Re: Cocaine and heart-attacks
Some more goodies off that same site (I think cocaine.org is basically a pro-ecstacy and other as-yet-uninvented designer drugs site):
Within the next few decades, however, humanity will have the pharmaceutical and genetic opportunity to choose whatever range of the affective axis we wish to occupy as the backdrop to our lives. To date, we have barely glimpsed the potential extremes of the pleasure-pain axis; in the case of the dark side of sentience, it may be hoped (and statistically expected) that we never will. More ambitiously, the new biotechnologies promise to extend our range of choices way beyond tools for crude, unidimensional mood-modulation. For we'll have the tools to re-design the neural basis of our personalities to repair the deficits of natural selection. Even better, ethically speaking, the application of germline hedonic engineering can ensure that parenthood won't entail bringing any more suffering into the world. Misery becomes physically impossible if the genetic code for its biological substrates is missing. Thus having children needn't, as now, entail causing more heartache as well as episodic happiness. Procreation becomes permissible even for the negative utilitarian who finds it impossible to practise ethical parenthood with a Darwinian genome.
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