Stanford Report, March 4, 2009

Should healthy people take drugs to think better?

Hank Greely

Benjamin Franklin said, "Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise." But such good habits may no longer be enough: Growing numbers of Americans are turning to new drugs that do a better job of enhancing cognition and alertness.

Almost 7 percent of U.S. college students are buying and using prescription drugs such as Ritalin, Adderall and Provigil to study harder and to get better grades, according to a recent study. Many people see this behavior as cheating, but law professor Henry "Hank" Greely, JD, and other leading bioethicists see it as an inevitable evolution of caffeine-fueled study sessions.

Greely, chair of the steering committee of the medical school's Center for Biomedical Ethics, supports the use of cognitive-enhancing drugs given proper risk management, and recently spoke about the issue during a podcast of the "1:2:1" program, produced by the medical school's Office of Communication & Public Affairs. An expert on the legal, ethical and social issues surrounding health law and the biosciences, Greely in December co-authored a Nature paper, "Towards responsible use of cognitive-enhancing drugs by the healthy."

The interview with Greely can be heard at http://med.stanford.edu/121/2009/greely.html.

To subscribe to "1:2:1," a series of conversations about health-care policy and biomedical research, visit Stanford on iTunes U at http://itunes.stanford.edu and go to the "Health and Medicine" category.