Psychopharm Going 'Mainstream' In Schools? 717
PizzaFace writes "Back in the day, college was a place where a lot of kids tried recreational drugs. Now the world's more competitive, psychopharmaceuticals are better targeted, and millions of students are routinely using drugs to work better and longer. Stimulants developed for attention deficit and narcolepsy are giving mentally healthy students an edge like athletes get from steroids or human growth hormone. These psychotropics seem fairly safe, but should they be banned in the interest of fairness, perhaps with enforcement by urine tests before exams? Or do we tell our kids that, if they want to compete in this brave new world, they better find some Adderall and jack their brains up like their classmates'." If college students are doing it, how many programmers are? What say you?
Drugs are no help (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Just Say No To The Drugs... (Score:5, Insightful)
Safe? (Score:5, Insightful)
These are amphetamines [wikipedia.org] we are talking about. They're a lot less healthy [medicalmar...procon.org] than the recreational marijuana use favored by other students. Just because they have a brand name, doesn't mean they're safe.
Curiosity (Score:5, Insightful)
Someone who is curious continues to mull over material long after the test has been passed. Someone who only cares about the grade will forget about it after the test.
Smart employers can tell the two apart.
I do it (Score:4, Insightful)
Old School (Score:3, Insightful)
I've a standing approach to legal and recreational drugs. I don't touch anything new to the market until it's been in wide use for at least 5 years. Let the military, professional jocks and paid lab rats take the initial risk. Drugs might jack you up but it's still rigorous logic and imagination that get the job done. A few years ago when a doctor asked me to write some tests I scored a 161 in a standard IQ test. I know 161 isn't first string but I also got an above average memory and I find I can move across most problem spaces. I very much doubt any drugs are going to improve on what I do now.
Meth amphetimine is dangerous cheap and plentiful. Long term use includes symptoms very like schizophrenia. I can't imagine why it's so widely used.
Recreationally beer, pot and mushrooms keep me amused and their long linage pretty much tell me what I need to know about harmful side effects.
just my loose change
modafinil, etc. (Score:5, Insightful)
But I did this at one time, taking amphetamine and methamphetamine as well as ritalin, modafinil, adderal and any number of other substances at work in order to be able to work longer and care less about doing other people's bidding. Don't forget the flipside, the taking B-vitamins to deal with the burnout, tyrosine to fix the receptor loss, benzodiazepines to deal with fact that you can't really sleep properly anymore. counselling to deal with the psychosis and the weird mental states you get into from the fact that your brain can't cope with being up for many days straight.
The slant of this post was that there is something inherently UNFAIR about this, that "we" need to test against people doing this. There isn't a big worry because the people doing this all end up at one time or another like me, running on borrowed time means massive burnout. I aged biochemically about 10-15 years in the space of 3 years. Mileage may vary, but its not a smooth move. Ironically taking amphetamines to study isn't even a great strategy. Just going to class and paying attention is a better plan. Being on amphetamines reduces memory retention so much that its not worth the effort.
The big issue here, to me - is that people feel the need to self improve just so they can put out like whores for other people. Learn to live cheap and work less. Why do people feel the need to work harder and longer? I'm not sure why I did it, most of the money I was making was just going into the very drugs I was taking just to make more money for more drugs. Now I live on almost nothing and what unhappiness I have is mostly from the things lacking from my life from when that lifestyle caught up to me. Living on borrowed time catches up to a person. And when your employer finds out you're not just an eccentric hard working savant and really you're tricked out on speed you find out just how little they really care about you.
Re:Just Say No To The Drugs... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Surely more recreational? (Score:2, Insightful)
You dont need drugs made in a factory! (Score:2, Insightful)
YMMV of course!
Charlie
Re:Surely more recreational? (Score:5, Insightful)
-matthew
Piracetam (Score:3, Insightful)
(No, it wasn't me.)
Re:I do it (Score:1, Insightful)
So before you start comparing your "do what the you are told pills" to my good old fashoined weed, please notice that they are two completely different things. One is medicine, and one is recreational that has just recently been found to have medical benifits. Dumbass.
