(Published February 17, 2009)
Like it or not, performance-enhancing drugs may be the wave of the future. Not just for professional athletes…but for the average employee.
All heck broke loose last week when the Yankees' Alex Rodriguez admitted that he'd taken performance-enhancing drugs in the past. He wasn't the first MLB superstar to do so, and he won't be the last. But whatever your opinion is of A-Rod and his doping, the fact is that performance enhancers are expressly prohibited in the MLB.
Not so on college campuses. Prescription drugs such as Adderall and Ritalin (stimulants used for the treatment of Attention Deficit Disorder) and Provigil (a stimulant used for the treatment of narcolepsy) are being sought by perfectly healthy students for a well-documented off-label use: keeping the user mentally sharp. Like caffeine (a less potent cognitive-enhancing stimulant), these drugs can't actually make a person smarter. But they can enable the user to do mental calculations a little quicker, to concentrate longer and harder, to remain mentally sharp after too much work or too little sleep.
Use of these drugs is perfectly legal, as long as it's by the prescription-holder. (They are often bought and sold on the black market, however, which is illegal.)
An article published in the December 2008 issue of the scientific journal Nature caused a stir when it advocated this kind of "responsible use of cognitive-enhancing drugs by the healthy" and urged society to reject the idea that "enhancement" is a dirty word. The article cited a survey that estimated that almost 7% of students in U.S. colleges have used prescription stimulants in this way, and that on certain campuses, up to 25% of students had done so in the past year.
So what's going to happen when all these artificially enhanced students graduate and wind up in the workplace as artificially enhanced employees? An episode of NBC-TV's "ER" addressed this possibility a few seasons back — a medical student who'd been prescribed Ritalin for ADD as a child was still dependent on it to give her a mental edge, much to the disapproval of her supervising medical resident. Yet when she tried weaning herself off, her supervisor scolded her for being too slow, too disorganized, not "on the ball."
Whether an employee takes a legally prescribed drug in the workplace is generally none of their employer's concern. But what happens to co-workers who are relying on their own unenhanced brains and brawn to get their work done? Will managers' expectations become skewed by the results produced by enhanced workers, putting "natural" employees at a disadvantage? Or is it akin to some employees choosing to chug caffeine-packed Red Bulls every couple of hours for extra energy while others abstain?
And what about the hiring process? Will you start to wonder whether an applicant's stellar college transcript is attributable to a prescription? And what if the applicant confirms that he/she was helped by cognitive enhancers? Would disqualifying them from the position on that basis be an illegally discriminatory act?
It's a slippery slope. Just some food for thought! (Now, where's my steaming hot cup of caffeine…I mean, coffee...)
Eileen Mager
Writer
Home
