Psychopharm Going 'Mainstream' In Schools?

PizzaFace writes "Back in the day, college was a place where a lot of kids tried recreational drugs. Now the world's more competitive, psychopharmaceuticals are better targeted, and millions of students are routinely using drugs to work better and longer. Stimulants developed for attention deficit and narcolepsy are giving mentally healthy students an edge like athletes get from steroids or human growth hormone. These psychotropics seem fairly safe, but should they be banned in the interest of fairness, perhaps with enforcement by urine tests before exams? Or do we tell our kids that, if they want to compete in this brave new world, they better find some Adderall and jack their brains up like their classmates'." If college students are doing it, how many programmers are? What say you?

Comments

Overkill

[koh]

90% of current programmers probably do not use those drugs, since they're overkill for Visual Basic coding...

Re:Overkill

[tomhudson]

90% of current programmers probably do not use those drugs, since they're overkill for Visual Basic coding...

shouldn't that read ...

90% of current programmers probably do use drugs, since you've gotta be on drugs to be coding in Visual Basic ...

All kidding aside, if you count caffeine, I think you'll hit 99.99999 ... ah wtf, say 100%. Both programmers and school kids. Ditto for sugar.

Re:Overkill

[devnull17]

90% of current programmers probably do not use those drugs, since they're overkill for Visual Basic coding...

I wrote Visual Basic code for years, and I took Adderall twice a day. I (or rather my employment status) probably couldn't have survived without it.

There's a common misunderstanding about stimulants like Adderall and Ritalin. They don't make you smarter or faster. They make you able to focus, and they make typically miserable tasks interesting. (Wiring database fields to GUI forms all day is boring, soul-crushing work, but well-paying, challenging jobs don't grow on trees.) They make you feel productive while performing the most menial tasks.

The reason that students take Adderall to cram for exams isn't because it makes you smarter, but because it increases your attention span and allows you to focus on really dry subject matter, so you can study for longer. It also keeps you awake at times when even coffee could not--that, from what I've seen, is the only place where abuse of the drug occurs.

This is anecdotal, but I know a lot of people who took unprescribed Adderall in college. Most of them have never touched any other illicit drugs, but they find the substance useful, and it doesn't seem to cause any harm. I really don't see the rationale for making it illegal for adults without ADD.

Re:Overkill

[koh]

There's a common misunderstanding about stimulants like Adderall and Ritalin. They don't make you smarter or faster. They make you able to focus, and they make typically miserable tasks interesting. (Wiring database fields to GUI forms all day is boring, soul-crushing work, but well-paying, challenging jobs don't grow on trees.) They make you feel productive while performing the most menial tasks.

I am genuinely intrigued by this. You appear to be saying that programming is a menial task (or is it only VB programming? You know, you can wire DB fields to GUI forms all day long in C# too ;)

First reaction: Are you sure you took the right job? Solving problems by writing some kind of obscure code that mere machines can understand should be a least a little entertaining even if you're forced to use VB *shrug*. Is it isn't, how do you manage deadlines and PHBs and retarded co-workers spitting out code like "If i = 0 Or i = 7 Or i = 14 Or i = 21 Or i = You_get_my_drift..."?

Second reaction: Oh, that's what the drug is for. Silly me.

More seriously, IMHO if you have to take drugs (okay, maybe except recreational ones, and even that I'm not so sure) in order to accomplish your job, you should change jobs. Maybe, somewhere on the way, you passed something that would have been exciting and entertaining to you, as well as make some money... Time to get back and find your True Function In Life (TM).

God, my english is awful tonight.

Re:Overkill

[miskatonic alumnus]

Time to get back and find your True Function In Life (TM).

For most of us, that would be working and consuming goods like responsible corporate serfs.

Re:Overkill

[ChrisMaple]

There's a big difference in how the body reacts to sugar, and how the body reacts to chemicals that are eventually converted to sugar. The ability to convert other chemicals into sugar allows people to not have to eat sugar.

Sugar isn't just one chemical, there are many that qualify as sugars. There are also sweet alcohols (like xylitol) that can replace sucrose or fructose in some applications, with advantages like not promoting cavities.

Re:Overkill

[KanSer]

The class of drug Adderal and Ritalin belong to has another name.

SPEED. They are fucking hard drugs. You want to talk about a gateway drug? Jesus Christ.

