by Mark Easton
Money soon began to pour into what was dubbed a new clinical discipline, much of it from pharmaceutical companies who were wide awake to the potential profits from sleep. Products promising users the power to defy nature, to control their sleeping and waking, became big business in a world encouraged to feel anxious about its hectic lifestyle. The scientific community, though, was torn: some believed the new designer drugs were an answer to the suffering associated with 24/7 demands; others feared corporate greed was driving a dishonest and dangerous pill-pushing racket.
Ian Oswald and colleagues of mine at the BBC’s Panorama programme found themselves caught up in the row amid reports that the sleeping pill Halcyon, made by the American pharmaceutical firm Upjohn, was addictive and linked to memory lapses. They suggested the drugs company had covered up and lied about evidence of side effects, accusations vigorously denied by the executives at Upjohn’s headquarters in Kalamazoo, Michigan.
It all ended in London’s High Court in May 1994, the culmination of a long-running libel trial. Justice Sir Anthony May ruled in favour of Upjohn but, illustrating the passions generated by the issue, both Ian Oswald and Upjohn physician Royston Drucker were also obliged to pay damages to each other for libellous remarks. The case exemplified the furious debate that had begun to rage over humankind’s quest to become the master rather than the servant of sleep.
There are now an estimated 13 million prescriptions for sleeping pills issued each year in Britain, as the nation looks to the medicine cabinet for help in dropping off. At the same time, sales of ‘energy drinks’ to keep people awake have been soaring. Analysts reckon Britain spends a billion pounds a year on cans and bottles fizzing with stimulants. Coffee is also a billion-pound-a-year product, with corporate cafe chains barging their way on to every high street for a slice of the action.
It has become relatively normal to begin the day with a jolting Americano and to close it with a dose of Zopiclone: from A to Z where once it was simply dawn ‘til dusk. This cocktail of tranquilisers and stimulants, however, has left Britain a restless place, nervous about messing up the balance between alertness and tiredness. To the rescue have come an army of sleep consultants, experts to advise us on ‘fatigue management solutions’.
The MetroNaps EnergyPod, for example, is marketed as the answer for stressed-out city executives who currently ‘seek rest in places not intended for it: at their desk, in a conference room, a parked car or even a bathroom’. Instead, they could rejuvenate with a power nap in a machine apparently based on years of research and thousands of design hours. Lie back on what looks like a dentist’s chair, your head enveloped by a huge dome, and let the soft lights and music guide you on a short round-trip to the unconscious world. The brainchild of a banker who said he kept finding colleagues asleep in lavatory cubicles and store cupboards, the pods have apparently been installed in a number of London city firms, bosses persuaded that the monthly rental is less than the increased productivity.
The phrase ‘power nap’ reinforces the idea that success comes with the ability to control sleep. Winston Churchill, John F. Kennedy, Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and Tony Blair were all power-nappers, we are told, insisting on a short and intense rest period in the afternoon that recharged their batteries and invigorated their minds. I once sat on a train with Pierre-Yves Gerbeau, the French businessman who had been asked by Tony Blair to rescue the Millennium Dome project. As the Eurostar sped through the Pas-de-Calais, his aides informed me that PY would now take a nap. With that, M. Gerbeau closed his eyes and sat trance-like in his seat. After precisely ten minutes he opened his eyes once more and continued the conversation, apparently refreshed. It was hard not to be impressed.
The French have had quite an influence on our thinking about sleep. The geophysicist Jean-Jacques d’Ortous de Mairan was the first to discover circadian rhythms in 1729. In the 1950s and 60s, the neurobiologist Michel Jouvet led the way on sleep research, organising the first international symposium on the subject in France in 1963. He is likely to be remembered, though, for events twenty-five years later when he was the director of a laboratory at the pharmaceutical firm Group Lafon. There he made a breakthrough hailed as a great French discovery, a drug that promised to give us greater mastery over sleep than ever before.
Professor Jouvet had adapted an anti-depressant to make a pill, he said, which did away with the need for rest. He took it himself to test its properties and claimed it made him super-productive without any apparent side effects. His baccalaureate students also tried the new drug and were said to have seen a marked improvement in their capacity for revision, able to stay awake for sixty hours at a stretch with little or no decline in their cognitive performance. What made Modafinil such an advance on previous stimulants, though, was that it caused virtually no noticeable rebound. Users didn’t need to make up for lost sleep.
