Cognitively enhanced
Over recent blogs I’ve been rehearsing some thoughts about what I call neurological reflexivity. The idea being that instead of a world in which what matters is what we think increasingly we are engaging with the question of how we think.
So it was timely to wake up this morning to hear on the Today programme about the report of the Academy of Medical Sciences’ report on Brain science, addition, and drugs. Following on from the Government Foresight project, Drugs Futures 20205, this commission was set up to investigate the societal, health safety and environmental issues raised by the Foresight report. It analyzes the scientific and ethical issues of drug development, use and abuse.
While there are some interesting findings about drug misuse and treatment, which are gratifyingly in line with the RSA Drugs Commission, what interests me here are the implications, both scientific and ethical, of using cognitive enhancement drugs on otherwise healthy individuals.
What the report argues is that because cognitive enhancement drugs are developed for use on unhealthy individuals (victims of stroke, Alzheimer’s or other degenerative neurological conditions) not enough is known about the long term side on healthy brains.
They argue that further research into this is necessary, particularly as the current drugs are increasingly available on the grey-market, and could be misused, for example, by students seeking to enhance exam results. Playing with brain chemistry must be an exact science given the scope for unpredictable and long term side effects.
There are major ethical implications of cognitive enhancement. John Harris, who spoke here last year,and others have powerfully attacked the superstition that we shouldn’t ‘unnaturally’ enhance our physical capacity. What he argues is the categorical difference between eye glasses and brain supplements? The more pressing dilemmas concerns equality of access and ‘devaluing unaided achievement’.
People who can afford to pay for their daily dose of cognitive enhancers will have an extra unfair advantage over those who cannot. These will probably tend to be the same people who already benefited from the environmental factors that seem to most enhance IQ.
The point about unaided achievement is that we have a strong – albeit complex and tacit – belief that achievement should result form the combination of talent and effort (we are also, according to opinion polls, happy to recognise the role that luck can play). But if performance in education, athletics, perhaps one day relationships, is dependent less on ability and effort than on access to drugs or on the interaction of these drugs with our personal physiology then, notwithstanding equity issues, this seems to challenge our most basic assumptions about human endeavour and status.
These are deep waters. They require a discourse that brings together scientists, social scientists, philosophers and policy makers. The public needs to understand and engage with dilemmas that have quickly moved from science fiction to pharmaceutical reality. And these are some of the key purposes of the RSA cognition project that we will be launching in a few weeks.
Put that in your pipe…
Is the Government really intent on reclassifying cannabis despite the advice of drug experts, police officers and the evidence that cannabis use is becoming less popular among young people?
This policy is apparently based on the idea of ‘sending a message’ about society’s disapproval and the harm caused by drugs. But is legislation the best way of sending a message, particularly to young people?
As the father of teenage sons I sometimes hear them talk about their peers smoking ‘weed’. For them it seems to be an aspect of identity, with smokers seen as a subset of what used to be called grungers; teens who wear baggie jeans, have long hair and spend a lot of time in their bedrooms listening to bands like Nirvana and their various imitators. My sons have different lifestyles and reference points so they tend to be disparaging about this particular subset of teen culture.
The point is that in all these discussions I have not once heard the idea that young people’s choices about cannabis are based on the law.
Indeed it is almost the reverse, as cannabis (the majority of which is now grown in the UK) has become easier and easier to get hold of it has lost some of its connotations of rebellion leaving young people to take a dispassionate view of its effects and its effects on those people who take a lot of it.
For me, and this is a view which echoes the excellent work of the RSA Drugs Commission, the more we can encourage young people to talk openly and pragmatically about drugs the more likely it is that most young people will make an informed choice.
While experimentation, rule breaking and pushing the boundaries of experience are all a natural part of growing up, spending most of your adolescence in a haze and becoming less mentally and physically fit than your peers is simply not a very smart thing to do.
The more you criminalise an activity the harder it is to have such a debate; ‘it’s against the law, what is there to discuss?’
Whatever happens in today’s elections the Government has some work to do to reconnect to voters. For a Government that claims to be both progressive and evidence-based, being seen to ignore evidence and good governance principles in favour of headlines in some newspapers (as it did yesterday in the decision not to increase the prisoners’ maximum weekly wage to the princely sum of £5.50) means that the battle of the headlines may be won but the war of credibility will be lost.
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