Institute For The Future

Performance-Enhancing... Marijuana?

 

A recent survey about performance-enhancing drugs and poker has gotten some press for the not-terribly-shocking finding that approximately 80 percent of those surveyed take some sort of performance-enhancing drug to improve play. I say I'm not surprised because poker seems to fit the type of activity that an outstanding 2009 New Yorker article described as the sort of activity most likely to encourage the use of enhancement therapies: An activity involving intense competition, where "small advantages produce disproportionate rewards.” Naturally, I expected that poker players would use the sort of neuroenhancers that Margaret Talbot described in that article--drugs to concentrate, drugs to stay awake and work harder. As she described it at the end of her piece, neurological enhancers to boost productivity are becoming the defining drugs of the next decade:

 

But it’s not the mind-expanding sixties anymore. Every era, it seems, has its own defining drug. Neuroenhancers are perfectly suited for the anxiety of white-collar competition in a floundering economy. And they have a synergistic relationship with our multiplying digital technologies: the more gadgets we own, the more distracted we become, and the more we need help in order to focus. The experience that neuroenhancement offers is not, for the most part, about opening the doors of perception, or about breaking the bonds of the self, or about experiencing a surge of genius. It’s about squeezing out an extra few hours to finish those sales figures when you’d really rather collapse into bed; getting a B instead of a B-minus on the final exam in a lecture class where you spent half your time texting; cramming for the G.R.E.s at night, because the information-industry job you got after college turned out to be deadening. Neuroenhancers don’t offer freedom. Rather, they facilitate a pinched, unromantic, grindingly efficient form of productivity.

 

 

 

 

So I was surprised, then, that in addition to these sorts of efficiency-focused enhancers, poker players are turning to a chemical that's known for having, well, different effects. In addition to drugs for concentration and energy, poker players use marijuana to enhance their play.

 

In a presentation of these findings, researchers led by Kevin Clauson offer some representative quotes from poker players to explain the finding. "I am a tilt monkey, then I smoke weed," one player said. "Then I stop being a tilt monkey." That is to say, this poker player gets caught up in the emotion of the game and starts making ill-advised choices; marijuana helps calm him down and play a more focused game.

 

I bring this up in the context of our Health Horizons conference this week, where, among other things, we'll be examining what it might mean to use medical sciences for enhancement purposes. We often think about enhancements in a fairly uniform way: As tools for to make us smarter and more capable of concentrating, or, in the case of athletes, as chemicals and surgeries to improve physical health and strength.

 

But this example from poker players calls that assumption that there are a limited number of ways to enhance into question. It highlights, for instance, that while for some people, the path to dealing with stressful situations involves more concentration, for others, it might involve something more relaxing.

 

One of the participants in our discussion at the conference, Carl Elliott, wrote a fantastic book Better Than Well a few years ago that notes that this question of medical enhancement is deceptively simple: While lines between treatment and enhancement sound straightforward, they get at deeper questions about the nature of our identities, about our social influences, and the challenges we face in our lives and about the competition we face between each other.

 

In this sense, one way of thinking about health enhancements is to think of them as tools--chemicals, foods, surgeries--that help people cope with challenges of a complex world and navigate that world in a preferred way. They don't treat anything so much as shift the nature of normal.