The potential of the drug was quickly recognised, not least by the military. At an international defence meeting in Paris, Professor Jouvet told generals that Modafinil could keep an army on its feet and fighting for three days and nights with no major side effects. The Pentagon was all ears. A $3 billion programme to develop a ‘Metabolically Dominant Soldier’ was already investigating how to keep US troops in combat for long periods without sleep. It had, for instance, been researching how dolphins manage to send half of their brain to sleep at a time with the hope, presumably, that soldiers might learn to do the same. Now, it was suggested, the answer wasn’t in Flipper. It was in France.
British forces were equally intrigued. The Ministry of Defence paid the military technology company Qinetiq to investigate the potential of Modafinil, sold in the UK under the name Provigil. Large orders were placed for tablets just before the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq in 2001 and 2002. The MoD denied the drugs were being tested on soldiers, but Qinetiq scientist Dr Anna Casey told a committee of MPs in 2005 that ‘one is always looking for something that would give military personnel an extra edge.’ Modafinil, she confirmed, had been ‘shown to enhance physical and mental performance’.
The official line from British defence chiefs was that the pills were purchased for legitimate clinical reasons, prescribed to soldiers suffering from narcolepsy or sleep apnoea, but word was spreading that scientists had come up with a wonder drug. High-powered city traders were among the first to bring supplies to the UK, eager to exploit a product that meant they could operate at full throttle on just a couple of hours’ sleep a night.
Students too were quick to spot the potential benefits. The University of York student website ran interviews with Modafinil users in 2009. ‘In a typical Modafinil-fuelled night, I take the drug with dinner, go to the pub with my friends and maybe watch a film, before getting in at around 1am and working for another eight hours. It’s a productive way of living; it lets me be sociable and academic at the same time,’ said Tim. Charles explained the effects. ‘People talk about the Modafinil buzz, but there’s no high in the traditional sense. I was able to concentrate more easily, like my memory was improved. I could stay awake all night and do nothing but work without getting bored. I wasn’t “high” so much as “enhanced”.’
There were side effects, of course: fever, sore throat and nausea. A few users developed potentially fatal skin diseases and the manufacturers were obliged to update the label to include warnings of the possibility of developing Stevens-Johnson Syndrome or toxic epidermal necrolysis. No one could yet know the long-term effects of use. But it did appear that science had stumbled upon a relatively safe answer to an ancient puzzle. Modafinil, though, also posed a new question: how will humanity use its power over sleep?
My guess is that, in this country at least, a sleepless world would sound too much like a restless world — a relentless environment in which ‘Metabolically Dominant Citizens’ forget the guilty pleasure of a quiet doze in a deckchair or forty winks while pretending to watch the cricket. Britain may worry about being seen to have too much or too little of the stuff,
but we have got enough to keep us awake at night without taking on the responsibilities of the great god Hypnos. And so to bed. Zzzz.
