Legal, Cheap, Beneficial Drugs: I'll Get the Family Pack

I'm thankful for every small outbreak of common sense. Even just the absence of hysteria is cause for rejoicing. This too is your brain on drugs, and these stimulants are actually (mostly) good for you.

Three job candidates sit in a quiet room, straining over a tough exam. But one of them has taken a memory-enhancing drug the other two couldn't afford. Is the test fair? In another futuristic scenario, a drug can help airline pilots keep focused during a long flight, though it causes some side effects. May an airline require pilots to take the drug?

Get ready to confront such questions in daily life, a group of scientists and policy experts urge in a thought-provoking commentary published online Sunday by the journal Nature. Brain research is accelerating, and a new era of "cognitive enhancement" — the use of brain-stimulating drugs and devices by healthy people — is approaching, the authors said.

While thorny ethical and medical questions must be addressed, pharmaceutical enhancement of inborn mental gifts is a trend to be welcomed, the seven co-authors from Harvard, Stanford and other prestigious institutions said.

"We call for a presumption that mentally competent adults should be able to engage in cognitive enhancement using drugs," said the writers, who include Stanford law Professor Henry Greely and neuropsychology Professor Barbara Sahakian at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom.

Here's one qualm cited by a fellow scientist who's less than enthused:

[I]f the nation moves to providing a basic package of health care to all its citizens, it's hard to see how it could afford to include brain-boosting drugs, said [Erik Parens, a senior research scholar at the Hastings Center, a bioethics think tank in Garrison, N.Y.]. If they have to be bought separately, it raises the question about promoting societal inequalities, he said.

Jesus Christ. You know what else could possibly create societal inequalities?

Every. Single. Thing.

Time was when the introduction of the car could be said to promote societal inequalities, because, hell, not everybody could afford one. We can expand this notion to include everything from television sets in the 1950s to cosmetic surgery and Harvard degrees today. It's not for everyone. People might lack the money to pay for it. Me, I don't own a snowmobile, a jet-ski, or multiple hunting rifles — to say nothing of a fine collection of medieval manuscripts or a vacation home in the Caribbean. I've visited neither Disneyland nor the Egyptian pyramids. I guess life's inherently not fair.

Oh, one more thing: when it comes to proposals to liberalize drug policy, it is the farthest thing from clever or illuminating for some nay-saying expert to chuckle, "I wonder what they were smoking." (I'm lookin' at you, George Annas.) I've been reading some variation of that hoary 'pun' for three decades now, and it's truly beyond time to batter this embarrassing witlessness to death with a shovel, and bury it ten feet deep.

Comments

[McDuff]

You misunderstand the hidden agenda there. We know from history that making drugs illegal is the surest way to keep them in the hands of the rich and to keep the gap between the haves and the have-nots nice and wide. If we can convince the haves, who you may recall rule the world and get to decide these things, that all these drugs will help them keep their grubby empires from our grasping hands, we stand more chance of getting them for ourselves.

Even though liberalising and regulating these drugs will, no doubt, contribute to inequality, it won't contribute to it as much as making them illegal. Which is why there's no way we can actually *tell* any rich moralists that!

[McDuff]

Oh, and the objectively correct response to "what have they been smoking?" is, in fact, "Your mum." Guaranteed hilarity.