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Psychopharm Going 'Mainstream' In Schools?
PizzaFace writes "Back in the day, college was a place where a lot of kids tried recreational drugs. Now the world's more competitive, psychopharmaceuticals are better targeted, and millions of students are routinely using drugs to work better and longer. Stimulants developed for attention deficit and narcolepsy are giving mentally healthy students an edge like athletes get from steroids or human growth hormone. These psychotropics seem fairly safe, but should they be banned in the interest of fairness, perhaps with enforcement by urine tests before exams? Or do we tell our kids that, if they want to compete in this brave new world, they better find some Adderall and jack their brains up like their classmates'." If college students are doing it, how many programmers are? What say you?
Maybe we need to get Nancy Reagan out of the 80's closet just tell everyone to say NO to the drugs. It's bad enough in California that you have to show ID to buy cough medicine and be limited to two packages, while I can walk into a cloud of pot smoke at my apartment complex even when the police are nearby.
I'd imagine recreational drugs would be far more appealing to programmers, in order to unwind after a long day at the codeface.
Nothing new here, at least for Uni students. Back in the fifties and earlier, when amphetamines were over-the-counter andcould even be baought in vending machines in some places in Europe, Uni students cramming for an exam used to pop quite a lot of those. These new drugs may not come with the unpleasant side effects now, but we'll see what effects long-term use will have in a few years when use becomes widespread.
I'll stick with colas. Guess I'm old fashioned
I've tried many "performance enhancing" drugs over the years. From caffeine to adderall, riddlin, cocaine, and methamphetamines. All these things have been reported to allow one to think and work faster and longer.
My experience? I perform much worse on these substances. Sometimes I'm jittery and cannot focus. At times I think and work so fast that I make many carless errors that end up taking me more time to fix than if I had done the work slower and did it right the first time. The drugs that kept me up and allowed me to work longer just took more of me the next day.
I can tell you all, from personal experience, that taking stimulants to try and help you through the day is a waste of money, is a health risk, and may actually decrease your overall monthly or yearly performance. Not to mention the fact that our over-reaching government would be more than happy to put you in jail for a very very long time for posessing many of these substances.
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Reaganisms aren't a suitable way of dealing with such problems. Face it, the "War on Drugs" failed. It failed for a number of reasons, but it mainly has to do with the fact that "drugs" aren't an enemy that can be beaten via a war.
This is a case of people using drugs to bring them some sort of an advantage over their peers. That is often done for economic reasons. Instead of cracking down in a police-state fashion, the best way to deal with these problems is to make them unfeasible in an economic sense.
First of all, if a company wants their staff to be fuck-buzzed on some stimulant, then so be it. That company may see benefits in the short-term, but in the long-term their income will suffer. In the world of software, they may be the first to get their product out there, but it will likely be a piece of shit. Most companies can't pull that sort of stunt off. Chances are people will end up having a very negative image of that company, and will likely avoid their future products. Of course, such future iterations of products will be building on a base of dung, and will likely be of a very low quality themselves. Soon enough, companies will realize it is better to hire employees who aren't high on various substances. There's no need for government regulation when the free market will punish those who wish to partake in such drug use.
Two things are getting overlooked in the comments so far:
One, the comparison to pro athletes is flawed because in those cases the steroids are in addition to hard training. Same way, none of these drugs replace the problem that you can't know what you never read. So no, the dumb kid won't beat the smart kid. It'll just score a-little-not-quite-so-dumb.
Two, aside from what medicine tests (and currently denies) in side-effects, there's always one to be aware of: Habit. If you go into every test pumped up, you will lose your ability to pass a test without your little helpers. Which means that since most higher-up jobs nowadays are essentially continous crisis management, you'll never be without them until retirement.
I'll add a third: You probably miss out on the incredible drugs your body can produce on its own...
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
The drug that does marvels for me is practicing judo twice a week. Nothing worked better for being able to focus attention in a very short time on something important and going to the core at once. Mind will serve you only if you are the one that controls it. However, it took several years to be a nidan.
