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["Lynn Wigglesworth" <lynnw1366 AT hotmail.com>]

Call me crazy, but I think that popping pills so you can go on less sleep, 
function with more stress, eat the wrong foods, etc. is a dumb idea...the 
long-term effects of that are not going to be pretty. It's like taking pain 
killers so you can walk on a broken leg. I think more and more that Judith 
Warner lives in a different world than I do.

Lynn Wigglesworth

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "bobf" <bobford79 AT yahoo.com>
To: <homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org>
Sent: Saturday, December 27, 2008 9:21 AM
Subject: [Homestead] pharmacological Calvinism


> Wendy, since you are active this am; what do you think about this article 
> in this am NYT.  One of the scientists advocating cognitive enhancement 
> through pharma is a writer from the journal 'Nature'.
>
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------
> Living the Off-Label Life
>
> By JUDITH WARNER
>
>
> What if you could just take a pill and all of a sudden remember to pay 
> your bills on time? What if, thanks to modern neuroscience, you could, 
> simultaneously, make New Year’s Eve plans, pay the mortgage, call the 
> pediatrician, consolidate credit card debt and do your job — well — 
> without forgetting dentist appointments or neglecting to pick up your 
> children at school?
>
> Would you do it? Tune out the distractions of our online, on-call, 
> too-fast A.D.D.-ogenic world with focus and memory-enhancing medications 
> like Ritalin or Adderall? Stay sharp as a knife — no matter how overworked 
> and sleep-deprived — with a mental-alertness-boosting drug like the 
> anti-narcolepsy medication Provigil?
>
> I’ve always said no. Fantasy aside, I’ve always rejected the idea of using 
> drugs meant for people with real neurological disorders to treat the 
> pathologies of everyday life.
>
> Most of us, viscerally, do. Cognitive enhancement — a practice typified by 
> the widely reported abuse of psychostimulants by college students cramming 
> for exams, and by the less reported but apparently growing use of 
> mind-boosters like Provigil among in-the-know scientists and professors — 
> goes against the grain of some of our most basic beliefs about fairness 
> and meritocracy. It seems to many people to be unnatural, inhuman, 
> hubristic, pure cheating.
>
> That’s why when Henry Greely, director of Stanford Law School’s Center for 
> Law and the Biosciences, published an article, with a host of co-authors, 
> in the science journal Nature earlier this month suggesting that we ought 
> to rethink our gut reactions and “accept the benefits of enhancement,” he 
> was deluged with irate responses from readers.
>
> “There were three kinds of e-mail reactions,” he told me in a phone 
> interview last week. “ ‘How much crack are you smoking? How much money did 
> your friends in pharma give you? How much crack did you get from your 
> friends in pharma?’ ”
>
> As Americans, our default setting on matters of psychotropic drugs — 
> particularly when it comes to medicating those who are not very ill — 
> tends to be, as the psychiatrist Gerald Klerman called it in 1972, 
> something akin to “pharmacological Calvinism.” People should suffer and 
> endure, the thinking goes, accept what hard work and their God-given 
> abilities bring them and hope for no more.
>
> But Greely and his Nature co-authors suggest that such arguments are 
> outdated and intellectually dishonest. We enhance our brain function all 
> the time, they say — by drinking coffee, by eating nutritious food, by 
> getting an education, even by getting a good night’s sleep. Taking 
> brain-enhancing drugs should be viewed as just another step along that 
> continuum, one that’s “morally equivalent” to such “other, more familiar, 
> enhancements,” they write.
>
> Normal life, unlike sports competitions, they argue, isn’t a zero-sum 
> game, where one person’s doped advantage necessarily brings another’s 
> disadvantage. A surgeon whose mind is extra-sharp, a pilot who’s extra 
> alert, a medical researcher whose memory is fine-tuned to make 
> extraordinary connections, is able to work not just to his or her own 
> benefit, but for that of countless numbers of people. “Cognitive 
> enhancement,” they write, “unlike enhancement for sports competitions, 
> could lead to substantive improvements in the world.”
>
> I’m not convinced of that. I’m not sure that pushing for your personal 
> best — all the time — is tantamount to truly being the best person you can 
> be. I have long thought that a life so frenetic and fractured that it 
> drives “neuro-normal” people to distraction, leaving them sleep-deprived 
> and exhausted, demands — indeed, screams for — systemic change.
>
> But now I do wonder: What if the excessive demands of life today are 
> creating ever-larger categories of people who can’t reach their potential 
> due to handicaps that in an easier time were just quirks? (Absent-minded 
> professor-types were, for generations, typically men who didn’t need to be 
> present — organized and on-time — for their kids.) Is it any fairer to 
> saddle a child with a chronically overwhelmed parent than with one 
> suffering from untreated depression?
>
> And, furthermore, how much can most of us, on a truly meaningful scale, 
> change our lives? At a time of widespread layoffs and job anxiety among 
> those still employed, can anyone but the most fortunate afford to cut 
> their hours to give themselves time to breathe? Can working parents really 
> sacrifice on either side of the wage-earning/life-making equation? It’s 
> disturbing to think that we just have to make do with the world we now 
> live in. But to do otherwise is for most people an impossible luxury.
>
> For some of us, saddled with brains ill-adapted to this era, and taxed 
> with way too many demands and distractions, pharmacological Calvinism may 
> now be a luxury, too.
>
> Judith Warner writes Domestic Disturbances, a column at nytimes.com. Gail 
> Collins is off today.
>
> http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/27/opinion/27warner.html?hp
>
>
>
>
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