FURTHER READING
A is for Alcohol
1. C. MacAndrew and R. B. Edgerton, Drunken Comportment: A Social Explanation (Aldine, 1969)
2. R. Martínez and L. Martín, ‘Patrones de consume de alcohol en la comunidad de Madrid’, Comunidady Drogas, 5–6 (1987)
3. Social Issues Research Group, Social and Cultural Aspects of Drinking: A Report to the Amsterdam Group (SIRC, 1998)
4. G. A. Marlatt, B. Demming and J. B. Reid, ‘Loss of control drinking in alcoholics: an experimental analogue’, Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 81 (1973)
5. M. Hough, Drugs Misuse and the Criminal Justice System: A Review of the Literature, (Home Office, 1996)
6. D. B. Heath, ‘Flawed policies from flawed premises: pseudo-science about alcohol and drugs’, in R. C. Engs (ed.), Controversies in the Addictions Field (Kendall-Hunt, 1990)
B is for Bobbies
1. History of the Metropolitan Police, www.met.police.uk
2. R. V. G. Clarke and M. Hough, Crime and Police Effectiveness (HMSO, 1984)
3. M. Davis, ‘Fortress Los Angeles: The Militarization of Urban Space’ in M. Sorkin (ed.), Variations on a Theme Park: The New American City and the End of Public Space (Hill and Wang, 1992)
4. G. Kelling, A. Pate, D. Dieckman and C. Brown, The Kansas City Preventive Patrol Experiment (Police Foundation, 1972)
C is for Cheese
1. M. Thatcher, Speech at Franco-British Council Dinner, 16 May 1982, www.margaretthatcher.org
2. D. B. Grigg, The Agricultural Systems of the World: An Evolutionary Approach (Cambridge University Press, 1974)
3. Anthony Woodward, ‘Design Dinosaurs: 11: Lymeswold’, Independent on Sunday, 10 April 1994
4. Sir Stephen Roberts obituary, Daily Telegraph, 19 July 2002
5. Authenticity in Food and Drinks: New Insights into Consumer Attitudes and Behaviors (Datamonitor, 2006), www.datamonitor.com
6. British Cheese Board, www.britishcheese.com
7. Capricorn Goats Cheese, www.capricorngoatscheese.co.uk
D is for Dogs
1. A. C. Swinburne, Mary Stuart: A Tragedy (Chatto & Windus, 1881)
2. E. Kienzle, ‘A comparison of the feeding behavior and the human-animal relationship in owners of normal and obese dogs’, The Journal of Nutrition, 128 (1998)
3. Canine obesity, www.csp.org.uk
4. Medical and legal implications of veterinary cosmetic surgical procedures, www.animalmedcenter.com
5. Pet Food Manufacturers Association statistics, www.pfma.org.uk
6. R. B. Lee, A History and Description of the Modern Dogs of Great Britain and Ireland (Horace Cox, 1893)
7. J. H. Walsh, The Dog, in Health and Disease, by Stonehenge (Longman, 1859)
8. A. Manning and J. A. Serpell, Animals and Human Society: Changing Perspectives (Routledge, 1994)
9. W. Secord, A Social History of the Dog in Art (Antique Collectors’ Club, 1992)
10. Report from the Select Committee of the House of Lords on Rabies in Dogs (Parliamentary Papers, 1887)
11. N. Pemberton and M. Worboys, Mad Dogs and Englishmen: Rabies in Britain, 1830–2000 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007)
E is for Error
1. PRCA membership statistics, www.prca.org.uk
2. B. Engel, The Power of Apology (John Wiley & Sons, 2001)
3. A. Massie, ‘The art of saying sorry’, Independent, 30 September 2004
4. A. Boin, P. Hart, E. Stern and B. Sundelius, The Politics of Crisis Management: Public Leadership under Pressure (Cambridge University Press, 2005)
5. J. Grout and L. Fisher, What Do Leaders Really Do? (John Wiley & Sons, 2007)
6. A. Barry, Political Events (University of London, 2002)
7. C. Hood, The Blame Game: Spin, Bureaucracy and Self-preservation in Government (Princeton University Press, 2011)
F is for Family
1. Social Justice Policy Group, Breakthrough Britain: Ending the Costs of Social Breakdown (Centre for Social Justice, 2007), www.centreforsocialjustice.org.uk
2. The UK Family: In Statistics (BBC/ICM, 2007)
3. J. Bowlby, Forty-four Juvenile Thieves: Their Characters and Home-life (Baillière, Tindall & Cox, 1946)
4. R. Berthoud, ‘Family formation in multi-cultural Britain: diversity and change’, in G. Lowry, T. Modood and S. Teles (eds.), 6. Ethnicity, Social Mobility and Public Policy (Cambridge University Press, 2005)
5. L. Platt, Ethnicity and family: Relationships within and between ethnic groups: an analysis using the Labour Force Survey (Institute for Social & Economic Research, 2009)
