Henry Greely of Stanford Law School has some sensible thoughts on drugs for cognitive enhancement, starting with the prescription stimulants already on the market.
He asks the right question: What constitutes “safety” for a drug not intended to treat disease?
He doesn’t ask the next question: Assuming that the drugs have bad long-term side-effects, how do we control the pressure on people in cognitively competitive environments — especially teenagers trying to get into selective colleges, college students trying to get into the “right” graduate or professional school, and people in their twenties and early thirties bucking for tenure at universities, or competing to be Chief Resident, or scrambling to make partner at law firms, or undergoing the comparable winnowing processes at consulting firms or investment banks — to use the drugs and accept the damage because they can’t afford to be left behind by their competitors?