Brain-boosting drugs for healthy people
abcnews.go.com
abcnews.go.com
Einstein didn't believe in free will. However, he said that holding people responsible for their actions was a pragmatic approach for society to take (presumably because such action changes the environment that we are all in).
There are huge struggles because people don't want to accept that they have less free will than they ascribe. As such, the goal is to hold people responsible for faults that you don't have and find excuses that let you off the hook for any faults that you have. There are organizations that create campaigns to get society to accept their fault as something that should be compensated for. Short attention span? That's ok because it's medical. Stupid? Lazy? Those are things that are the fault of the individual.
It's really hard. If you can medicalize your faults, you get legal protection for them. If you can't medicalize them, you're personally responsible for keeping them in control. That creates a huge incentive for medicalization of everything in the human condition. And we're all worried about being left behind in this Red Queen's Race.
If fundamental interactions are in fact deterministic at this point, we haven't learned how to predict their consequences, which has led to the many interpretations of quantum mechanics. Einstein was fond of "hidden variables" since it held out some hope of quantum mechanics at some point being deterministic once again:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_variable_theory
His interpretation is, however, not widely accepted. In other words, "free will" may be an emergent property of quantum interactions.
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/03/righting-a-wron.html
free will is probably a further side effect of the same biological processes that gave rise to what we view as self-awareness: recursive thinking.
First, the notion that there is an optimal "healthy" state is make-believe. We all get old and die, so in a sense we are all terminally ill. We should have a right to improve our minds and bodies as long as there is room for improvement.
More to the point, brain types fall on a spectrum. ADHD is just one extreme. Equating "median" with "healthy" is a fallacy. Consider this: is synesthesia a disease? It can make life very hard, but it can also make patient extremely creative. Imagine a world where synesthesia is the normal condition -- non-synesthetes would be considered retards!
If there were a drug that could turn you into a synesthete, should the drug be illegal?
Second, we all already take a brain-boosting drug: caffeine, which is both undeniably effective, and has a wide spectrum of side effects. Other drugs like modafinil have almost zero side-effects in comparison, but they are prescription-only because they don't have a history of social acceptability. "Used historically" = "safe" is an even bigger fallacy.
Third, you can't prevent people from taking brain pills by not funding research (if the research doesn't happen in the U.S, it will happen in other countries.). All that this policy will achieve is encourage a black market and unsafe usage.
The whole thing reminds me strongly of that Kurt Vonnegut piece posted here yesterday: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=388642.
Maybe these drugs are good. "Maybe". Most drug tests occur over a matter of months, rather than a lifetime. Caffeine has been tried over centuries, and that fact has value, because within those centuries are lifetimes and generations. Every new drug is roulette, and you know it.
modafinil have almost zero side-effects in comparison,
See, bullshit
I'm not saying caffeine is some kind of dangerous drug; I'm just saying that "almost zero side effects in comparison" is at least plausible given the Wikipedia page.
What you linked to is actually a pretty mild side effect profile, although I take back "almost zero side effects." The maximum increase compared to placebo is 11% (for headaches), whereas the majority of people have caffeine-related headaches at some point.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caffeine#Overuse
The only difference is, modafinil is classified as a drug and so the negative effects are termed "side effects" while caffeine is classified as food and so the same exact negative effects are termed "overuse". It's an emotional/connotative difference. The list itself is almost identical: nervousness, headaches, insomnia, dry mouth, rapid heartbeat etc. In fact, I don't see caffeine's potential dangers of mania, depression and psychosis on the modafinil list. How's that for conservative?
Oh? I'd love to read the study on the safety of long term modafinil usage that you are doubtlessly referring to.
I think it's ridiculous that the government prevents me from taking various substances, but claiming that poorly understood drugs are safe is ridiculous. No one even knows how modafinil works.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modafinil#Pharmacology
Sure, there's no long-term studies, but we can extrapolate from the receptors that it acts on and its relatively minor side effects that it wouldn't be too bad to take it over a long term. At least for it's main indication, ADHD, it's far better than the alternatives of Ritalin or Adderall.
http://www.docguide.com/news/content.nsf/news/8525697700573E...
Also, I was on medication for about 2 months. Then I threw away the prescription -- it left me soulless. How is it treating you?
Even in the sports industry, where performance enhancing drugs are relatively pervasive, you don't see steroids becoming compulsory for athletes. I know professional athletes who don't even take protein shakes.
Why would mind enhancing drugs become compulsory to keep your job?
Even then, caffeine does not have long-lasting side-effects as has been proven over few hundred years.
It would totally suck to be forced to take those drugs to remain cometitive, so I hope they will keep those drugs in limited circulation until their safety can be proven beyond doubt.
I hope that FDA keeps those drugs unavailable for next 40 years, and during that time hundreds of organization and individual doctors around the world will be able to test the long-term safety.
What incentive does a drug company have into spending millions of dollars researching and developing a product to maybe reap benefits 40 years in the future? In a similar situation, I would move onto something more lucrative in a reasonable time frame. It's conceivable to imagine an industry completely stifled by having extremely high barriers to market entry.
Additionally, imagine being forced to use research that is at least 40 years behind the curve (undoubtedly it'll be more), when the new is available.
I understand you may have been exaggerating -- but this is still a good point to bring up.
Legal mind-enhancing drugs are a great danger to society. They will put everyone in the position where they have to take those drugs, or risk perpetual unemployment. If side effects surface decades later they will cripple entire population of the country because no one will be able to abstain. The same level of danger is not present in any other drug - there is currently no pressure to take drugs on anyone but small group of competitive athletes.
Replace "drugs" with "education", and ask what should be done. Ban learning?
