Veritaserum... Fact or Fiction?
After reading other people's posts this afternoon about lie detection, I started looking for real life chemicals that might make someone spill their secrets. Most of what I found led me to believe that truth serums are better left for pages in a science-fiction novel but I did find one article interesting, on Wikipedia of all places.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth_serum
Granted, Wikipedia's reliability isn't the greatest but generally speaking they are good for some stuff so I am going to take their word for it for arguments sake. According to this article, there are certain chemicals that can induce people to tell the truth. These chemicals have been deemed unethical under the grounds of torture in international law however they can be used for psychiatry purposes. The reliability of these drugs are called to question in this article as it states that the drugs do not actually cause people to tell the truth, it is the fact that the people the drugs are being administered to BELIEVE that they cannot tell a lie under the influence of the drug. It also states that the drugs causes people to talk more frequently thereby releasing more information and maybe telling more truths.
I found this information very interesting especially the part about it being illegal in international law. Now I am just as much for civil liberties as the next person but I do not feel that this should fall under the guidelines as torture from an international legal standard. I suppose one could argue that in a very contrived scenario where someone is administering truth serum on a governmental figure to obtain information (let's say codes to our nuclear weapons arsenal) then YES maybe then you can view truth serum as torture (although if someone wants access to our nukes then they probably don't care about international law anyway). What do you think? Is a truth serum unethical? If so why or why not?
(For those that didn't get the title reference, Veritaserum is a fictional truth serum)
Now, truth serums are a typical device used in Hollywood, but they do exist. For example, I know a couple of cases where the military has used something called "Sodium thiopental" AKA "Sodium Pentathol" on subjects that are verified bombers. These serums don't make it so the victim can't lie; it weakens the victims ability to resist coercion though. Is it moral? That's for each individual to decide for themselves. Psychologically, you can see the implications here. One may feel a loss of control if they "can't" lie, but the fact that individual is being interrogated in the first place is enough to cause distress. For the user, it does give them a sense of greater control.