Last time I wrote on neurowarfare it created quite a response from across the planet. To remind you, I write on neurowarfare to accelerate the conversation about their use and to highlight that like all technological advances, neurotechnology will also be twisted for the purposes of national defense and warfare.

Although this week's Science magazine does not come out and say it, a team of researchers have made a fundamental advance in neurowarfare technology by figuring out how to make non-lethal opiates.

Opiates are powerful painkillers, but they come with some baggage: a troubling tendency to depress breathing. By giving an experimental drug along with a narcotic, a team of researchers eliminated the opiate's potentially lethal side effect while preserving its ability to blunt pain. The result could have far-reaching clinical implications for anesthesia and the treatment of acute and chronic pain. (oh, and warfare)

Like morphine and other narcotics, a painkiller called fentanyl disrupts nerve cells deep in the brain that register pain as well as another subset that governs breathing rhythm. Well-controlled doses of the drug can work wonders, but overexposure can be disastrous: In October 2002, 129 people died in a Moscow theater when authorities subdued hostage-takers there by pumping what many believe was fentanyl into the building.

I wonder if the defense departments across the planet have assimilated what has happened here: the development of non-lethal sleeping agents.  Clearly, the Russians haven't been researching this area too deeply.  Who else hasn't?