Cognitive enhancing drug use amongst students in (neoliberal) higher education: a functional response

Abstract

Over the past number of decades there has been an increasing amount of literature and media attention concerning the use of cognitive enhancing drugs (CEDs), particularly by higher education students. This increased interest in the use of CEDs by contemporary higher education students, has seemingly coincided with the spread of neoliberalism, principally in the West, into every sphere of the social environment, including higher education. Accordingly, along with the trend in wider enhancement drug use, the use of CEDs by higher education students and the apparent significance of neoliberalism to this drug trend, requires innovative theoretical developments in the area of drugs and drug use. Certainly, the use of CEDs by higher education students does not neatly fit within dominant, established drug use theories, often developed in accordance with medical perspectives, which frequently individualise, pathologize and stigmatise, via the subsequent positioning of drug users within dichotomic binaries, such as, the prevailing recreational or problematic, dichotomic binary. Therefore, this paper draws on the author’s qualitative research, to establish an innovative, ‘Functional Response Framework’ for augmenting understandings of CED use by students in higher education. In addition, a Functional Response Framework can make a significant contribution to advancing theoretical understandings of drug use, more broadly.

Keywords:

• Cognitive enhancing drugs
• higher education
• students
• neoliberalism
• theoretical developments
• drug use

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 It should be noted that, historically, the term ‘Nootropics’ represented a different class of substances than the contemporary notion of CEDs. According to Dr. Corneliu Giurage (1973), who first coined the term ‘nootropic’, a ‘nootropic’ substance, be it natural or synthetic, should meet the following criteria: Enhance learning and memory. Be non-Stimulant or Sedative. Promote interhemispheric transfer. Augment cerebral resistance. Reinforce subcortical processes. Cause no harm, or negative side effects, to the user.

2 From the 1970s onwards, neoliberalism has generally been linked with, The Chicago School of Economics (Davies, 2014, 2017; Harvey, 2007).

3 Phenibut is a drug developed in Russia that is similar in molecular structure to the brain chemical gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA) and is purported to be an anxiolytic and a CED. However, unlike other anxiolytics such as Benzodiazapines, anecdotally, Phenibut does not produce sedative like effects, when taken in low doses (Lapin, 2001).

4 In the UK, Paramol is an over-the-counter pharmaceutical painkiller comprised of Paracetamol and the opiate, Dihydrocodeine.