A leading expert on chemical and biological arms control called Wednesday for urgent efforts to stop new mind-altering drugs developed for medical purposes from being adopted by the military for use in warfare.
In an article in the U.S. journal Nature, British academic Malcolm Dando said civilian researchers in many countries seemed largely unaware of the danger and urged quick action to adapt a key arms pact to head it off.
"In the past 20 years, modern warfare has changed from predominantly large-scale clashes of armies to messy civil strife," wrote Dando, citing the Bosnian conflict of the mid-1990s and current fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Chemical agents and even gene therapy being developed in civilian life science laboratories "are particularly suited to this style of warfare; it is not hard to find people in the military world who think they would be useful," he declared.