First thing to do is make sure you're eating a diet which provides everything your body and brain needs. The western diet is... abysmal... mostly; mediterranean isn't bad.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/4511759.stm
The body and brain are chemical machines, they need certain quantities of certain substances to run at their maximum potential and if you're not consuming the right substances, they'll be artificially limited to a lower performance. So you're wasting your time if you eat crap then try to boost your performance with drugs.
Deleted
Now they're moving on to modafinil (aka Provigil). In tests, they can stay up for several days at a time without fatigue, jitters, headaches, nausea, or loss of alertness or attention span. At the end of the test, 10-12 hours of shut-eye seems to reset their sleep clocks, and they move on, largely without any apparent side effects.
So now I wonder about it, even though I shy away from taking most pills aside from the occasional Advil or Rolaids. I have my day job, which is getting a little tougher because aside from training on a sudden influx of new technologies, I also have to help make up for the quarter of our team that went elsewhere. I have some side work that I do for extra money. I'd like to get back to learning C/C++, and pick up Perl as well. I also want to go for Cisco and Linux certifications, and come this fall I'd like to go back to school and get back on the path to my degree. Being able to slice out even half of the nights that I currently use for sleeping would be a tremendous assistance.
But is it fair? If I'm able to use this time to ramp up like that, will it force others to do so as well? Is it fair to my colleagues if I'm able to do half of their jobs (time permitting)? If I'm awake 24 hours at a stretch, and don't mind putting in an extra four hours since I have eight more than usual, am I putting their jobs at risk? And what happens to me when the next person comes along who is not only taking modafinil, but also a memory booster?
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
Drugs are no substitue for real learning, but they can provide an unfair advantage in an artificial situation intended to measure learning, such as a college exam.
It's bad enough that the standardized test scores of the kids who get extra time for learning-disabilities are no longer flagged with giant red text saying "TEST ADMINISTERED UNDER NONSTANDARD CONDITIONS." Neither are the tests of the kids who take drugs for ADHD flagged as such. They're getting time and/or focus advantages on those tests that the rest of us aren't; I was wild and unforcused as a kid too, but instead of getting drugs to make me do better my parents made me sit down and work. Now we have to compete against kids who get special advantages such as extra time and chemical assistance. Think about that the next time you get denied for an award or a scholarship based on test scores or GPA. The people using these test scores can't tell if a high-scorer was smart or just drugged (or given extra time).
It's no suprise that healthy people want the same advantage, but just like with the extra time for the learning disabled and the kids on ADHD drugs, the real losers will be the students who would have done well on their own whose scores are now deflated compared to the enhanced population.
I made it through high school, undergrad, and a graduate program and never took an exam under the influence of anything more mind-altering than a few Coca-Colas. Perhaps that's a question that should be asked in job interviews.
Posting AC because of drug talk.
I go to a college well-known for its drug culture (Ithaca). The most prevalent drug on campus is, by far, marijuana. But the second most prevalent is adderal/generic knockoff (adderal has 4 amphetamine salts, most generics are just amphetamine sulfate). Kids will rail addies to stay up to study, to stay up and be able to drink more, or before finals. (Other drugs make appearances too... psychadelics and opiates mostly, to my knowledge there isn't a very large coke/coca market at all.)
I'll preface this by saying that yes, I've done speed to do work, and even to party. I've found it to be an incredibly useful tool, if used well, though I very much dislike the effects of the drug. Speeding isn't very pleasant -- you're totally unable to relax or chill out, but rather you have enough energy to do whatever it is that needs to be done. 20-page term papers become 4-hour fodder... or 10,000 lines of code, or a semester's worth of reading for a class.
What could be better? Literally -- you eat a pill and have 6 hours of pure work-ethic, plus your brain is on overdrive so you're working faster anyway. I know kids who don't do work for about 2 weeks straight, and then rail some addies, and do whatever is owed in one night. I know kids who say "drugs are bad" but will eat 30mg before studying for finals. I also know kids who are addicted to amphetamines.