Sincerely Doubt It (Score:2, Insightful)
As an example, I could teach a four year old that e^(i*Pi) + 1 = 0 (Eulers Formula) - furthermore, given a week or two, I could probably even get that same four year old to be able to repeat the entire series of steps to arrive at this formula. That child could then wow people with his "knowledge". But the child would have no idea who Euler was, what Euler's Formula means, etc.
At best, you'd end up with a person in your workplace who exhibits extremely erratic behavior.
There is no smart pill. Sorry.
Re:this is ironic (Score:5, Insightful)
Based on my own volunteer work in school programs, I would say that class sizes should rarely be above 15-20 in total, and should have 1 teacher/assistant competent in the subject for every 5-7 students. I also think kids should be streamed per subject, with some flexibility for when certain groups of kids happen to work well together. (No, that does not mean cribbing the notes.)
The problem with the existing system is that it is geared around people learning as and when the teacher gets round to it, rather than pushing people as far and as fast as they are able. It is no wonder that kids use drugs, but my guess is that its more to zone out the inadequacies of the educational system as it is to improve learning. You can't accelerate much beyond the speed the material is taught.
Based on research that has been caried out, I think that I'd extend this basic concept by throwing in a second or even a third language, as it appears that the complexity of language is such that learning new languages young boosts the growth of neural connections and seems to improve the capacity to learn. Languages, therefore, may provide a safe alternative to these drugs in that they'll boost intelligence and have no risk of later side-effects.
deregulate almost all drugs (Score:4, Insightful)
The only drugs that should be far more tightly regulated than they are are antibiotics and antivirals, because incorrect use by one person harms other people.
Re:Just Say No To The Drugs... (Score:4, Insightful)
I agree with your statement only if taken out of context. In this case, the double standard is in favor of pharmacuticals. Ephedrine is not only more dangerous [erowid.org] than Marijuana, but it is also used to create methamphetamine. I'm not saying I agree with the ID laws, just that you should reconsider which one is really the "bad stuff".
New levels of usage maybe... (Score:5, Insightful)
Onpoint 09/2002: College Students and Psychoactive Medication [onpointradio.org]
Never mind the old equation of college and recreational drugs, the parents' old tiptoe through pot and peyote. A new generation is arriving at university heavily armed with prescriptions for Zoloft, Dexedrine, Paxil and Prozac. Xanax, Adderall, Cylert and Ritalin. And it's not about weekend benders. It's about ADD, anxiety, OCD and depression.
Officials say that today that about 40 percent of American college students are on psychoactive drugs. Everybody knows the number is huge. But what exactly does it mean? Up next On Point: the Medicated Generation goes to college.
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And maybe the reason for the increasing levels of usage is that they are learning this from their days in grade school?
Better Living through Chemistry? (Dr. Leonard Sax) [worldandi.com]
This year some six million children in the U.S.--one in eight-- will take Ritalin. With 5 percent of the world's population, the U.S. consumes 85 percent of this drug. Have we considered the consequences?
and...
Despite their stubborn refusal to medicate their children with Ritalin, these other countries do not lag behind the United States in academic performance. On the contrary: according to the most recent studies, France, Germany, and Japan continue to maintain their traditional lead over the United States in tests of math and reading ability.
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This article dates to 2000, but it's about the very same crisis that we've been hearing about more and more the last few years. Children are being medicated in order to get them to sit still in school (where 'unproductive' things like things like recess are being cut in favor of more cramming). Maybe a whole generation has been raised to think of 'learning' as something you need drugs to accomplish. And now we are beginning to see the consequences.
Re:Just Say No To The Drugs... (Score:4, Insightful)
Wrong. "Just say no!" teaches ignorance, it says don't question, don't learn, just repeat after me. But the truth is that illegal drugs aren't all the same, and the legal status of a drugs makes absolutely no difference to whether it's "good" or "bad" for you. The difference comes when whether you've learnt how to use the drugs responsibly.
