Academics say school students should be able to take 'smart' drugs to help them revise

Use of drugs such as Ritalin among young people is becoming so common that family doctors should be able to prescribe them as study aids to school pupils aged under 18.

That is the provocative but cogently argued view of Dr Ilina Singh, an academic at the London School of Economics. "Psychotropic neuroenhancement by young people under 18 is growing, and is certain to increase further with the availability of effective drugs and increasing tolerance for neuroenhancement practices," she writes in the American Journal of Bioethics-Neuroscience. This, and the difficult ethical issues raised by teenagers being given drugs to boost their learning, has prompted her and co-author Kelly J Kelleher to suggest what they call "a rationale for clinical management of psychotropic drug neuroenhancers for young people".

They explain: "If neuroenhancement in young people is to become a common social practice, which is likely ... if they meet the rigorous parameters that will ensure minimum risk and maximum benefit, all young people ought to have access to existing resources to improve themselves and their performance".

They suggest a situation whereby GPs would be able to prescribe these substances to schoolchildren wanting to boost their memory or capacity to stay awake – to revise, for example. Safeguards would have to include both the child and parents consenting to the taking of these "smart" drugs, and, crucially, proof that pushy parents had not cajoled their offspring into it.

Singh is the LSE's Wellcome Trust university lecturer in bioethics and society, and her LSE profile says she specialises in "the psycho-social and ethical implications of new biomedical technologies for children and families". Kelleher is a professor of paediatrics and psychiatry at the Nationwide Children's Hospital in Columbus, Ohio. Briefly, they argue that consumption of these drugs by both adults and young people in America, Europe and the UK is growing. Use of stimulants "will also increase, not least because the use of psychotropic neuroenhancing agents will likely become normal in future generations".

More controversially, they say that "from an ethical perspective" these drugs are little different from using caffeine, "brain exercise" regimes, tutors, vitamins and early learning programmes such as Baby Mozart.

"We believe the acceptance of drug delivery techniques will normalise, as more and more people choose to take these drugs. At that point, several advantages of drug-delivered neuroenhancement – ease of use, quick results and the perception of greater efficacy than other interventions – will likely outweigh the intuition that it is wrong to psychotropically enhance young people's cognition and performance."

Singh insists she is not endorsing NHS prescription on demand in the UK, and says her views and research on this only apply to the US, although her paper appears to offer advice to any country where there is an emerging trend. The authors argue that as a safeguard, only stimulants that cannot easily be abused should be prescribed, and that pupils should be able to take them only for a short while. And the fact that young people are probably more vulnerable to side-effects than adults would have to be flagged up.

New memory-enhancing drugs developed to help Alzheimer's patients "have clear applications in the enhancement of young people's academic performance, and it is highly probable that they will eventually be used for this purpose", the authors predict.