Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.