The only drug I've ever become addicted to was one I was prescribed from a doctor, because I trusted/just accepted what I was told. All other drugs I've 'experimented' (recreational only, I stear well clear of the big addictive one's such as smack/crack) with, I've researched beforehand, and not hand anything like the same kind of problems with. I've even managed to boost my work productivity (programming) with some, which has saved my ass at least a couple of times.
Whenever I've seen people having problems with these drugs, is because they don't respect them, think that taking more == makes you cooler, they get competative ("I can handle more than you"), or often believe that the drug will solve something that it can't. But guess what... you get the same problems with legal as you do with illegal drugs. Just because it's legal, doesn't mean you won't become addicted, or that it won't screw your liver or whatever, and just because something illegal, doesn't mean it will.
I've become far more successful in my life, both work wise and socially, since I discovering what levels of different chemicals have different effects on me, what I can achieve in different states, and importantly: my limits. I can use amphetamines (the family ritalin is in, as is speed) to slam out code for 24hours straight, but the brain needs to rest, so if I keep doing it, I just end up being awake, and can't be productive. I've learnt this, I use it wisely, I use it responsibly, I monitor my health (physically and mentally) very closely. There's no reason why I should stop (except legal status).
Take responsibility for your own life, for MORE of your own life, and you'll find you can be safer from most things, and see that some things are only "dangerous" if used irresponsibly (like powertools) but can be useful if used wisely (like powertools).
the other problem (Score:3, Insightful)
the worrying bit is that people could feel pressured into using drugs without a proper understanding of any bad side effects they may have, I wonder if this was more of the reason for drug testing in sports than fairness considerations.
Re:Drugs are no help (Score:2, Insightful)
Pardon me if I'm mistaken, but did you just suggest that providing LD students with accommodations deflates the scores of other students?
Accommodations do not devalue test scores. If anything, it makes the test scores a more accurate comparison, because the students who would normally be discounted for external reasons (that is, reasons outside of the knowledge being tested) are now being fairly measured.
The use of psychotropic drugs by healthy individuals is all kinds of stupid, and they are, in a sense, deflating scores. But let us not suggest for a moment that allowing students with learning disabilities or ADHD to compete fairly is somehow ruining it for the rest of you. It is that kind of thinking that perpetuates the myth that ADHD is "just laziness" or that LD kids "just need to try harder".
Re:Drugs are no help (Score:3, Insightful)
> comparison, because the students who would normally be discounted for external reasons (that is,
> reasons outside of the knowledge being tested) are now being fairly measured.
> The use of psychotropic drugs by healthy individuals is all kinds of stupid, and they are, in a
> sense, deflating scores. But let us not suggest for a moment that allowing students with
> learning disabilities or ADHD to compete fairly is somehow ruining it for the rest of you. It
> is that kind of thinking that perpetuates the myth that ADHD is "just laziness" or that LD kids
> "just need to try harder".
I'm not particularly athletic or adept at long distance-running. Let's say that gets me labeled as "atheletically disabled" and the school/courts/congress decide that I should be spotted an extra 4 minutes when running a mile. Now let's say the school is also required to report the times of all runners without noting who got extra time on the report. My four-minute mile (really an 8 minute mile) and a true athelete's four-four minute mile look the same on the report. How does that scenario not devalue the athelete's score?
I maintain that the same applies to academic schores. It devalues the scores of everyone who took the test under the stated conditions if some students are allowed to take the test with extra time or chemical enhancement.
I'm not against giving people with recognized illness extra time (or medication); I am against not marking the extraordinary test conditions in big red letters on all of their score reports. People receiving the scores would thus know the person did well on the test (because of the score) but not to compare that person unfavorably against someone who maybe didn't do so well but took the test under the required conditions.
Call it unfairness, discrimination, or whatever you want, but if I come into the ER with a life-threatening illness, I don't want treatment delayed half an hour because I get a physician who needed 30-minutes of extra time to pass an "illness diagnosis" exam in med school. The undergrad school, med school, and hiring hospital all need to know if the candidate's tests were given under extraordinary conditions.