Realistically, I am not going to read every single study on every single substance and make my own judgments. The government doing it for everyone, with force of law behind them, is better for all of us than just letting anyone sell anything and make any claims about it they want and expecting all of us to do all of our own research about everything.
Can the FDA make mistakes? Of course. Realistically, are they more likely to make a mistake than me, based on my own research and interpretation about things on which I am not an expert? No.
If you're so risk-averse that this isn't good enough for you, you should feel free not to take them, but insisting that others don't take them crosses over into the territory of "meddlesome".
[quote]
It would totally suck to be forced to take those drugs to remain cometitive, so I hope they will keep those drugs in limited circulation until their safety can be proven beyond doubt.
[end of quote]
If these drugs are allowed, everyone will have to chose between employment + drugs or drug-abstinence + unemployment. There will be no opt-out. At all.
Of course this will suck for you, because from your point of view, it will be as if the number of programmers in the world has just vastly increased, creating competition for you and driving down your salary. Presumably just as candle-makers' salaries were driven down by the invention of the light bulb (which could make you blind after 20 years--nobody knew for sure).
Let's take this to extreme - suppose that there is a ticking bomb in these drugs and after 20 years of intake one becomes a medical ruin, similar to crystal meth addicts. So you can take the drugs and die in 20 years from now, or you can abstain and live for another 20 years (40 years total). Those who abstain will be priced out of their lives, but most will give up and start taking drugs - let's be real.
Nobody knows about it now, so there will be no push-back until 20 years later, and when the time comes everyone will be medically ruined by then (except the youngest kids).
And you are really stretching it wrt lighbulbs making people blind - it's not in the same ballpark of likelyhood as drugs ruining people's health.
Let's not "take this to the extreme", and instead be realistic. Your "ticking bomb" would be the first in history. Like I said, no drug is tested for 20 years before being released (and approved by FDA), so if there was such a risk, then with the sheer number of new drugs developed, you'd see these disasters left and right. Where are they?
As for modafinil, a quick look doesn't turn up any long-term safety studies (pub med is either down or even slower than usual today, which amounts to the same thing, so I might be missing something), except for one 9-week study. You could smoke for 9 weeks without being affected much.
It's not like it's a rare thing for drugs to turn out to be harmful. We'll just have to wait and see.
EDIT: given the lack of long-term safety studies, but also the lack of problems with short-term studies, I personally would use modafinil for finals week or a long car trip or something like that but not day-in day-out for years.
Second, what do you mean proven beyond doubt? Testing these drugs is a statistical process, so what kind of confidence interval are you willing to accept? Keep in mind, that becoming more confident in your statistics means more testing, which makes the drug more expensive to bring to market and takes longer as well. Even then, a few drugs are going to pass the FDA approval process and cause unintended side effects, and people are going to argue for an even longer approval period.
You have to consider the opportunity cost of keeping these drugs in limited circulation. Most people don't take this into account, and there's plenty of research that shows that the FDA's requirements are actually probably too stringent, because government bureaucracies tend to be too risk averse. I think it takes an average of 12 years for a drug to pass FDA inspection and get to market, so imagine if it was 20 years. This means that during those extra 8 years, people weren't able to reap the benefits of a drug like Modafinil to stay awake. How many driving deaths could be prevented during those 8 years if people weren't driving while sleepy? Or what about the productivity gains from scientists or hackers that can get away with 4 hours of sleep a night instead of 8, without reducing their cognitive abilities?
I'm not saying there couldn't be unforeseen nasty side-effects of using the drugs fourty years from now, but given the evidence it seems like it's probably a negligible risk for most people.
Now, I do not mind these drugs being distributed under presecritiption well before that, because it will be only a fraction of percent of the total population.
Not impressed - they would rather everyone be equally "stupid" rather than some people be smarter than others? These drugs do not take away from anyone, they only add.
"Whether we like it or not, that property of stimulants is not going to go away," she said."
So, substances with a known history of addictive behavior. This is what we call burying the lede (quote from page 3 of the article). As important as the other considerations are that were brought up, this seems to trump them.
Do we know how addictive? Addictive like caffeine, or crack, or somewhere in between?
http://www.erowid.org/experiences/subs/exp_Modafinil.shtml
The long term effects would be a concern of mine if I was going to take it though.
Or is it the case that working in a startup is already motivating enough that there wouldn't really be much of an additional benefit?
And cortisol is technically a steroid, but not the body-enhancing type that everyone refers to.
And steroids do allow you to train harder and recover quicker, but you still have to cycle off after 6-8 weeks... and then you go back to your original strength.
Hard training at a young age can lead to amenorrhea and slowed hormonal development, but anabolic steroids cause irreprable damage to your liver and kidneys. And will ruin your joints.
There is no inconsistency here. It's not binary, it's on a gradient.
Another difference is that steriods at the level taken by athletes use is demonstrably harmfull for their health, this is not necessarily true for mental boosters.
Uhhh, professional sport isn't 'real' work? I would would say without a doubt every single processional athlete probably works much harder then your typical white collar worker (due to the fact that they are not typical athletes) As far as "productive" goes, each pro organization is staffed with hundreds of people all doing 'productive' work which is possible because of the athletes that work for the corporation.
Now contrast this with mental abilities. If people can solve medical problems then they can prevent deaths and enhance health. If they can solve technical problems they can make peoples lives easier and allow them to achieve more. In general mental skills can make the world a better place. Not a zero sum game.
In contrast, regular "productive" work is not trying to be entertaining, it has other goals (e.g. moving packages from one place to another). If I ride my bicycle while delivering packages, more packages get delivered.
Now if deregulation also resulted in drug companies actively concealing negative side effects, and thus duping consumers, then they would have been victimized.