A Brave New World of Performance Enhancing Drugs at Work?


An alarming report has just been published, ‘Human Enhancement and the Future of Work.’

Worries about the report are compounded by an article in today’s Financial Times including comments from the Work Foundation’s Ian Brinkley.

Brinkley is quoted as saying, “The idea of using enhancements to help older people and the disabled back into work is uncontroversial…”

Really, Ian? I can’t believe your former colleagues at the TUC would go along with this way of thinking.

 Dangerous assumptions lurk in Brinkley’s singling out of ‘older people and the disabled’ being potentially in need of performance enhancing drugs.

Let us presume for one moment that the pace of work in the twentieth century were to justify such pharmaceutical interventions – is such relentless ratcheting up of pressure to pass without comment?

Is there no more in life than value for money appraisals with speed up drugs and greater focus demanded beyond the limits of natural human abilities? 

Let’s be clear about it – anyone with a medical condition should be prescribed whatever treatment his or her doctor considers necessary. But the idea that healthy older or disabled people should be assumed to be ‘correctible’, or ‘improvable’ to acceptable levels of performance by the administration of medication is offensive and deeply worrying.

Let’s be fair to Ian – he accepts that “…employers insisting on the use of drugs for disabled and older workers would be a bridge too far.” I should hope so!

But once we start down this road it will be very hard to draw the lines. Who is to say who is insisting and who is just making a quiet suggestion in a friendly chat?

Methinks this subject demands careful unpacking.

On one level, using drugs to enhance performance could be said to be part of the world we already know – who hasn’t written a student essay to meet a deadline under the influence of a few cups of black coffee, for example? So there are no absolutes in this discussion but there are big differences in the kinds of drugs.

We are not talking of a tea time pick me up.

Let’s not go into drugs in sport, but the world of cycling has seen a time when performance enhancement using EPO, blood doping, human growth hormone and various steroids and stimulants was pretty close to the surface of normality for a while.

It was an awful, duplicitous, cheating world destroying lives and creating a veneer of falsehood in what should be a simple, enjoyable human challenge – to work and compete as honestly and fairly as we can to win.

Quite rightly, the idea of drug cheats in sport outrages one’s common sense of decency and fairness. The same principle applies at work. If X is promoted above me because he or she takes drugs, what message does that create? Once this genie is out of the bottle there is no putting it back.

Moreover, the drug has not been invented yet that does not have some kind of adverse effect on the human body and life expectancy.  

For sure, famous artists and writers have worked under the influence of narcotics. (Byron was an opium eater. Shelley on laudanum; Hemingway stewed under an alcoholic haze; Gaugin, Van Gogh and Toulouse Lautrec got their jollies on absinth.)

On the other hand, whether any of these substances actually enhanced their performances is a moot point.

They were the lifestyle choices of the individuals concerned which with the benefit of hindsight most of us see as misguided and decadent.

We now know more of the devastating health consequences of most of these drugs. We don’t need to be persuaded that heroin (an opiate) is a dangerous and health threatening drug for example, even though Byron probably wrote Don Juan with its molecules buzzing round his brain.

We don’t really know what side effects long term use of drugs will lead to until it is be too late - perhaps some twenty years down the line. What else might we expect if this brave new world becomes the reality?

Willingness to use drugs might become essential if one is to enter certain professions or occupations.

Older workers might for example, be encouraged to carry on working night shifts under the influence of drugs, with unknown potential consequences for their health.

Instead of taking a stand for better work life balance, unions (who knows?) and employers could be tempted down the road of recommending performance enhancers to enable workers to cope with long hours and stressful jobs.

The expectation that an older person can take drugs to succeed at work is a short step away from the idea that he or she might need them to get a job in the first place.

People struggling in the labour market might feel obliged to dose up before interviews.

And once we are on this slippery slope, how far to slide before the point where the welfare to work industry recommends them to job seekers, and then perhaps expects them to use them?

If we believe that technology will in time conquer all, we might even accept that performance enhancing drugs will inevitably feature in the workplace of the future.

But is all this without controversy, as Brinkley suggests? I don’t think so. Maybe it is part of an awful nightmare around the corner but we should fight against it at all costs.


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