I'm a college student AND work in a pharmacy (Score:4, Insightful)
I work in a pharmacy and my expierence with the ADHD medications shows how insanely stupid these college kids are being. We had a pharmacist lose his licence for slipping some of the ADHD pills on the sly; there is a reason the FDA classifies them as controlled substances, they are highly addictive. Some of them (Ritalin for sure, maybe Allderal as well) are narcotics which are the most addictive and most highly controlled category of legal drugs. In the state I live in (I'm not going to reveal that because the pill popping pharmacist is still under investigation by the state) controlled drugs are required to be locked in a cabinet that only the pharmacist can access.
Now, for further insight- I am a college student, a soon to be senior political science and history major, I pull 4.0's with nothing more than Earl Gray tea doused in honey to help me write those term papers on Progressive politics until 3:00 am. I equate taking controlled substances illegally in order to gain an "edge" to writing notes on the palm of your hand before stepping into the exam room. I got my high GPA the honest way, I'm going to take my GRE the honest way, and I'm going to persue my PhD the honest way.
Before popping the controls in order to push up those scores realize they are controls because they are highly addictive. If they were safe for use without a prescription then I doubt they would be locked under the counter and subject to an insane amount of paperwork and redundant checks before dispensing. Besides, taking an illegal drug to get your edge reflects badly on you and cheapens the meaning of everything you gained.
Like any lawyer will tell you: IT DEPENDS (Score:4, Insightful)
I am shocked that no one has mentioned the simple fact that IT DEPENDS on the person taking the drug.
I'll use food for my analogy.
I have a buddy who weighs about 120lbs (skinny), eats like a pig. I'm 205lbs (fatty) and I also have a terrible diet. Yet another friend is pushing 250lbs (fatty+), and he's a lifelong vegetarian. We're all about 6' tall.
I have no interest in splitting hairs between "food" or "drug"; both cause chemical reactions in the body, and these reactions are entirely dependant on any number of factors (diet, lifestyle, age, race, location, gender...I could go on and on and on...).
I for one think it is disgusting that we live in a country (USA) which advertises perscription meds to children every night during prime time, and then locks these same kids up a few years later for smoking dope. This isn't hypocritical; it's fucking asinine.
Call it "free markets", call it "the people", the verdict is in: WE LOVE DRUGS and WE LOVE FOOD. Both will affect each and every one of us in different ways, and legal or not, each must be used in MODERATION and with ALL DUE CAUTION.
Re:Overkill (Score:3, Insightful)
I am genuinely intrigued by this. You appear to be saying that programming is a menial task (or is it only VB programming? You know, you can wire DB fields to GUI forms all day long in C# too
First reaction: Are you sure you took the right job? Solving problems by writing some kind of obscure code that mere machines can understand should be a least a little entertaining even if you're forced to use VB *shrug*. Is it isn't, how do you manage deadlines and PHBs and retarded co-workers spitting out code like "If i = 0 Or i = 7 Or i = 14 Or i = 21 Or i = You_get_my_drift..."?
Second reaction: Oh, that's what the drug is for. Silly me.
More seriously, IMHO if you have to take drugs (okay, maybe except recreational ones, and even that I'm not so sure) in order to accomplish your job, you should change jobs. Maybe, somewhere on the way, you passed something that would have been exciting and entertaining to you, as well as make some money... Time to get back and find your True Function In Life (TM).
God, my english is awful tonight.
Psychotropics (Score:2, Insightful)
Contrary to what the submitter says about Adderall "jacking your brain up", is also another gross generalization. Unless you have ADD/ADHD or narcolepsy its not likely to be helpful on a clinical level, but unlike most amphetamines it doesn't have too many side effects.
Most people who obtain prescription drugs are most likely to benefit from them and are relatively safe, and as far as SSRI's go, for example, recreationally students are better off without the drug due to sexual side effects, so they'd be more prone to be taking it for the actual label use.
Re:deregulate almost all drugs (Score:3, Insightful)
I agree that everyone should be allowed to take Achilles' choice (a short life but unending fame vs. a long but quiet life), but it isn't usually that simple.
