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 veggie
Registered: 07/25/04
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 Scientists back brain drugs for healthy people
#9390055 - 12/08/08 02:14 AM (3 years, 5 months ago) |
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Scientists back brain drugs for healthy people
December 7, 2008 - Associated Press
NEW YORK (AP) — Healthy people should have the right to boost their brains with pills, like those prescribed for hyperactive kids or memory-impaired older folks, several scientists contend in a provocative commentary.
College students are already illegally taking prescription stimulants like Ritalin to help them study, and demand for such drugs is likely to grow elsewhere, they say.
"We should welcome new methods of improving our brain function," and doing it with pills is no more morally objectionable than eating right or getting a good night's sleep, these experts wrote in an opinion piece published online Sunday by the journal Nature.
The commentary calls for more research and a variety of steps for managing the risks.
As more effective brain-boosting pills are developed, demand for them is likely to grow among middle-aged people who want youthful memory powers and multitasking workers who need to keep track of multiple demands, said one commentary author, brain scientist Martha Farah of the University of Pennsylvania.
"Almost everybody is going to want to use it," Farah said.
"I would be the first in line if safe and effective drugs were developed that trumped caffeine," another author, Michael Gazzaniga of the University of California, Santa Barbara, declared in an e-mail.
The seven authors, from the United States and Britain, include ethics experts and the editor-in-chief of Nature as well as scientists. They developed their case at a seminar funded by Nature and Rockefeller University in New York. Two authors said they consult for pharmaceutical companies; Farah said she had no such financial ties.
Some health experts agreed that the issue deserves attention. But the commentary didn't impress Leigh Turner of the University of Minnesota Center for Bioethics.
"It's a nice puff piece for selling medications for people who don't have an illness of any kind," Turner said.
The commentary cites a 2001 survey of about 11,000 American college students that found 4 percent had used prescription stimulants illegally in the prior year. But at some colleges, the figure was as high as 25 percent.
"It's a felony, but it's being done," Farah said.
The stimulants Adderall and Ritalin are prescribed mainly for people with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, but they can help other people focus their attention and handle information in their heads, the commentary says.
Another drug called Provigil is approved for sleep disorders but is also prescribed for healthy people who need to stay alert when sleep-deprived, the commentary says. Lab studies show it can also perk up the brains of well-rested people. And some drugs developed for Alzheimer's disease also provide a modest memory boost, it says.
Ritalin is made by Switzerland-based Novartis AG, but the drug is also available generically. Adderall is made by U.K.-based Shire PLC and Montvale, N.J.-based Barr Pharmaceuticals Inc., and some formulations are also available generically. Provigil is made by Cephalon Inc. of Frazer, Pa.
While supporting the concept that healthy adults should be able to use brain-boosting drugs, the authors called for:
_ More research into the use, benefits and risks of such drugs. Much is unknown about the current medications, such as the risk of dependency when used for this purpose, the commentary said. Also, according to the Food and Drug Administration, Adderall, for example, is an amphetamine that carries warnings about possible sudden death, heart attack and stroke, especially for people with heart problems.
_ Policies to guard against people being coerced into taking them.
_ Steps to keep the benefits from making socio-economic inequalities worse.
_ Action by doctors, educators and others to develop policies on the use of such drugs by healthy people.
_ Legislative action to allow drug companies to market the drugs to healthy people if they meet regulatory standards for safety and effectiveness.
Dr. Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, said she agreed with the commentary that the nonprescribed use of brain-boosting drugs must be studied.
But she said she was concerned that wider use of stimulants could lead more people to become addicted to them. That's what happened decades ago when they were widely prescribed for a variety of disorders, she said.
"Whether we like it or not, that property of stimulants is not going to go away," she said.
Erik Parens, a senior research scholar at the Hastings Center, a bioethics think tank in Garrison, N.Y., said the commentary makes a convincing case that "we ought to be opening this up for public scrutiny and public conversation."
One challenge will be finding ways to protect people against subtle coercion to use the drugs, the kind of thing parents feel when neighbor kids sign up for SAT prep courses, he said.
And if the nation moves to providing a basic package of health care to all its citizens, it's hard to see how it could afford to include brain-boosting drugs, he said. If they have to be bought separately, it raises the question about promoting societal inequalities, he said.
