Survival of the Most Pharmaceuticaly Wealthy

I have written about transhumanism before. This is the belief held by some that the next stage in evolution will be through the use of technology or gene therapy to make us faster, stronger, smarter and all around better. Well, to an extent college kids are doing that now. There is a drug called Adderall, it is used by people with attention deficit disorder because it is claimed that it helps them to concentrate. Well some smart college kids decided it might help them study and it is now common for kids to take these pills in order to pass their classes higher.

KTLA.com - The Adderall Advantage": Students Taking Big Risk for Good Grades

Let us for the sake of argument assume that Adderall actually works, what are the issues in taking the drug? In graduate school I learned some of the other students were taking uppers to help them study. I thought it was foolishness. So what if it works, would you take it just to pass a test? When you get a job, do you stop taking it or do you become dependent on it to do better than others?

Lets think about this a different way. You go out and buy a new car, you buy a new Ford Fiesta. A decent compact car with good gas mileage. You want to go fast so you put the same gas in the car that you would put in a race car. Eventually, you will burn the car out because it wasn't made to go that fast or use that type of fuel. Same things for humans.

Adderall is an amphetamine salt. It is speed. In a study as many as 25% of the kids at one college reported taking it to study. So do you think these kids get the money from their parents to buy the pills? No, they get enough money that they don't have to ask. Kids in Universities tend to come from wealthier families.

So what if you could do better in life if you could afford the medicine? Poor people don't pay $15 for a pill to study better, they couldn't buy enough of them to last four years. If transhumanism occurs, who will be able to afford these "upgrades" and will you feel at a disadvantage if you don't get them? The thing is, all the knowledge in the world is meaningless if one does not have wisdom.

Now lets say that you use pills to compete in the world because you can afford them, wouldn't you want them to be expensive so that not everyone could get them. I mean if everyone could get them then it sort of defeats the purpose. You would get no competitive edge.

I forgot something, the kids at the colleges where binge drinking was big are the same ones more likely to take Aderall according to the article. Well off kids who get completely blasted and then take pills at the last minute to get good grades. So the kids with the best grades that will get the best jobs binge drink and take speed to get ahead. Our future leaders.

Where are we headed as a nation? I mean things are bad enough already; but, where are we headed? We are so busy looking for advantages that we have not earned that we fail to see what a society based on such things becomes. We need to slow down and take an inventory of ourselves rather than plunge head first into new improvements of ourselves.

When did life become all about "winning", when did it stop being about living and growing at our own pace? And what type of world do you win, when you cheat?