There are idiots or ignorant people who take drugs without realising the consequences. They might become addicted and start stealing etc to support their habit, they might take too much and overdose, costing society a lot, they might become psychotic with nasty effects to others like family, friends, etc. This is usually perceived as a problem by society. I'm not even getting into direct damage to others : would you like your father/your mum to turn to a life of drug and abandon you and your siblings while still at a young age ?
In other words antibiotics are not the only drugs with nasty side effects for other people than those who take it, and that is precisely the reason why they are regulated. I believe most people would not be able to cope with themselves in a society with very few laws (an anarchy), yet most people are under the delusion that they could.
If you have a workable solution to this, I'm sure many govt around the planet would like to hear it.
Re:I'm a college student AND work in a pharmacy (Score:3, Insightful)
I consider staying up until 3AM working to gain an "edge" the same as writing notes on the palm of your hand before stepping into the exam room. Lack of sleep not only can cause health problems, but can be dangerous to others if you are driving a motor vehicle or operating heavy machinery. What about the people who are narcoleptic or need their beauty sleep? What about the other students who are forced to engage in this reckless sleepless behavior in order to compete with you?
I think it is time the University and the Police step in. If you would have actually been learning from your Progressive Politics studies, it is that we desperatly need the government to legislate on this issue, and to criminalize the dangerous and reckless behavior that you engage in! And there should be a strictly enforce state-mandidated sleeping regime that all students should be required to adhere to!
Re:the other problem (Score:3, Insightful)
Sure. They might have side effects. So can staying up late, studying too long, partying, overstressing one's self in the gym, not going to the gym, having a bad coach, facing a much better opponent, eating too much (or too little, or the wrong things), getting laid instead of getting sleep. Then again, moderation will help reach towards a balance — you can get laid *and* you can get sleep, for instance. You can study a reasonable amount of time. And, you can use drugs in a reasonable manner. The possibility of side effects cannot be justification for prohibition; if it were so, your meals would be controlled, your sex life would be controlled, religion would be forbidden, suntanning would be illegal... etc., ad infinitum. These are personal choices, no more, no less. There is no possible justification for prohibition with regard to them. The state is not your mommy, and there is no legitimate justification for it in its attempt to be your mommy. There is no basis for the state's attempt to be your mommy in the constitution, and frankly, you didn't sign or formulate the constitution so you're not ethically or morally bound by the state's interpretation of it unless you choose to be, anyway.
It is also very important to note that in many cases, the "side effects" are either vastly exaggerated (marijuana is the poster child for this) or outright lies (LSD's reputation for "damaging genes" was complete hogwash.) Sometimes side effects are beneficial -- for instance, aspirin can reduce the risk of heart attacks, marijuana acts directly to improve the state of the eye, and hash brownies taste really, really good.
The objective — of course — is to create performance enhancers without side effects, or minimal side effects. Everyone knows that, or would, if they'd stop to think about it for even a second. There is nothing inherently bad about the idea of a drug that insists there be side effects, and the presumption that all drugs will cause the user to experience nasty side effects is a false one from the word go. Moderation is one of the keys to avoiding side effects. Everything has side effects if taken too far. You can kill yourself by drinking too much water, for crying out loud. Should we forbid water drinking, or large glasses, or drinking water under age 18? Should we put additives in water that will force you to vomit before you get to a point where you've drank so much it will kill you? Or... here's a wild idea... should we let the citizen decide how much is enough? Oh, wait. ;-)
Moderation in all things is a much better guideline than the awesomely stupid "this is your brain on drugs" message put out by the drug war morons. Drugs are tools. Sometimes they are tools to beat other organisms in contest with us such as viri, bacteria, parasites and poisons such as snake, spider and scorpion bites. And... is that "fair"? Sometimes they are tools to save us from our emotional excesses, sometimes they are tools to make us more effective so we can work, or work better in the face of various challenges, internal and external (everything from aspirin to dayquil to more modern performance enhancers and symptom supressors fits here.) Sometimes they are tools to make life more enjoyable — viagra, alchohol, a nice latte, marijuana, etc.
