Smart Drugs vs Performance Enhancing Drugs

[NobleSavage]

If you test positive for testosterone (or 1000 other drugs) in sports you get banned, even if your doctor prescribes it. Should kids who take Adderall, to get through finals, be kicked out?

 

[braces_for_impact]

Doesn't seem like apples to oranges to me. One is trying to enhance abilities beyond their normal capabilities while the other is trying to approach "normalcy" by using the drug. (Unless you meant kids using it without a prescription.) Anyway, I don't think Aderall actually helps you concentrate any better if you don't have ADD, at least no more than say, coffee does. I could be wrong about that though.

 

[NobleSavage]

Doesn't seem like apples to oranges to me. One is trying to enhance abilities beyond their normal capabilities while the other is trying to approach "normalcy" by using the drug. (Unless you meant kids using it without a prescription.) Anyway, I don't think Aderall actually helps you concentrate any better if you don't have ADD, at least no more than say, coffee does. I could be wrong about that though.

You can get a doctor to prescribe testosterone if you have below average levels. Tons of college kids take Aderall and similar stimulants during finals. What if we had better smart drugs? What if the side effects of PEDs were similar to caffeine?

NCAA banned substances:

Caffeine if concentrations in urine exceed 15 micrograms/ml

http://www.ncaa.org/health-and-safety/policy/2014-15-ncaa-banned-drugs

Granted that is a high dose, but why don't they do that test before exams?

 

[Kharakov]

Doesn't seem like apples to oranges to me. One is trying to enhance abilities beyond their normal capabilities while the other is trying to approach "normalcy" by using the drug. (Unless you meant kids using it without a prescription.) Anyway, I don't think Aderall actually helps you concentrate any better if you don't have ADD, at least no more than say, coffee does. I could be wrong about that though.

I've heard from various sources that amphetamines have been used (without prescription) to pass all sorts of tests. A friend of mine told me he went to a pharmacist (back in the 60s) and they gave him a bottle of dextroamphetamine pills to help him cram for a test.

 

[J842P]

Most of the stimulant abuse I witnessed in college was in an effort to pull all-nighters, usually before finals or term-papers, or whatnot. It's not exactly nootropic. Perhaps a more precise analogy would be the use of analgesics during training. Regardless, I don't buy the outright ban on "performance enhancing drugs", but even if I did, I don't see what college students are doing with stimulants as exactly analogous to what professional athletes are doing. For that matter, why should education be run like professional sports?

I sense some ulterior motive in this OP - that is, I don't think you believe that educational institutions should be expelling students for the use of stimulants. You are using that to arrive at another point.

So what are you getting at? The issue of performance enhancing drugs in professional sports? If that's so, then why bring up stimulant use in education?

 

[NobleSavage]

Most of the stimulant abuse I witnessed in college was in an effort to pull all-nighters, usually before finals or term-papers, or whatnot. It's not exactly nootropic. Perhaps a more precise analogy would be the use of analgesics during training. Regardless, I don't buy the outright ban on "performance enhancing drugs", but even if I did, I don't see what college students are doing with stimulants as exactly analogous to what professional athletes are doing. For that matter, why should education be run like professional sports?

I sense some ulterior motive in this OP - that is, I don't think you believe that educational institutions should be expelling students for the use of stimulants. You are using that to arrive at another point.

So what are you getting at? The issue of performance enhancing drugs in professional sports? If that's so, then why bring up stimulant use in education?

No ulterior motive. I just want to compare the two. I think there is a double standard. Nobody gives a shit if you use a stimulants to get better grades. In sports that behavior it's banned.

 

[J842P]

Most of the stimulant abuse I witnessed in college was in an effort to pull all-nighters, usually before finals or term-papers, or whatnot. It's not exactly nootropic. Perhaps a more precise analogy would be the use of analgesics during training. Regardless, I don't buy the outright ban on "performance enhancing drugs", but even if I did, I don't see what college students are doing with stimulants as exactly analogous to what professional athletes are doing. For that matter, why should education be run like professional sports?

I sense some ulterior motive in this OP - that is, I don't think you believe that educational institutions should be expelling students for the use of stimulants. You are using that to arrive at another point.

So what are you getting at? The issue of performance enhancing drugs in professional sports? If that's so, then why bring up stimulant use in education?

No ulterior motive. I just want to compare the two. I think there is a double standard. Nobody gives a shit if you use a stimulants to get better grades. In sports that behavior it's banned.

Again, what does education have to do with professional sports? Why should there be consistency between the two areas? They seem like very different things to me. To say that there is a double standard presupposes that the two activities should be held to the same standard. But that isn't obvious to me at all.

I guess it's hard for me to grok since I actually support allowing the use of performance enhancing drugs in sports.

 

[Bomb#20]

If you test positive for testosterone (or 1000 other drugs) in sports you get banned, even if your doctor prescribes it. Should kids who take Adderall, to get through finals, be kicked out?

The point of a sports competition is to test whether the other player/team can play the game better than you. The point of finals is to test whether you've learned the course material.

 

[NobleSavage]

If you test positive for testosterone (or 1000 other drugs) in sports you get banned, even if your doctor prescribes it. Should kids who take Adderall, to get through finals, be kicked out?

The point of a sports competition is to test whether the other player/team can play the game better than you. The point of finals is to test whether you've learned the course material.

I don't know... the point of a test for a lot of people is to have a higher grade than everyone else. The ultimate goal is to have a higher GPA than everyone else so you can get into a good college or get a scholarship. In law school you get an exact rank from first to last. You don't get into Stanford if you get a B in chemistry. I'd say academic competition is every bit as fierce as professional sports.

 

[Bomb#20]

I'd say academic competition is every bit as fierce as professional sports.

Maybe so; but it's not supposed to be. Academia is supposed to be about shared pursuit of knowledge, not crushing the other guy; to apply sports standards would be to abandon the ideal, and embrace school as a game to be won or lost. If you want to talk "double standards", PEDs are the least of the issue. In sports it's perfectly okay to shove somebody and knock him over to get him away from the puck; if you shove another student to the ground to get him away from a math problem he can answer better than you they'll expel you.

 

[NobleSavage]

I'd say academic competition is every bit as fierce as professional sports.

Maybe so; but it's not supposed to be.

Good luck with that. If we are gonna have a meritocracy we will have lots of competition.