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Is Non-Prescription ADHD Medication Use Ever Ethical?
derekmead writes "College students' voracious appetite for study drugs like Adderall is widespread enough that it was one of the main topics of a marquee lecture on neuroethics at Society for Neuroscience's 2012 conference called 'The Impact of Neuroscience on Society: The Neuroethics of "Smart Drugs."' It was excellent stuff by Barbara Sahakian, faculty at Department of Psychicatry at the University of Cambridge. Her focus is on prescription drugs for diseases and conditions like Alzheimer's, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and depression, with the fundamental goal of understanding the neural basis of dysfunction to develop better drugs. Specifically, she wants to create drugs with no risk for substance abuse which means drugs that have no effect on dopamine. The true goal then of her research, fundamentally and briefly, is to repair the impaired. But doing so brings us to the discussion of how much repair is ethical when the repair can be disseminated to people who don't actually need it. Divisions abound on what is to be done. Some experts say that if people can boost their abilities to make up for what mother nature didn't give them, what's wrong with that? Others say that people shouldn't be using these drugs because they're designed for people with serious problems who really need help. So another question for the ethicists is whether cognitive enhancers will ultimately level the playing field or juice the opposing team."
Just like steroids in sports right?
in the short term, it gives you superpowers. in the long term, it turns you into a soulless ghoul
that's right, i just said the lord of the rings is a parable about drug addiction
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Reminds me of Vonnegut's story: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Bergeron
We don't need a prohibition on drugs. We need better drugs. When fully-informed people choose to take drugs, we should let them.
it's just another way for the pharmaceutical industry to remove money from your wallet. Perhaps ADHD is just a reasonable and rational response to a completely insane world of hyper-focus. Perhaps we should all be chasing buffalo and living in tipis because, it's better. Maybe depression is a correct response to a world gone mad - a civilisation hell bent of murdering the biosphere. Maybe mental health, isn't.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Mandatory drug tests for every single college student in America!
/sarcasm
I can't imagine a world where perfectly healthy people feel the need to take addictive stimulants just to help them focus throughout the day.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm off to Starbucks.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
If an ADHD drug is used to enhance studying abilities, but is managed by a competent physician, then that can be acceptable. On the other hand, if someone is purchasing it off the street - possibly depriving someone of their needed prescription or purchasing a questionable product - then the danger is significant.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Anything you do to your own body is always ethical, other considerations aside. If you've signed up to an agreement involving a "level" playing field (such as sports or something) and you violate that agreement, that's unethical because you've broken your word.
The race is faster when you hop up all the ponies on speed. But its still the same field of ponies, the only winners are the ones running the race.
They can have my command prompt when they pry it from my cold dead fingers.
I have ADHD and posting AC because I know people at work frequent here.
Long story short, these kinds of drugs literally saved my life. Imagine waking up from a coma, yeah, that potent.
For everyone? Nope, but if it was truly able to keep people more focused the general population would eventually accept it.
We have soldiers taking stimulants to keep them up for 36 hours at a time, we have people who try hypnosis to stop smoking, we have "energy" drinks which are legal, but probably more harmful.
Make no mistake, greed will destroy the good. It will become another form of drug abuse which students will eventually use to get their marks changed because they're "addicted" and governments will intervene, and pass laws.
Bah, you can't stop people from being greedy and dicks. But at least you can help those who need it.
Lt. Commander Data: Sir, Lieutenant La Forge's eyes are far superior to human biological eyes, true?
Capt. Picard: M-hm.
Lt. Commander Data: Then why are not all human officers required to have their eyes replaced with cybernetic implants?
Interesting article, I suppose, but is this really /. stuff?
But doing so brings us to the discussion of how much repair is ethical when the repair can be disseminated to people who don't actually need it.
Or, how much illegal drug use is ethical if the user also started a popular cancer charity?
For what it's worth we've decided it's ethical for our military to use (dextro)-amphetamines in long flights, even bombing runs I recall. In the case of long-term studying, the ethical boundaries will be defined by the success of its use as a legitimate "tool" not unlike a 5 Hour Energy.
Obviously the effects aren't comparable but Americans love to take a pill to cure or enhance something, anything, everything. This seems to be the logical conclusion of this thinking continued. If it's any consolation, perhaps amphetamine salts are the most benign uppers physiologically.
Would it ever be ethical to ween a meth user off through the use of non-methyl amphetamines?
Addictive and dangerous substances such as those found in more powerful ADHD medicines should not be ethically given out to those who do not require it. It is dangerous and may contribute to widespread misuse and abuse.
Safer forms of mind-enhancing chemicals, like caffeine, may be ethically used. Additional therapies like electrostimulation may also be used to increase brain performance. Learning to make our minds work better is not a bad thing, but creating a society where one is forced to play with a dangerous substance to get an edge is ethically questionable at best.
The only way you could see these drugs as unethical is if you look at life and learning as a game - if someone learns more than you on the down-low that's cheating, life should be a struggle, etc. Obviously people with rich parents should be banned from the competition.
For those who haven't tried it: adderall is a much smoother stimulant than caffeine. The effect is similar, but without the crash. Hands down better for productivity, just more expensive thanks to prohibition.
As someone who has ADHD I used ritalin to boost my abilities and collage and in the work place. I have used it to stay awake all night, in fact I didn't really discover caffeine until midway though collage because I was already using a much more powerful stimulant. When I got a new doctor I just told him I had ADHD and what dose and drug and needed and he gave them to me no questions asked, so if you decide you have ADHD you too can talke ritalin.
I don't think there's anything left that can be defined as unethical when it comes to Pharma, in the eyes of the pill popping, therapy seeking nut-jobs that have taken over America.
War on drugs? Stop popping fucking morphine and amphetamines would be a good start. Last time I was in the US visiting a friend, the amount of pharmaceuticals in his medicine cabinet was fucking staggering - and from what I could see (I then took an interest in peeking in everybody's cabinet) his was quite normal.
Wake the fuck up (preferrably without the aid of speed) and smell the coffee, you retards
Ethics is about reducing suffering, not fairness or propriety.
Medical ethics deals with procedures which reduce suffering when the choice is not black-and-white, nuanced, or could possibly be abused. Medical ethics involves things like when to do organ harvesting, informed consent, DNR, and the like.
Whether drugs should be taken when not needed - that's not an issue of ethics. It's possibly an issue of honor (broken promises, such as in sports), definitely an issue of law, and most certainly a perceived issue of fairness and political correctness.
The principle layer which cuts through most of the bullshit is the "Doctrine of Individual Dissent", which states that people have the right to choose for themselves. We sometimes violate this fundamental right by forcing people to do things for their own good; nonetheless, it should trump all the other rights.
It's the layer that would keep someone from forcing a smoker to quit, or an obese person to exercise, or a driver to wear seat belts. When Asimov failed to make a robotics law about it, drama ensued.
The best we can hope for is to warn people of the dangers. Beyond that, self determination is a fundamental right.
The White Witch's turkish delight
Except when they are not. Responsible use of psychotropic is not unheard of. See coffee and see alcohol. Two abusable substances but that can be used responsibly.
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
There may be a circumstance where it might be deemed ethical, but don't lie to yourself. Most amphetamine addicts die young, and that's usually why they got hooked in the first places. There's fifty shades of gray, and it's best you don't step into the first one.
Although, it is a roundabout thing, I use coffee to focus.
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
If we are truly capable of "better" or "super" abilities but with the aid of some kind of drug, stimulant or other substance... basically aren't we just harnessing something we already "have" but is not finely tuned or inaccessible? In the mechanical world this is done all the time - engineers scour all the possible ways to make a race car, an airplane, a piece of factory machinery more efficient. Humanity is looking for solutions to LOTS of complicated things. Why can't we make OURSELVES more efficient?
The bigger question to me is why aren't we naturally that well tuned, why do we have to take a drug to make ourselves more focused, better working, harder working? Were we generally more tuned in the past? What has this modern environment of cubicles, GMO food, blinding fluorescent light, lack of healthy and walkable environs, what has that done to the human animal and our ability to think and work?
That's why I fear hard-core drugs like coke, crack, meth, heroin, etc. I don't trust myself. I've never had an addiction before, but I'm not about to find out how strong of a will I have either.
Sage advice: Don't think about experimenting. Just walk away if presented with the stuff.
Long term studies of children perscribed stimulant medication shows two things
1. Through their teens, they're less likely to abuse drugs or alcohol compared to their peers
2. As adults, their rates of drug/alcohol abuse are neither higher nor lower than is normal for their age group.
/Caffeine might as well be apple juice compared to amphetamines
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
I, for one, welcome our Non-Prescription ADHD Medication User overlords.
But seriously. If I can ingest something that's going to improve my mind in some way without side effects, or with known side that I can manage, I'm sure as hell going to do it.
Almost all of us already do it and have been doing it for a very long time. Coffee. Aspirin (its much easier to think without a headache..). Ginseng. And probably a hundred other naturally occurring things. Even vitamins count. I personally feel I've even gotten benefits from LSD and Marijuana. If some current or future compound can improve my memory, my thinking speed, or reduce the amount of sleep I need, I'm all over it.
Now pardon me while I suck down a still legal monster energy drink and work all night long..
-- Senior Software Engineer, Attorney appearance services, locallawyerapp.com.
I get prescribed adderall and i dont technically need it. But then i go through a months supply in a weekend.
If you think Lance Armstrong, Keith Richards and Ben Johnson are forming a super team to take on the alien Chitauri and all they need is a super intellect to round out the team, I can't see it as unethical.