I can't say whether any drug is bad or not -- I firmly believe that a drug is what you make of it and how you use it. But the people who should be taken to task for the prevalence of these drugs on college campuses are the pharmaceutical industry, for its aggressive campaigns claiming far more people have ADD/ADHD than actually do, and the doctors who take the rhetoric and perscribe the pills the companies tell them to. Anecdotal evidence is a buddy of mine who is convinced he doesn't have ADD/ADHD, and yet has an 80mg/day perscription for adderal (he sells the pills he doesn't keep for his own scholastic use).
I'll never use speed to party again (with the exception of ecstasy, which is an amphetamine [methylenedioxymethamphetamine]), but for school I find it a very useful tool. I'm just very careful that I use it sparingly and have a safe place to come down [if you've got more tests to take when you're coming down, the only solution is to do more amphetamines].
As to its fairness... I think it is inherently unfair that one human differs from another -- we're not all on an even playing field physically or mentally. That's just the way it is, fortunately or unfortunately.
Just for reference, Adderal is so prevalent that either I'm handed pills for free, or pay around $2 a pill. During finals week, the price was up to $5, and I heard of people paying upwards of $10.
Has she dealt with non-narcoleptic modafinil users? Modafinil is nowhere near an amphetamine and while I'm sure it too can be abused, is much safer because it works so differently. I'm a college student who occasionally uses it when I've got over 200 pages of reading to do in a night. No addiction, no hard coming down, and when I use it I don't feel wired, I just don't have to worry about falling asleep.
Where's the harm in that?
I once tried caffiene tablets to keep going at the office (working 12-16 hours a day for months at a stretch because an employer is too fucking cheap and shortsighted to let a QA director hire ample qualified staff takes its toll) but it didn't help. I felt better for an hour or two then I'd crash harder. I can only imagine that it would be a harder, more painful crash with stronger (and illegal) stimulants.
:)
What does work is exercise and getting more sleep. I've been trying to burn both ends of the candle at my own business, but lately I've been eating fruits for breakfast and bicycling to and from work, so now when I do work long days I still feel tired, but not to the point where I feel totally exhausted. Soon I'll be bringing in more help and knocking back to 5 days a week. I still make sure I get at absolute minimum 6-1/2 hours or so of sleep per night, and I try really hard to get between 7 and eight (any more than that and I end up either groggy or get a migraine).
Do yourself a favor if you need to work long hours: MAKE a way to get exercise into your routine, and lay off refined foods. You'll find yourself able to work longer before you feel tired, and you'll feel better overall, and will probably lose any extra weight you're carrying at the same time.
Drugs (legal or otherwise) might give you a temporary lift, but there is no subtitute for sleep, eating right, and actually getting working your muscles from time to time. If there were a magic bullet, America wouldn't be full of fatties. I'm glad to say I'm no longer a fatty, and while I still have some more weight to lose, the first 25 pounds has made a huge difference and I only have a few more to go.
Need a lift? Eat a banana or drink some herbal tea, or just drink plenty of water.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
What drugs can certainly do is to make you think you are smarter and temporarily relieve the pain of learning. The problem is that anything that makes you different, smarter or otherwise, is painful in some way. - Nonsense.
The fact of the matter is, these drugs do provide a significant and beneficial effect when trying to cram for that next exam, or finish that scientific paper for submission to the journal of your choice. While I can't say anything about the long term effects on memory, it's the near-term deadlines that these drugs are getting used for. Several class-mates and friends of mine have resorted to taking ADHD and narcolepsy drugs during crunch time in grad school and I have seen them produce, in 24-48 hours, high quality work that would have otherwise easily taken a week or more. When you don't need to sleep but 4 hours a day, and you can be at full concentration for 16 hours straight without getting distracted or losing your train of thought, you can certainly get a lot more work done. As one friend described it during an all nighter before a grad-level physics exam, you feel "sharper" and abstract concepts that are otherwise difficult to wrap your head around just make sense. I'd wager that at least 40% of graduate students have used these drugs at some point in their academic careers...
Regarding the concern about drugged students having an edge over other students during tests: I would think that this would be at least somewhat less of a concern if you don't grade on a curve. That dampens the effect of "extra leverage".
The trick isn't to just find a friend with a prescription, but to find a friend who doesn't need his/her prescription. I had a friend who was diagnosed with ADD but was prescribed more adderall than was necessary... much more.