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 bloodsheen
ChemChaplin
Registered: 09/24/08
Posts: 1,076
Last seen: 1 day, 8 hours
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Re: Scientists back brain drugs for healthy people [Re: veggie]
#9390685 - 12/08/08 06:49 AM (3 years, 5 months ago) |
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I'm not opposed to drug use (obviously), but I like to keep my drug use recreational. If you dont have to try to pay attention or study, you will just naturally become dependent. Its not a matter of how addictive it is, why would you ever stop taking them if you could just pop a pill and get better grades? That would be like saying we should give everybody anti-depressants so they would feel better all the time, its ridiculous to give people medicine when they dont need it.
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A cautious young fellow named Lodge / Had seat belts installed in his Dodge. / When his date was strapped in / He committed a sin / Without even leaving the garage. That's clever, isn't it?-A boy and his dog
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ntropic mind
Stranger
Registered: 11/11/07
Posts: 85
Loc: here
Last seen: 3 years, 5 months
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Re: Scientists back brain drugs for healthy people [Re: bloodsheen]
#9390795 - 12/08/08 07:29 AM (3 years, 5 months ago) |
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yeah, but its pretty awesome to be able to study for six to eight hours at a stretch and have a good memory of everything that was covered. It can be a real life saver in crunch time around mid-terms and finals. And it isn't always the case that a student's been slacking off throughout the semester and simply wasn't paying attention to studying, some classes are just hard and require hours upon hours of studying.
I also don't feel that its at all appropriate to make any type of comparisons of cognitive enhancers to things like sports-doping, because the idea of school is to learn as much as you can while you can; there's no reason why if I'm able to improve my cognitive abilities that I shouldn't merely to maintain some illusory "level playing field" of fairness for the other students in the class, in terms of grades. And also with science, it is not a competition where the idea of fairness is anything to be concerned about, its about producing scientifically-rigorous research that yields results leading to a greater understanding of the universe in order that it benefit mankind.
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"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
-Arthur C. Clarke
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Cannashroom
Smoke two Joints
Registered: 10/25/07
Posts: 1,757
Loc: Everywhere
Last seen: 19 hours, 9 minutes
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Re: Scientists back brain drugs for healthy people [Re: ntropic mind]
#9391009 - 12/08/08 08:21 AM (3 years, 5 months ago) |
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Yeah, Legal Meth for all, But NO WEED!
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"A human being is part of the whole, called by us 'Universe'; a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest -- a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness.
This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and affection for a few persons nearest us.
Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole nature in its beauty.
Nobody is able to achieve this completely but striving for such achievement is, in itself, a part of the liberation and a foundation for inner security."
Albert Einstein
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Green_T
Getting to the chopper
Registered: 10/02/08
Posts: 4,024
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Re: Scientists back brain drugs for healthy people [Re: Cannashroom]
#9391077 - 12/08/08 08:39 AM (3 years, 5 months ago) |
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Lots of people took ADHD medication to study when i went to uni. I can see how some people wonder why people take drugs for recreation, and not for something productive. I can also see how it could be very habit forming. It's an interesting dilemma...
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"I have sworn upon the altar of god eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man" - Thomas Jefferson
Legalize Meth | Drug War Victims
Their vial of acid, which is on the table over there, tastes vile because they're incompetent chemists.
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piracetam
bioanalytical chemist
Registered: 05/03/08
Posts: 4,154
Loc: TX 
Last seen: 1 day, 17 hours
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Re: Scientists back brain drugs for healthy people [Re: Green_T]
#9394680 - 12/08/08 06:26 PM (3 years, 5 months ago) |
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not a big fan of stimulants, they are not really nootropic. they mainly get people wired and dependent, rather than enhance cognition.
the downside to these drugs is obvious (emotional disorders, increased anxiety following cessation).
modafinil (provigil) is marketed as some sort of new brain booster, but it's really just another CNS stimulant with a rather long half-life.
I especially find it appalling that troops abroad are given psych evals, refills on modafinil, then returned to duty.
ampakines have more promise as legitimate "brain boosters", probably with less potential for abuse.
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"It only takes 20 years for a liberal to become a conservative without changing a single idea.
In an evolving universe, who stands still moves backwards." ~R.A. Wilson
Edited by piracetam (12/08/08 06:38 PM)
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ntropic mind
Stranger
Registered: 11/11/07
Posts: 85
Loc: here
Last seen: 3 years, 5 months
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Re: Scientists back brain drugs for healthy people [Re: piracetam]
#9394840 - 12/08/08 06:54 PM (3 years, 5 months ago) |
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not all of them are uppers or amphetamines, for instance Modafinil.
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"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
-Arthur C. Clarke
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