See: The Uplift Series.
If drugs and/or surgical modification was both safe and effective? Sign me up. I'd love to sit down with a C++11 book, flip through the pages fast in half an hour and then be an expert programmer. Spare me the - admit it - religiously inspired dogma. I want to be better, stronger, faster, and while I'm at it please remove that bummer of a failure condition called "death" too.
I've gone through psychological testing (counselling and IQ testing, tests for learning disabilities), and I've also tried various ADHD prescriptions. To be honest, performance increases are over-hyped. I don't think any of the ADHD prescriptions artificially increase intelligence or effectiveness other than becoming more efficient. What I mean by that is it might help bring one's mental processes up to a focused task, but it doesn't magically create will power, or an ability to grasp concepts that are beyond your non-drugged brain.
Nothing to see here folks, it's "just" placebo and people who are too enthusiastic about drugs.
I don't do any illegal drugs, I've never smoked marijuana or cigarettes, but I do use Ritalin both for stress and when I need to be productive. There aren't any side effects unless you abuse it. Frankly, it's a drug I'd like to see "abused" more, considering it's effects are essentially the opposite of marijuana's, it makes you productive and want to work!!!
The main difference between "Mental" doping and "Physical" doping may be that enhancing mental abilities can be used to help a large number of people, whereas athletes that dope do so for purely personal gain.
In high school, I had my own web development company and was an accomplished, award-winning saxophone player but I struggled getting the grades I should have been able to get for a reason that I couldn't understand. I was diagnosed with ADHD in 10th grade and set upon a journey involving virtually every drug recommended for the disorder. I settled upon Adderall and have been taking it ever since. Reading through the comments on this page, I find it amusing that everyone seems to have such a black and white opinion on the subject. I, on the other hand, really don't know what to think.
Studies show that nothing is more effective at treating ADHD than stimulants and cognitive therapy does virtually nothing without drugs. Furthermore, people who control their ADHD with medication are FAR more likely to avoid substance abuse than if they leave their condition untreated. I'm sure everyone knows a really smart kid in high school who smoked their life away on weed and never made anything of themselves. I know that I personally would have probably gone this route, as I was already heading in that direction. Finally, stimulants like Adderall haven't been shown to have any real long term health consequences and (contrary to popular belief) are not particularly addictive if taken as directed.
Anyone who has been to college in the past decade can tell you that Adderall can certainly help you cram for tests. Does that mean it gives them an advantage? I really don't think so. I've crammed for a lot of tests, and unless you're a business or mass communication major, you are not going to get an A by cramming. Try cramming a month's worth of organic chemistry in one night with some Adderall. You'll probably pass, but you definitely aren't getting an A. People get A's on tests by keeping up with the work. Not to mention the horrific day you have after cramming all night on speed. The biggest advantage I saw with Adderall was playing Quake 3, and even then there were people a lot better than me that used nothing but Mountain Dew.
I guess what I'm saying is that I think that people are overestimating the power of stimulants. Their biggest advantage is that you can stay up later, but if you don't take the drug regularly, you will also not be able to get to sleep. You'll also not eat enough and will probably have issues with sexual dysfunction. If that sounds like an unfair advantage to you, I don't know what to tell you.
these medications is they provide an escape for learning things when someone doesn't have the self-motivation to propel themselves through the task. As you continue to use the substance, it becomes the primary means for information uptake. "I don't feel like studying right now, I'll just take a little dose of this to enhance my motivation/interest" becomes the de facto fallback. A hefty majority of life is learning to spark your own interest; when you're constantly doing it through rose-colored glasses, it becomes much more difficult to achieve on an even keel. At least, this has been my experience with the situation.
MouseClass extends ScrollClass, which extends TabClass, which extends SidebarClass, which extends PowerClass, w
Except the way students are abusing Adderall (and other ADHD drugs) is not the normally prescribed dosage nor method of use. They open the capsule and snort what is inside, to get the most immediate and sharpest impact. The problem is, they develop a tollerance using the drug this way, and require more and more.
The LA times had a great article about this back in the spring, unfortunately I can't find a link to it. :/
Me take adderall long time. I not soulless ghoul
Is it ethical that, based on either upbringing or genetics, some people have advantages over others, with regards to sports, or sociability, or intellectual pursuits? If you are not on the right side of the bell curve in these abilities, why not attempt to improve using chemicals? I believe that it is only unethical if there is unequal access, so that say in a college class, only the students with access to an unscrupulous doctor can receive drugs like Adderall. Life is about choices that may risk one's health to succeed. When a student signs on as an athlete to get a scholarship, they are risking their long-term health to receive a free education; why should cognitive ability be any different?
Was anyone harmed or endangered? Assuming the answer is no, then the question is: if self-improvement is unethical, then what are ethics good for?
If ethics are good, then harmless self-improvement can't be unethical. If ethics are neither good nor bad, but just a set of valueless rules or tenets, then the question can only answered by the ethical standard's author. And there's no evident reason anyone else should care one way or the other.
So, according to you somehow purchasing adderall off the street is "possibly depriving someone of their needed prescription"...
Q: When has purchasing prescription drugs off the street ever made this statement true?
Also, your plan seems to only make it available for people rich enough to afford to buy off a physician to manage it. Basically if you are too poor to afford it, you get left in the dust. A modern day quaint extension of the idea that only rich kids get to go to college...
Is it ethical to take away stimulant medication from a person who has been thriving due to their ADHD being successfully managed? How does a doctor adhere to the Hippocratic Oath of "Do no harm" and deny the patient access to a medication that has changed their life?
There are always exceptions. A very good friend discovered he could get high by hoarding ADHD med and then taking more than one at a time. The last instance, he took a whole months worth at a time and collapsed. Three days in the hospital and then rehab, which is when we found out about it.
And enhancers like nutrition, exercise and study, education and experience.
Is it ethical to educate the normal?
Is it ethical for the normal and super-normal to do anything other than sit on the sofa, eat KFC or McWhatever and sop up big media TV?
Sage advice: Don't think about experimenting. Just walk away if presented with the stuff.
That begs the question - what does one do when everyone else around them is using a drug that, while maybe negligibly harmful, gives them the upper hand at doing your job? Do you relegate yourself to taking out the trash for the drug-enhanced super-performers, or do you bend to the pressure?
It's an interesting topic, to be sure. I am of the same opinion that I am not about to try some random drug, but I am not so sure that I would be able to resist the temptation of a "Limitless" type substance.
If you're a regular person (i.e. not diagnosed with ADHD), and taking Adderall helps you to remain mentally sharp / focused for a period of time, is that unethical? No... at least no more so than the person taking it "legitimately"
The fact that it is or is not prescribed means nothing. Prescriptions are written out by doctors, despite what the industry would like you to think, they are not completely objective. Just look at the number of prescriptions issued to celebrities and the wealthy, they essentially can write their own... heck I'd guess that even the average person out there can do something similar by just knowing the correct responses to the prompts the doctor gives. So does the fact that they obtained a "permission slip" to take the drug suddenly make it any different from a person who did not go through that process? I argue it does not.
If testosterone and steroids are used to enhance athletic ability, but are managed by a competent physician, then that can be acceptable.
Does the argument still work? The sports world would publicly argue that it does not... meanwhile "everyone is doing it".
I personally am not interested in taking any sort of controlled performance enhancement, whether it's Adderall, steroids or viagra... it's a matter of principal, if I can't hack it, I can't hack it.
BTW, I certainly do not feel that coffee and any other freely available products count in this regard... if society decided that Adderall should be sold at the supermarket for a few cents per pill, then I'd probably start to treat it like I treat coffee... something that I will occasionally ingest in moderation.
But sometimes yes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines
Q.E.D.
in the short term, it gives you superpowers. in the long term, it turns you into a soulless ghoul
that's right, i just said the lord of the rings is a parable about drug addiction
So then you are saying that the drugs will lead to a life in politics?
Mean what you say...say what you mean.
Originally LSD was a medicinal drug. It was, supposedly quite effective, for re-programming a patient's personality.
Heroin was originally a medicine to replace morphine.
What's the definition of "impaired"? I have always had a terrible memory. In college, I would study the material when it was taught. When the tests came around, I had to basically re-learn the material from scratch. And re-learn it again for the final exam. While I was a top student, I looked on with amazement when other students could retain stuff after learning it the first time. Is a lousy memory an impairment? I don't know, but I would certainly have been ecstatic to be able to swallow a safe, non-addictive pill and get a decent memory.
Let's set any PC idiocy aside. If one can avoid addiction and side-effects, there is absolutely nothing wrong with enhancing people's cognitive abilities. Why should there be?
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
I question whether you've really used Ritalin to stay awake for extended periods of time. Why? Because I've taken stim meds since preschool, and I can tell you that using methylphenidate to stay awake doesn't work. At least, not for more than about a day. You can use it to live "tomorrow" tonight, or maybe even pull off a 42-hour marathon if you were totally well-rested to begin with... but eventually, you'll end up "dazed and wired", and be intellectually useless until you get about 12 hours of sleep. You'll feel kind of awake, but everything will go straight over your head.
Same goes for oranges - get them off the street.
And milk - particularly if it has added vitamine D - get it off the street.
Air, particularly if one is depriving someone else of their needed air or if the air is of questionable quality - then the danger is significant.
Drugs are chemicals.
Vitamines are chemicals.
Nutrients in general are chemicals.
Poisons are chemicals.
Many chemicals are beneficial in some quantities and combinations and harmful in others. Even water and oxygen are deadly in excess.