What he didn't use ended up going to his friends who wanted it. I know its not really the point of the article, but I worry more about the kids who crush it up and snort it over the kids who take it to study for a test. I've never really bought into the idea of most "gateway drugs", but I've seen a lot of people make the leap from snorting adderall to snorting coke.
Most of the commentators have latched on to the drugs are bad conclusion, so maybe it's time for some devil's advocating... Suppose a drug is invented that has almost no adverse side effect - would it be ok to take it?
There's an assumption in most people's responses that drugs must inherently have a bad sideeffect. That the badness of the side effect is in general proportion to the benefits obtained. Hence, it cannot be good to take X, because X must have a hidden side effect that cancels out any advantages it may provide. Such reasoning may be true when we were kids and were having the 'Drugs -just say NO' message drummed into us, but they aren't going to be true forever. And it's not as though the 'healthy' alternatives are really perfect, either. Exercise to improve fitness is fraught with physical risks. Increased study to boost academics hurts social lives, and may well have a greater cumulative harm than impotence 30 years down the line. (At least, if you've been taking drugs, you've actually slept with someone in that time) How many teenage suicides would have been averted if the victim was taking recreational drugs, and kept taking them? (So no withdrawal symptoms...)
If we look at things in a certain way, there is no special evil associated with using chemicals to achieve some effect over carrying out some other activity. As technology improves, the lines are bound to blur even further.
Hey, do you have any idea how much money there is in pharmaceuticals to treat kids who consume too much simple carbohydrates? Do you have any idea of the sheer mountains of cash to be made from adult-onset diabetes and obesity? The meat producers certainly don't want us to know that eating too much protein (i.e., more than 5% of your diet) leads to blood acidosis, increased cholesterol, and chronic kidney stress.
And do you know how many tons of soy go into our factory-farmed cattle to make that cheap, taxpayer-subsidized burger on your plate? Somebody has to grow all that soy, you know. And as you may know, petroleum companies own all the seed companies and the petro-chemical companies produce all the nitrogen fertilizers to allow things to grow in depleted soil, so you're stepping on some big toes here. It's like, you want to ruin the whole game, man!
Look, the agro-pharmaceutical cartel is one of the fastest growing industries right now, and they depend on our ignorance and acquiescence. For their sake, if nothing else, we should eat what tastes good as often as possible regardless of nutritional value. Anything else would be anti-capitalist.
And it's not just the pharmaceutical companies and the private hospitals that need our clogged organs to survive. Many of these ADD kids are slated for residency in America's emerging privatized prison system.
If we want these capitalist enterprises to succeed, we must continue to push standardized tests into the core of our educational curricula. We must continue to feed our children the cheapest, fattiest, and most sugar-laden foods we can. And by god, we must get more soda machines into our schools. By these means we can keep them on their poor diets, increase their stress, cause them to lose focus, and peddle more pharmaceuticals to them.
How can anyone be against using such means to increase profits and grow markets? Everyone understands that war and crisis are extremely profitable for those who can offer a little relief at a price. We live in a world where profit is an end unto itself, and corporations don't have to consider any "big picture" beyond their own survival. The stockholder is all who matters. Everyone else is cattle, and we should just take our pills and learn to live with it.
I mean, if people switch to a proper vegetarian diet, how will they ever be made dependent for life on pharmaceutical treatments for diabetes and high cholesterol? If people stop eating too much meat, what will become of all that soy, and what will happen to mom and pop factory farmer?
I shudder to think.
-- thinkyhead software and media
while working or studying.
Yea, believe me, it really delivers.
For the first 1-2 minutes, it relaxes the mood and brain, the caffeine tension little bit goes away, and when you do not pay attention to the music anymore and it falls to the background - voila - youre on one magic journey. Thoughts flow in and away, like you are in the middle of a chorus.
