Sean A. Spence wrote an article in the Journal of British Psychiatry, about whether we should use drugs to make people behave ethically. Among other points, the paper gives a few examples of ways that drugs are already being used to make people behave ethically.

There are drugs that make you happy, drugs that help you pay attention, and even drugs that make you smarter. What about drugs that increase empathy? There are many potential applications for such a drug.

These drugs might be able to help sociopaths, who have no ability, or a significantly lessened ability to sympathize with other human beings. It could “cure” a sociopath in the same way that an anti-depressant can cure someone with clinical depression.

What if an entire group of people artificially upped their empathy? Would this group of people be happier or sadder, more productive or less productive?

I’m not even willing to guess. This is an area where much more research needs to be conducted. Vast amounts of money are spent on both promoting behavior enhancing drugs, and studying the effects of these drugs on individuals. But, little is being done to research the effects of wide use on a population

The current trend is towards it being okay for everyone to use drugs that “improve” behavior. Is this trend for better or worse?

It is interesting that it usually takes a tragedy to set people straight, and even then some don’t catch on. In October, 2007, 17-year-old Ashton Bonds showed up at Carilion Roanoke Memorial Hospital in rural Virginia, complaining about pain in his side. Less than a week later he was pronounced dead. Ashton was infected with MRSA. MRSA, short for methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus, is a modern day superbug of our own creation. Spawned by the gross over perscription of antibiotics, this superbug is resistant to almost all of the commonly prescribed antibiotics (except vancomyocin).

The scary thing is that this is not the only bug of its kind, there are now several multiple, drug-resistant organisms that have been created. This is just the one we hear about in the news. Other genuses such as Enterococcus, Streptococcus, Neisseria, Salmonella and Mycobacterium tuberculosis all have shown multiple drug resistant strains. So the next time you go to the doctor with a cold, begging for antibiotics, think twice.

The responsibility is on us, not just the doctors, to utilize antibiotic drugs in a responsible way. Antibiotics are a wonderful thing when you really need them, lets hope that they can be as useful to us in the future as they have been in the past.