The Current

Issue date: 11/26/07 Section: Opinions

Stuart Reeves Staff Writer

What do Barry Bonds and the over-achieving brown-nose of your high school class that beat you to Valedictorian and got accepted to an Ivy League school potentially have in common? Performance enhancing drugs.

Bonds' current legal issues aside, the British Medical Association has highlighted the need for public debate on the use of cognitive enhancing drugs in a recently published paper titled, "Boosting Your Brainpower: Ethical Aspects of Cognitive Enhancement."

Let me spell it out for you. Prescription cognitive enhancement drugs are those substances that can be used to boost concentration and memory.

Both Ritalin and Adderall are prime examples. These drugs are not just for calming down the hyper kids in class anymore; they have also been proven useful for late night, last minute cramming sessions for exams.

As Dr. Tony Calland, chairman of the BMA's Medical Ethics Committee, put it, "We know that there is likely to be a demand by healthy individuals for this 'treatment.'

However, given that no drug is risk free, is it ethical to make them available to people who are not ill?"

In a separate statement, the BMA said, "…people are willing to endure major surgery to enhance their visual appearance, so they may be willing to do so to improve their cognitive ability as well."

For now, we can set aside the debate on the rampant, and often inappropriate, diagnosis of attention deficit hyperactive disorder in children, and look at the bigger picture.

Competition in academia and the workplace has gotten to the point that we may actually condone the use of drugs to boost productivity.

Riddle me this Batman, how do we tell our children not to use performance enhancing drugs in sports, but allow them to do so in the classroom?

We are in an era where every grade, every test score, every extracurricular and recommendation letter matters to get into college and post-graduate programs.

The ability to memorize that extra fistful of vocabulary words or equations could make the difference between Ivy and a place in the boardroom one day or not.

Do not get me wrong, I take no issue with the increased pressures of competition in academia. In fact, I see it as a good thing. Innovations in technology, for one example, are most often the result of competing research initiatives.

However, I find the prospect of telling our children that it is okay to take a drug targeted to treat a condition they do not have in order to get a better test grade completely unpalatable.

I absolutely think there needs to be a debate on this topic. We have seen a fair number of academic plagiarism scandals make headlines over the years. As a hopeful career academic, I rue the day that we find out Nobel Prize Laureates are tossing back brain boosting pills.

I would even be curious to hear what our own UM-St. Louis faculty and administrators would have to say on the topic. How is a professor to react if he/she finds out their star pupil in a course was treading this precarious path?

So there you have it, folks. As far as I am concerned, one man's Superbowl is another man's SAT, and all scholars need to "play clean."

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