another cool new yorker piece

This one is called "Brain Gain" and its subject is stimulants such as Ritalin and Adderall, prescribed most commonly for ADHD but now commonly co-opted as neuroenhancing 'study aids'. The whole article is interesting, but 2 things of note:

1) What type of students are most likely to use neuroenhancing drugs?
According to McCabe’s research team, white male undergraduates at highly competitive schools—especially in the Northeast—are the most frequent collegiate users of neuroenhancers. Users are also more likely to belong to a fraternity or a sorority, and to have a G.P.A. of 3.0 or lower. They are ten times as likely to report that they have smoked marijuana in the past year, and twenty times as likely to say that they have used cocaine. In other words, they are decent students at schools where, to be a great student, you have to give up a lot more partying than they’re willing to give up.

It's interesting that the highest achievers/'go getters', if you will, are not the ones most likely to use neuroenhancers. Rather its the students who want to maintain a healthy lifestyle and get their work done at the same time.

2) What is the culpability of doctors in this phenomenon?
Anjan Chatterjee, a neurologist at the University of Pennsylvania, predicts, some neurologists will refashion themselves as “quality-of-life consultants,” whose role will be “to provide information while abrogating final responsibility for these decisions to patients.” The demand is certainly there: from an aging population that won’t put up with memory loss; from overwrought parents bent on giving their children every possible edge; from anxious employees in an efficiency-obsessed, BlackBerry-equipped office culture, where work never really ends.

This is what is most worrisome - doctors acting in this bogus 'consultant' role, where they can advise on 'proper use' of neurologically active substances, without bearing any responsibility for their side effects. If you want to give perfectly healthy patients elective mind-altering drugs, so be it. But doctors are the gateway to access for these drugs, and they should bear some of the responsibility for the inevitable cases in which people go batshit crazy.