But you gotta find a good selection to listen - preferrably an internet radio that does music for the workdays. One i listen to almost always is the Klassikradio. German, hamburg based. It plays wonderful selection in workday, nothing sleepy, nothing gothic, but right on pitch, and at nights it passes to a nice selections on blues, jazz and soft tunes. Give it a shot, you will be satisfied :
http://www.klassikradio.de/live-stream/
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Actually, not all of the ADHD medicines are amphetamines, and have slightly different modes of action. The primary action of amphetamines, such as Adderal, is to trigger the release of neurotransmitters (primarily dopamine) from both the axon (the "sending" side of the synapse) and the vesicles in the axon that are storing the neurotransmitters for the next signalled release. This occurs by the drug triggering a reversal of the "pumps" that take the neurotransmitters back up into the axon or into the vesicles in the axon for storage. This is actually the source of much of amphetamines' reported neurotoxicity, the vast depletion of the neurotransmitters to a high degree. Ritalin, as with cocaine, does not appear to reverse the synaptic and vesicle transporters like amphetamines do, but instead appears to block the uptake of neurotransmitters at the synapse (mainly dopamine). This lessens its potential to be neurotoxic, but not completely. Strattera acts in a similar way, but only on norepinephrine transporters.
Just because these compounds are prescribed by doctors does not mean they are safe by any means. Nor should you necessarily trust anything our government has to say about recreational use or other ingestion not overseen by a doctor. Too many lies and exaggerations have shadowed the really important information. Instead, find out everything you can about these compounds, from multiple sources, know what they will do to you and why, what the potential risks and side effects are, and weigh for yourself the consequences of your actions. Know yourself, know your source, know your drug.
aloha
psilo
Did the knowledge stick with you any differently than if you'd just learned it the "normal" way? I ask because I've known once-upon-a-time-heavy smokers that swore up and down the things they learned while they were regularly smoking kinda faded away when they tried to quit. So if they needed to recall something they'd go take a smoke. Of course, it could just be them rationalizing their desire to take their first smoke in a few years/months. :) I was just wondering if anybody had any similar anecdotes for other drugs.
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Good heavens. ADD is not "being wild and unfocused". I have ADD. I was never wild. I was not hyperactive. Nobody looked at me on the playground and said "Oh that kid is soooo ADD" (Which phrase I positively detest). However, my performance in school did not at all match my intelligence. I was given some kind of IQ test (I don't remember anything about it, nor do I know what I scored on it.) The psych just went on and on about how intelligent I was. My grades (esp. the work habits section that was on our elementary school report cards) sucked. I was not just unfocused, I was unable to focus. In third grade, my parents finally found a doctor who didn't just say "Oh he seems to be emotionally healthy, and plenty smart, I don't know why he's sucking so much at school", and he said that I had ADD. I was given Ritalin, and suddenly, when I sat down to do my homework, I was actually capable of doing more than one problem at once without drifting off and thinking about who knows what for half an hour in between. Oh and by the way, my parents did make me sit down and work. I could spend three hours sitting at the kitchen table doing nothing but homework, and still only finish a single one page worksheet. And this was with my mom in the kitchen checking on me to make sure I was still working every few minutes. Oh yes, my parents made me sit down and work. On the other hand I never have had time advantages on tests or anything. I could at my college, but I don't because I don't need to, and if I didn't take my medicine, the time advantages wouldn't be anywhere near long enough.
Yes, ADD is horribly overdiagnosed, and the typical "That kid is so ADD" reaction to undisciplined children doesn't help at all. However, in spite of this, it is a real problem, and it does affect numerous people, many of whom you would never suspect. It is worth noting that I am no longer taking narcotics like Ritalin, but am now on Strattera. Strattera is not a stimulant. In fact, there are large segments of the population on whom strattera doesn't work at all. This seems to correlate well with people who actually have ADD versus those who were just "wild and unfocused children". My doctor says that he'll put people on strattera, and they'll complain and want to go back to ritalin, because "It doesn't give me the same rush". Well, Ritalin never gave me a rush at all. In fact, that is sometimes used as a diagnostic test for ADD: a small dose of ritalin will make someone without ADD slightly high, but someone with ADD will not get high at all.
You say that kids with ADD are getting time and focus advantages. I can assure you that in cases where those kids actually have ADD that taking ritalin or whatever is not an advantage over kids without ADD. In fact, unless the dosage is pretty much perfect, it probably still leaves them at a slight disadvantage.
