One
From the ‘End of the Drug Wars’ Oral History Project.
Edited interview transcript with Julie Davies, member of
the Vice development team.
Before we start, I just want to point out that the device,
in some form, would have been developed anyway. Our little team just sped it up
by a couple of years.
For me, it began in the Psychoactive Café, the most popular pub
on campus. The PA Café was founded by Psychology grad students to show movies
when the university was founded thirty years ago. In those days, movie nights
were still big social events, especially in winter. The café has kept up with
the times and doesn’t show movies any more, as such.
It was winter, February, the worst part of the year in northern
Manitoba. The five of us were grad students – me, Chenko, Naseer, Miguel and
Xiang. That’s spelled with an X, by the way, not Sh, but you know that, of
course. I was the only one born in Canada, which was totally normal at Thompson University. Few Canadian students wanted to go to university in the sub-arctic,
and foreign students didn’t know what they were getting into.
Chenko was a Canadian citizen, but had spent most of his
life in Russia; at least I think so. The rest of us were used to warmer
climates – Toronto, where I come from, is subtropical compared to northern
Canada – and we were having a hard time dealing with the cold and the dark,
especially Naseer and Miguel. We’d been lured with money and equipment. TU was
trying to make a name for itself by investing in bright young scientists, and
it was building a reputation for ground-breaking research on pain management.
My faculty advisor was studying how meditation techniques could manage chronic
pain, and my dissertation….
Oh, well, I’ll get into that later.
I remember our conversation vividly. We were talking about
how to improve the PA. It’s in a former lab space in a concrete basement, and
despite that unpromising location had become a major destination for the entire
university. It had been tweaked over the decades by generations of psych majors
and engineering students.
The acoustic tiles had been ripped out of the ceiling and
replaced by a sound-deadening fabric that changed colours with the lighting,
from pearly gray to cerulean blue to the darkest indigo. The lights were
invisible, hidden behind the ceiling, and could be adjusted to mimic different
times of day. There was some kind of projection system that could add drifting
clouds and, since the last upgrade, convincing stars, probably LEDs liberated
from a research project.
The space was divided into several big rooms by movable
floor-to-ceiling dividers and doorways covered with thick curtains. Each room
was located in a different part of the world. The one we were in during that
conversation was in Switzerland, in the mountains. The room was big enough for
seven or eight tables, and the place was crowded.
I was looking out the fake window – a huge high-density
screen synchronized with three other windows, one on each wall, each facing a
different direction – facing the meadow, enjoying the spring flowers. I could
see the wind ruffling the grass and the sunlight moving on the mountains. It
was kind of cheesy because the dividers were made out of cubicle fabric, and
they ended abruptly at the fake sky above our heads. The illusion wasn’t great,
but it sure beat looking at the snow in the dark under fluorescent lights. This
time of year we could go days without seeing the real sun, going into the lab before
dawn and coming out long after the sun had set.
We had checked the other rooms before settling on this one.
There was the ever-popular Caribbean island, the spaceship view-deck favoured
by the engineers, and an African savannah complete with giraffes in the
distance.
In the old days, the PA had scenic posters on the walls
surrounded by fake curtains tacked onto the partitions. A couple of years ago,
in a major upgrade, it started using feeds from a
From the ‘End of the Drug Wars’ Oral History Project.
Edited interview transcript with Julie Davies, member of
the Vice development team.
Before we start, I just want to point out that the device,
in some form, would have been developed anyway. Our little team just sped it up
by a couple of years.
For me, it began in the Psychoactive Café, the most popular pub
on campus. The PA Café was founded by Psychology grad students to show movies
when the university was founded thirty years ago. In those days, movie nights
were still big social events, especially in winter. The café has kept up with
the times and doesn’t show movies any more, as such.
It was winter, February, the worst part of the year in northern
Manitoba. The five of us were grad students – me, Chenko, Naseer, Miguel and
Xiang. That’s spelled with an X, by the way, not Sh, but you know that, of
course. I was the only one born in Canada, which was totally normal at Thompson University. Few Canadian students wanted to go to university in the sub-arctic,
and foreign students didn’t know what they were getting into.
Chenko was a Canadian citizen, but had spent most of his
life in Russia; at least I think so. The rest of us were used to warmer
climates – Toronto, where I come from, is subtropical compared to northern
Canada – and we were having a hard time dealing with the cold and the dark,
especially Naseer and Miguel. We’d been lured with money and equipment. TU was
trying to make a name for itself by investing in bright young scientists, and
it was building a reputation for ground-breaking research on pain management.
My faculty advisor was studying how meditation techniques could manage chronic
pain, and my dissertation….
Oh, well, I’ll get into that later.
I remember our conversation vividly. We were talking about
how to improve the PA. It’s in a former lab space in a concrete basement, and
despite that unpromising location had become a major destination for the entire
university. It had been tweaked over the decades by generations of psych majors
and engineering students.
The acoustic tiles had been ripped out of the ceiling and
replaced by a sound-deadening fabric that changed colours with the lighting,
from pearly gray to cerulean blue to the darkest indigo. The lights were
invisible, hidden behind the ceiling, and could be adjusted to mimic different
times of day. There was some kind of projection system that could add drifting
clouds and, since the last upgrade, convincing stars, probably LEDs liberated
from a research project.
The space was divided into several big rooms by movable
floor-to-ceiling dividers and doorways covered with thick curtains. Each room
was located in a different part of the world. The one we were in during that
conversation was in Switzerland, in the mountains. The room was big enough for
seven or eight tables, and the place was crowded.
I was looking out the fake window – a huge high-density
screen synchronized with three other windows, one on each wall, each facing a
different direction – facing the meadow, enjoying the spring flowers. I could
see the wind ruffling the grass and the sunlight moving on the mountains. It
was kind of cheesy because the dividers were made out of cubicle fabric, and
they ended abruptly at the fake sky above our heads. The illusion wasn’t great,
but it sure beat looking at the snow in the dark under fluorescent lights. This
time of year we could go days without seeing the real sun, going into the lab before
dawn and coming out long after the sun had set.
We had checked the other rooms before settling on this one.
There was the ever-popular Caribbean island, the spaceship view-deck favoured
by the engineers, and an African savannah complete with giraffes in the
distance.
In the old days, the PA had scenic posters on the walls
surrounded by fake curtains tacked onto the partitions. A couple of years ago,
in a major upgrade, it started using feeds from a
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