An opinion piece published online in Nature examines the illicit use of “brain-boosting” drugs like Adderall and Ritalin by college students, and concludes…that we should totally do more of that.
The seven authors–at least two of whom are consultants for pharmaceutical companies–argue that we “should welcome new methods of improving our brain function,” and say that doing it with pills is no more morally objectionable than eating right or getting a good night’s sleep. They sort of gloss over the fact that getting a good night’s sleep doesn’t come with a warning label (unlike Adderall, which carries warnings about the possibility of sudden death, heart attack, or stroke).
I think they kind of buried the lede, where the authors note that steps would have to be taken to ensure that the benefits of these drugs didn’t make socio-economic inequalities worse. There have already been a few reported cases of overly gung-ho parents dosing their healthy children with Ritalin in order to give them an edge in school; it’s not hard to envision a scenario where unmedicated kids wind up with a competetive disadvantage in school and employment.
Should we allow unfettered access to this type of brain-boosting drug? We already alter our brain function with drugs like caffeine; is this really all that different? If having unregulated brain chemistry becomes a great liability, wouldn’t parents be remiss if they didn’t help their kids compete? A lot of SF examines this kind of human bootstrapping; perhaps this is the first step to a real-life Uplift. Or maybe it’s just a really, really bad idea.
What do you think?
2 responses to “What Could Possibly Go Wrong?”
I, for one, welcome our new pill-pushing pharmaceutical overlords.
At least the scrip will be cheaper than a case of $ENERGY_BEVERAGE with my co-pay. Glaven.
Playboy ran an article a month or two ago about the use of Adderall on college campuses. Having spent several years living on a college campus in the ’70s I, for one, would have welcomed replacing the Rx asthma meds I was scoring to keep me awake during finals with something that would enhance concentration and focus. Most Americans augment their lifestyle with stimulants, barbiturates, alcohol or anti-depressants anyway, and the study drugs at least offer the possibility of a beneficial return.
However, I do consider college students to be adults capable of making their own decisions about the trade-off between the positive and negative aspects of any drug. I have reservations about parents dosing minors with drugs unrelated to their physical well-being. ADD is one of those vaguely defined conditions that often presents no other symptom than “my child is under-performing in school”, and prescriptions for Ritalin get tossed around like confetti at a Republican convention. Like most other attempts to give children every available advantage, fair or unfair, this boils down to a parenting decision. I happen to believe that children shouldn’t be science projects, even if the end result is, potentially, a blue ribbon and scholarship.
As far as socio-economic inequalities engendered by the availability of study drugs to parents in lower income brackets — regardless of my opinion about the legitimacy of their unprescribed use on minors — there is a widespread availabilty of illegal or unprescribed recreational drugs at even the lowest income levels, and if there were sufficient parental demand, I think that study drugs would eventually be equally available.