A British medical ethicist argues that adults should be free to take the popular stimulant drug Ritalin for cognitive enhancement.
Professor John Harris, of the University of Manchester, says many adult students are already taking the the drug which is illegal in the UK without a prescription. He says that if it is safe for children with ADHD to take Ritalin over an extended period for a non-life threatening condition, there was there is reason to prevent healthy adults using it to.
The problem with making stimulant drugs more freely available though, is the likelihood that a large segment of the population will prefer to use them for getting high instead of performing smarter.
In the first half of the 20th Century, stimulant drugs were quite widely used among professionals and the military for cognitive enhancement. Even the original Coca-Cola was advertised as a red-bull-style pick-me-up which contained a small amount of cocaine.
However, the fallout from hedonistic sixties in which the use of pharmaceutical drugs for recreational purposes was widely popularised for the first time, has done considerable damage to the cause of those wishing to promote stimulant drugs for improving mental performance.
The image of stimulant drugs was further damaged in the 1970s when dextroamphetamine was used in large concentrations as a sliming aid for women, with the result that a number of prominent female celebrities suffered from stimulant-induced heart failure.
Since then authorities in most developed countries authorities have been severely cracking down on the use of stimulant drugs, which are now are now primarily abused by the underclass. Ritalin for example, is often taken from children to which it's been subscribed and ground down and smoked or snorted for a quick rush (slow-release versions have been developed to get around this problem, but not without significantly increasing the cost).
The demise of smoking though, has created a large gap in the market for a relatively safe stimulant, that's only been partially filled by the renaissance in ground coffee products.
Over the next few decades it's going to be interesting to see whether the needs of the middle class for increased cognitive enhancement options will win out over the needs of the therapeutic state to contain the pathologies of the underclass.
At this stage my money's still on the therapeutic state.
