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In the Age of Information, Can the Great Wall Stand?China faces a conflict between the modern and the outmoded: how to balance the country's information-related needs with the government's authoritarian policies. During a RAND seminar in September, China expert Nina Hachigian reported trends in that country's attempt to juggle both. According to Hachigian, a Council on Foreign Relations fellow at the Los Angeles-based Pacific Council on International Policy, 17 million Chinese citizens use the Internet. The typical user tends to be urban, male, single, educated, and young. This year in China, 27,000 new web sites have been created, and about 2 million telephone lines are added every month. The Chinese government cautiously supports expansion of the Internet for economic growth by sponsoring online contests and offering tax breaks to information technology companies. Still, Hachigian described potential problems that the Internet poses to Chinese authority. For example, dissident material is regularly distributed via e-mail. Although state control over the Internet is diminishing, the Chinese government still attempts to exert control by blocking sites and enforcing censorship regulations. The government has also shut down several pro-democracy web sites. It recognizes that the Internet has created a shift in communication, allowing people to speak en masse, which could potentially foster hostility toward the government. Most likely, anything the United States might do to influence the Internet in China would be considered imperialism, said Hachigian. She suggested that an effective vehicle for developing China's Internet along international standards would be the creation of an international nongovernmental forum where China's regulation of the Internet could be discussed.
How does an occasional drug user become a drug addict? The answer is in the brain, according to Alan Leshner, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse at the National Institutes of Health. Speaking to an audience of RAND researchers in October, Leshner described new science that elucidates the physiological nature of drug abuse and addiction. Just as people don't start out intending to get lung cancer when they smoke, or to get clogged arteries when they eat fatty foods, people don't intend to become drug addicts when they first use drugs. "Initial drug use is a voluntary and therefore a preventable behavior," said Leshner. "However, drug addiction is a disease, a treatable disease that's expressed as a compulsive behavior." According to Leshner, drug addiction is the result of the inexorable, yet undetected, destructive biochemical processes at work.
While all illicit drugs have idiosyncratic effects on the brain, these drugs also have common effects: They trigger the release of dopamine, a neurotransmitter that is directly involved in the experience of pleasure. In essence, drug addicts are addicted specifically to the dopamine spike that drugs produce in the brain. "While we haven't yet pinpointed precisely all the triggers for the changes in the brain's structure and function, a vast body of hard evidence shows that it is virtually inevitable that prolonged drug use will lead to addiction," said Leshner. "From this, we can soundly conclude that drug addiction is a brain disease." Why, then, does an individual take drugs in the first place? "People use drugs for two dichotomous reasons: to feel good (sensation-seeking) or to feel better (self-medicating)." The sensation seekers, Leshner points out, are looking for a novel or exciting experience. The self-medicating types are attempting to escape life conditions, such as poverty or untreated mental disorders, using drugs as if they were treating anxiety or depression. Whatever the initial reason for using drugs, the vast majority of people addicted to drugs cannot stop. "The reason for this is that prolonged drug use changes the brain in fundamental and long-lasting ways. In some sense, the brain is actually rewired as a function of drug use." Leshner emphasized that addiction comes from drug use--not drugs--in a way that is not obvious. There is something unique about administering drugs to oneself. For example, when doctors give morphine for pain, patients do not become addicted. Although patients may develop physical dependence on morphine in this case, the compulsion to abuse morphine does not become manifest--and the compulsion is the essence of addiction. The upshot for policymakers? According to Leshner, the notion that drug addiction is a character flaw--that those addicted to drugs are just too weak to quit on their own--flies in the face of scientific evidence. Therefore, that notion should be discarded. Instead, attention should be focused on improving drug treatment systems, similar to those for treating other chronic relapsing conditions like asthma or hypertension.
The proliferation of commissions, conferences, and publications about terrorism makes it is easy to conclude that the terrorist threat to the United States is on the rise. But that conclusion could just be the result of all the attention, according to Brian Michael Jenkins, a leading RAND expert on terrorism. Confounding the problem is the influence of popular culture. "Popular culture plays an immense role in threat perception," said Jenkins. Movies, books, television, and lurid newspaper and magazine articles can--and do--influence the public and politicians. "For example, the president reads a novel about a biological threat. Then he asks his staff if it could actually happen. That's not a casual question when asked by the president." Suddenly, staffers and experts mobilize to answer the question, some saying maybe yes, others saying maybe no. A commission is convened. A government report is published. Journalists, novelists, and screenwriters then use that report as a basis for further and more dramatic scenarios. Ultimately, what develops is a kind of "feedback" between politicians and popular culture. In fact, national security analysts have been known to study what novelists are writing. "Years ago, we did some research on the possibilities of nuclear terrorism," said Jenkins. "One of the tasks was to track all of the nuclear terrorist novels. We wanted to know how well informed they were technically, what their operational schemes were, what problems nuclear terrorists would confront, and how the novelist solved those problems. "What it really shows is that people get frightened," he continued. Real or not, a perceived threat could promote panic or provoke individuals in positions of authority to react inappropriately. Popular culture encourages speculation about worst-case scenarios. "In the 1990s, these scenarios, this kind of speculation, has moved from the outer edge of work on terrorism into the mainstream of terrorist threat assessment." The process begins with someone identifying a hypothetical possibility. With time and debate, the possibility gets legitimized, then becomes a probability, then becomes an inevitability, and finally the threat seems imminent. "One can always identify a vulnerability, conjure up an enemy, describe catastrophic consequences, and then avoid them by taking the right measures," said Jenkins. "We never know, in fact, if there was a threat to begin with. It's circular and self-contained. And I think that's pretty dangerous as well." The way that analysts forecast the terrorist threat is changing, Jenkins concluded. "Traditional analysis breaks down, because it doesn't tell us about the rare events we're looking for." Today, analysts are moving away from the process of identifying potential enemies and toward focusing on domestic vulnerabilities such as water, gas, power, or air navigation systems. "The problem," cautioned Jenkins, "is that the vulnerabilities are infinite."
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