Now, all this is not to say that I think drugs like ritalin should be given out willy-nilly. In fact I am completely opposed to it. It would also be nice if all extant diagnoses of ADD could be required to go back and see an actual competent doctor this time and get rediagnosed (or, in perhaps most cases, not). Then, if those people could be convinced not to stupidly give out their pills, and to keep them locked up (my ritalin was stolen from the school nurse's cabinet several times when I was little), perhaps these drugs would not be a problem, ADD would be recognized as a real problem instead of being scorned as a cop out for bad parenting, and you wouldn't have to whine about kids getting advantages on tests anymore. Unfortunately, it's not going to happen.
SIGSEGV caught, terminating
wait... not that kind of sig.
You've covered the amphetamines.
But the whole POINT of the "psychedelic" drugs (which turned out mainly to be hallucinogens) was an attempt to increase mental ability - intelligence, creativity, empathy, intuitive pattern-matching, and perhaps obtain access to paranormal abilities (this being before Rhine was debunked).
The very WORD "psychedelic" was coined to reflect this. Means "mind-expanding".
The adolescents of the '60s and '70s were trying very hard to obtain exactly the sort of mind amplification that these new drugs actually produce.
Unfortunately, they only had what was available at the time.
LSD, for instance, apparently reduces the threshold of patten matching - whether it's a real pattern or a false one - but simultaneously reduces the threshold of the "eureka" signal. So the user has a lot of odd thoughts, and every time he has a new one a his mind says: "That's RIGHT!". (You can imagine how this warped the minds of even well-educated and intelligent users, such as the emminent psychology professor Timothy Leary.)
Or amphetamines - which mimic various neurotransmitters, primarily in the fight/flight mechanism. You could achieve more focus and alertness (with some of them - at the cost of deep thought). But you paid for it later, as non-emergency systems (such as cell growth and even immune response) were put on hold to conserve resources for the "emergency".
Some use was also self-medicative. Psychology at the time (before the widespread use of Crack Cocaine led to the recognition of Freud's theories as typical cocaine addict ravings) was largely in a religious and black-art stage, and while there were a number of psychoactive drugs available that were pallative, but often mis-prescribed. People with mental problems often attempted to cadge prescriptions for, or buy on the black market, drugs that they perceived (often correctly) as improving their condition. And the Vietnam adventure resulted in a lot of people with injuries producing chronic pain, which could be alleviated only by narcotics.
And of course once a generation was "distracted" from government-approved "channels" into "self-actualization", the government started an ever-escalating drug war - which meant that the pure, pharmacutical-quality, drugs were supplanted by black-market concoctions of dubious ingredients, strength, and purity. This also warped medical practice, leading to under-medication for pain (which is still with us).
By the '80s the use of drugs in an attempt to increase intelligence had pretty much died out, and the remaining use of the remaining garbage-quality street drugs was mainly hedonistic, self-medicative, and the feeding of addictions.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
The description above describes my time in school perfectly, and there was a great deal of pressure put upon my parents by counselors, psychologists, and doctors to dose me with ADD. Fortunately, my parents paid more attention and realized that my "inability to pay attention" didn't extend to other things like leisure reading, playing with legos, tinkering with electronics, or roaming around the woods memorizing the latin names and of wild herbs. I could do these things for hours at a time, but was unable to complete a worksheet that required me to write complete sentences despite having tested well above average both in terms of intelligence and emotional maturity. So I wasn't "attention deficit" in anything but an educational system that values blind conformity over any style of learning. Sure, my GPA suffered, but I learned far more than most of my fellow students. Maybe this has hurt me in finding work, but I find I'm now capable of working in just about any field. While I'm sure ADD and ADHD exist and are real disabilities, I think the tests to determine diagnosis are nowhere near reliable. Further, as a former premed, I had to compete with many students who openly used these drugs to help concentrate for exams. This definitely led to an alteration of the curve to the disadvantage of those who would not or could not take the drugs, especially in classes that prided themselves on rote memorization and other "dry" styles of learning. The result? Tons of students with 4.0 GPAs who haven't learned a thing, and a bunch of students with 3.5s who learned and could apply their knowledge, but were shifted artificially down the curve. Guess my point is that there is abuse on both sides of the educational fence.