America seriously needs to wake the fuck up from its asinine hypocrisy. We have fucking hard liquor advertizing on FUCKING RACE CARS. Every body and their mother is addicted to Caffeine. We are such a drug culture that it's such an absolute joke how much money we spend on the 'war on drugs'.

caffe-ine
coca-ine

Big diff, right?

Now the meat of the argument is that I think it should all be legal for adults. My huge problem is the generation of children we have gotten started on speed. We have 10 million teen-age addicts. 10 million kids intimately familiar with the street value of their little bottle of pills.

10 million kids with the taste of speed in their mouths. Does that not scare anyone else?

Re:Overkill

[WCD_Thor]

The college students I met this year (was a freshmen) for the most part did not use these kind of drugs. For the few that did, it was for finals week where they were up for 4 days strieght (why can't I spell anymore? Bah) or they would just use them to see how long they could stay up, but were not actualy doing anywork, they were playing WoW or something equaly stupid (I hate WoW). I think its kind of sad that people need think they need these drugs to compete. I for one will not be using these drugs and plan on "competing" just as they do.

Re:Overkill

[binarybum]

But we're not talking about recreational drugs here. We're talking performance enhancing compounds. Sure, I'd choose sleep over caffeine any day, but in my world that probably wouldn't get me ahead, in fact if I slept as much as I should I probably couldn't even make the status quo. It's one thing to tell kids to entertain themselves with their toys and then allow them to entertain themselves with recreational drugs when they are mature enough to use them wisely. However, how can we expect our kids to grow into the neurotic workaholic freaks that we idealize if they don't get started early with performance enhancing compounds? Sure it's sick, and yes it scares me, but this isn't about drugs, laws, or rules nearly as much as it is about the society we've created. I can't imagine we'll ever really be able to turn back now.

Re:Overkill

[damiena]

caffe-ine
coca-ine

Big diff, right?

calam-ine
chlor-ine
cos-ine
coastl-ine
cuis-ine
can-ine
clothesl-ine
crystall-ine

Re:Overkill

[EllisDees]

>Adderall is becoming popular because it has signs of being just as nonaddictive as Ritalin & co., but with longer active period and less side effects.
>
>Speed is a different class of "uppers", namely amphetamines.

Umm, Adderall *is* amphetamines.

"* 1/4 Dextroamphetamine Saccharate
  * 1/4 Dextroamphetamine Sulfate (Dexedrine®)
  * 1/4 Amphetamine Aspartate
  * 1/4 Amphetamine Sulfate"

Re:Overkill

[deuterium]

10 million kids with the taste of speed in their mouths. Does that not scare anyone else?

Not particularly.
I think that you're overstating the case to say that Ritalin is speed. Ritalin has a much slower onset, and therefore is not as reinforcing. Kids with genuine ADD actually tend to feel "better" off of the drug, and ADD kids who were treated with Ritalin prove less likely to abuse illegal drugs later in life than those left untreated. Ritalin has been researched and reviewed more than almost any other drug, and found to be safe and effective.
What's also hard to appreciate is the fact that such drugs affect different people differently. Some people do get a rush from taking Ritalin, particularly if they insuffulate it. Some feel simply calmed. Some feel anxious. It's not uniformly a euphoriant or even reliably performance enhancing. It all depends on the brain chemistry of the user.
The problem with every psychotropic drug (or any prescription drug) is that there will always be some people who are incorrectly diagnosed, and medicated needlessly. I don't doubt that there are kids who have something other than ADD, but who were hastily diagnosed by a doctor under duress from their parents, or simply because they're poor doctors. It's not the drugs that are bad, however, it's the doctors.
Ritalin can be a godsend for someone who really needs it, such as myself. Without it, I often find myself locked out of my own brain, unable to initiate or sustain a train of thought. My brain does what it wants, and I'm at its whim. With it, I am able to simply think and have control over what I think about. Not better or faster or happier, just normally, like everyone else can. Whether it's natural or right or whatever isn't of concern to me. Humans have learned to manipulate chemistry to our advantage, and we'll continue to do so. It's simply another tool.

Re:Overkill

[MrZaius]

When he said that Ritalin and Adderall were in the same class of drug as Speed, he was suggesting they could serve as gateway drugs to mephamphetamine use. This is not just a recreational drug. There are many, many reports of the drug being used as a performance enhancing drug. It's even present in the IT industry. I wasn't able to find a link, but I know Wired Magazine has run at least one article about meth use by programmers/IT workers.

