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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."
Fuck you you little ignorant shit.
I have a very serious, crippling disease. I spend more than half of my day managing medical treatments, and I need frequent surgery to keep me alive and I still can barely walk - and not always even that. It consumes so much of my time I have weeks I can accomplish nothing but keeping the symptoms at bay.
Life as it is doesn't have a level playing field. Society doesn't have a level playing field. I'm a pariah, a joke to people around me - when they bother to acknowledge the hobbling cripple at all. Picking on the cripple is good fun - ignoring the cripple is what people do most of the time.
So take your just world fallacy and shove it up your ass. Life isn't fair.