The distinctions are laregely semantic and a fabrication of culture.
People should only be breathing clean air and eating nutritious food under the supervision of a physician and they should only be available by prescription.
Pepsi Mae West? Coke and chips? - no problem. Vegetables? Pushers should be in prison. Unlicensed suppliers should be in prison. Only pharmacies should be supplying vegetables, and only to patients with prescriptions from their physicians.
If we don't bring everything under control of the physicians, people may harm themselves or others.
career and success are about etics? Sounds funny, given the amount of books out there which advise you how to do things close to lying and selling youself as somebody who you arent, books how manipulate your co-workers, etc.
No career and success are always about what you are willing to do, and what personal consequences you are willing to accept
Hey, sometimes I'm asked to teach ethics at a largish public university. I wouldn't call myself an ethicist, but can smell the bullshit on this from a mile away. First of all, every ethicist, along with every moderately educated person, should be aware of the genetic fallacy - which is that the origin or original purpose of something is irrelevant to what ought to be done with it. So what if these drugs were made to treat impairments? What relevance does that have to what should be done with them? Second, they act like pharmaceuticals should only be given to people "in need" - but what does this mean? Just in what sense do men "need" Viagra and women need birth control? I strongly support giving access to everyone who wants these drugs, but let's not pretend that they're being distributed on the basis of need. Their role is to enable lifestyle choices, not to remedy a need. And that's what makes them good things. We on Slashdot know very well that you don't need to fuck, ever.
I definitely have an ethical problem with sports doping, but that's because it's an unsafe practice that should be contained for the sake of the health of the athletes. If Adderall turns out to be similarly dangerous, I say that the ethical argument is over. But the interesting case would be if it (or its better successors) turn out to be acceptably safe - like caffeine is - and also measurably effective. Then the question of fairness comes up: Undrugged people will be at a disadvantage. Then again, uneducated people are very much at a disadvantage. Education is the most important personal enhancement you can obtain, and it's not cheap, nor accessible to all. Yet this would be a strange reason to ban it. Some people might complain that they are in an unfair competition because their competitors have Ph.D's in science - a sort of juicing. But that would be very silly. I certainly think that the Adderall gap is much easier and cheaper to close than the education gap, so this "unfair advantage" argument also smells like crap to me. If I had a worry about this drug scenario, it would be that unscrupulous companies would demand that their employees are doped up with enhancers when they're on the clock. That would be unfortunate. But then again, I don't think that many people would take such a job, and those that do would be entitled to a higher compensation. We already have the concept of hazard pay, and this kind of an office job would still be less dangerous than, say, underwater welding. In general, it seems like these so-called ethicists are just fishing for reasons to be luddites, and their fishing skills are are rather poor.
... and I'll show you a misleading marketing campaign worthy of a Presidential election.
Ain't no such thing yet. Possibly never will be. Prescribing neuroactive drugs now is like playing darts blindfolded.
Of course non-prescription use is ethical - if it is used for its intended purpose. Just because a drug doesn't require a prescription doesn't make it ineffective. And abuse is abuse, whether or not the drug requires a prescription. The summary (and presumably the article) isn't really about whether a drug happens to require a prescription or whether a drug is actually prescribed (I suppose physicians can still subscribe drugs that don't require a prescription), but whether use of a drug outside of its specific intent is ethical.
I mean, I can easily imagine that parents of a child with ADHD might hear of some non-prescription alternative, do suitable research to determine if it is likely to be effective, what an appropriate dosage for their child would be, and of course compare costs - and decide to switch to the non-prescription alternative. What, exactly, would be unethical in that?
in the short term, it gives you superpowers. in the long term, it turns you into a soulless ghoul
that's right, i just said the lord of the rings is a parable about drug addiction
So then you are saying that the drugs will lead to a life in politics?
So then you are saying that the drugs will lead to a life in politics?
Only if you don't inhale!
If my comment didn't sound as good in your head as it did in mine, then I guess we all know who's to blame
Why do your legs bow if you don't get enough vitamine D?
It isn't surprising that we are still finding some of the vitamines we need for optimum performance or that some vitamines are so rare in the natural environment that our lifespan, health and performance are sub-optimal if we don't get them from artificial sources.
Remember: vitamines are just chemicals that we need in small quantities and without which our lifespan, health or performance are sub-optimal. Drugs are just chemicals produced by for-profit industry or found in nature but discouraged by society. It is not surprising that some drugs are also vitamines.
Is it ethical to withold vitamines from the normal and super-normal just because they don't have a disease or disadvantage?
Exactly. We try to improve ourselves in countless other ways. Diet, exercise, sunscreen, makeup, plastic surgery, moisturizer, viagra, propecia, yoga, and on and on. To me that's not even a question. We can and should improve ourselves.
Now the questions that remain are
What are the benefits? What are the side effects, short and long term? What is the tradeoff?
Are there broad public health concerns, like addiction?
What is the cost - and is this going to deepen class inequality?
From my perspective, the government should have *very* *very* good reasons before they consider taking away my right to weigh my options and decide what substances I will put in my body.
And for what it's worth, when there are drugs that make us smarter, with minimal side effects, I'm all for taking them and getting them to as many people as possible. We need more smarts around here. Meaning everywhere on the planet.
"I don't know half of you half as well as I should like, and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve."
You are posing half the questions, so you get the wrong conclusion. I'm not going to propose a conclusion, as there are none that fit all cases.
Should we do anything to get better ? If it has no adverse consequence, why not? The problem is that it has, more than often, consequences. Those athletes on steroid die young for a reason. L. Armstrong got a specific kind of cancer when he was still very young, he was lucky to survive it, but it is typical of a substance abuse induced cancer. Assuming that he did take pills to improve his performance (although proofs are becoming difficult to refute, it is still debated, but lets just assume for the sake of the argument that he did), was it ethical for Armstrong to sacrifice his health to improve his performance? Maybe it was free choice, so we should not interfere.
But then, what about the other competitors? If they don't take performance pills, they cannot compete, it is as simple as that. So now, just to be level, even if you don't want to, you have to take dangerous substance to stay level in the field.
Now we are talking about sports, an activity that can be mostly seen as an entertainment (even if big money can be entitled). But if we were to extend performance pill usage to all activities, then where is your choice ? You have the choice between being an unproductive, unfit and impoverished sorry food bond subside, and being a successful but short lived professional who made the "choice" of dying from performance enhancement ?
As for productivity, it has never been so high. Maybe so high that we are actually already starting to kill ourselves "thinking and working", as the stress has also never been so high. Past difficult works tended to be straining and physically dangerous. But they were also repetitive and less involving. Today's works are less physically dangerous (even in fields which are still dangerous or physical, machines and better practice have improved the situation), but they appeal to more creativity, involvement and are deadline oriented. To meet productivity milestone, it often takes more work that is normally possible, leading to stress from under-achievement (systematic as goals are unrealistic) and overwork. Should we make the picture even darker by adding the threat of chemical poisoning to meet ever increasing performance goals? Maybe not.
Let me guess, this is an American study, right? There are social factors that aren't taken into account. I call it bullshit and irresponsible.
What i want to see, is a study on how DNA changes over time after people take these drugs, not necessarily abusing them. Then, how it's affecting their children.
There's a pill for everything ...
He's just stupid!
God forbid this be treated as anything other than a zero sum game, or that we focus more on the detrimental effects than some weird standards of biological fairness.
"The bigger question to me is why aren't we naturally that well tuned, why do we have to take a drug to make ourselves more focused, better working, harder working?"
Because evolution is S -- L -- O -- W.
Humans are already among the hardest working of mammals (bet you didn't know that). A human being can do more work ("work" as defined in physics) over a long period of time, per kilogram of body mass, than almost any other animal known.
We already probably have among the longest, if not the longest, attention spans.
I mean really... what do you want? It would take thousand of years, perhaps more, before those things improved significantly, left up to Mother Nature.
what an adult chooses to put into their own body. Period.
Except maybe the smallpox virus.
This space available.
This isn't a relevant test for ethical self-improvement
Driving a car to work? - unethical because some people are harmed or endangered.
Exercising? - unethical because some people are harmed or endangered.
Military service? - unethical because some people are harmed or endangered.
Working in construction? - unethical because some people are harmed or endangered.
Eating fresh vegetables? - unethical because some people are harmed or endangered.
Life is nothing but a set of tradeoffs. Every choice results in harms and benefits, directly or indirectly to oneself or others. What is unethical is anything other than the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, such that others make misguided decisions for themselves. Otherwise, it is just tradeoffs with different people placing different values on the various potential consequences of their actions.
A: Because street drugs are typically stolen somewhere in the supply chain.
Slate did an excellent writeup a few years back on experimenting using non-prescription ADHD meds. One of the most interesting tidbits to come out of that article was that authors Jack Kerouac, James Agee, Graham Greene, and Philip K. Dick all apparently took ADHD drugs "recreationally" to help them write, as did Paul Erdos. Whether it really helped them create all that great work is up for debate, but most of those guys swore by the stuff and they all seemed to pump out some pretty good work....
Monstar L
If you tell someone the truth, knowing they are not able to understand it and that they will ignore or misunderstand it and as a result of being told the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth they will act in ways that are harmful to themselves or others, then surely telling the truth is unethical. Surely, in such a case, the only ethical thing to do is withold some of the truth or tell lies.
If someone chooses to do something and I think they are making a bad choice that harms themselves or others, then surely it is unethical for me to let them make that choice for themselves. Surely in such a case the only ethical thing to do is to prevent them doing what they choose and force them to do what I choose.
