'Era of doping' on the horizon in academia?

As prescription stimulant use rises on college campuses, some neuroscientists think academia is entering an age of widespread drug-induced brain enhancement.

"An era of doping is probably looming in the culture, and academia is going to be a part of that," said Anjan Chatterjee, an associate professor of neurology at Penn.

At the end of last year, two Cambridge professors found that a handful of their colleagues who studied cognition-enhancing drugs had actually used stimulants to improve their own academic performance.

That informal study, published in the journal Nature, has sparked media interest and debate about the ethics of stimulant use by students and faculty.

While most academics freely admit to a daily coffee or soda habit, more powerful prescription stimulants are stigmatized, according to Alexander Kranjec, a cognitive psychologist at Penn.

"It's the kind of thing that, if someone did, they'd be pretty private about it," Kranjec said. "There's this weird pride in academics where everyone wants to seem naturally smart."

Martin Wiener, a research specialist at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, said stimulants like Adderall are "crutches" that academics without cognitive disorders should not need.

"It's like the equivalent of doping in sports - how do you feel about an athlete when you find out that athlete has been taking steroids?" Wiener asked.

Wiener said widespread doping in academia "certainly exists," and has likely been around for the last 10 or 20 years. He has heard about it in students, but "would not be surprised" to learn that faculty were using cognition-enhancing drugs as well.

Yet such drugs have not been shown to automatically improve the academic performance of their users, according to Elizabeth Smith, a graduate student at Penn's Center for Cognitive Neuroscience.

"There's not a whole lot of evidence that they are 'smart pills,'" Smith said. "It's not like taking a pill is upping your IQ or something . this won't lead to Nobel Prizes."

But undergraduates at prestigious schools like Penn still seem to think they can help.

In 2005, University of Michigan researchers found that non-medical stimulant use was higher in students at "colleges located in the northeastern region of the U.S. and colleges with more competitive admission standards."

Chatterjee also observed "a kind of ultra-competitive environment that most of us at Penn have bought into."

While he does not think using stimulants to enhance mental abilities is necessarily "intrinsically wrong," Chatterjee pointed out that widespread use of the drugs could result in all kinds of workers eventually being required to take them to stay more alert on the job.

"Where do you draw the line, and - more importantly - who draws the line?" Chatterjee asked.

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