6. A. Giddens, ‘Family’, Runaway World (BBC Reith Lectures, 1999)
7. P. Thane, Happy Families? History and Family Policy (British Academy, 2010)
8. Doing Better for Children (OECD, 2009), www.oecd.org
G is for Grass
1. F. L. Olmsted, Walks and Talks of an American Farmer in England (Harvard University, 1852)
2. Report of the Select Committee on Public Walks (Parliamentary Papers, 1833)
3. J. C. Loudon, The Utility of Agricultural Knowledge to the Sons of the Landed Proprietors of Great Britain, &c, by a Scotch Farmer and Land-Agent (1809)
4. J. C. Loudon, Hints for Breathing Places for Metropolis, and for Country Towns and Villages, on Fixed Principles (Longman, Rees, Orome, Brown and Green, 1829)
5. A. F. Prévost, Mémoires et aventures d’un homme de qualité qui s’est retiré du monde (M. G. Merville & J. Vander Kloot, 1728)
6. Down with the Fences: Battles for the Commons in South London (Past Tense Publications, 2004)
7. Urban Task Force, Green Spaces, Better Places (DTLR, 2002)
8. D. Tibbatts, Your Parks: The Benefits of Parks and Greenspace (Urban Parks Forum, 2002)
9. M. L. Gothein, History of Garden Art (J. M. Dent & Son, 1913)
10. A. Bottomley and N. Moore, ‘From walls to membranes: fortress polis and the governance of urban public space in twenty-first-century Britain’, Law and Critique, 18 (2007)
11. Select Committee on Environment, Transport and Regional Affairs, Town and Country Parks (TSO, 1999), www.publications.parliament.uk
H is for Happiness
1. J. Stiglitz, A. Sen and J. P. Fitoussi, Report by the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress (2009)
2. The Istanbul Declaration (OECD, 2007), http://www.oecd.org
3. D. Cameron, ‘The next age of government’, TED conference, 16 February 2010, www.ted.com
4. P. Noonan, ‘There is no time, there will be time’, Forbes ASAP, 30 November 1998
5. Declaration on Social Progress and Development (United Nations, 1969), www.un.org
6. D. Kahneman, E. Diener and N. Schwarz, Well-Being: The Foundations of Hedonic Psychology (Russell Sage Foundation, 1999)
7. Strategy Unit, Life Satisfaction: The State of Knowledge and Implications for Government (Cabinet Office, 2002), www.nationalarchives.gov.uk
8. R. Layard, Happiness: Lessons from a New Science (Penguin, 2005)
I is for Immigration
1. R. Brown, ‘Racism and immigration in Britain’, International Socialism Journal, 68 (1995)
2. ‘Citizenship: A History of People, Rights and Power in Britain’, The National Archives, www.nationalarchives.gov.uk
3. G. Clayton, Textbook on Immigration and Asylum Law (Oxford University Press, 2010)
4. I. R. G. Spencer, British Immigration Policy since 1939: The Making of Multi-racial Britain (Routledge, 1997)
5. B. Carter, C. Harris and S. Joshi, ‘The 1951–55 Conservative Government and the racialisation of black immigration’, Policy Papers in Ethnic Relations, 11 (1987)
6. Home Office, Secure Borders, Safe Haven: Integration With Diversity in Modern Britain (TSO, 2002)
7. M. Prestwich, Edward I (University of California Press, 1988)
&nbs
p; 8. Cabinet Papers 1946–68, The National Archives, www.nationalarchives.gov.uk
9. Andrew Neather, ‘Don’t listen to the whingers — London needs immigrants’, London Evening Standard, 23 October 09
J is for Justice
1. P. Colquhoun, A Treatise on the Police of the Metropolis (H. Fry for C. Dilly, 1795)
2. W. Allen and Y. Barzel, ‘The evolution of criminal law and police during the industrial revolution’, Working Papers (Simon Fraser University, 2007)
3. Justice Committee, The Crown Prosecution Service: Gatekeeper of the Criminal Justice System (House of Commons, 2009)
4. R. Reiner, ‘Media-made criminality: the representation of crime in the mass media’, in M. Maguire, R. Morgan and R. Reiner (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Criminology (Oxford University Press, 2007)
5. P. Murray, Signal Crimes: Risk Perception and Behaviour (ODPM, 2004), www.communities.gov.uk
K is for Knives
1. ‘Tackling Knives Action Programme (TKAP) Fact Sheet’, The National Archives (2008) www.nationalarchives.gov.uk
2. No to Knives campaign launch, The National Archives (2008) www.nationalarchives.gov.uk
3. M. Easton, ‘Knife “fact sheet”: the e-mail trail’, BBC, 5 March 2009, www.bbc.co.uk
L is for Learning