Isn't it the case that the only ethical action is saying and doing whatever is necessary in order to optimize (which may be a euphemism for normalize) everyone's outcomes in life?
In my experience, any head-ache tablet or common cold medicine will improve your mental accuity and test scores. For example Aspirin, Codis and Actifed all helped me pass exams. The best is a combination common cold cure with a coctail of things in it. I figured that out when I noticed that I performed remakably much better in the winter exams when I was sniffeling and feeling totally rotten - so I started to take a dollop of the goop during the summer exams and it worked.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
And that's one of the reasons why steroids are illegal and medical providers that are caught providing stimulants for non-medical reason lose their licenses.
It's one thing to train harder or smarter than the competition and another to abuse medicine in an off label fashion to gain a competitive edge.
Is it ethical to throw people in jail for smoking an organic plant that has proven medicinal properties?
Thanks to Non-Prescription use I am not able to get my PRESCRIPTION ADHD meds filled due to the tightening of DEA guidelines on amphetamine salts.
I need my meds to function. Without them I am pretty much useless. I have been on Dexedrine for almost 20 years, but my prescription has gone from (no-insurance prices) $50 to over $400 a month.
I can't afford it, and unless I can get a decent job I can't get prescription coverage to get my meds, but I can't get my meds without a prescription.
Mostly thanks to recreational users and college age drug seekers who want to party all night and still carry a 3.5.
Enjoy your parties, and higher scores... just know that it might not be YOU that is paying the price. It might be someone else who is paying the price for your cheating your way through school on speed.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order- Ed Howdershelt Via Tass
No, we were not better tuned in the past. We are animals, we evolved to find food, use as little of energy as possible (rest and be lazy as much as possible), and try to breed with as little effort as possible, since the number of offspring is the only thing that matters. But neutral drift in our genetics granted us larger brains... our goals, the goals of those with intelligence, differs to that of our genetics. We want to know, we want to think, we want to discover... that is at odds with our flesh, guided primarily by our genetics. All this technology, everything else that does not deal with getting drunk, stupid, lazy, and trying to fuck everything that moves, is not in our standard behavioral pattern as the animals that we are. Thus, the drugs that help us concentrate and focus are good, because it allows and grants more control to our minds, as opposed to our flesh.
If you want to go back to climbing trees and chasing game, go for it. But I'm not in your camp, and you will no tell me what I am or am not allowed to do, or put into my body. I have bigger things to concentrate on, not just finding mates and food.
So then you are saying that the drugs will lead to a life in politics?
Only if you don't inhale!
Maybe if he had taken study drugs, he would have remembered that he did inhale . . . ?
. . . and better understand what the word sex means . . . ?
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Somebody who is using Adderal to get high has other issues. Their life is not comfortable and they seek escape. Denying them drugs does not solve the problem.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
the wisest man respects his own limits
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Unless you have the ability to predict the future that will never be a real choice. What you are offering is a pill to make you smart and then kill you. You might make no significant breakthrough - unlike Hollywood in real life simply being smart is not enough - otherwise the first thing I would do after taking the pill is figure out a way to overcome the fatal side effects of taking the pill.
Flashback 20 years ago: I limp out of high school with barely the grades to graduate - because I only showed up long enough to take the tests.
Then college. Not so easy. First semester: enrolled for 12 hours total, GPA 2.4.
I go see a doctor at the behest of the parent paying tuition, diagnosed with Adult ADHD who then prescribes Ritalin.
2nd semester: 19 hours, 3.9 GPA
That was 20 years ago. TWENTY F@#%ING years ago.
If this were the Olympics I'd be banned forever already.
You could say the same thing about going to movies, people go to them to seek escape.
Anyways, you can't generalize drug abuser like you did. There are plenty out there who are comfortable and happy, and taking the drug recreationally because it is fun.
Is it acceptable if you are just taking it to counteract the other non-prescription drugs you took the night before?
Why should we not use every last available option to improve ourselves? You're arguing that we should walk, when we could take mag-lev trains, or fly, because it's somehow "not natural."
>College students' voracious appetite for study drugs like Adderall is widespread enough that it was one of the main topics of a marquee lecture on neuroethics
That doesn't mean jack shit. Urban legends are widespread enough that people take stupid precautions against things that have never happened. Exactly how many students are using these drugs? Is this a real problem or just another sensational story that blows a few cases out of proportion?
-1 disagree is not a modifier for a reason. -1 troll, flaimbait, redundant, overrated are NOT acceptable substitutes.
you must be a member of the 50cents party, american branch...
Then why are not all human officers required to have their eyes replaced with cybernetic implants?
The U.S. Army is already there with the Warfighter Refractive Eye Surgery Program. "To increase combat readiness, the Department of Defense has established the Warfighter Refractive Eye Surgery Program (WRESP) which allows eligible active-duty soldiers to receive laser refractive eye surgery. The goal is to minimize or eliminate the need to wear corrective eyewear."
This is a common case: folk who can get high with neither benefit nor atavism. They're the tweeners who add nothing useful nor become a social problem. They have no problem for me to solve. But yes, I did leave them out because in this discussion they are nulls.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
By peers, do you mean all teenagers? Because the people with symptoms that'd you prescribe stimulant mediation for might be the types of people who are less likely to use drugs/alcohol in general.
"Somebody who is using Adderal to get high has other issues. Their life is not comfortable and they seek escape."
This is a massive over generalisation. Drugs are not about escaping a problem or your issues for many of us they are about enjoyment. The difference between my drug of choice and the legal "apparently acceptable" drug alcohol is that it doesn't leave me with a hangover in the morning.
I don't see any reason to believe those people are "fully actualized." Why would someone who is "fully actualized" see the need to alter their body chemistry in order to enhance their "performance," in the face of potential harmful side-effects. A fighter pilot, maybe, in order to stay awake, but those others don't really need them. This whole conversation reeks of insecurity. Most of these uses are really no better than the "male enhances" they sell at conveince stores. Only someone who's insecure has that much trouble accepting their limitations.
Yep, manufactured millions of doses over the years, esp. ww2.
The question is: is it safe? If its harmful, we should avoid using it. If not, who cares?
Use them to stay awake, alert, and productive.
You are correct there are always idiots who will abuse things like model glue, pain pills, hell even energy drinks. Unfortunately we have evolved to allow people like that to continue living and even scarier breed. In the words of the late great George Carlin " What ever happened to natural selection? Survival of the fittest? The kid who swallows too many marbles doesn't grow up to have kids of his own. Simple stuff. Nature knows best."
He was confused with the question when they said sexual intercourse he didn't know oral and anal counted.
Don't ask for further medical insurance support if you don't have a former medical prescription.
Of course its not unethical. Its your body, you have the right to do what you want to it.
Steroids in sports aren't unethical either. Lying about using them in order to game the system is what makes steroids an ethical issue, not their consumption. People need to stop telling other people what to do with their own bodies and mind their own fucking business.
So my guess is that the kids logic goes along the lines of:
Take smart drugs -> get better grades -> get better job, earn more money -> happiness
Now if they were a bit smarter they would just go for conventional "good time" drugs:
Take drugs -> happiness (albeit temporary)
in the short term, it gives you superpowers. in the long term, it turns you into a soulless ghoul
that's right, i just said the lord of the rings is a parable about drug addiction
Once again your Right Wing propaganda against "Drugs" is getting up-moderated. Congratulations, the self-proclaimed "Left" can be just as Right Wing as the people who identify as Conservative.
Too bad your religious-like demonetization of Drug use makes you and your Cabal immoral (something that you people will never admit to), and your attitudes are ruining society.
Listen son, being immoral may be cool, but you will NEVER have self-respect for yourself. You should THINK before posting such inflammatory statements. The vast majority of people have already been deeply and severely brain-washed by government and religious anti-Drug propaganda; YOU and the people who Moderate your Trolls and Flamebaits higher are merely perpetuating the hatred.
"Others say that people shouldn't be using these drugs because they're designed for people with serious problems who really need help."
How is this a reason to ban usage? The intent of the designers should govern individual usage? How is this even relevant to the question?
I have to ask this question because of my brother and the experience we had getting him help for his mental disabilities. Me and my mother knew something was wrong with him when he was 17 but mentally much like an 8 year old. There were a lot of things that come naturally to a "normal" person that he struggled a lot with despite having my mother, father, and I trying our best to help him. Along the way to getting him into a specialist to see if it really was mental disabilities impairing his ability to grow as a person we ran into a lot of people that tried to say he was doing it intentionally, which anyone that spend a couple hours working with him could tell you was most definitely not the case. Only one place out of the countless places we tried to get him tested at took us seriously, and thanks to them he did eventually get the help he needed. When they put him on some really strong drugs we began to see improvements, little by little he was finally learning all the complex concepts that he previously struggled with. These days he's one of the most brilliant programmers I've ever met, took everything I taught him and ran with it, surpassing me like I was standing still.
Sadly not everyone with mental disabilities has that drive to become something more. My brother met lots of friends while going to consoling and checkups with the place that gave him help. Some of those friends were just as bad as he was, and seen similar improvements to their ability to learn and use new concepts. But only one other really put their newfound ability to use like my brother did. The rest were contempt just being "normal", doing "normal" things.
Never ever kid yourself into thinking taking some drug will make your smarter, that's not how it work. A drug may make it possible/easier for you to become smarter, but at the end of the day it is up to you to put in the work to achieve that goal. Let's face it, most people are too damn stupid to bother spending their free time learning new things or experimenting with things they know to understand them better.
