Professors Taking Performance-Enhancing Drugs:
From the Chronicle of Higher Education News Blog, via IsThatLegal:
Some university faculty members have started popping 'smart' pills to enhance their mental energy and ability to work long hours.
In a commentary published in Nature on Thursday, Barbara Sahakian and Sharon Morein-Zamir of the University of Cambridge revealed an informal survey showing that a handful of colleagues, all involved in studying drugs that help people perform better mentally, would take the drugs.
The notion raises hackles in some parts of academe. "It smells to me a lot like taking steroids for physical prowess," said Barbara Prudhomme White, an associate professor of occupational therapy at the University of New Hampshire, who has studied the abuse of Ritalin by college students. With the recent revelations about the use of performance-enhancing drugs in professional baseball, she sees parallels between striving athletes and faculty members.
Merry Christmas.
Some of us work a lot harder than students. Have a nice vacation.
I've heard it told that Graham charged the $500 to his school, Yale, as a business expense, although that part might be apocryphal.
Tell it to the practicing attorneys. =)
Some of us make 1/3rd the money of practicing attorneys. ;-)
Do we really think that ensuring "fairness" in the competition for jobs is more important than optimizing results? I can see the argument for what amounts to professional game-playing, but who here wants to go into surgery with a surgeon who has been denied his morning coffee, or rush to the E.R. to be treated by a caffeine-free resident in her forty-third straight hour?
It's difficult to look at them the same way you might look at steroids etc. It's not a perfect analogy but I think of cyclists who add the red blood cells so they don't fatigue as much. I mean as others point out, I have come to find coffee a tasty drink, but I've definitely had a few cups at 10:00pm or even midnight in order to finish an outline, a practice exam, a brief, or an indenture or whatnot in practice.
I remember in undergrad I had a Professor build up a huge talk about how F. Scott Fitzgerald abused a substance in the making of the Beautiful and the Damned and the Great Gatsby. Said he drank it constantly, and refused to write without it. The reveal: coca-cola! Zing! Anyway, it's a greyer area when we're not talking about sports.
It reminds me of when I was a young lad, taught about Edison's great industriousness ("he needed very few hours of sleep a night!") and innovation ("he invented a bazillion new devices!").
Then as an adult, I learned that his industriousness came, at least in part, from significant cocaine use and his innovation came, at least in part, from significantly filching others' ideas and actively working to thwart some others.
There foundered another childhood hero, his shining myth dashed on the rocky shores of reality. :(
If any of my professors managed to work less than me, another law student, s/he would have to be a truly gifted -- perhaps magical -- individual.
Try taking it easy. Life is too short and this is probably your last chance to really have a relaxing life.
Is there any evidence that there exists any drug capable of enhancing sustained mental performance beyond the use of stimulants to allow continued but declining performance?
Vernor Vinge's Focus to bring the discontinuity sooner and more painfully for many than it would otherwise occur?
Though I find cigars to be performance-enhancing
Now, disregarding caffeine and sugar as they are legal, and believed to be safe in typical dosages (all nighters not withstanding), the remainder of mind enhancers are either illegal (cocaine), prescription drugs (under the above rules), or items which will interfere with the results of drug tests. This makes the case for intellectual drug use pretty open and shut, unless a professor can show his memory or attention is slipping (in which case he has a legit reason to use it).
Now, I did blow by the issue of cheating, but I do wonder, What is a professor who has tenure taking drugs for? That's just showing off for no good reason; like keeping fit after you get married :p
I remember studying for finals in lawschool and having a buddy of mine give me a few ritalins to take over the weekend. Dang! The little suckers were effective.
I hate big pharma, otherwise I would get a scrip for ritalin, or the fashionable substitute of the moment. So I take "Attend" instead. Better than nothing.
Or one could just "attend" class.
Athletes don't do anything useful, and their only purpose is to compete with each other. Since the value of their performance is relative and not absolute, "cheating" means something.
Similarly, law students don't do anything useful, and their performance is measured in relative terms.
