A recent NY Times article raises the ethical question of drugs for brain-enhancing performance. If we don't like it for athletes, why for academics and others? Here's the url for "Brain Enhancement is Wrong, Right?" in the NY Times on March 9, 2008, by Benedict Carey: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/09/weekinreview/09carey.html?ex=120581280...

The issue is that, if we're going to be critical of Roger Clemens and Barry Bonds and all the other athletes for taking performance-enhancing drugs, what do we do with all the recent work that shows that stimulants like Adderall and Provigil might (might!) not only cure narcolepsy but might also create more attentive, focused, creative intellectual performance? Or what about white blood cells and mental prowess? Do we run blood-doping tests at the SAT's or L-SATS? Or, as Carey asks, do we put asterisks after Nobel, Pulitzer, and Lasker award winners' names when it turns out they were taking intellectual or creativity-enhancing drugs?

Hmmmmm . . . what does that do to Coleridge? Or Baudelaire? Or any of those nineteenth-century opium-eaters? The long tradition of drug- and alcohol-use (and abuse) among musicians, artists, writers: does it change performance in a way that causes us to question the validity of that performance? Psychotropic enhancements all, do these stimulants make the creativity somehow "false"?

As long as there has been art (I'm talking tens of thousands of years ago, pre-writing even), there have also been psychotropic substances. I'm not sure if, proportionately, humans are taking more mind-altering substances now than in the past. We may be regulating them more, but (oh, Foucault, yet again!) regulation rarely means "ending" the problem. It typically means documenting what has long existed.

Carey raises an intriguing question. I have no answers, but it is interesting to think about what we mean by "performance." Is the issue athleticism or athletics-for-pay? Is the real issue which substances (including potentially dangerous ones) enhance performance? Or is it which enhanced performances unfairly skew the odds and lots of people betting illegally or legally on outcomes then feel cheated or manipulated? Which is the real issue? The performance-enhancement or the betting-enhancement? Not many bets out on who's going to take the top science prizes this year.