Comment by jerf

Of course they are. Among the "evil intent" they would reduce is any desire to rebel against your government, so you bet all big intelligence agencies are looking into it, for instance. Science fiction wrote about this decades ago.

Fortunately, there's a lot of considerations involved in deployment of anything. It's easier said than done to get something of a medical nature into a population surreptitiously, because it's hard to get a certain dose into one person without someone else getting not enough and yet someone else getting way too much. You'd have to come up with a way of delivering a medical dose in a controlled fashion and lie about it or something, you couldn't just sneak it into the food/water reliably.

Further, just because someone can name the exact complicated effect they'd like doesn't mean there's a drug that corresponds to it. Serenity, already mentioned, is a bit of silly example in my opinion because such a large effect should have been found during testing. But it does no good to pacify the population such that they'd never dream of so much as peacefully voting out the current leaders if the end result is that nobody would ever dream of so much as having enough ambition to show up to their jobs and you end up conquered by the next country over without them even trying, simply because they economically run circles around you. Or any number of other possible second-order effects. In a nutshell, it's dangerous to try to undercut evolution just to stay in power if not everywhere decides to do so equally, because you'll be evolved right out along with the society you putative rule. Evolution is alive and well and anyone who thinks it's asleep and they can screw around without consequences is liable to get a lethal wakeup call.