He who would be a man, must be a nonconformist. -- Emerson
Sugar isn't just one chemical, there are many that qualify as sugars. There are also sweet alcohols (like xylitol) that can replace sucrose or fructose in some applications, with advantages like not promoting cavities.
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I am not interested in qualitative studies for the most part and I have little regard for statistical studies. These are too easily rigged to suit people's preconceptions. Empirical research - where possible - where a definite pathway A-to-B-to-C can be demonstrated is the ideal. In education, empirical research is extremely difficult and it's only recently that technology such as fMRI even existed. Certainly, schools aren't equipt with such technology to routinely scan the kids' brains to determine how the school culture is influencing things. Virtually all other research is culturally biased and heavily statistical with no statement on the level of confidence used in the statistical tests, or indeed what statistical method was used, and how it was ensured that a genuinely representative random sample was obtained.
The understanding of the importance of language comes from a mix of research - some involving fMRI (which lends credibility to it), but most involving qualitative assessments of education and the impact on society from schools in Europe over the past 2,500 years. The amount of data is fairly impressive and there is therefore some credibility beyond the "hard science" to the argument that multi-cultural and linguistically sophisticated education is far superior to insular mono-cultures such as those found in many parts of the US.
I'll finish up with costs. I hold to the belief that skilled work generally produces more than it costs, whereas unskilled work is merely necessary to get any work done at all. If you eliminate unskilled labour as much as possible, transferring it to machines or whatever, and raise the educational standards across the board, the net value of the work done will rise. Since we pay taxes as a percent of our income, and corporations pay taxes according to their earnings, etc, the net value of taxes must also rise, if the populace is adequately educated. Now, the law of diminishing returns does come into play here. You can't improve education forever and expect the wealth generated to go to infinity. That won't happen. What will happen is that it will tend to some upper limit. There is therefore some upper bound where further investment will have no significant benefit. However, investment BELOW that point will generate a substandard return and investing further will reap enough of a return to be profitable all round.
(It's not a simple relationship. Greater education produces not only greater skills but better research, which means that the cost for R&D will fall, with respect to the value of the products developed. This will directly benefit the companies, but because you now have more money circulating, you also have more money collected in taxes. R&D is much more random, however, and therefore it is much harder to predict the impact of higher-quality work. This is something you can really only try and see.)
Total investment in education is as much a myth as the total employmen
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I stopped reading when the quoted "statistics" from Partnership for a Drug Free America. They use long discredited studies and studies with questionable methodology along with pulling numbers out of their butts to push an agenda.
It is an interesting subject. I just want an article with research. Not propaganda from a shill group.
The obscure we see eventually. The completely obvious, it seems, takes longer. - Edward R. Murrow
Yes I do. How could anyone think so little of their judgment that they need to look to a noncorporeal entity such as a government for it? Multiplying people together doesn't make them more ethical.
However, Rouseau, writing in The Social Contract recognized that our individual will must become subordinate to a more embracing general will which expresses the views of society en masse.
Well, Rouseau can "recognize" all he'd like to, but I disagree with him. Since we're invoking arbitrary dead people to back up our arguments, I guess I'll toss this out (Thomas Jefferson):
appear quite willing to violate the law in order to make a statement
And indeed I am, although this has nothing to do with my earlier statements. If a law is unjust, people should not abide by that law. That's essentially the beginning of how many unjust laws get removed, believe it or not. The simple truth is that bullshit laws stick around on the books all the time (e.g., sodomy laws in the South).
Your posts suggest alienation and indifference to the political process.
No, I think that political processes are not relevant to the reality of what is right and what is wrong. They are a vehicle to ensure fair treatment of citizens in a civilization, and any time their treatment becomes unfair (e.g., indefinite copyright extension), I am by definition alienated.
This can of course be cured by becoming proactive in the political process by writing the FDA, Congress, etc.
