Globally, there is growing evidence of using smart drugs, or cognitive-enhancing drugs, by healthy people. So, are they using these smarts drugs to perform in a competitive environment or to tackle daily stress? But, the most important question is it ethical for healthy individuals to use smart drugs for non-medical purposes?
Off-label, people use smart drugs like modafinil and armodafinil to boost their memory, focus, attention, concentration, and motivation in order to perform well under competitive environments.
Doctors often prescribe smart drugs, aka nootropics, for the treatment of cognitive deficits in patients with Alzheimer’s disease, schizophrenia, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), etc.
In a paper, published online last year in the journal Philosophy, Ethics, and Humanities in Medicine, researchers have addressed the ethical issue of the use of smart drugs by healthy individuals who have no medical reason, in the context of boosting their cognitive functions.
Using prescription smart drugs for non-medical purposes has driven many controversies over cognitive enhancement. We do not know the long-term cognitive and biological effects of smart drugs on healthy people. Therefore, the non-medical use of nootropics deserves an in-depth discussion, as far as medical, ethical, and legal issues are concerned.
Many experts say that off-label use of smart drugs that fall under the category of controlled substances is not ethically right. For instance, using prescription smart drugs like Provigil or Nuvigil without a doctor’s recommendation is unethical because those drugs have the potential to cause drug addiction.
There are social, ethical, and legal dilemmas when it comes to the non-medical use of smart drugs. It is important to conduct more studies in terms of the neurophysiological effects of smart drugs and the ethical specifics of their use among different populations.
Dr. George Savulich of the University of Cambridge and his colleagues suggest addressing the main challenges, such as investigating awareness of the risks posed by smart drugs and regulating the legalization of nootropics.
They also recommend exploring the issues of the ethics of healthy individuals taking smart drugs, according to the National Health Institutes (NIH).
“More stringent regulation would most likely only strengthen the growth of the black market, where it is possible to find substances of questionable composition, quality, and purity,” NIH wrote.
Establishing a legal market for smart drugs would allow the drug regulatory bodies to monitor the drugs’ actual efficiency and the drugmakers to concentrate on the development of products in relation to the purpose of medical use.
In addition, establishing an ethical market would help end-users to receive safe, controlled, and legal substances. For many reasons, unethical use of smart drugs to improve cognition needs serious consideration because there is accumulated wisdom about their use, safety, efficacy or social consequences. Also, they may have a huge impact and are ethically disputable.
