This entry is in response to Discover magazine's April 2009 issue article entitled: "Brain Boost: Should Everyone Be on Ritalin?" by Sherry Baker. Humanity's historical and growing dependency on mind-altering substances has always fascinated me and this article illustrates our nation, among others' growing obsession with cognition-enhancing pharmaceuticals.
Baker opens her piece addressing a conversation she recently had with three other professionals over dinner, a physician, a neurology technician, a computer executive and herself a writer. The discussion revolved around her company's growing fascination with a newer drug Provigil. Provigil is the marketed drug composed of modafinil, an attention-enhancer which gives similar affects as aderol and ritalin, however without the "cracked-out", "crash" effect. Provigil is mostly taken by those desiring increased performance without a proper diagnosis or disease. Baker discusses how this group of professionals along with many others have grown to not only thrive on but also depend on attention-enhancing drugs.
Statistics include: Through a study conducted at the University of Maryland including 1208 interviewed students, 18% take attention-enhancing drugs without a prescription. During a survey conducted by Nature reported that 20% of 1400 respondents reported using cognition-enhancing drugs for non-medical reasons, 50% of which reported daily and weekly use. Nearly half of those interviewed are not part of the younger within-the-twenties generation either, about half interviewed age over 35.
The article delves into other aspects of attention-enhancers in terms of countries as a whole. A Neurotechnology researcher is quoted discussing not only individual potential of these drugs but economic growth potential for countries in general. He states: "Think of millions of workers in India or China cognitively enhanced with neuropharmaceuticals. Will the United States be able to compete?" This leads into discourse about the machine-like nature certain drugs can entail in humans. This type of remark yields the belief that humans will in the future be run by drugs, thus economies will depend on substances such as ritalin and provigil. The article also discusses more mundane drug use such as LSD, marijuana, psilocybin, mescaline, etc. in terms of creativity-catalyzing characteristics.
Baker also illustrates the rise of memory-enhancing drug and deems memory as "the new sex" in terms of peoples' obsession with increasing our cognitive memorizing capabilities. Also intriguing in the article is the authors discussion of "transhumanists" and "transhumans". She first discusses altered athletes using steroids but focuses in on humans who make drug enhancement their profession. She describes such "transhumanists" as those who study the voluntary "ethical" use of technology to create humans with biological capacities enhanced far beyond people of today". This scares me in that this research pushes our potential as human beings past what is naturally occurring and begins to devise artificially-aided intelligence rather than naturally-attributed cerebral capabilities.
In terms of the author's own personal drug use she concludes in a very interesting manner. The author discusses her own stress revolving throughout her life presently and notes that a friend offered her a joint to smoke, a doctor handed her some Provigil samples "just in case" and she also noted that she is prescribed Klonopin for anxiety. The author leads the reader to believe that she is "above this" and that drugs just "aren't for her". She concludes however, writing: "Is [Provigil] really a less natural way to augment my life than flying 38,000 ft above the planet at 500 miles per hour? I tuck the pills into my carry-on bag and go". Good point Sherry Baker. In current conventional society it becomes more difficult to truly differentiate between what is natural to our nature and what is nurtured and created artificially. We seem to have become a hybrid species, have dependent on our nature and half revolving around synthetic and mass-produced pharmaceuticals. This, thus, aids our discourse into the heart of the matter and of humanity: What is real?
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