Will Drugs Make Us Smarter and Happier?

5:50 p.m. I´m driving home, and Senator Davidson is on the radio. I support this psychopharm-disclosure bill she´s pushing. Shouldn´t we have the right to know if our elected leaders are taking empathogens and avarice-reducers like they´re supposed to? My wife is working late tonight; I´m with the kids. I love them, but sometimes my patience wears thin. With the advanced beta-blocker I take, though, a tantrum doesn´t set me off. Before bed, we say prayers. Truthfully, I never used to believe. But one little white entheogen pill and I feel-I don´t know, a presence. It´s comforting.

Smarts, of course, don´t guarantee happiness. In the pro- enhancement manifesto The Hedonistic Imperative, transhumanist philosopher David Pearce calls for liberation from our natural biochemistry-the â€sick psycho-chemical ghetto bequeathed by our genetic pastâ€-and the beginning of an era of â€paradise engineering.†With the help of drugs, he writes, we´ll be able to chemically crank our dopaminergic systems so that â€undiluted existential happiness will infuse every second of waking and dreaming existence.â€

Sounds great. Sounds familiar, too. Similar if slightly more modest claims circulated two decades ago about Prozac, Paxil and other selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) antidepressants. The drugs are indeed effective and popular. Still, most Americans don´t use them. Their side effects-jitteriness, fuzzy thinking and diminished sex drive-are one reason they haven´t been widely adopted as enhancers, says Samuel Barondes, a psychiatrist at the University of California at San Francisco and author of Better Than Prozac: Creating the Next Generation of Psychiatric Drugs. â€The public´s desire for a pure, selective-acting wonder drug remains.â€

For much of the 20th century, drug development relied on luck-usually in the form of a serendipitous discovery that a known substance had additional positive effects. Miltown, the first blockbuster psychiatric drug, launched in the 1950s, was originally an antibiotic; Prozac, created in 1972, was a descendant of a common over-the-counter antihistamine.

Going forward, drug development will become less depen-dent on chance. Studies of genetically modified lab animals are revealing valuable information about the genetic and biochemical mechanisms underlying mood. At the University of Colorado, behavioral geneticist John DeFries selectively bred dozens of generations of mice until he had a dark-haired strain that was 30 times as brave as an albino one, as mea-sured by fearfulness tests. The gene variants governing mouse anxiety may turn out to be different than the human ones, but DeFries´s discoveries will probably shed light on genetic contributions to human fear-and may lead to new drug targets.

The completion of the Human Genome Project in 2003 and the rapidly decreasing cost of tools to collect and analyze DNA samples are also aiding drug development. By examining the gene variants that distinguish a depressed man from his happy brother, for instance, researchers may be able to create a more effective mood-elevating drug. Maybe. This burgeoning field, known as psychiatric genetics, is controversial. Any given aspect of personality, behavior or mood is influenced by the interplay of multiple genes-often a dozen or more-as well as environmental factors.

Nevertheless, futurists hail these genetic advances; some drug developers do as well, though more cautiously. In 2001 Emory University neurobiologist Larry Young genetically engineered a line of male prairie voles to have extra receptors for the hormone vasopressin. The manipulated voles formed bonds with females more quickly than normal voles and didn´t need to have sex before doing so. Futurists wonder: Will this knowledge pave the way for a drug to domesticate wayward men? Dean Hamer, chief of gene structure and regulation at the National Cancer Institute, has found that people with a variation of the VMAT2 gene, which affects the transport of the neurochemical monoamine, are more likely to report having transcendent spiritual experiences. Futurists wonder: A pill to make you believe in God?

And finally, happiness itself. Studies of twins have indicated that our fundamental dispositions may be 40 to 50 percent rooted in genetics. Futurist James Hughes writes in Citizen Cyborg: Why Democratic Societies Must Respond to the Redesigned Human of the Future that â€the heritability of happiness . . . suggests that there could be future drugs and gene therapies that jack our happiness set-point to its maximum without negative side effects.â€

June 7, 2025, 8 p.m.I´m out at dinner with my wife, and things couldn´t be better. Hard to believe we were so close to divorce. All that tiresome couples counseling. Then, simple oxytocin therapy. In a few sessions, it was as if we were dating again-such great chemistry. Right now, we´re on our third bottle of Connect-serotonin levels up, corticosteroid levels down. Sure, you can have an intimate conversation without this stuff, but it´s so much easier with it. We´ll go dancing later. Not naturally my thing, but I can pop some Steppinex-it makes me feel ecstatic. Before driving home, I´ll take an AntiStep and instantly be sober.Let´s say the optimists are right, and we´re able to create powerful new enhancement drugs. Should we? To many people, the answer is clear: absolutely not. Social critic Francis Fukuyama, author of Our Posthuman Future, presents a disquieting vision of a pharma-enhanced population. â€Stolid people can become vivacious; introspective ones extroverted; you can adopt one personality on Wednesday and another for the weekend,†he writes. Fukuyama worries that the qualities that make us essen-tially human would be lost.

Biomedical philosopher Leon Kass, who recently chaired President Bush´s Council on Bioethics, writes that â€in those areas of human life in which excellence has until now been achieved only by discipline and effort, the attainment of those achievements by means of drugs . . . looks to be ´cheating.´â€ Enhancement, in his view, is wrong because it is unfair. And unnatural: â€All of our encounters with the world . . . would be mediated, filtered, and altered.†More than human, in his view, is no longer human at all.
Back at the casino, Naam and I decide to have another go at the tables. He watches closely, soaking up information from the dealer and other players. Soon he´s hitting when he should hit, staying when he should stay, and doubling down. He goes up $120 before pushing back from the table, smiling and flipping the dealer a tip. Seldom is learning so rapid. Still, if Naam had been on a cognitive enhancer, maybe he would have learned even faster and lost less money up-front. Would that be unnatural? Unfair?

â€I think it´s unfair that Michael Jordan was born with better basketball genes than me,†he says. â€If somebody has a
disposition toward being smarter or having a better memory than me, then maybe drugs could help even that out.†Naam also disagrees that enhancement drugs are unnatural. â€The urge to better ourselves has been a force in history as far back as we can see,†he says as we head for the door. â€Embracing the quest to improve ourselves doesn´t call our hu-manity into question-it reaffirms it.â€

James Vlahos wrote about the riskiness of everyday life in July´s Popular Science.