Somatopia

 

Yes, it has happened. A veritable holy host of academics, scholars, psychiatrists and lawyers has come together to argue that we need intelligence enhancing pills now! in the pages of Nature. 

It goes something like this: 

Today, on university campuses around the world, students are striking deals to buy and sell prescription drugs such as Adderall and Ritalin — not to get high, but to get higher grades, to provide an edge over their fellow students or to increase in some measurable way their capacity for learning. 

These transactions are crimes in the United States, punishable by prison. Many people see such penalties as appropriate, and consider the use of such drugs to be cheating, unnatural or dangerous. Yet one survey estimated that almost 7% of students in US universities have used prescription stimulants in this way, and that on some campuses, up to 25% of students had used them in the past year. 

These students are early adopters of a trend that is likely to grow, and indications suggest that they're not alone. In this article, we propose actions that will help society accept the benefits of enhancement, given appropriate research and evolved regulation. Prescription drugs are regulated as such not for their enhancing properties but primarily for considerations of safety and potential abuse. Still, cognitive enhancement has much to offer individuals and society, and a proper societal response will involve making enhancements available while managing their risks. 

This is true. From several college roommates, I knew that the market for Adderall, in particular, was booming: $20 a pill in my salad days, and that was seven years ago. While I never personally used it (enough sleep issues already, thank you) it was quite the drug du jour for the ambitious types that just had to get a degree. 

In and of itself, there's absolutely nothing wrong with the approach advocated by Greely & Co. arguing essentially that "we should welcome new methods of improving our brain function." Believing in free minds, souls and, yes, bodies, I generally advocate that people should be able to install or put anything into their flesh that they please, as long as the risks are spelled out clearly in advance and whatever insanity ensues doesn't damage another person's life. 

But this gives me pause. It's not so much that they're wrong, just shockingly naive. Welcome to Somatopia.

Take for example, what's happened with the increasing range of anti-depression and mental illness medications. 

These are, of course, incredible tools, and combined with therapy and personal growth, they can offer a good way to blunt the symptoms of acute depression, etc. long enough to engage in deep and meaningful treatment. 

But that's not how they've been used. Even though studies find that therapy is as or more effective in treating depression, even severe cases, not to mention insomnia, insurance providers are increasingly more reluctant to pay for it. 

After all, companies and insurance plans just want you functional and pills are an easy damned way to do just that. Fuck therapy. 

Hence chemicals that could potentially be a benefit when used as part of an overall approach become a way of covering up deeper issues. It is, after all, an easy way to avoid hard questions. 

Severely depressed? Fuck you, take a pill. Child being too rambunctious? Fuck 'em, take a pill. Problems with thinking? Fuck it, take a pill. 

Lost in this is the question of if cognitive enhancers help with anything except temporarily absorbing knowledge or increasing focus. If the way psychiatric medications have been embraced is any indication, slower but deeper methods of learning and retaining knowledge will soon be ditched if these become widely available, while side effects will be ignored.

Not that those methods don't have their limits, but they've hardly been exhausted (how many people know about Memory Palaces these days?) and if their abandonment is anything like what's happened to therapy, the results could be catastrophic. 

Such cognitive methods aren't as dependent on a small range of medications provided by large pharmaceutical corporations: they don't go away if you can't afford your pills -- and they tend to build more interconnected thought structures, thus making them more likely to encourage critical thinking and innovation.

These medications are particularly popular among the scions of the upper-middle class, for whom getting a degree is a rite of social passage as much as anything else. Adderall-fueled study binges are a great way to retain info for a short time, regurgitate it, barely pass the classes, get the degrees and thus avoid questions that might result in Junior deciding they don't actually want to go into finance after all. That would be terrible, wouldn't it? 

Examples used in the Nature article of the government requiring the military to take meds to stay awake aren't perhaps the best choice. Turning soldiers into speed freaks has some pretty horrific consequences. 

The same might follow for the rest of us, chemical dependency is never pretty, however socially convenient it might be. Unhappiness, too, can be necessary to spur people and societies to make needed changes.

But most terrifyingly, a combination of more readily available "enhancing medications" and their practical function conveniently covering up an array of fracturing social issues makes the following possible: Somatopia. 

Yes, the title's borrowed from Huxley's Brave New World, where Soma keeps the masses docile. But Somatopia embraces a far wider range of uses for tomorrow's drugs than that. 

Imagine: a combination of pharma lobbying clout and perceived need leads to mandatory screening and medication for any perceived mental disorders. From a very early age, children are put on a medication regimen. 

As the pressure to test and market new medications increases, so does the number of perceived disorders. Naturally, the push from a generation of status-driven parents makes similar regimens available as the child proceeds through school. This goes hand-hand with a "for your health" nanny state tendency that cuts across the normal political factions, manifest now in small things like banning transfats or smoking (full disclosure: I've never smoked and eat healthy, but some things aren't properly the state's business).

Cash-strapped governments rapidly conclude that drugs are cheaper than cops (or social programs) and start distributing them for a minimal charge to poverty stricken areas. After all, at least someone makes a profit off it, and it's an easy, quick fix to a number of current drug epidemics.

There will be pills for more focus, pills for increased IQ (fickle a beast as that is), medications for any type of perceived intellectual deficiency, all culminating in another regimen to make sure that the citizen makes it through school with flying colors. Nor does it end there. Jobs are stressful, and there are pills for the attendant anxiety, depression, sleep disorders. When the mid-life crisis comes, there will be pills to make it all better. A million little friends to get you through the night. 

The key feature of somatopia is that the meds aren't just endorsed, but required. It's not hard to see a bad performance review ending up not in "you really should increase your effort" but "we've prescribed the following medications for you..." and a medicinal "credit report" required for some basic societal hurdles like insurance, jobs or college entrance. Just to make sure, naturally.

When the next generation goes stark raving mad they'll never see it coming.

Comments

[m1k3y]

Awake != Smarter.

It shits me that they keep calling this stuff, modanifil included, Cognitive Enhancers.

Mostly because I would love some real IQ boosting pills.

But yeah, the whole thing stinks of big-pharma trying to push more product. Fuckers. My future is not over-medicated.

[David Forbes]

Good point. Smarter isn't necessarily the goal here, functional (in society's terms) is and for that, awake is good enough.

I included IQ enhancers because no doubt at some point a bright chemist will figure out a pill that can stroke that abstract-thought brain chunk that constitutes IQ (or close enough). The same dilemma will probably apply as did with psych meds: undoubtedly useful, but prone to becoming a substitute for deeper, longer-lasting methods.

My future is not over-medicated.
Mine either. The scary part of a Somatopia would be that it constitutes an attempt to make everyone's future drugged into meaninglessness.