The picture is bleaker than you paint it. When I was about 18 I had the privilege of meeting one of the very first programmers who lived in my country. Some 40 years earlier (in the late 50's and early 60's) he had created the countries first database for social welfare on a computer the size of a building with 64 kilobytes of ram - and all the data in punch-cards.
He always used to say "today's programmers can't program - if your ALGORYTHMS can't fit in 64k of ram, they are badly written"
But the point is this - because of the sheer manual labour of finding the right punch card and loading it in - looking up a case-file alone took 20 to 30 minutes, before the person trying to see it could even read it.
Then there was whatever the cause was for reading it, whatever new notes were added, and ultimately replacing his punch-card with an updated one which had to be filed.
Editing a case file to add "payment made $DATE" took an hour.
And that was the most advanced technology available in the day - that hour sounds long, but it was 4 hours less than when the WHOLE process was manual (and you couldn't do things like do searches and extract statistics automatically AT ALL - even if they were slow due to card loading times).
What percentage of disability recipients were still war victims ? My grandfather worked in the department (that's how I got to meet this man) when he started there in the late 1940's answering that question would take two months. By the 1960's with their big computer - it would take just over a week.
Today any well-run such department could extract the answer to a question like that in seconds, a few minutes at worst.
We are literally ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE more productive than our grandfathers were. We do in minutes what took them days and weeks. Simply because we have the technological capacity to achieve this.
So why are we, on average, working 30% longer every week than they were - for the same salaries our parents earned ? (On an HOURLY measurement for real hours worked, middle class salaries have decreased 30% over the past 3 decades) .
Where is that mass of extra productivity going ? It sure as hell isn't making our lives better - it sure as hell isn't improving our average quality of life like it used to. It isn't eradicating poverty either - indeed part of why unemployment is a growing problem world-wide is because there is too MUCH productivity available for the economy to make use off.
What is happening to the enormity of creation we all produce every week - so much more than any previous generation ever could - that we're working longer than they did and earning less for it?
Personally - I think the only logical conclusion is that every penny of that productivity is going into the pockets of a tiny elite.
This is when I remember the warning Adam Smith gave us nearly 2 centuries ago: High wages is good for society, high profit margins are bad for society.
The only logical conclusion is that there is only one kind of healthy economy and it's one where labour is the most valuable and expensive comoddity you can find and companies make virtually NO profit at all -just enough to survive, spending almost everything they make on salaries.
Exactly the OPPOSITE of the society we've built.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
out of Deus Ex: Human Revolution. Those who take performance enhancing products will be enslaved by those who produce said products.
I have used opiates as medicine and amphetamines as tools, marijuana is what I smoke recreationally.
And I do have to say that modanafil is THE most useful amphetamine.. Can't imagine a situation where I would use anything else except maybe a war or other similar extreme situation, and even then in the front lines. There's a reason the air force in particular is moving away from plain amphetamine sulphate.
Perhaps the issue is not alleged abuse. Perhaps the issue is over-regulation in the face of a fairly common practice. Perhaps the best approach is to challenge those rules through political activism instead of accepting them as unmalleable.
Read Breggin's work.
No, never ethical, never appropriate. Leave drugs, their costs, their risks, their side effects, to those who have diseases. --JSt
Great. Tell me how I appeal to the DEA please, because I have been trying to plead this case for about 2 and a half years now, and so have several thousand doctors who have patients who can no longer access their medicines.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order- Ed Howdershelt Via Tass
The ones against "enhancements" are trying to kill the dystopia before they are forced to join or worse, be relegated to the non-meds, pariah class.
# touch universe # chmod +rwx universe #
So that noise that Gollum makes was actually just an Adderall stuck in his throat? I get why he was so persistant and focused about that ring now.
Actually in ethics null is not unethical, therefore it is ethical by default. The question was 'is non prescription adhd medication use ever ethical'. If people use it for fun and harm no one, then the answer is yes.
If smart = fit and fit = more kids, any gene that makes you smart will propagate exponentially. Changes giving a 1% boost will become dominant in a population after a few hundred generations.
"Cognition-enhancing" drugs have rather simple effects on the brain. It's almost certain that there's some genetic diversity that twiddles with the concentration of or sensitivity to any specific neurochemical - essentially you can be pretty sure that evolution has the tools to be able to mimic anything that a simple neurochemical intervention could also do.
Thus performance-enhancing drugs probably won't increase the overall evolutionary fitness of typical humans, because if improvement were that easy then evolution would already have made the same change the drugs make.
These drugs probably can increase your ability to focus, and that might be a good thing to be able to do now that we're not preyed upon so often. However, the idea that a simple drug could make average humans smarter in every way doesn't stand up to our knowledge about how evolution propagates good genetics. We can modify our moods, and the best mood for a hunter-gatherer might be different than for a PHP programmer, but that's it - there's no across-the-board upgrade to be had from a simple drug.
Expected time to finish is 1 hour and 60 minutes.
People who have been long term stimulate users which kids given ADHD medication are. Leads to less drug abuse because they aren't taking a large enough dose. Someone gives them a shot of cocaine for a first time user they feel a small high, where as normal person with little stimulant history would be "on top of the world". Since, they don't realize they have tolerance they are very unlikely to increase their dosages in order to compensate. Why don't they get addicted to the prescribe drugs?? well, dosage and time release. Remember the main mental component how of addicting a substance is has a lot to do with how strongly the mind correlates the action of taking the addictive substance with the pleasure received. If they chewed their meds addiction would be very likely. So, what you are saying is people who have decent drug tolerance are unlikely to get addicted to drugs because they fee reduced effects. WOW!!!!
he's not stupid and he's a laywer, he asked what they meant by sex and since what he did not fall under their definition he could truthfully answer that he did not have sex with that women
anyway the only person who really had a right to ask that question was Hillary ...
Doping is doping.
the [formerly] wisest man respects his own limits
She made the willows dance
Firstly on the downsides theme, no doctor really likes side effects. (Let's skip the really evil businessmen with MD's doing scary corporate things for this discussion.) So the Pharm companies are already trying to overcome the side effects. So you can rest a little easier that big money is already going after that problem.
It's a really slippery choice. If for example you are intuitive and you can "almost see" the breakthrough, it could give you the willies just losing the chains of thought at the last links and then getting derailed. Instead, if you take the medicine and can suddenly "snap" the last links in the chain together, you can qualitatively go beyond levels you ever did before. But maybe this kind of choice is a truly tough test of our humanity, because one of the formulas could have a pure straight-line increase in benefit right up until your brain shorts out. Could you stand for example almost understanding Stephen Hawking, knowing that if you took the stuff you absolutely would, only to croak the next day? Eerie.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Since slashdot threads run their course so quick, I don't have time to properly research this. But I'm pretty sure that in fact this is indeed happening out there, somewhere in the research world.
The problem with Algernon cycles is the effect of your passing on the world around you. The quickest example to point to is the family - if the father decided to go that route, all the way to the end, the rest of the family is stuck with a new suboptimal structure for the rest of their lives. There's an information export problem. Let's say the effect works, but the researcher doesn't get his act together and publish his results, then all that potential vanishes in a tragic puff.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Slashdot must be full of coffee-drinking Nazgul then...
Palm trees and 8
The risky challenge is when there is a straight continual increase in ability right up until you keel over. Then instead of dying at 72 instead of 80, you croak within a day. Knowledge is like a fractal - the smarter you are, it just keeps on getting spiffier. Where do you draw the line at your new enhanced level when the summit of Everest is in front of you?
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Always. It's our right to better ourselves, and and it is fully up to us what we put into our bodies. Next question.
I actually worked on some of this myself.
There are other ways to address ADHD that do not lead to a life long dependency on speed, sorry, Ritalin and that resolve the issue permanently . If I had any money right now I'd set it up as an organisation, as it also helps with those so-called "difficult" kids who are basically undiagnosed and get kicked into a corner - this can be done at a sensible price but still make good money.
The problem is that it takes someone with cojones to fund it, because despite being based on solid research you'll still have a fight on your hands as the revenue from Ritalin is MASSIVE and pharma is not going to take it lying down that you nuke 70% of their income - and they fight *dirty*.
Insert
Improvements can be had naturally through exercise and general healthy living - basal metabolic rate is raised and (potentially) bloodflow improved. But the #1 thing most people should do is simply get more sleep. It's all too easy in a world of artificial light and constant distractions to run a deficit every night, until you're so impaired you're probably not even safe to drive to work.
"LIMITLESS" -> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THE_hhk1Gzc&feature=related
* Yea, right... sorry, it doesn't work THAT way!
Now, personally, I've got NO PROBLEM with say, Professional Athletes using steroids (hey, it's THEIR BODY after all, & nobody else's). IF they want to take the risk? So be it.
(So, "that all said & aside" - Then, the same goes here I suppose... but, one SHOULD BE AWARE of the true if not only potential "downsides" of such things & their use...)
Ala "What profiteth a man to win the world if he loses his soul"...
APK
P.S.=> The sad & even funny part is, all of these drugs have side effects that do NOT manifest themselves right away (think of PROZAC or even STEROID USE among athletes) - since they're not "perfected" as is, and won't be ever imo... you get what you bought into folks, and there's NO SUBSTITUTE for actual years-to-decades of hard work and study people... none, and, there never WILL be!
