Enhance your mind
BMJ 2008; 336 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/sbmj.0804142 (Published 01 April 2008) Cite this as: BMJ 2008;336:0804142- Daniel Wood, sixth year medical student1,
- Edmund Naylor, fifth year medical student2,
- Sheheryar Kabraji, fifth year medical student3,
- Julian Savulescu, chair and director4
- 1Oxford University Medical School
- 2Oxford University Medical School
- 3Oxford University Medical School
- 4Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, Oxford
Mind altering drugs have been used for millennia, but until recent decades their use has largely been recreational. Alcohol has a history as long as civilisation and is even used by other primates, and the quest for opium has had a great historical impact. Now drugs designed for medical use have begun to be used by healthy people to enhance experience, intellect, and ability. This poses novel ethical challenges.
Here enhancement is defined as “interventions designed to improve human form or functioning beyond … good health.”1 This is a simplification and the subject of considerable discussion but is suitable for our introduction to the topic.2
The latter half of the 20th century saw the beginnings of modern neuroscience and psychiatry. These disciplines have largely focused on developing treatments for neurological disease, but many of the treatments developed also have profound effects on the healthy brain. Until recently the negative attributes of most prescribed psychotropic drugs ensured non-medical use remained limited, but newer agents are finding a wider audience as the balance between benefits and side effects shifts.
Get a new personality
To date the popular imagination has largely been captured by fluoxetine, the prototypal selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), better known as Prozac. Thanks to marketing and media coverage it has become a household name, and prescriptions of fluoxetine and similar drugs for the treatment of depression have increased massively. This is in part thanks to a safer profile than for older tricyclic antidepressants but also likely to be because of public pressure on prescribers. According to the UK Office for National Statistics, prescriptions of antidepressants rose from 9 to 24.3 million between 1991 and 2001, and this rise looks set to …
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