Therapeutic Forgetting: The Legal and Ethical Implications of Memory Dampening

Summary

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Neuroscientists have made significant advances in identifying drugs to dampen the intensity of traumatic memories. Such drugs hold promise for victims of terrorism, military conflict, assault, car accidents, and natural disasters who might otherwise suffer for many years from intense, painful memories. In this article, the author describes possible legal and ethical implications of memory dampening. For example, he notes that traumatic events frequently lead to legal proceedings that rely on memories of those events. Drugs that dampen traumatic memories may someday test the boundaries between an individual's right to modify his memories and society's right to stop him from altering valuable evidence. While memory dampening may eventually require thoughtful regulation, broad-brushed restrictions are unjustified: They have a deeply personal interest in controlling people's own minds that entitles them to a certain freedom of memory. The mere possibility of memory dampening raises fundamental questions about who owns their memories and how they should balance the rights of memory-holders against society as a whole.

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Therapeutic Forgetting: The Legal and Ethical Implications of Memory Dampening

INTRODUCTION

Suppose we could erase memories we no longer wish to keep. In such a world, the victim of a terrifying assault could wipe away memories of the incident and be free of the nightmares that such memories often cause. Some memories, however, even quite unpleasant ones, are extremely valuable to society and ought not be eliminated without due consideration. An assault victim who hastily erases memory of a crime may thereby impede the investigation and prosecution of the perpetrator. In a world with memory erasure, our individual interest in controlling our memories may conflict with society's interest in maintaining access to those memories.1

While true memory erasure is still the domain of science fiction,2 less dramatic means of dampening the strength of a memory may have already been developed. Some experiments suggest that propranolol, an FDA-approved drug, can dull the emotional pain associated with the memory of an event when taken within six hours after the event occurs.3 Furthermore, by reducing the emotional intensity of a memory, propranolol may be capable of dampening its factual richness as well.4 Together, the research holds out the possibility that, under some circumstances, propranolol may dampen both emotional and factual components of memory.

Researchers are now conducting larger studies with propranolol to confirm these preliminary results5 and to test whether propranolol might alleviate traumatic memories from the more distant past.6 Meanwhile, even though propranolol was originally granted FDA-approval to treat hypertension, clinicians may already use it to treat traumatic memories because doctors are permitted to prescribe it for off-label purposes.7 Whether or not further research supports the use of propranolol to treat traumatic memories or focuses on some more potent successor, the quest for drugs to "therapeutically forget" is underway, and the search is starting to show promise.

Those susceptible to posttraumatic stress disorder ("PTSD"), an affliction characterized by invasive, painful memories,8 stand to gain the most from memory-dampening drugs. Attention to PTSD has increased in recent years as a result of terrorist attacks, military conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, and natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina and the Asian tsunami of 2004. These events have left thousands of survivors gripped by traumatic memories. The Department of Veterans Affairs has raised particular concerns about the cost of treating PTSD in soldiers.9 Veterans received PTSD benefit payments totaling $4.3 billion in 2004, up from $1.7 billion in 1999.10 Any drug that can consistently and cost-effectively prevent or ease the suffering of PTSD will be of great interest not only to doctors and patients, but also to federal and state governments, private insurers, and pharmaceutical companies.

Despite the potentially huge market for memory-dampening drugs, the subject has received surprisingly little scholarly attention,11 appearing primarily in brief news articles.12 It is already clear, however, that people have remarkably divergent intuitions about the desirability of memory dampening. For example, in response to an article on the subject in the New York Times Magazine, one mother wrote the following letter to the editor:

Six years ago, I watched both of my teenage boys die, several hours apart, after our car was struck by a speeding patrol car . . . . I don't mean to judge the way in which others should treat (or be treated for) their own personal tragedies. But for me, I needed to retain every detail of my memory, not only for the manslaughter trial that followed a year and a half later but also for my own well-being. . . . Although it's painful to relive that night and its aftermath, doing so helps me feel that I am doing something positive with this tragedy. As for erasing the memories of that night, I would never want to take a chance that even an iota of all the positive memories of my wonderful sons would disappear along with the painful ones.13

By contrast, in an online discussion of memory dampening, one participant commented:

I really feel that this could help a lot of people heal . . . the pain that stays in their mind. I for one would go through with it because I can hardly go on through life with all this pain. I have been dealing with multiple traumas in my life and its [sic] going on almost 14 years now.14

Another participant added, "[I] have severe [PTSD] and would sell my soul to the devil himself to be rid of my 24/7 hellish flashbacks and night terrors."15

These heartfelt but dramatically different points of view highlight the numerous legal and ethical issues raised by memory dampening. The President's Council on Bioethics (the "Council")16 explored many of these issues in a series of hearings in 2002 and 2003.17 By and large, the Council was skeptical of the merits of memory dampening,18 raising concerns that memory dampening may: (1) prevent us from truly coming to term...

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