... apk
Why the frack would it -not- be ethical? Let people ingest whatever the frack they want, if it's not hurting anyone else? Now, what wouldn't be ethical is for anyone to -force- people to take drugs of pretty much any sort, including these (i.e. take them if you want to graduate college, take them if you want to keep your job, etc.), but if you want to take them of your own free will, how the frell would that possibly be considered not "ethical"? Where does ethics even freaking factor in? (Other than perhaps if they got them from a doctor, rather than on the black market, and the doctor didn't disclose side effects...)
It may be illegal, but that has nothing to do with ethics.
Drugs don't alter DNA.
"Pulling together is the aim of despotism and tyranny! Free men pull in all sorts of directions" -- Havelock Vetinari
"What's your secret?" ANSWER (from the film "LIMITLESS" = "Medication" -> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THE_hhk1Gzc
* Sorry guys, you're NOT going to become Eddie Morra from the film "LIMITLESS" by using Adderall... it doesn't WORK that way! There is truly NO SUBSTITUTE for the "school of hard-knocks 'hands-on' experience"... none.
(Personally? I have NO PROBLEM with what one does to one's body OR mind - since it's YOURS to do with as you wish for the most part, just like Steroid using athletes & I saw THIS part when it was JUST COMING ON THE SCENE - "roid rage"? Not funny... same with PROZAC... once it "bottles up" inside enough? It "explodes" onto the scene, & once more/again - NOT pretty!).
APK
P.S.=> "Worth the risk? What would YOU do?"...
... apk
Most of us already take a cognitive enhancer to help us with school or work, so that ship sailed a long time ago. The most commonly used cognitive enhancer is caffeine, which seems to be pretty benign, although it is at least mildly addictive. Some people also take nicotine, which is severely addictive and (at least as commonly administered) quite harmful.
Then of course there are people who are diagnosed with ADHD. Although there is almost certainly some biological, and probably genetic, basis for ADHD, there is currently no objective diagnostic test that will distinguish people with ADHD from those without--diagnosis is by an essentially arbitrary set of behavioral criteria. Where the line is drawn between "normal" variation and disease is pretty arbitrary. Sometimes, the line is drawn based on the efficacy of a treatment, and at one time it was thought that ADHD drugs like methylphenidate (Ritalin) and amphetamine (Adderall) only benefitted people with ADHD, but this turns out to be untrue, so this also does not qualify as a diagnostic criterion.
So far, the ADHD medications seem to be fairly benign, although they too can be habit forming (except perhaps for atomoxetine [Strattera] which is probably less effective as a cognitive enhancer). I say so far, because it has been just a bit over a couple of decades since we began chronically treating children with these ADHD drugs on a large scale, so if they were going to come down with, say, early Parkinson's Disease in middle age, we probably would have seen at least a hint of it by now, but it's still a bit early to be certain.
Prescription ADHD medication isn't ethical either. Just because it comes from scribblings from a doctor doesn't change that fact.
I am a transplant patient. Prior to transplant, i was tested monthly for everything (diagnostic stuff, and drug screens through in as a bonus). I tested positive for everything the first time too. It was impossible as with no kidney function and limited liver function, i'd be disabled or die from that many illicit substances (in addition to the pretty substantial drug load from liver/kidney failure treatment). Second test, I was positive for every other drug (i.e. Yes, no, yes, no, etc). Dr. ordered a change in lab, at the new lab suddenly i'm clean.
More than just lab equipment can fail.
But, back to the original topic, taking a lot of drugs can change your attitude toward them. I don't mind folks taking drugs, mostly, as long as they are completely legal such that recreational addicts will kill or sterilize themselves. Watching them torment the inevitable children they will have is too much.
Drugs are costly to develop and then Big Pharma are large corporations who want to make money. If they can market these drugs to larger populations (say the smart-drug set as well as patients with degenerative diseases) the costs may come down substantially, and they may be more likely to develop more of these drugs.
Huh?
We're collectively a long, long, long, long, long way from too smart. Pop them brain boosters as soon as available.
Some parts of the US should apply for disaster relief emergency supplies of them. I think I saw a map recently where they were marked in red.
-- TWZ
Thanks Betteridge.
that's right, i just said the lord of the rings is a parable about drug addiction
Actually, I've often wondered whether Tolkein knew any opiate users - maybe WWI veterans who got hooked on morphine? I don't have any firsthand experience with them myself (aside from having my wisdom teeth removed, and Vicodin is pretty tame stuff compared to injected morphine), but the description of Gollum's cravings sounds a lot like what I've read about opiate addiction.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The real question is, when is it ethical to stop consenting adults from putting something into their own body? I don't think so. A person's body is his own, he must live with whatever it does or whatever its lack doesn't do.
I am not talking about children, or the mentally retarded of course, those are other matters, but in general, if a person is taking it thesmself, based on their own (however limited) knowledge, then I see no ethical issue.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
It depends on how it plays out.
My first thought was: your body, your rules. You can do whatever you want to your own body, for all I care. But, then I started looking at some possible future scenarios. Assuming the future is more competitive than today, we can envision a scenario where the only way to secure a job is to abuse work-enhancing drugs, without regard to long-term health. And if the drugs turn out to burn out your brain or turn you into a work automaton, well, that's better than starving.
We should be using technological advances to improve the lives of people, not to extract more work out of them.
Thanks to Non-Prescription use I am not able to get my PRESCRIPTION ADHD meds filled due to the tightening of DEA guidelines on amphetamine salts. ...
I can't afford it, and unless I can get a decent job I can't get prescription coverage to get my meds, but I can't get my meds without a prescription. Mostly thanks to recreational users and college age drug seekers who want to party all night and still carry a 3.5.
The problem isn't the users of the drugs, it's the way that society is obsesses with keeping them out of their hands, which is to deny them to everyone, including those that need them.
I had an excruciating episode of IBS, was out of pain killers because I had just moved between states, and went to the hospital emergency room for some relief. I told them through clenched teeth that I have IBS, and that the only thing I have found that relieves the pain and symptoms in the past (my previous two emergency room visits) was morphine. They gave me the evil eye, and told me to sit down. After an hour or begging to see a doctor, and watching minor cases go before me, they finally put me in a room. After waiting another hour, I went to the door and yelled at the nurse "look, if I don't see a doctor soon, I'm going to have my wife drive me to the local park and buy some Vicodin off the local dealer." The nurse finally gave me some attention, and said , "now we are going to take a blood sample you know." WTF? After 15 minutes a doctor came in and I got my Morphine, and the episode was over in a half hour.
Turns out that IBS is one of the classic ploys by addicts to get drugs from emergency rooms. They expected to find drugs in my blood, but I hadn't had an episode in months, so I was completely clean of opiates. Reading some nursing blogs, the standard procedure for suspected drug addicts is to make them sit for an hour. Addicts will usually just leave and try to get their drugs somewhere else. People in real pain have to sit and endure their pain.
Do I blame the addicts? To some degree. But the real blame has to be on the so-called health care community, that is denying pain killers to people who need them, just in case they might be giving them to someone who doesn't. This obsession with denying drugs is insane.
The only thing worse than a Democrat is a Republican.
in the short term, it gives you superpowers. in the long term, it turns you into a soulless ghoul
You become a lawyer?
that's right, i just said the lord of the rings is a parable about drug addiction
Actually, I've often wondered whether Tolkein knew any opiate users - maybe WWI veterans who got hooked on morphine? I don't have any firsthand experience with them myself (aside from having my wisdom teeth removed, and Vicodin is pretty tame stuff compared to injected morphine), but the description of Gollum's cravings sounds a lot like what I've read about opiate addiction.
Or alcohol addiction. But yeah.
Drugs don't alter DNA.
Some do, for example drugs that cause cancer. All drugs have the potential to affect gene expression. We don't really know enough about it yet to say more.
Steroids are used to gain an advantage in an playing field kept as level as possible through external rules and a large suite of referees watching every move, in order to maximize the entertainment value. But this is about life, where the playing field is never level, the rules are far more vague, and enforcement all but non-existent.
Coming soon to the real world if the "liberal progressives" keep gaining power and getting their way.
Fuck all this "gotta level the playing field" nonsense. I say let everyone use whatever advantage they can give themselves if that's their choice... but they also have to agree to suffer the consequences if it backfires in their face too.
And fuck the government for telling us what we can and cannot put into our own bodies.
One problem with ADD/ADHD meds is that they don't enhance cognitive capacity, they alter it. For those with ADD/ADHD, they alter it in a manner that mimics non-ADD/ADHD brain function. For others, it's more like what happens when using methamphetamines. For all the increased focus, concentration, and attention one might gain for singular tasks, one also sacrifices the broader abstract capacity needed to understand larger swaths of a field, or that required to create original work or research. Adderall might be great for things such as memorizing lists or sorting thousands of bits of metal into various jars, but not so great when it's time to come up with an original topic for a paper that incorporates disparate concepts in a field.
So if you use these types of substances through school, you should prepare to continue to use them through the course of your professional field. Otherwise what you will have done is artificially alter your cognitive abilities in such a manner that your academic record won't accurately reflect your abilities. Essentially you'll be performing a bait-and-switch. When you land in the workplace you will not have the abilities that your educational record will reflect.
So for all those kids out there using Adderall to study, to be fair you should plan on using it for the rest of your working days.
The lack of a doctor's prescription doesn't automatically make using Ritalin medically unethical.
The lack of a medical need does.
If I miss my doctor's appointment and only have 2 days of pills left and I bum the same pill from a friend on the 3rd day, I wouldn't call that medically unethical. It might be illegal and therefore unethical according to my or my friend's personal code of ethics (example of such a code of ethics), but it's not medically unethical.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
The question should be, "Can an individual choose to take a performance enhancer for their own reasons, even if it's not officially sanctioned by government bureaucrats, lawmakers and voters with a vague sense that something might not be egalitarian...somehow?"
