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“Smart Drugs” Are Coming to the Office

Executives and entrepreneurs never hesitate to adopt new tools that improve their performance. From spreadsheets to smartphones, innovative technologies have driven enormous gains in productivity in recent decades.

That same drive for peak performance explains why nearly every business gives its employees a legal drug (caffeine) to increase their alertness during meetings, presentations, and brainstorming sessions.

In that context, it’s easy to see why some believe that nootropic drugs (“smart drugs”) could drive the next revolution in productivity. Prescription drugs approved for other uses are increasingly being used by managers, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, lawyers, bankers, and even university professors studying their impact on the brain.
According to a Harvard Business Review article by Carl Cederstrom, the most commonly used smart drugs are:1

- Modafinil, which is sold in the U.S. by Cephalon under the name Provigil and is approved by the FDA as a treatment for excessive sleepiness caused by narcolepsy, obstructive sleep apnea, or shift work sleep disorder,

- Adderall and Ritalin, both of which are prescribed as treatments for attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

Studies show that American college students who do not have sleep disorder or ADHD are using the drugs to sharpen their concentration so they can complete term papers, study for tests, and do well on final exams.

For example, a survey of 616 students at an Ivy League college found that nearly one in five students had misused a prescription drug in an attempt to get better grades, and one in four of those students had done so at least eight times.

As these students graduate and enter the workforce, we can assume that they will depend on performance-enhancing drugs when they need to write a report for a client or deliver a speech. If the users of smart drugs perform at a higher level than their peers, the pressure will be on everyone else in the workplace to take them in order to avoid falling behind.

It’s already happening, according to published reports:

- According to an article in The Financial Times, smart drugs are already “becoming popular among city lawyers, bankers, and other professionals keen to gain a competitive advantage over colleagues.”2

- TechCrunch, a blog that covers tech startups, has called Modafinil the “entrepreneur’s drug of choice” and suggests that one executive who admitted to relying on it to work twenty-hour days isn’t unusual.3

- New York magazine profiled an entrepreneur who is working on one startup during the day and another at night, thanks to Modafinil.4 Not long after taking his first little white pill, “he was experiencing a level of concentration he’d never imagined. ‘My senses sort of shifted to the visual, and my auditory sense went down. Sounds didn’t even register…. It was very easy to stay visually focused.’ Tasks that were usually soul-crushing now had his undivided attention.”

- In a survey completed by 1,400 readers of the scientific journal Nature, “One in five respondents said they had used drugs for non-medical reasons to stimulate their focus, concentration, or memory.”5 The survey found that 62 percent of users took Ritalin and 44 percent took Modafinil, while 15 percent took beta-blockers such as Propanolol, which suggests that some users take more than one drug. Other drugs cited included Adderall, Centrophenoxine, Piractem, and Dexedrine. The most common reason for using the drugs was to improve concentration.

Why are smart drugs becoming popular? Because they work.

Researchers from Harvard Medical School and Oxford University evaluated all of the twenty-four research studies on Modafinil published from January 1990 to December 2014. According to their systematic review, published in the journal European Neuropsychopharmocology, the drug helps people learn, create plans, and make decisions.6 The studies found no side effects other than a few instances of insomnia, headache, or nausea, which were also reported in the placebo group. The researchers’ conclusion: “Modafinil can be considered a cognitive-enhancer.”

Those results are supported by the findings of researchers at Imperial College London, who determined that sleep-deprived surgeons who used Modafinil made better plans, had better concentration, and made better decisions.

In fact, a survey of 1,145 surgeons, published in BMC Medicine, found that 20 percent had taken drugs for cognitive enhancement at least once in their lifetimes.7

The U.S. military is running its own experiments on smart drugs. According to a report on Slate.com, the studies are being conducted at the Air Force Research Laboratory, the Army Aeromedical Research Laboratory, the Army Medical Research and Materiel Command, the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, and the Special Operations Command Biomedical Initiative Steering Committee.8

For example, the military is giving Modafinil to pilots of Blackhawk helicopters and F117 fighter jets to test whether they are able to stay awake and capable of flying while deprived of sleep for eighty-eight hours.

Other countries are running their own experiments on soldiers, pilots, sailors, and paratroopers. The countries known to be active in this research include Canada, China, France, India, the Netherlands, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan. According to Slate, “In nearly every trial, Modafinil has extended the ability to function without sleep.”9

This is obviously a benefit, whether on the battlefield or in the boardroom. But let’s be clear: Smart drugs will not make you smarter. They will enable you to work more hours without sleep. They will enable you to concentrate with a laser-like focus so you can finish a project or make a decision you’ve been avoiding. But they won’t increase the size of your brain or the number of neurotransmitters within it.

