Students should be allowed to take “smart drugs”, such as Ritalin, to help boost their academic performance, a leading academic has suggested.

John Harris, professor of bioethics and director of the Institute for Science, Ethics and Innovation at the University of Manchester, said the government and medical profession should “seriously consider” making cognition-enhancing drugs available to students without prescription, or allowing them to be prescribed for non-therapeutic purposes, such as studying.

Students have long used drugs to boost their study performance. Caffeine and ginseng are traditional favourites. But recently the use of more powerful, restricted drugs, particularly the anti-hyperactivity medicine Ritalin, has spread from campuses in the US.

Currently such drugs are available only on prescription. Although many students buy them on the internet, their use without a prescription is a criminal offence.

But Professor Harris, joint Editor-in-Chief of The Journal of Medical Ethics, said that serious consideration should now be given to making some of them available on prescription for non-medical reasons, specifically for the purpose of enhancing cognitive performance.

There was now a sizeable body of evidence to show that stimulants such as Ritalin, Provigil and Adderall significantly improve concentration and performance and their side effects were proportional to their benefits, he said.

Many prescription drugs, such as the contraceptive pill or sleeping pills given to air travellers, were already prescribed for non-therapeutic reasons, he added.

“Viagra has a medical use, but it is well know that the sales figures are far in excess of the level of dysfunction in society,” he told the Times Higher Education magazine.

Professor Harris said he was calling for universities and the government to recognise that there was nothing wrong in principle with trying to improve cognitive function.

If the government did accept this idea and changed the law accordingly, universities would have to develop policies on use of drugs before exams, he added.

“The issue would move from legitimacy to one of fairness and cost,” he said.

Professor Harris, who published his views in a commentary in the journal Nature earlier this month, said it would be helpful to determine precisely how widely used such drugs were by bringing the debate about their use into the open.

“If, as seems probable, they continue to prove safe to use and they have advantageous effects in terms of cognitive enhancement, it would make sense to try to maximise their benefits,” he said.

Up to now the debate on performance-enhancing drugs within British universities has focused primarily on the health risks faced by students taking prescription drugs.

There are also questions of fairness as some have questioned why performance-enhancing drugs should be allowed for students in exams, when the practice is banned in sport.

But students appear not to share these concerns and their use is believed to be widespread.

In recent years Modafinil, a powerful drug stocked by the Army to keep combat troops alert and used medicinally to treat sleep disorders such as narcolepsy, has also becoming popular on university campuses. Drug trials suggest that it is highly effective at enhancing short-term memory and enabling users to stay up for extended periods.

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