouse Security hopes, all homes and businesses will be protected this way. The company has built and maintains a communications center near each community in this country. If there is no police agency willing or able to accept the signal, then their own communications center responds and guarantees to dispatch law enforcement personnel within four minutes — that is, the good guys with the good guns will be at your door within that time. It does not matter if the intruder enters with a passkey or blows in the whole side of the house, or as they tell me it’s being done now, bores down through the roof — however he gets in, for whatever reason, the mechanism responds and transmits its signal. Only I can turn the system off. And if I forget to, then — I suppose, anyhow — it’s all over for me.
Someone suggested, by the way, that perhaps this passive infrared scanner sweeping out the interior of my house constantly “might be watching me and reporting back to the authorities whatever I do right there in my living room.” Well, what I am doing is sitting at my desk with pen and paper trying to figure out how to pay Westinghouse the $840 I owe them for the system. As I’ve got it worked out now, I think that if I sell everything I own, including my house, I can — oh, well. One other thing. If I enter the house — my house — and the system finds I’m carrying illegal narcotics on my person, it doesn’t blip; it causes both me and the house and everything in it to self-destruct.
Street drugs, by the way, are a major problem in the area where I live — that is, the illegal drugs you buy on the street are often adulterated, cut, or just plain not what you’re told they are. You wind up poisoned, dead, or just plain “burned,” which means, ‘You don’t get off,” which means you paid $10 for a gram of milk sugar. So a number of free labs have been set up for the specific purpose of analyzing street drugs; you mail them a portion of the drug you’ve brought and they tell you what’s in it, the idea being, of course, that if it has strychnine or flash powder in it, you should know before you take it. Well, the police saw through into the “real” purpose of these labs at one glance. They act as quality-control stations for the drug manufacturers. Let’s say you’re making Methedrine in your bathtub at home — a complicated process, but feasible — and so every time a new batch comes out, you mail a sample to one of these labs for analysis. . . and they write back, “No, you haven’t got it quite right yet, but if you cook it for perhaps just five minutes longer. . .” This is what the police fear. This is how the police mentality works. And, interestingly, so does the drug-pusher mentality; the pushers are already doing precisely that. I don’t know — to me it seems a sort of nice idea, the drug pushers interested in what they’re selling. Back in the old days they cared only that you lived long enough to pay for what you purchased. After that, you were on your own.
Yes, as every responsible parent knows, street drugs are a problem, a menace to their kids. I completely, emphatically agree. At one time — you may have read this in biographical material accompanying my stories and novels — I was interested in experimenting with psychedelic drugs. That is over for me. Too many suicides, psychoses, organic — irreversible — damage to both heart and brain. But there are other drugs, not illegal, not street drugs, not cut with flash powder or milk sugar, and not mislabeled, that worry me even more. These are reputable, establishment drugs prescribed by reputable doctors or given in reputable hospitals, especially psychiatric hospitals. These are pacification drugs. I mention this in order to return to my main preoccupation, here: the human versus the android, and how the former can become — can, in fact, be made to become — the latter. The calculated, widespread, and thoroughly sanctioned use of specific tranquilizing drugs such as the phenothiazines may not, like certain illegal street drugs, produce permanent brain damage, but they can — and, God forbid, they do — produce what I am afraid I must call “soul” damage. Let me amplify.