Hacking your Brain

Quite a few people I know take drugs. None are druggies, because they're rather careful about what they take. I haven't seen any of the addictive ones like coke or heroin – it’s ot hard to get them, of course, and some people have tried them, but nobody I know uses them regularly. The most common one you see and smell is weed. People use it to relax and to have a more enjoyable time on the weekend. A good thing is that you never see anyone who's loud or violent because they smoke up; you can't say the same thing about drinking. But bad things are that you never know quite what you're getting, and that it's illegal. Cops swoop down on some places where they know drugs are being used, and I sometimes think about what would happen if they sealed off the Res and searched everyone's stuff on a Friday night. A lot of people would be in a lot of trouble.

Other kinds of drug that you often see are amphetamines. These have quite the opposite effect: they make it easy to keep plugging away at your schoolwork for hours longer than you normally would, so you can get that paper done or that exam studied for. These are not illegal drugs, and some people can fake ADHD and get a doctor to prescribe them. Taking them if you're a normal person is called "off-label". The companies who make them say they don't like this off-label use, but they probably don't work very hard to prevent it. They certainly make a lot of off-label money around here. Mostly, the people who take them haven't begun their work soon enough; they've partied and procrastinated for too long, and now the pills are the only way to get it done in time. Then the next time they have to get schoolwork done, they know what worked last time, so they think they can party more and leave the work until the last minute again, as long as they've got the pills.

But there are those who have a different attitude. They’re serious about their work, and for some, their work is never good enough to satisfy them -- the kinds of people who think of an A as not good enough because it should have been an A+. These people will tell you that they are actually smarter with the drugs: they can work a lot longer, better focus, and get things done that they wouldn’t have been able to complete otherwise. I said to one of these people, "Hey, you're making yourself into a person you're really not." He agreed: "self-enhancement", he called it. "I just want to be the best person I can be." He told me that he could maintain a 10 hour a week part time job in the cafeteria that otherwise he wouldn't have had the time for, and that without that money, he didn't think he'd be able to come back at all next year. He talked about people who are naturally depressed and negative about everything; they take antidepressants and then suddenly are different people from what they really are. That's true, I've seen it. I had an uncle who was bad-tempered and down on everything, and he suddenly became a changed and much-improved guy. Later, I heard it was because he'd starting taking antidepressants. So what's the difference? Hard to answer that one.

But where will it end? If too many people have this attitude, everyone else will have to work longer and harder to compete with them. Profs will see what these people can do without necessarily knowing how they do it, so they'll increase their demands on everyone else as well. That way, there will be pressure on everyone else to take these drugs. Or maybe they'll ban them and make us pee into a bottle before every exam. Another thing: the competition to get into this University is brutal, and I know some parents who get weekend and summer tutors for their perfectly normal kids at age 15, and will do anything at all to make them get higher marks.

"Kid enhancement": it scares me to think of it.