As for ethics, it depends on your starting set of unprovable precepts. Have at it. Garbage in, garbage out. Just don't expect me to take it seriously.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Or, maybe they're perfectly comfortable, but on one night a week or whatever, they feel like relaxing a bit more and enjoying it.
What YOU'RE saying is that anyone who drinks a beer on a friday night while watching TV or whatever is not comfortable with their life, and want to avoid reality. With one beer. On one day a week. Which doesn't affect anyone else on earth, nor their job, nor anything whatsoever except the person themself.
Let that person drink their damn beer without being all preachy about how they're avoiding reality.
Yet more people are addicted to, and die from, alcohol than all those drugs combined.
There's a reason prohibition was tried... there's also a reason it fails.
Which is why, if you weren't already at +5, I'd want to mod you insightful.
Being somewhat easily distracted has both pluses and minuses, just like being taller or shorter than average. For some the pluses outweigh the minuses
On the other hand, being extremely easily distracted, or its opposite, always being so hyper-focused that you don't notice fire alarms or other important interruptions, get in the way of living what most people would call a "normal life."
It's a matter of degree, and for some, a matter of choice.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Many colleges don't have "+" or "-" grades, so if you will get a "high B" if you "study like normal" it's to your advantage to do everything you can to ace the final so you can eke out that A.
For some, this means cramming the night before and a caffeine our *coughdorm-matesRxcough* pill an hour before the final.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
A de-facto definition for "impaired" or "handicapped" is any physiological condition that prevents you from doing something that most people take for granted or which is pretty much necessary for living in the society you live in.
If your memory is as bad as you describe, I'd say it's an impairment, but not necessarily a severe one.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Can you either get a doctor's note that any medical professional in the country can easily verify, and/or get on some centralized registry of people who should be given morphine without being given the run-around?
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Great. Tell me how I appeal to the DEA please, because I have been trying to plead this case for about 2 and a half years now, and so have several thousand doctors who have patients who can no longer access their medicines.
--
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order- Ed Howdershelt Via Tass
Bypass the FDA and go to the press (soapbox) and engage in the political process (ballot).
I'm dead serious about the political process. Join your favorite or least-favorite political party and work to get ADD-patient-friendly resolutions adopted and planks added to the party's platform. If you are a medical professional, lobby your peers the lobby Congress together. If you are a patient, lobby your doctor to do the same.
It may not be fast enough for your case but it can prevent the next generation from having to deal with this.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/medical_examiner/2005/05/the_adderall_me.html
And likely contributing to an early death from cardiovascular conditions
This was during the 1930s and 1940s
Sure, if they are banned in that sport, then yes that is unethical.
Otherwise it is not.
And this is where your anger should lie. With the DEA. Not with people who want to put chemicals in their body which don't do a damned bit of harm to everyone else. You should be angry with prohibition.
Fully actualized humans
Please define this term.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Like the Luddites?
There's a lot showing that epigenetics carry your poor life choices on to your children. So, though the DNA itself may not be changed, there very well may be an inheritable genetic result of drug use.
- No Bounce, No Play -
The War on Everything(tm) has affected companion animals, too.
A few months ago, my 17 year old kitty almost died, and needed major painful surgery to survive (he's fine now). I had to go, in person, to the vet EVERY SINGLE DAY for ~2 weeks, to pick up one Fentanyl patch for him, because they couldn't give me more than one at a time. Officially, I was supposed to bring him in each day, but they bent that rule because they'd just spent 9 days pulling him back from the brink of death, and they admitted to me point blank he was too fragile at that point to stress out that way (among other things, vomiting at that point would have been an official life-threatening emergency).
Likewise, my other cat has ALWAYS freaked out when she has to go in the car, and still does. For years, the vet was happy to prescribe Xanax treats to give her. Now, all he'll let her have is acepromazine, which leaves her dangerously disoriented & groggy for almost a day (the Xanax wore off cleanly halfway through the trip, and she was fine because her specific fear is of getting put into her carrier and *beginning* the trip). Most of the time, I now don't give her anything because I don't want to keep her trapped in her carrier for half the day upon arrival so she won't try to jump or climb and get hurt, and every trip - without fail - she poops and pees in her carrier 15-30 minutes after we leave the house, and I have to agonize between leaving my elderly kitty in the car for 10 minutes while I try to sneak her into a restroom to clean up the mess, or letting her wallow in it for 2 hours & trying not to gag from the odor.
Our government f***ing sucks.
Unless you're arguing that people shouldn't enjoy self-autonomy, then there's nothing wrong with people taking whatever performance-enhancing drugs they want to in their private life.
that's right, i just said the lord of the rings is a parable about drug addiction
You can interpret it that way, but it wasn't intended that way. It's a story about the virtue of courage, even in hopeless situations.
in the short term, it gives you superpowers. in the long term, it turns you into a soulless ghoul
Neither of these are true. Stimulant medications don't give you super powers; those college students on illegal methylphenidate (ritalin) are pretty much getting to be where they'd be if they regularly got a good night's sleep. As for turning you into a ghoul, it may be true that methamphetamine abuse causes a serious, personality twisting dependency, but ritalin doesn't. It doesn't hit those dopamine reward circuits as hard as amphetamines do. A stimulant that was like ritalin and which didn't stimulate the brain's reward mechanisms at *all* might well be safer then caffeine.
Caffeine, by the way, is the old school way of improving your school performance. But it too is no substitute for taking care of yourself: getting enough sleep, exercising, eating well, managing your time.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Is just what comes out of the mouth of sheeple who have accepted living as children.
If you are an informed responsible person you are an adult. an adult who weighs the risks and gains and comes up with an informed decision is not being unethical.
If I look at potential organ damage and effectiveness of treatment for addiction as well as the side effects of long term use of Aderol and decide that being able to focus is worth it, tehn no puppet show "war on drugs" with its invented villains is going to suddenly make my decision unethical.
If you want to live as children then go for it, do not say that because you do that, I also must.
Adult hood is not an age it is a behavior pattern. A 12 year old who only makes informed responsible decisions is more of an adult than a 50 year old who's thought process have never extended beyond "I want!".
So we do not have a drug problem here, what we have is a problem with awarding adult hood to everyone, when they have managed to orbit the sun enough times.
the wrong question.
Using a precription drug outside it's design use runs with it certian risks.
Add to that, when more people us it, there will be statically the same,. but more actual side effect issues which will get into the news. This will inaccurately make the drug seem more dangerous then it is. This could cause people who need the drug to go without.
Now, if we assume no side effects, or say, fewer side effects then aspirin* should people take it? I can't think of why note. I use my smart phone to help me retain data. People use caffeine as as stimulant.
The only risk is that it will be the expectation for everyone to take it.
Would I take it? why yes, yes I would.
*Which actually is troubling for about 4% of takers, who don't even know it.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Great. Tell me how I appeal to the DEA please.
Campaign to get your pro-drug-war dickbag congressman, or even your county sheriff, out of office? I know, I know, it's wishful thinking, but maybe if enough people overcome their own cynicism we can make for some incremental change?
It's not jst in case. In some ares, it'sd all the time. AS in at least one person an hour wonders in, sometimes more.
If we had a universal health care system that just would have needed to look up your record, see you last prescription. The figure out how many pill you should have taken. The get your morphine.
Since that can't tell what you have taken, have no record, you end up stuck. It' sucks, but they have no way of knowing if you really need it. If it wasn't abused, it wouldn't be a problem either.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Thanks to Non-Prescription use I am not able to get my PRESCRIPTION ADHD meds filled due to the tightening of DEA guidelines on amphetamine salts. I need my meds to function. Without them I am pretty much useless. I have been on Dexedrine for almost 20 years, but my prescription has gone from (no-insurance prices) $50 to over $400 a month. I can't afford it, and unless I can get a decent job I can't get prescription coverage to get my meds, but I can't get my meds without a prescription. Mostly thanks to recreational users and college age drug seekers who want to party all night and still carry a 3.5.
I know exactly what you're talking about, as I've been on IR Dexedrine for about 7 years now and you're putting the blame in the wrong place. You're also being disingenuous, unless you're unaware of the situation with Dexedrine IR right now. I'm sure you know that the reason your Rx went up is because the IR Dexedrine ($50/mo, generic) is not currently available, so you had to switch to either Vyvnase or ER Dexedrine ($250++/mo). You can view current drug shortages here: http://www.fda.gov/Drugs/DrugSafety/DrugShortages/ucm314739.htm
I know this because I went through the same thing. I was told by a pharmacist that they could no longer order it. I told my psychiatrist, who did not believe that it was not available and suggested I just needed to look harder. The first month I called 9 pharmacies. I called him and told him this and he still would not write me another Rx until our next visit. The next time I had to get it filled I ended up taking time off of work to bus out to the only pharmacy that said they had any ("tablets, not capsules, right?") only to find out they did indeed only have capsules. I was on the edge of a nervous breakdown and the pharmacist broke protocol to fill the script with capsules. In talking with a number of pharmacists, one told me that they had been inquiring about availability and the manufacturer (Teva) would not even give them information about its availability and would not tell them if it was going to be discontinued.
