Far more alarming is the brisk trade in black market pharmaceuticals over the Internet. In cases where it’s impossible to get doctors to fill out off-label prescriptions, many are simply ordering the high-powered drugs online from companies in Europe and India, who ship right to the front door. It’s a black market trade that experts expect will only increase.
Aside from the health risks, many ethicists are opposed to cognitive enhancement on a more fundamental level. Some argue that since smart drugs come with hefty price tags, only the rich will be able to afford them. There are also worries the drugs will create an unfair playing field between those who use them and those who don’t. When Britain’s Academy of Medical Sciences released a report earlier this year on cognitive enhancement, one panel member suggested schools might introduce urine tests at exam time to test for smart drugs. Lastly, some academics draw the line at the drugs being used for anything other than treating genuine illnesses. “The original purpose of medicine is to heal the sick, not turn healthy people into gods,” wrote Francis Fukuyama in his 2002 book Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution.
Cole has heard all these complaints before and he’s not buying it. “We’re in a competitive world—it’s either sink or swim,” he says. “From people to machines, we’re pushing ourselves further with modern technology and medicine. This is the reality of the world we now live in.”
Yet in all the debate over cognitive enhancement drugs, the question that often gets overlooked is whether they really work. On that front, the results are decidedly mixed. Tests have found modafinil does enhance short-term memory in healthy individuals, enabling them to better recall a longer string of random digits than those people not taking the drug. And in studies involving pilots in flight simulators, moda?nil was shown to improve the alertness and reaction time of subjects. Yet the gains were minimal amongst those pilots who already performed well without the drug. Likewise, Ritalin is far from the golden study-drug it’s made out
to be. Researchers at the Society of Nuclear Medicine recently tested how healthy people performed at cognitive tasks when using the drug. Those test subjects who already performed well without the drug did improve with Ritalin, but those who performed poorly actually saw their results deteriorate.