(a) Teaching is the answer, not prohibition, to the informed, or not, status of drug consumers, and...
(b) your instincts are right — there is absolutely no fairness in sports. Nature deals bet
Re:Overkill (Score:3, Insightful)
For most of us, that would be working and consuming goods like responsible corporate serfs.
Re:I'm a college student AND work in a pharmacy (Score:3, Insightful)
1. n. An addictive drug, such as opium, that reduces pain, alters mood and behavior, and usually induces sleep or stupor. Natural and synthetic narcotics are used in medicine to control pain.
Ritalin is certainly not a narcotic. You are correct that Vicodin is Schedule 3 - up to 15mg/dose, however. After that, it is Schedule II.
Other drugs on Schedule II that are not narcotics include cocaine (which does have legitimate medical uses), methamphetamine, amphetamine, and phencyclidine (PCP), among others.
Also note that FDA classification does not denote agreement with the medical profession. Marijuana is listed as Schedule I, the most highly physically addictive, dangerous category that is supposed to have no medical use, but most doctors would agree that is is not physically addictive. Marinol, a synthetic d-9-THC pill, is Schedule III, Nicotine, which is sometimes regarded as more addictive than heroin, is not scheduled at all. As a matter of fact, heroin is Schedule I, but fentanyl, which is even stronger, is Schedule II.
Drug laws will never be based on facts, and I hope you realize this.
Re:As a High school student... (Score:2, Insightful)
Or you take out student loans, and pay them off after you've got your degree. So you can work less, or not at all, while you study.
If you own a portable music player, you can listen to your own playlist of music as you bop around. Otherwise, you don't.
This is an advantage? Besides, you can get a cassette player for $20 at Wal-Mart. Or a cheap portable radio from a dollar store. We're not talking uber-expensive, here.
If you have (for instance) a Bowflex and a personal trainer, you now have the opportunity to outperform most of your fellow atheletes in terms of how long it takes you to reach your potential, and how close you are going to get to it.
Or you can use the campus gym, and ask advice of the phys-ed instructors.
If you have a car, you drive to school. Otherwise, you walk, sponge, or use pubtrans.
Or you can take online classes that allow you to do everything at home. (Except the occasional proctored exam.) Speaking from experience, I can tell you this frees up your schedule like you wouldn't believe.
If you have a laptop, you have many performance-enhancing tools. Otherwise, not.
Sure. You can type up your notes in class, and record your lectures. Nothing you couldn't do just as well with a Gregg shorthand textbook and tape recorder. Or bite the bullet and find an old 386 laptop with DOS that someone's trying to get rid of. (And believe me, that works fine for notetacking. MS Edit isn't a bad editor.)
All of these "advantages" have one thing in common: Money; the ability to purchase the advantage.
All of these "advantages" have another thing in common, too: There are cheaper alternatives.
It's not about money, or about the rich keeping the poor down. As for drugs, I won't take stimulants without talking to someone who's willing to prescribe them. There's a reason things like Ritalin and Adderall are perscription medications. They either have side-effects that can harm you, or they haven't been in use long enough to prove that they're generally safe.
Re:Drugs are no help (Score:5, Insightful)
As long as we're trading anecdotes, I skipped class for six weeks before my linear algebra final, then nailed it. [*] No drugs, no studying. For whatever reason (my natural talent in mathematics? low standards? the professor letting us use TI-89s to check our work?), I found the class and test really easy.
On the other hand, E&M was the real deal. Challenging material, demanding (but great) professor. I went to class, I studied, and I was proud when I got As on those tests.
My point is that anecdotal evidence is worthless. You felt more focused while studying. But was your studying actually more effective? Or were your finals simply as easy for you as my linear one was for me? What grade would you have gotten if you hadn't taken any drug? What grade would you have gotten if you'd taken a placebo? It's impossible to know.