In the real world, however, where people are asked to produce things that have value to other people, the idea of "cheating" is less relevant. If I'm being treated by a doctor, I don't much care if he's taking drugs that make him a better doctor, so long as those drugs don't have any countervailing side effects that also affect my treatment. If President Bush took some drugs to make him smarter and more astute (again, with no countervailing side effects), I think most people would appreciate that.
I think professors are more like presidents and doctors than like athletes and law students. They supposedly have some purpose other than merely competing with each other, and if they do well at their jobs with "artificial" help, not all of the baggage associated with steroids in sports necessarily transfers over.
This is not to say that there are no problems with performance-enhancing drugs other than their effects on the fairness of competition, only that the athlete analogy isn't very good.
BTW, I highly recommend the "I only did it once or twice, and only to recover from X" as your confession. It seems to be the excuse all the kewl kidz are using.
I dunno. Most people see athletes as entertainers. In that sense, they're like the orchestra musicians mentioned above. If we look at them that way, they seem much more like the doctor than the law student.
From your lips to God's ears.
According to your link, "Attend" is homeopathic. Nothing is exactly what you're taking.
You must not be a sports fan. Athletic performances are an important form of human endeavor, just as chess playing, playing a musical instrument and dancing are other forms. They constitute a measure of the limits of human performance of one type. They have an absolute value as well as a relative one. Look at a records book. They help us understand the working of the human body and mind. They entertain us, as Mark Field notes. They are a way of making life more bearable. Some are beautiful to watch; poetry in motion, as they say. Plus taking part in them is exhilirating, life-affirming, life-lengthening if one remains fit. No value? Not useful? Quite the contrary.
Medicine is a soft science in that it involves not just the physical absolutes of nature, such as gravity (I drop a human being or a rock, they both fall at the same rate), but the relative absolutes of individuals (I take 40 mg of ritalin and it makes me 10x more productive, but a guy with the same height, weight, hair color, etc, needs 50mg to obtain 5x increase in productivity). No amount of aggregated data broken down to bla bla significance can possibly match what I conclude on my own. And that goes for all the studies that "prove" homeopathy is bunk.
Now, in fairness, if Colin or Professor Bernstein performed a rigorous test of my real performance with or without Attend, and this test said that it's all in my head, then, and only then, I would agree that what I experience is a placebo effect, or whatever.
I only read the head, and thought y'all were coming clean about rampant use of V**gra in the ivory towers. Not that there's anything wrong with that!!
The transition to "spent" leaves was made in 1904, according to Wikipedia. Only faint traces of cocaine would have made it into the Coca-Cola batches by that method, and significant amounts certainly would not have been permitted after 1916, when cocaine was made mostly illegal in the US.
Which goes together nicely with the fact that, um, you don't work nearly as hard as the people in private practice making 3 times what you do. :)
The fact that university faculty feel they need drugs because they are working "long hours" reminds me of those days -- back in the long long ago, in the before time -- when I thought I needed a vacation from college.
I sure got an education in the wake of my schooling.
A vacation from college. It is to laugh.
Not that I'm bitter.
Some of us don't have the luxury of tenure either.
As an aside, the comment does remind me of something my favorite law professor said: "I teach for free. They pay me to grade."
Celebrity academics should make their anonymous, low-paid research lackeys take the drugs. Think of how much more prolific the academic superstars could be if their ghost writers were chemically enhanced!
Clint said it much more clearly than I did, earlier in the thread:
I can't argue with this.
The law students are upset that they don't get their grades back for six weeks.
The untenured professors are upset that they don't have tenure.
The tenured professors are upset they don't make as much as practicing attorneys.
The practicing attorneys are upset that they work longer hours than professors.
Sheesh.
And that's not even the best routine I've ever seen "Mr. Personality" do.
I wonder if perhaps alias were to take some drugs to make her smarter and more astute (even with some countervailing side effects), would most people appreciate that even more?
In other news, the Russians, had a state secret overall vitality (mind *and* body) mixture called ADAPT that combined ginseng (the real stuff, not the little bottles sold at drug stores), some berry (Schizandra chinesis) with a certain very legal herb called Rhodiola (see Science News weekly magazine, 22 Sept. 2007, Vol. 172, p185). They gave it to jet pilots etc. The Rhodiola seemed to be the key component.