Now this is just condescending. You know nothing about me or my involvement. You may be surprised to learn that many politically active people disagree with the law from time to time.
If you were to wake up tomorrow and decide pants were optional could you justify not wearing them? What if you woke up and decided you wanted to kill your neighbor's dog?
Then I'd do those things. If I woke up tomorrow insane, I'd do insane stuff. If you woke up tomorrow, robbed of your judgment, you'd make poor decisions too.
If it is change you seek- do it within the system.
Does this mean, "abide by the law"? Because from the looks of change in the past, that's piss-poor advice.
You my friend are merely being a fatalistic troll.
No, I simply disagree with you. I suppose I'm fatalistic because I don't have a rosy, comfortable view of the individual's relationship with government? I'll see your fatalism and raise you one accusation of complacent naivety. But thanks for calling me a troll, that says something about one of us.
If other reasons we do lack, we swear no one will die when we attack
I am all for good enhancements of all kinds especially mental enhancements with no or little side effect like Provigil. It is about time we got over the War on Some Drugs and the paternalistic feds telling people what they can and can't put in their bodies. If I can effectively work better and smarter for extended periods I can be way more productive and build more cool things in less time. What is not to like?
When he said that Ritalin and Adderall were in the same class of drug as Speed, he was suggesting they could serve as gateway drugs to mephamphetamine use. This is not just a recreational drug. There are many, many reports of the drug being used as a performance enhancing drug. It's even present in the IT industry. I wasn't able to find a link, but I know Wired Magazine has run at least one article about meth use by programmers/IT workers.
Ritalin and Adderall are controlled substances for a reason. They have serious side effects if misused. Between the side effects of those two drugs when taken without consulting a physician and their potential to lead to Meth abuse, this is a big problem.
> YOU ARE A DRUG ADDICT.
Maybe he is, but maybe he isn't.
Simple logic error really. Your premise, "Drug addicts all believe they can self-monitor.", may be close to truth, at least close enough to use as a society level generalization. However, if set A is a subset of set B, it does not mean set B is a subset of set A. Just because he thinks he self-monitors, does not make him an addict. In effect, your logic error says "any recurring user is an addict". However, from other little clues in his post I tend to lean towards thinking this particular guy may indeed be addicted, but that is just my opinion with little to back it up.
I've know many people back in college who _self-monitored_, very much as this guy describes. I'd say roughly 10 people. A couple I lost track of, but of the ones I still know only one sunk into self destruction. The others, except one, basicly grew out of any usage except caffiene. That other one still does a quasi-scheduled monthly recreational party thing, and an annual binge-week-in-Mexico thing, but shows no other signs of self destruction.
"However, from other little clues in his post I tend to lean towards thinking this particular guy may indeed be addicted"
No, in fact I've cut some out completely, and cut down on pretty much everything else (although I have drank a lil more caffeine than usual the past week). What you're likely picking up on is not a "need for drugs", but a passion for them, for the difference they have made in my life, and difference I have seen them make in so many other peoples lives. I've seen them bring people together, and open peoples minds. As many bad hypothetical stories most people have heard about drugs effect on people, I can give real stories about real people who have had their lives changed for the better.
I have learnt a lot through experimenting with various drugs (it's always been curiosity driven), combined the "field tests" with my study of the neurosciences, learnt a lot about the mind and the memory (even applied some of what I've learnt to software development), and had a lot of fun along the way.
More people use drugs recreationally than you know. They don't get into fights, or steal to support it, or any of the other things commonly associated with "drugs" (which are in fact associated with the highly addictive drugs, such as crack and smack, which *aren't* used in the same way, for the same reasons, or with the same attitude). It doesn't rip lives apart or do the damage so many people have been led to believe, and I hate the fact that so many people have been so mislead, and lump people like myself together with others such as crack/smack dealers/users, because they don't understand how there can be any difference. There is. And it's huge. I feel sorry that they will never have the kind of amazing experiences that I have had, seen things as incredible as I have, and I'm extremely annoyed that my such activities are illegal because people don't understand them (and thus fear them).
Please try and be open minded. You'll find that people can be more open with you.
Alex
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia