Get Neuro-“Enhanced”: Drugs for Our Generation.
I wrote the post below for a bioethics blog that the illustrious Jue Wang co-edits, called E-Monk. I’m not sure if it falls under the purview of E-Monk’s subject matter, so, until its tenuous acceptance, it’s housed below.
(On a more Gawker/Ivy-Gate-esque note, I’d also like to note that I’m pretty sure I know the identity of the Harvard student profiled in the article…)
The trappings of experience come in several guises: music, literature, fashion… and drugs. In the April 27th edition of the New Yorker, reporter Margaret Talbot argues in “Brain Gain” that while LSD was the prototypical drug of the consciousness-expanding ‘60s,* the 2000’s are characterized by a very different type of drug: neuro-enhancers. Adderall, Provigil, Ritalin, and other such drugs enable stressed college students and task-laden employees to handle their workload. A 2005 study out of the University of Michigan’s Substance Abuse Research Center found that in the year before, 4.1 percent of American undergraduates had taken neuro-enhancers for non-clinical use, and at some schools the percentage was far steeper, up to 25 percent. If we take Talbot’s observation to its logical conclusion, completion and competence, not excellence and creativity, are the desirables in our civilized daily warfare.
Three groups of questions arise from Talbot’s piece.
If our peers are taking these drugs, does that mean we must also take these drugs to keep up? Is there something ethically wrong with altering ourselves by giving our brains the mental equivalent of steroids, conferring an unfair advantage to those who can afford these pills and are willing to use them without prescription? Is there a vast difference between the enhancing effects of these drugs and caffeine?
Second, do these neuro-enhancers really “enhance” our abilities? (Talbot writes that they can make you more efficient, but can’t help you become more creative)
And third, does this trend presage a highly efficient, strung out, focus-less, pill-popping society that we don’t want to be a part of anyways? Or are we already living in it? The media fetishizes start-ups, but how much of the start-up world is based on being creative, and does that creativity do anything to validate or balance the hyper-efficient lifestyle?
*We are living in a post-60s world in so many ways. Ritalin was invented in the ‘60s, but didn’t find wide usage until the ‘90s.
