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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."
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
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.
We employ people for industry. Welders, electricians, mechanics, etc. to build or repair mining machinery, among other things. Some work sites do mandatory drug testing.
You wouldn't believe the number of people who back right off when they hear about that. "Would you pass a drug test?" "Oh... I think I'll give that job a miss."
Or, "I don't know, maybe." "Well, are you a regular user?" "Is two or three times a day regular?"
We once had an employee get drug tested and the testers called the test machine's manufacturer because they thought it was broken.
He returned positive results to everything.
Meandering back towards the actual topic: screw smart drugs, it's 2012, where's my neural implants?
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
Millions of years of evolution have figured out the most efficient way to balance survival, intelligence, and metabolic conservation.
It's just not the case that evolution always leads to an optimal design. Evolution has a tendency to get stuck on "pretty good" solutions because some random decision early on limited the future solution space.
It's also not true that evolution is somehow finished with humans, having already figured out how to squeeze every ounce of efficiency from our brains. We are not the end product of evolution. For all we know, future generations may have more efficient brains than we have.