Healthy people are increasingly turning to brain-enhancing drugs like Ritalin to boost their performance in school or at work, researchers said on Monday.

And while some expressed alarm over the trend, others embraced the idea, provided the drugs are proven safe.

"In the United States, stimulant medications are widely abused," Dr. Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute of Drug Abuse, said in a telephone briefing.

Volkow said recent surveys on college campuses suggest drugs like Novartis' Ritalin, or methylphenidate, and Cephalon's Provigil, or modafinil, for narcolepsy are being used by students, professors and others as a way to get a competitive edge.

"They are abused for a variety of reasons including the fact that people want to get high, but there is the realization that they are being increasingly utilized to improve cognitive performance," she said.
(Reuters)

There are two interesting things here. Firstly is the very thinly veiled criticism that using drugs to improve brain function is somehow "cheating". One can just smell it in the news text. Somehow it is socially acceptable to take horrendous medicines with unproven safety records and dubious health benefits if one is "sick". Being functionally impaired due to some accident of nature is seem as a cause for sympathy and a bag of pills. But if one wants to improve on nature's parsimonious gifts then that's somehow... not right.

Note that drugs such as Ritalin were developed for attention deficit disorders, but fairly obviously might be of benefit to enhance attention. The generic drug is called Methylphenidate (MPH) and is as close as one can legally get to cocaine - so much so that cocaine addicts cannot tell the two apart.

So we come to the touchy subject of drug use and abuse. Why should using MPH be considered abuse? Let us look at perhaps the most profitable drug in the world, Viagra. It was originally designed for heart conditions and yet it was found to have useful side-effects as a sexual enhancer. Now, would it be considered "cheating" to have such an unlikely erection for so long? You might think so, but does it count as abuse? Does it really make a difference if a drug is being used to enhance one's first or second favourite organ?

On a more elevated note, MPH has been linked to the onset of psychosis. If this becomes established then, once again, we will find that our wonder drugs are as likely to cause harm as they are to have benefits. But that isn't the message pharmaceuticals want us to hear. These companies don't really care if their drugs are used or abused so long as they are bought.

The article cited goes on to say that institutions should consider having policies about the use of brain-enhancing drugs, no doubt rather like they do in (some) sports. Like many similar stories this begs the biggest question of all, which is why institutions - especially those of learning - don't actually teach people how to use their full mental potential. Why we are being asked to carry heavier and heavier loads without being taught how to fine-tune our mental engine. I guess there is no money to be made in teaching meditation, and there would be no targets for sanctimonious conservatives.

Ultimately, these articles seem designed to keep people in their lowly place rather than exploring the heights.

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