Imagine, though, if you found a silvery blister-pack marked Modafinil and on brandishing said pack were met with the indignant response: “But maw! It’s to help me do well in the exams.” And it isn’t even a bare-faced lie.

This year, possibly for the first time in history, the phrase “students on drugs” means “students working harder”.

Apparently. Smart drugs, or “cognitive enhancers”, are finally going overground, the relatively new discovery of alternative uses for the Modafinil pill (invented to treat narcolepsy, UK-approved in 2002) now being increasingly favoured by students in the run-up to exams, as are old-timers Adderall and Ritalin (treatments for ADHD), since it’s claimed they improve memory, increase focus and eradicate fatigue with apparently minimal side-effects – although long-term effects are still completely (and crucially) unknown.

Undergraduates at the super-swot universities are, it seems, keenest, a Varsity report estimating that 10% of Cambridge students have now used Modafinil.

Barbara Sahakian, a clinical neuropsychologist at Cambridge University, says there’s surely no turning back. “The drive for self-enhancement of cognition,” she tells the New Yorker, smartly, “is likely to be as strong if not stronger than in the ‘enhancement’ of beauty and sexual function.”

Which makes smart pills not only the new Botox but the new Viagra and possibly less of a strain on the neurological system than the former generation’s traditional enhancements of caffeine, ProPlus and 40 Regal King Size.

And less of a cheat, possibly, than the ruse some of us adopted in the 1980s; the writing of pesky Latin verb tables straight onto the back of the school tie, with shamefully winning results.

Once again, we’ve invented something which makes us faster, stronger, forgoes pesky discipline, does much of the hardest work for us and the possibilities (and abuses) are infinite: hot-housing parents sprinkling Junior’s Cheerios before a spelling test; bosses everywhere encouraging “pills for pay rises!” while the finance maniacs over in the City may never sleep again, being fatally burnt-out – but billionaires! – by the age of 27.

Then, as with any drug (especially those consumed by youth), there’s the high probability of psychological dependency, physical addiction, peer pressure, dodgy dealers and market exploitation. “Neuroenhancers are perfectly suited for the anxiety of white-collar competition in a floundering economy,” muses journalist Margaret Talbot in the New Yorker. “And they have a synergistic relationship with technology: the more gadgets we own, the more distracted we become, the more we need help to focus. ”

Little to do with being smart, then, and everything to do with the unrelenting march towards the human automaton with a Duracell battery where our heads once were. Recently, meanwhile, a neuroscience student in Texas, Joshua Goodwin, blogged for Psychology Today on whether the students taking “study drugs” were really outperforming their classmates.

“The students who used these drugs more often,” he concluded, “also tended to skip more classes and smoke more pot. Rather than tools to get ahead, students used stimulants while cramming to catch up for lost study time. Students earning A marks were mostly doing so by steady work throughout the semester.”

Some things, after all, remain exactly the same forever. Barbara Sahakian, meanwhile, is dubious. “The trouble is, you don’t know what you’re getting,” she muses, of the lack of long-term research. “But we are accelerating into a 24/7 society where people work all the time, because they can.” Just as we live to be 100, because we can. Or, as with the latest Apple iPhone, have 65,000 “apps” on it, just because we can. That’s 178 “apps” for every day of the year. And who has time for that? Help! Got any drugs!?