Children hooked up to drips, shown on Chinese television
From Saturday's Daily Telegraph
The creepiest image published this week shows Chinese teenagers hooked up to IV drips in a classroom, feeding amino acids into their bloodstreams so they can concentrate harder on their National College Entrance Exam. The school, in Xiaogong, central China, is unapologetic. Parents ask for the drips, it says, because otherwise their children become exhausted swotting for examinations that will determine the course of their lives.
It’s easy to jump to conclusions. Those ruthless Asians! So this is where the “tiger mom” thing leads – to a jab of the needle to make sure the homework gets done and your son or daughter ends up working for a bank rather than assembling iPhones and thinking about topping themselves.
But hang on. In America between 2003 and 2007, the number of parent-reported cases of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) increased by nearly a quarter. That’s a million extra children taking medicines far, far stronger than amino acids.
Let’s leave aside the sensitive question of whether ADHD is real. Instead, we should ask: how many of the millions of Ritalin and Adderall pills handed out for ADHD are taken by students who weren’t prescribed them, but who have traded them from friends or siblings?
Attention-deficit pills are popular with young people for two reasons. First, since most of them are amphetamine-based, they can give you a nice buzz. Second, you can be cognitively “normal” and still find your concentration magically boosted. Which is handy, if you’re just about to sit SATs or college exams.
Last summer I sat in the canteen of one of America’s most expensive universities. I was interviewing a professor for The Fix, my book on addiction, about the use of doping as a study-enhancing tool. He said there was a lot of it about. But I could have worked that out for myself, because in the background we could hear college kids discussing how much Adderall they’d need to finish their term papers.
The plot thickens. In addition to the ADHD drugs, there’s a new generation of “smart” enhancers designed to boost perfectly healthy attention spans. These drugs, of which modafinil is the best known, help you concentrate and do without sleep – but don’t give you a high. Armed forces all over the world, including Britain’s, make use of them. They’re also all the rage at Harvard and Yale, where grade-point averages really matter. Now they’re spreading to England’s top-tier universities, where competition for highly paid jobs is most ferocious. They are showing up in the City, Wall Street and Silicon Valley, too.
Cognitive medications don’t make people cleverer: they keep them alert for longer. They may also cause psychological harm, but that’s unlikely to trouble an authoritarian country that decides to force-feed its citizens pills that will give them an edge over international rivals and could increase GDP.
The obvious analogy is with sport. It requires heavy, expensive vigilance to stop athletes taking illegal supplements. What will happen when the virus of cognitive doping works its way through the global economy? In a 24-hour working environment, there are few attributes more useful than not needing to sleep.
Some scientists think the legacy of these drugs will be burnout, brain damage and addiction. The truth is that it’s too early to say: we don’t have the data. By the time we do, hundreds of millions of people may have taken cognitive enhancers. That is an incredible prospect, potentially a turning point in history. Are we genuinely unaware of what’s happening? Or are we just having difficulty concentrating?
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