The issue is not only that the DEA has not raised the amount of total stimulant medication for almost 4 years (which they have), and it is not only that the DEA limits the total amount of stimulant medication that can be produced as a result of their fear of misuse. The issue is that the only current manufacturer of Dexedrine IR (Teva) is allowed a given quantity of precursor material by the DEA that will allow them to make a number of different amphetamine salts. Now, do you think they are going to manufacture more of the generic tablets that retail for ~$50/mo or the ER capsules that retail for ~$300/mo? Keep in mind this is a corporation, driven by their stockholders to maximize profits. The only other companies that made Dexedrine IR in the past have either stopped production or been shut down by the FDA for poor quality control.
I personally find it unbelievable that our medical system and the DEA and the doctors cannot work together to ensure that medication is available for those that need it. There are people who have it worse - people on cancer drugs that have gone out of production, for instance (obviously not from the DEA in that case). You can blame anyone you want, and you can imagine that part kids and students are making your medication unaffordable, but they aren't the ones who stopped making your generic medication that works just as good as the one that costs 5 times as much, they aren't the ones imposing production limits, and they aren't the ones dropping the ball on ensuring that medication is available and inexpensive. So please, keep that in mind.
" What has this modern environment of cubicles, GMO food, blinding fluorescent light, lack of healthy and walkable environs, what has that done to the human animal and our ability to think and work?"
it has NOTHING TO DO with any of that.
these drugs would have been useful 100 years ago..hell 1000 years ago, 10,000 year ago.
Just becasue we found a way to get us to do something better doesn't mean there was something wrong.
You stand outside naked when it's -50, and you will die. Why? what have we done wrong in the last 10 years to cause us to die like that?
DO you see the stupidity of your question?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
" We need more smarts around here"
careful what you wish for. More smart would be applied against you. It doesn't mean there will be reasonable things, it just means the people creating and defending unreasonable thing will do it more intelligently.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
That's the whole problem with this argument. By arguing that the competition of education should be fair, it assumes education should be a competition. We shouldn't be grading people on curves. 1. If everyone learns the material adequately, why should we give the least successful people F's? 2. If everyone gets a perfect score, why should everyone get a C (i.e. average)? 3. If no one learns the material adequately, why should the best of the failures still get passing grades? We should be grading students based on their mastery of the material, not pitting them against eachother. Education should not be a zero sum game. How well you know the material should not be affected by anyone else. If drugs can be produced that help you think more clearly, with minimal side effects, then why not encourage people to use it? The fact remains that you know what you know, regardless of whether you know it because you were able to do it because of a drug. If I could magically make myself understand quantum mechanics like how Neo learned Kung Fu in the Matrix, maybe some would argue that I didn't learn it on my own. So what? If I know quantum mechanics then I can do I can perform the job of someone who needs to know quantum mechanics. That's what a degree is supposed to signify anyway. Who cares how easy it was for me. Figuring out better and easier ways of doing the same thing is a good thing. I don't understand this desire for difficulty or suffering that people seem to have. There are people that want birth control to be illegal because they think promiscuous people deserve to suffer consequences (i.e. raising a child) for their behavior. They don't consider that enjoying sex without consequences is a good thing. The behavior isn't bad. The bad consequences are bad. So eliminate the bad consequences. Even if we wanted to preserve the competitive nature of education, our quest for levelness of the playing field is stupid. By that logic we should ban computers and the internet from education until even the poorest student could afford one. We'd have to make everyone blind so that the playing field is level for blind students. We'd have to give lectures that were only moderately comprehensible to make the playing field level for foreign students. It's just stupid.
where can sombedy get these drugs?
Most linux users don't know this, but the man pages were named after Chuck Norris. Chuck Norris fsck'ing hates noobs!
A combination of artificial ingredients in food, along with a lack of key nutrients like omega 3 fats, vitamin D, iodine, magnesium, plant phytonutrients, and so on, can really impair brain function. For more details, see for example:
http://www.diseaseproof.com/archives/cat-adhd.html
http://www.diseaseproof.com/archives/adhd-preventing-and-treating-adhd-in-children.html
See also for adjusting your taste preferences:
"How to escape The Pleasure Trap !"
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx
Good luck.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Read some of his comments in his journals. Despite generally being left wing, he goes absolutely batshit, any government action is ok if it supports the war on drugs.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
Stop blaming amphetamine users for stuff the government does to screw you over. Causality and responsibility are not the same thing.
You seem to value liberty, judging by your last line.
Why don't you get the fact that it is the government's prohibition on drugs, and the central planning of stimulant supplies that is the reason your med. is so expensive? Amphetamine in particular is a pathetically simple molecule. With a little organic chem. background, anyone can take a look at the simple amphet. structure and just grok how absurd it is to think that it could ever be successfully kept out of the hands of those who want it. The stuff has been around for over a century, is butt simple, and should be $0.05 a pill--just ask the pharmacist for it if you don't have a Dr. script, sign a little waver that if you get into trouble with it you have no legal recourse to sue the pharmacist or manufacturer, and get on with it.
That would be liberty!
There's a really good reason why those of us who grew up on Ritalin have zero interest in cocaine (at least, after trying it once) -- to us, cocaine feels like the worst generic Ritalin (methylphenidate) SR we've ever been unfortunate enough to experience at some point in our lives before discovering Concerta. Brand-name Ciba Ritalin SR sucks. Generic "methylphenidate SR" sucks even worse.
For those who don't know, oldschool Ritalin SR is basically a 10mg ball of IR methylphenidate that's coated in wax, then coated with a shell containing another 10mg of IR methylphenidate. It's a miserable drug straight out of the 1960s, created by someone who obviously never took it personally. The only thing predictable about its metabolization was the fact that you knew it was usually going to suck. Sometimes, dose #2 would kick in an hour after dose #1, and you'd end up bodyslammed against the wall and floor, totally strung out, knowing you were going to have a tension headache from HELL and crash like an asteroid when they both wore off simultaneously an hour or two later. Other times, dose #2 wouldn't quite metabolize until dose #1 completely and totally wore off, dragging you through two nasty crashes in ~7 hours. Small amounts of Desipramine or Nortriptyline helped to buffer and smooth it out a bit, but let me tell you... it really, REALLY sucked.
In contrast, Concerta was obviously created by someone who grew up suffering the horrors of Ritalin SR who swore to find a way to make it work better. Concerta is basically a plastic cylinder filled with methylphenidate gel at one end, and a slowly-expanding sponge at the other. The cylinder itself is coated with your initial dose. It kicks in, then the sponge starts to slowly expand as it passes through the digestive tract. As the day progresses, the release rate slowly increases, then tapers off to slowly to avoid the crash that always accompanies oldschool Ritalin.
Compared to Concerta, cocaine just feels dirty -- like sticking your dick into hole #2, and seeing it come out covered in shit. We might enjoy the first few minutes of cocaine like everyone else the first time we try it, but then we feel it wearing off like cheap generic Ritalin SR, and any interest we might have had in EVER touching it again is gone forever.
"Normal" people who do cocaine don't have anything to compare it with. They feel the euphoria, and just accept the crash as an inevitable opportunity cost. That crashing feeling is something we experienced at least once every goddamn fucking day from kindergarten until the glorious day Concerta arrived from the heavens, presented by angels with golden wings. I know that I'd personally have to be completely desperate and in danger of having my life and career go down in flames before I'd *ever* voluntarily take either traditional Ritalin OR cocaine ever again. They BOTH suck.
On the other hand, if Colombian druglords ever find a way to reformulate cocaine into something that can be taken orally and manufactured into Concerta-like delivery pods,the DEA will have a drug on its hands that makes crack look like an orphan drug.
There's a glimmer of hope. A company called Mikart got approved from the FDA two years ago to manufacture generic IR dextroamphetamine... not only in the traditional 5mg and 10mg sizes, but in the same sizes as IR Adderall (7.5mg, 15mg, 20mg, and I think one or two more) as well. They have no ties at all to Teva, and apparently their first batches of 5mg and 10mg (other sizes coming next year) tablets are already getting shipped to distributors.
Of course, the DEA still has plenty of opportunities to cause problems by restricting the supply of d-amphetamine, and it's not inconceivable that Teva might quit making generic IR dextroamphetamine entirely (leaving Mikart as the sole source), but at least NOW there's at least one company that has no business relationship whatsoever with Teva making d-amphetamine for us. It's going to be a few more months until it's widely-available across the country, but those of us who do the best on plain generic dextroamphetamine (Adderall makes me grind my teeth) can breathe a little more easily now.
With a little luck, Mikart will do a better job than Teva does with regard to purity (several batches of Teva's dextroamphetamine have been analyzed by college students with access to the necessary lab equipment, and they've ALL been observed to contain 2% or more levoamphetamine) and consistency (it's widely acknowledged that for some unknown reason, two 5mg Teva d-amphetamine tablets are NOT indistinguishable from a single 10mg Teva d-amphetamine tablet).
The mentally limited troll gmhowell spews more of his crap on slashdot.
I'm not much of a believer in regulating ANY drugs. If people want to use these types of drugs to enhance their performance, that's their prerogative. The least risk is that in order to continue to advance at the pace they now find acceptable they will need to keep paying for the drug. There are obviously greater risks given that knowledge is not perfect and taking drugs on a regular basis tends to have side effects and interactions that don't come out in clinical trials.
This is a classic risk-reward scenario. People should be free to take their risks and their rewards.
Every rule has more than one consequence.
cool story bro.
anyway the only person who really had a right to ask that question was Hillary ...
Actually, since he was being sued for sexual harassment, the lawyers who asked that question DID have the right. If they did not, the judge would have ruled it immaterial. And then they had to botch it by underdefining it.