Do the adults organizing this consider the possibility that at least one of those anonymous nicknames may actually be a 15 year old struggling with his homework with $80 to blow? I hope they can live with that childs health on their conscience if anything goes wrong -- it would not be a position I would be placing myself in.
While I'm a little hazy as to whom you are referring to when you say "organizing adults", I can still presume the answer is probably no.
For one, it is not the organizing adult's responsibility, but it is ultimately either the user's or the legal guardian's. Look at any other situation; minors abusing drugs, alcohol, even hanging out with the wrong crowd, are truly the responsibility of their legal guardian.
Aside from ethics, I would hope minors and/or general users would be responsible enough to do background homework on any substance/supplement before they even think about ingesting it. I'm not even sure what racetams are considered to be (drugs, supplements, ect..), but, in general, they are considered to be safe. For instance, Piracetam has been well studied and shows both lower toxicity than salt while providing neuroprotective properties that also has effectiveness in treating mental decline. Studies have been done on healthy young individuals, and the results seem to be more or less subtle and inconclusive. Not to mention, such studies were done decades ago, and I have never read any reports of mental decline as repercussion from such studies.
As for ingesting unstudied substance, I agree with you completely. It's just a bad idea. But, as for the studied ones which are shown to be safe, I see no problem.
And to one of your points, as for students using well established and generally accepted safe supplements, for academic gain, and even healthy adults using them to seek cognitive enhancement, I see no problem. To be completely honest though, my viewpoint on this matter is very bias, as I am such a user. In my opinion it is the same thing as someone who takes prescribed Adderall. Notice how I said prescribed. This is because just as prescribed Adderall is a legal "enhancer", substances such as Piracetam are legal without such permission from a medical professional as well. There are no laws against such use, and I don't expect there to be. If you really want to be nitty-gritty with the ethics of such use, then 'enhancement' would have to be defined more explicitly. The reason for this being that you could even consider simple stimulants like caffeine (in my opinion to be the ORIGINAL nootropic, Europe has been said to be "built on caffeine", long night study sessions, ect..), certain daily supplements, and even possibly certain foods as 'enhancers'. I mean, hell, we might as well start to throw into the mix their parent's social class, ethnic background, date of birth (outlined by Malcom Gladwell in his bestselling book Outliers [I STRONGLY encourage to read this book]), primary education, and other such factors that do eventually favor one person over another and label them as 'enhancers'. Currently these could be classified as such, and this is the exact reason this area remains untouched.
I'm a Freshman in college at a very well established institution, and I will have you know that it is an extremely common practice to use such 'enhancers'. This leads me to my next point that is almost never looked at: future enhancers. If we're going to discuss the ethics of enhancers, what the hell, this needs to be mentioned. These future enhancers are something the average person has yet to conceive. Through my studies and research, I have been privileged to work on the future of enhancers (which isn't what they are really called, just for the sake of this discussion). Now, when I say future enhancers, one who knows of nootrpics may picture a limitless pill, this is even considered piddly compared to the magnitude of such future enhancers.
Now, let me preface this by saying that these ideas are difficult to fathom and sound like science fiction, and are a reality that our government and top institutions, as well as our brightest minds, are currently debating and working on. And to meme lovers: This is about to escalate quickly.
As you may know, technology is exponentially developing, and this exponential growth has a kind of 'cap' so to speak of. This cap is generally referred to as the singularity. It is estimated, by extremely well qualified individuals (Ray Kurzweil), that a computer will have the computational power of the human brain in the next two decades. Then imagine another decade off, it will have the computational power of the entire human race, remember I said hard to fathom, right? Such advances are accompanied by exponential growth in the study of the human brain. Here's where it gets REALLY crazy. Due to this growth, BCIs (Brain-computer interfaces) are about one or two decades off as well. To people who doubt this claim, look at the human genome project, it started out PAINFULLY slow, with a relative completion rate of 1% at the half marker of the study. With Obama's initiation of a project to map the human brain, we will have similar results. With this knowledge we will be able to start emulating the human brain. Now, here's where even the best minds start to drop off. You'd think we would start to treat learning a subject like putting a flashdrive into a computer, but for the brain, right? While this probably would be an intermediate step and a future enhancer for sure, it is not the ultimate goal.
Humans tend to believe we are the ultimate and unquestionable pinnacles of evolution. I'm sorry to break up that party, but, that's just wrong. The truth is, we're still evolving. One small problem though, calculations show that the human brain is an optimal size for computation (based on longer neural connections and such) and a brain that is any bigger would actually suffer performance. While this is true of biological systems, it is not true of technological systems. Once we have nailed such triumphs as an artificial brains and BCIs, the inevitable will come, and we will migrate from our host's body into these non-biological systems. We will become many many times smarter and live many times longer, and for what this holds, nobody knows. This will not only be a pinnacle for biological enhancement, but it will be our evolutionary step from homo-sapiens to homo-evolutis. Homo-sapien is latin for "wise man" and homo-evolutis is latin for "man who control one's own evolution". A lot of people consider this "unnatural", but fundamentally how is it any different than natural evolution? We are exploiting our evolutionary advantage: cumulative knowledge as a product of our imagination, just as unicellular organisms exploit chemistry, multicellular organisms exploit large numbers, and animals exploit systems of multicellular organisms (organs). But now that we are able to manipulate matter and incorporate it in ourselves, it becomes "unnatural"? I don't think so. I could go much more in depth on the ethics of this, but for the sake of people's time and space, will not.
This is easily going to happen in the next century, so relatively speaking, racetams are weak enhancers for this century. While this all may sound off topic, I wanted to share why I think general enhancers are ok, and are actually for the betterment of humanity. If we pinned them down and said no, what good is scientific advancement? I mean, where do people think science is taking us? To continue a capitalist market until the end of civilization? I'd hope not.
Now, there all some sad truths to future enhancers and these are more worthy ethical inquiries (when it comes to enhancers). For one, they won't be cheap - at all, and this determines accessibility. Secondly, many will reject this, probably religious people, as we will basically become "gods" as homo-evolutis advances to points that are really unimaginable. Third, the people who are left behind, without a doubt, will be less intelligent.
Final note: I expect backlash, but I simply ask to keep it civil.
Edited by CrazyIguana, 10 April 2013 - 12:32 AM.