Has anyone actually done any real scientific studies of the effects of these pills on healthy people? Our brains are complicated. While it seems reasonable at first to say you felt more focused, therefore you were more focused, therefore you were more effective, that's actually quite a leap. There are many drugs out there that will make you feel more effective, then discover afterward that your work was crap. Does a pill that turns an ADD patient into a "normal" person turn a normal person into a superperson? If even more of some chemical in our brains makes us even more focused and intelligent, why didn't natural selection increase the dosage? What's the catch?
[*] Okay, 98/100...forgot to normalize an eigenvector...though MathWorld says now that they don't have to be normalized, so I want my two points back.
Re:Drugs are no help (Score:5, Insightful)
This is the problem. College exams are terrible measures of learning. As an old prof of mine once said talking to some first-years in a physics lab: "If I tell you to measure this table, and you lay a tape-measure down on it like so and write down the number and hand it in, I WILL FAIL YOU. You never measure anything just once!"
As a prof I was even more uncomfortable giving exams than I was as a student taking them, because I came to realized that we were making a measurement in a way that we would never condone as scientists. We were making a single measurement on our students and saying it was a good measure of their capacities, which is nonsense.
If marks were objective they'd have error bars.
The "final exam" culture that exists in many modern universities is a product of mass-produced education, and I don't have any particularly good answer to it. We need some relatively simple way of evaluating students and reporting that evaluation to the world, but we take marks way too seriously given the shoddy, unscientific process that produces them.
But so long as we give such unrealistic and unreasonable weight to a few point-measurements of student performance, students will be tempted to use every means available to increase their performance to an unrealistic maximum at those few points.
Re:Drugs are good! (Score:1, Insightful)
You tend to adapt to the current circumstances and accept them as the new norm. So if I start permanently taking performance enhancers, say for concentration, chances are I will adjust either physically or mentally until my performance returns to 'acceptable', but now I get severely hyperactive without it, since I've become accustomed to letting the drugs do the work.
This kind of dependance on external factors is recognized as a bad thing. It's why they teach pencil-and-paper math in school, even though calculators are cheap and plentiful.
I think you'll find that most people today have the ability to function as human beings without anything but air, water and food. Having a large population dependant on a regular drug supply is a recipe for disaster, as sooner or later, they'll have to deal without them. No company would want their employees to start swinging from the chandeliers if their drug supplier failed to deliver...
Anyway, I think we'll have large debattes on eugenics long before we find some sort of side-effect-less superdrug. Biological wetware is a mess of spaghetti code and interdependancies that is best left untampered with for a while yet. "If it ain't broke," and all...
Re:deregulate almost all drugs (Score:5, Insightful)
There are lots of stupid people that do lots of stupid things without realising the consequences. It's not a justification for prohibition.
They might become addicted and start stealing etc to support their habit.
This is why stealing is already against the law. Nevermind that far more people are in prison for simple drug offences than theft. We're paying for 1 million peoples' annual room and board right now on account of prohibition. You'd better be able to show that that cost plus the cost of the drug war is less than the cost of letting people decide what to put in their own bodies, or all your financial arguments are out the window.
they might take too much and overdose, costing society a lot
This rationale could be used to outlaw everything dangerous, from McDonald's food on up.
they might become psychotic with nasty effects to others like family, friends
Good point. Let's add joining the Church of Scientology to the list of things that should be illegal along with drugs.
Re:This comment is so out of place here, but... (Score:3, Insightful)
Bottomline: exercise absolutely helps concentration and mental function.
Also, meditation has been proven to increase dopamine levels in the prefrontal cortex as well.
However, these on their own were not enough to overcome my ADD and I still had to take drugs. But they help. I would greatly prefer to take nothing at all, but there are limits to "natural" cures.