Another way to pull an all-nighter is to use sleeping pills, regularly, then just stop taking them, but this only works one day, especially if you drink wine with dinner the next day, like I always do. Zzzzzzz...fall asleep in chair, wake up at 3:30AM, and try to sleep in bed. Ugh.
Then there is all the Olde School "smart drugs" like lecithin and acetyl-N-carnitine etc. etc. etc. I admit to bulking up on those when I was a student. Now, an old man twenty years out of college (almost), all I use to stimulate my creativity is beer and girl-watching.
Yeah, but we get the satisfaction of tangible results, the people we deal with are generally less objectionable than law students and law professors, cool junkets involving firearms and explosives are not uncommon, and I suspect most women consider prosecutors as a class sexier than professors as a class. I harbor no bitterness toward law professors.
Yes, that's something sports fans tend to believe...
Speak for yourself. For me, watching Willie Mays play was a religious experience.
Just to supplement (pun intended) the post by NikfromNYCPhD, amphetamines have been used as a performance-enhancing drug in MLB for over 50 years. There seems to be an inexplicable double-standard which accepts amphetamines but rejects steroids or hGH. So that's your advice, Prof. Kerr: chow down on the greenies and get those grades out, but lay off the steroids. You'll have to find some students to help you carry your lecture notes.
But I do mourn the distorting impact of sports on medicine. Naively, you'd think that enhancing performance was a good thing. But that's exactly what the sports mavens find objectionable about performance enhancing drugs: They're just fine with guys destroying their joints by the age of 30, or accumulating closed head injuries, but let a substance actually improve athletic performance, and it's got to be banned to keep it from distorting sports outcomes, and banned for everybody, not just professional athletes.
Considering the extent to which health in old age is influenced positively by having built a decent muscle mass to decline from, the potential of performance enhancing drugs to improve the lot of non-athletes is remarkable, but it's never going to be realized as long as sports drive so much public policy.
Now I know that there are people right here on this blog who can explain to me what things are "really" useful and which things aren't. Thank heavens. I never would have been able to do that on my own. What we should do is create a system where the people who can make those distinctions will decide for everyone else. Then no-one will have to worry about people wasting their time and money on useless endeavors.
I couldn't help but laugh at the thought of law professors working long hours. Does that mean we should expect grades before February this year?
Merry Christmas.
OrinKerr:
Law student,
Some of us work a lot harder than students.
Tell it to the practicing attorneys. =)
Enoch:
Some of us work a lot harder than students.
Tell it to the practicing attorneys. =)
OK
Some of us make 1/3rd the money of practicing attorneys. ;-)
then it should probably matter that 4
Me:
law students make negative money
I'm not here to talk about the past . . .
BUT to return to the TOPIC, and not 'who makes less for more hours of labor': I am an academic who uses amphetamines.
They help my creativity tremendoulsy: I've gone from barely grinding away at minutiae to /giving away/ original research topics to colleagues and grad students, because I simply won't have the time to do them all. I still need 6-7 hours sleep a night: I don't have superhuman endurance as a result of the the meds (Insert V(*)agra joke here). But the connections in my brain have been fired up like never before thanks to 60mg/day of uppers.
After three years, I still cannot belive how much life is when on speed. But the meds are prescribed by my doc as a treatment for a severe, ADA-covered memory disorder. You can imagine how much of a problem that sort of thing is when you are a historian. I slogged through grad school and then my first job without the oranges, or even a diagnosis. So if someone wants to call this cheating," I won't be very sympathetic. Now I can actually remember the names of colleagues, and even family members. Which is nice.
What if a missed trial objection (that I would have caught had I taken some Adderall) ultimately results in my client's execution (on appeal, it would not have been harmless error, but it was not plain error). Seems if I were the client, I'd sure want to know my lawyer did everything he could to be the best advocate possible. I'd want my lawyer funcitoning above 100% if possible.
So, is there an ethical duty to take the pills to enhance your performance and function better than normal so long as you're not breaking the law in acquiring/possessing said pills?
Wow. I don't like where this is going. It's leading toward and ethical duty to stop drinking, carousing, sniffing glue, etc.