Hypermotivational Syndrome
By Ed Tenner August 2005
Recently, the Partnership for a Drug-Free America recently gave its
imprimatur to a new buzzword: Generation Rx. Its annual report on what
Americans think of controlled substances showed that for the first time,
more teenagers are abusing prescription painkillers than are using a variety
of common illicit drugs.
What are these prescription drugs being used for? Some of them mimic the
effects of street drugs. For instance, the pain reliever Oxycontin, when
stripped of its coating, can produce a heroinlike high. The consequences of
this kind of abuse are familiar. Antidrug advocates have warned for decades
that drugs impair not only users' health but also their work. Drug-induced
torpor even earned its own name: amotivational syndrome. Timothy Leary's
flameout on the Harvard fast track probably frightened more middle-class
parents than the warnings of J. Edgar Hoover.
But there is an aspect of prescription drug abuse mentioned only briefly in
the report: ingesting to excel, not rebel. There's now a hypermotivational
syndrome, use of prescription drugs not to escape the commanding heights of
education and the economy but to attain them.
The powers that be have long blessed chemical performance enhancement.
Employers once encouraged stimulants: a hundred years ago, African-American
dock workers in the South were given cocaine to fuel their back-breaking
labors. In the Southern textile industry, traveling "dope wagons" brought
milder stimulants like caffeinated, sugary soft drinks and snuff to mill
hands. The U.S. armed forces distributed cigarettes to help servicemen cope
with the combat stress of World War II. Amphetamine use by military flyers
began at the same time and persisted even during later antidrug campaigns,
though at lower dosages, with stricter controls.
Returning veterans stayed with tobacco; their grandchildren are looking
elsewhere for a mental boost. For students with full-blown attention
deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), Ritalin can be a miracle. In 2000,
People magazine profiled a Rhodes scholar who had overcome ADHD as well as
dysgraphia--the inability to organize, spell, or write legibly--partly by
taking Ritalin.
It is thus not surprising that non-ADHD students often try to persuade
family doctors to prescribe off label. Failing that, some students buy pills
on a growing black market. A junior at Yale University claimed that,
fortified with Adderall, he read Crime and Punishment and completed a
15-page paper on it in about 30 hours. The drug is "more efficient" than
caffeine, he told an ABC News correspondent. And Modafinil, also sold as
Provigil, lets military pilots remain alert during prolonged missions
without the perilous feelings of omnipotence or the addiction risk sometimes
linked to the older amphetamines.
Why is there so much passion for enhancing memory and decision-making and so
little for firing the imagination? Until the American Medical Association
declared its opposition to LSD research in 1963, leading to U.S. Senate
hearings in 1966 that resulted in a virtual ban, prominent medical
researchers and artists embraced it as a possible means of therapeutic
insight and expanded creativity.
LSD was marketed to psychiatrists by the Swiss pharmaceutical giant Sandoz.
At first the drug was widely acclaimed as a promising therapeutic tool. In
Saskatchewan, a psychiatrist, Humphry Osmond, and an architect, Kyio Izumi,
ingested LSD in an attempt to empathize with schizophrenia patients while
co-designing a new mental hospital. Aldous Huxley and Allen Ginsberg praised
LSD as a source of knowledge. John Markoff's What the Dormouse Said...
reports that, in the early 1960s, Myron Stolaroff, a former Ampex employee,
founded an institute that recruited volunteers, including some of the
electronics industry's brightest researchers, to explore LSD's potential to
stimulate creativity. Many became believers. (Bill Joy reviews Dormouse in
another article.) A founding programmer of Microsoft told the Washington
Post in 1996, "I consider the insights from LSD to be very useful, both
professionally and personally." The circle of distinguished people taking
LSD constituted a veritable hallucinogentry.
The moment didn't last. The dangers of LSD-induced psychosis and even death
were real. Imagination-enhancing substances were outlawed by the late 1960s.
And proscribed they have remained. Yet the newer drugs also have their
risks, especially psychological dependency. They compete with proven
nonpharmaceutical techniques like meditation. Taken indiscriminately, they
may not provoke users to leap out of windows, but they could lead them to
shut some doors.