Re:I'm a college student AND work in a pharmacy (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:This comment is so out of place here, but... (Score:3, Insightful)
And I'm not suprised that exercise started to add pounds. The most dangerous thing for me is starting to exercise - my body starts asking for more energy - more than I can burn when I'm ramping up. It's doubly bad if I get into a time crunch and let my exercising go by the wayside. For a couple weeks to a month, my body still expects me to hop back on the bike or into the pool any day, and demands calories to compensate. But instead I drive a desk for 10-12 hours - not much caloric demand there. Also, I can understand the boring side, too. I really enjoy swimming, but there is just nothing to keep the mind active. My second choice is cycling, on a old road bike on a set of rollers. It takes a bit to get used to (it's like riding on ice), but it does a good job, and even a new bike and a set of rollers is less than a stupid spinning machine. Plus you can always take the bike outside if the weather is nice, and you've trained your muscles to the motion. Oh, and boredom on the rollers - yeah, crushing. Except if you get a good audio player and listen to books. Not only does it pass the time, but you can relax with good reading material.
It's late, I'm rambling, and I really ought to consider getting back into the morning workout routine.
Re:deregulate almost all drugs (Score:5, Insightful)
While there are many valid functions for government, protecting people from their own stupidity or ignorance shouldn't be one of them. Furthermore, with the amount of money that currently goes into policing, we could create informational campaigns that ensure that everybody knows the dangers.
They might become addicted and start stealing etc to support their habit, they might take too much and overdose, costing society a lot, they might become psychotic with nasty effects to others like family, friends, etc.
Given a choice, the drugs people tend to take are drugs that make them happy and make them feel good; legalizing drugs would probably reduce use of drugs that cause people to harm others.
I'm not even getting into direct damage to others : would you like your father/your mum to turn to a life of drug and abandon you and your siblings while still at a young age ?
Drug addiction doesn't generally cause parents to abandon their children; except for unusually severe cases, most people with drug addiction can function reasonably well and seem to overcome addiction after some time if support is available. It is the fact that drugs are illegal that results in children growing up without their parents, either because their parents got killed or because they got incarcerated.
I believe most people would not be able to cope with themselves in a society with very few laws (an anarchy), yet most people are under the delusion that they could.
I'm not a libertarian or anarchist; I just think that proponents of drug laws have failed to demonstrate that they work. Oh, people like you use lots of "mights" and "mays" and "think of the children", but, in the end, the reasonable conclusion based on all available data is that drug laws make the consequences of drug addiction worse, both in human and in finanical terms.
Re:I'm a college student AND work in a pharmacy (Score:1, Insightful)
Great. Try pulling a 4.0 with a real major.
Re:Am I the Only One? (Score:2, Insightful)
Frankly, widespread minority amphetamine use for studying alarms, not least because I was diagnosed with ADHD when younger. I go without meds for it out of principle, but it still angers me that kids who possessed normal mindless-studying capacity in the first place now take drugs invented for helping those without such capacity to get ahead. We're left behind, again; this time by people with no problem abusing our solution.
And what about the kind of society that demands this? Another comment states that the use of drugs by medical students for their residencies used to be routine. Why are we placing inhuman burdens on people that can only lead to the requirement of inhuman aide?
Btw, just friended you. Nice to know somebody else likes to run their own damn brain.
Re:Overkill (Score:5, Insightful)
SPEED. They are fucking hard drugs. You want to talk about a gateway drug? Jesus Christ.
America seriously needs to wake the fuck up from its asinine hypocrisy. We have fucking hard liquor advertizing on FUCKING RACE CARS. Every body and their mother is addicted to Caffeine. We are such a drug culture that it's such an absolute joke how much money we spend on the 'war on drugs'.
caffe-ine
coca-ine
Big diff, right?
Now the meat of the argument is that I think it should all be legal for adults. My huge problem is the generation of children we have gotten started on speed. We have 10 million teen-age addicts. 10 million kids intimately familiar with the street value of their little bottle of pills.
10 million kids with the taste of speed in their mouths. Does that not scare anyone else?
Re:Overkill (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Overkill (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Overkill (Score:3, Insightful)
>
>Speed is a different class of "uppers", namely amphetamines.
Umm, Adderall *is* amphetamines. [wikipedia.org]
"* 1/4 Dextroamphetamine Saccharate
* 1/4 Dextroamphetamine Sulfate (Dexedrine®)
* 1/4 Amphetamine Aspartate
* 1/4 Amphetamine Sulfate"