If your work requires creativity, a few passing references in studies and articles, when taken together, suggest that smart drugs will make it harder to come up with innovative ideas. The Harvard and Oxford researchers briefly mentioned a study that indicated that creative people became less creative while using Modafinil. A computational neuroscientist who takes it mentioned in another article that it limits his divergent thinking. In other words, smart drugs narrow your focus, rather than expanding it. For some jobs and some projects, improved concentration will lead to greater productivity. But for jobs and tasks that demand creativity and innovation, smart drugs just might make you dumber.

Based on this trend, we offer the following forecasts:

First, the availability of smart drugs will raise several important ethical questions for employers, universities, and individuals.

As Cederstrom points out in the Harvard Business Review, one question is whether using the drugs is a form of cheating, in the same way that athletes who use performance-enhancing drugs are considered to be cheaters.10 Duke University recently revised its policy so that it now considers the “unauthorized use of prescription medicine to enhance academic performance” to be just as dishonest as plagiarism or “using unauthorized equipment or devices on tests, quizzes, assignments, or examinations.” But others, including a Duke professor, believe that smart drugs are as acceptable as coffee. Another concern is that smart drugs could widen the disparity between people who are privileged enough to have access to them and those who are not. On the other hand, it’s possible that prescribing the drugs to less advantaged students would allow them to score higher on standardized tests so they could get into better schools and gain access to better opportunities. Yet another issue is whether employers should require or encourage workers to take them in an effort to boost their performance. While this might seem inappropriate, many companies already use financial incentives to get employees to exercise or take advantage of health screenings in an effort to keep them on the job instead of in the hospital.

Second, peer pressure and the need to keep up with colleagues will play a key role in increasing the penetration of smart drugs in schools and the workplace.

In the Nature survey, 86 percent of respondents said that the drugs should not be given to healthy children under the age of sixteen.11 Yet, one in three parents said they would “feel pressure to give cognition-enhancing drugs to their children if other children at school were taking them.” Similarly, in the study at the Ivy League college, “more students who played a varsity sport and were affiliated with a Greek house reported stimulant misuse compared to students affiliated with only one or neither.” Furthermore, 37 percent of those who took the drugs believed that more than 30 percent of students had done the same, while that belief was held by just 14 percent of those who didn’t take them. Clearly, the pressure to conform to the norms of the team or fraternity plays a role in lowering resistance to using smart drugs, and the sense that “a lot of other people are doing it” motivates people to follow the crowd.

Third, for the military, smart drugs like Modafinil will enable soldiers and pilots to stay alert on the battlefield and in the cockpit.

According to Slate, “The Army rations caffeine gum, and every survey suggests that most U.S. aircrews, when in action, use stimulants.12 Against this background, Modafinil represents a refinement, not an amplification…. The initial idea was to keep you awake for a few extra hours. But the experiments have grown more ambitious, testing drugs for forty, sixty, or even ninety hours without sleep. In journal articles, scientists have speculated that with Modafinil, troops might function for weeks on just four hours of sleep a night…. With multiple countries investigating military Modafinil, staying awake becomes an arms race. A report by the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory explains why: ‘Forcing our enemies to perform continuously without the benefit of sufficient daily sleep is a very effective weapon.’” If U.S. soldiers can fight for twenty hours a day, they will have a significant advantage over enemy troops that get fatigued in half that time.

https://hbr.org/2016/05/like-it-or-not-smart-drugs-are-coming-to-the-office

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/0ac52ea2-fd4e-11e4-9e96-00144feabdc0.html-axzz4GrZK15PB

https://techcrunch.com/2008/07/15/how-many-of-our-startup-executives-are-hopped-up-on-provigil/

http://nymag.com/news/intelligencer/modafinil-2013-4/

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v531/n7592_supp/full/531S2a.html

6. European Neuropsychopharmacology, November 2015, “Modafinil for Cognitive Neuroenhancement in Healthy Non-Sleep-Deprived Subjects: A Systematic Review,” by Ruairidh Battleday and Anna-Katharine Brem. ⓒ 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

http://www.europeanneuropsychopharmacology.com/article/S0924-977X(15)00249-7/fulltext

http://bmcmedicine.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1741-7015-11-102

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/superman/2013/05/sleep_deprivation_in_the_military_modafinil_and_the_arms_race_for_soldiers.html

9. Ibid.

https://hbr.org/2016/05/like-it-or-not-smart-drugs-are-coming-to-the-office

http://www.nature.com/news/2008/080409/full/452674a.html

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/superman/2013/05/sleep_deprivation_in_the_military_modafinil_and_the_arms_race_for_soldiers.html