Smart drugs, or “cognitive enhancers,” can help consumers be more alert, improve concentration, and retain information better. In other words, they can make learning easier and improve overall performance. Some of the more commonly used smart drugs are Ritalin, Adderall, and Modafinil, which are used to treat ADHD and narcolepsy.
College students have already cottoned on to the benefits and competitive advantage that smart drugs provide. A 2010 National Survey on Drug Use and Health found that 11 percent of 12- to 25-year-olds used prescription drugs for non-medical purposes. The study also found that college students were twice as likely to use Adderall than their counterparts who were not in college.
At the Intelligence Squared debate, Nicole Vincent, associate professor of philosophy, law and neuroscience at Georgia State University, and Eric Racine, director of the Neuroethics Research Institute at the IRCM, argued against smart drug use. Their opponents were Anjan Chatterjee, professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and Nita Farahany, professor at Duke University.
To illustrate how prevalent smart drug use is among college students and the general public, Farahany cited an online poll that found that 1 in 5 of respondents had used smart drugs for non-medical purposes. “We can pretend that this isn’t a choice that large swaths of people are already making,” she said. “Or we can embrace that smart drugs are just one of the many ways that people exercise free choices in their lives.” Farahany said that other polls reveal that 1 in 3 incoming freshmen use smart drugs.
Chatterjee said that smart drugs are not completely understood by the medical community but that some data indicate that the drugs do not work the same way for all people. “To the extent that there is data that some people actually improve with these medications, some studies suggest that people who are at the lower end of the distribution, with some of these abilities like working memory, actually improve more than people at the higher end of the spectrum,” Chatterjee said. In that sense, the drugs could potentially be used to level the playing field between intellectual abilities.
So if smart drugs are already relatively common among college students, giving takers an intellectual boost that debaters compared at various points in the evening to the steroids that pro-athletes use, caffeine, and SAT prep tests, what is holding people back?
