Performance enhancers stimulate scrutiny

Roger Clemens has been in the news a lot lately for his alleged use of steroids and human growth hormone, and it’s pretty clear why this is a big deal to the public: It concerns whether somebody has reached a high level of success in a competitive arena by cheating.

It is interesting, however, how the conversation about athletic performance-enhancing drugs hasn’t quite carried over to academic performance-enhancing drugs, namely prescription stimulants such as Ritalin, Adderall and their many pharmaceutical permutations.

Maybe this is because we don’t consider prescription stimulants to be cheating, at least not to the same nefarious degree as we do steroids in sports. I think that perception is partly because of the altruistic perception of academia, compared to multi-billion dollar professional athletics leagues and organizations, which are all premised on fairness in competition.

Compare Clemens or Barry Bonds ““ who by all accounts were already multi-millionaire, all-star pros before (allegedly) artificially enhancing their abilities ““ to your hypothetical peers. Did the athletes really need more statistical achievements, more money, more success?

Maybe the girl sitting in the front row has been clinically diagnosed with ADHD and takes Concerta just to maintain her B average. It’s difficult to see the harm in correcting for natural disadvantages.

Maybe, however, your neighbor in the computer lab borrowed Adderall to fuel an all-nighter. You may not care if he gets an A on a midterm, but a law student or anyone else in a class with bell-curve grading would say otherwise.

This goes back to the competitive stakes of what is to be gained or lost by illicit usage.

It’s difficult to say how much Dexedrine “helps” compared to a venti latte, or how drastically non-prescribed use of stimulant medications throws off the competitive balance.

Prescription stimulants in academia aren’t the only performance-enhancers analogous to steroids in baseball.

Columnist Chuck Klosterman made an argument that Aug. 28, 1964, may be the most important date in rock history because that was when Bob Dylan met the Beatles in New York and got them high for the first time.

He wrote, “The introduction of marijuana altered the trajectory of the Beatles’ songwriting, reconstructed their consciousness and prompted them to make the most influential rock albums of all time.”

Klosterman also pointed out that Jack Kerouac wrote “On The Road” in 20 days while on a Benzedrine binge, “yet nobody thinks this makes his novel less significant.”

He also wrote, “No one views “˜Rubber Soul’ and “˜Revolver’ as “˜less authentic’ albums, despite the fact that they would not (and probably could not) have been made by people who weren’t on drugs.”

The main type of media discourse concerning the countless musicians on drugs ““ most recently Amy Winehouse ““ is about “bad role models” for young people.

This was also a key rationale behind Congress’ investigation into steroid use by athletes.

We are the young people Congress are trying to insulate, and yet the level of discussion concerning prescription stimulant misuse is barely audible.

Maybe this is because of in loco parentis ““ people expect college to be a time of experimentation.

Or perhaps the use of creativity-enhancing and cognitive-enhancing psychoactive drugs in music and academia, respectively, get a pass in part because it’s harder to dislike the end product. What if abusing Cylert enabled researchers to more expediently discover the cure for cancer?

In terms of weighing the importance of various types of performance enhancement on the national consciousness, the notions of individual gain versus harm comes into play.

For example, some would say that steroid use is an important issue because of the high degree of risk to the individual user’s health and the collateral risk to impressionable kids and to the integrity of the sport, while the only benefit is to the user. Seems kind of selfish.

Stimulants also may seem comparatively trivial, as if we were talking about competitive advantage on a much smaller scale.

But there is nothing trivial about the history of stimulant use in performance-enhancement contexts.

The blitzkrieg attacks of World War II were carried out by a German army hopped-up on large quantities of amphetamines, led by a guy who shot up as often as five times per day.

A recent Cambridge study suggests that professors are increasingly abusing Provigil ““ the same wakefulness-producing drug that is currently being tested for military use in Iraq. Still, Cornel West and Noam Chomsky could wig-out tomorrow and Congress would likely not care.

If athletes who use drugs to break records are cheats, and artists, writers and musicians who use drugs are creative geniuses exploring their respective crafts, then what do we think about students and professors who use drugs to advance and disseminate knowledge?

A study from the National Institute on Drug Abuse found that illicit use of prescription medications by college students is at its highest level in 15 years and that college students are far more likely to illicitly use methylphenidate (i.e. Ritalin) than same-age peers not attending college (4.7 percent versus 1.6 percent respectively), making prescription stimulant use more prevalent among young people than meth use.

Taking those statistics into consideration, it’s time to reprioritize how we think about performance enhancement.

E-mail Aikins at raikins@media.ucla.edu if this topic stimulates you. Send general comments to viewpoint@media.ucla.edu.

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