Ritalin and Adderall are controlled substances for a reason. They have serious side effects if misused. Between the side effects of those two drugs when taken without consulting a physician and their potential to lead to Meth abuse, this is a big problem.

Re:Overkill

[evil_tandem]

It's actually a very interesting experience. I have a job that I love, but occasionally I get my hands on some adderall and I take it on my way to work.

Adderall days I accomplish 2-3 days worth of non-adderall work. You are like a machine. I can work for 12 hours without eating or drinking. Whatever you point your brain at becomes so engrossing that just nothing else matters, and you can point it at anything at all.

It often makes me wonder if there are other people that can switch into something like that naturally (maybe I have slight ADD myself? or maybe it's bs and the difference is I was forced to learn to calm myself down and focus on something, where others weren't?). Maybe all that seperated average joe from 1337 scientist was he was capable of focusing like that.

I also couldn't imagine being like that all the time. I couldn't be like that everyday; after one I feel mentally exhausted.

Adderall is what caffeine wanted to be. The downside for me is that I don't really enjoy caffeine anymore. It makes you jittery and prevents you from being tired, more than it actually increases the quality of the time you are on it.

Just Say No To The Drugs...

[__aaclcg7560]

Maybe we need to get Nancy Reagan out of the 80's closet just tell everyone to say NO to the drugs. It's bad enough in California that you have to show ID to buy cough medicine and be limited to two packages, while I can walk into a cloud of pot smoke at my apartment complex even when the police are nearby.

Re:Just Say No To The Drugs...

[xlyz]

while I can walk into a cloud of pot smoke at my apartment complex even when the police are nearby

is this a bug or a feature?

Re:Just Say No To The Drugs...

[tsm_sf]

Well, one is a mildly psychoactive drug that's fairly harmless in moderate quantities. The other is used in the manufacture of an extremely physically and socially destructive substance. Sounds like the cops and politicians in your area are on the ball... have you seen what meth does to people?

Re:Just Say No To The Drugs...

[misleb]

Actually, I think he was referring to DXM containing cough medicine. The kind kids chug/eat to "trip." But yeah, I'd rather see them smoking a little pot. DXM is a little more dangerous.

-matthew

Re:Just Say No To The Drugs...

[zorander]

So is rubbing alcohol and rock salt. Should we begin restricting those, too? Where does this argument end?

Re:Just Say No To The Drugs...

[kfg]

The short answer is that a corporation doesn't make a profit on pot. Corporations do make a profit in opposing pot.

Of course it's a bit more complicated than that, but not much.

Here's how our mental "health" structure works these days:

Go to the psych ward at a city hospital and tell them you use pot. The shrink will put you on a program to teach you that drugs are not the way to deal with your emotional problems.

But go a few hours later though and tell them you have emotional problems and the same damned shrink will give you psychoactive drugs to deal with it.

It's totally schizo, but they get paid for both ya see.

Is it any wonder that our legislators are utterly psycho about the drug issue? They grew up being taught to accept this kind of cognitive dissonance without experiencing any cognative dissonance. They'll make cough syrup a crime, but mandate Ritalin.

The world has gone totally, fucking nuts. Does anyone know where I can find a nice, quiet, dry cave to hole up in?

Ummmmmmmmmmmm; with broadband.

KFG

Re:Just Say No To The Drugs...

[LGagnon]

Bush Sr. carried on Reagan's campaign into the 90s. The campaign was a notorious failure, with no significant reduction in drug use at all. Even celebrities in favor of it turned to drugs themselves. Was it the "Just Say No" campaign's fault that crack came into being? No, but it was its fault that America was not prepared to handle it.

Re:Just Say No To The Drugs...

[Poppler]

the problem lies in the double standard. you know how it works, laws are passed to prevent bad stuff(tm), most people will go on and do bad stuff(tm) and the police won't care, while they will bug to no end the only good guys(tm)

I agree with your statement only if taken out of context. In this case, the double standard is in favor of pharmacuticals. Ephedrine is not only more dangerous than Marijuana, but it is also used to create methamphetamine. I'm not saying I agree with the ID laws, just that you should reconsider which one is really the "bad stuff".

Re:Just Say No To The Drugs...

[x2A]

No, the problem with "just say no" isn't addiction, because to be addicted, you must have already not said no at least once already. The problem with "just say no", and in fact so much of the anti-drugs FUD out there, is the term: drugs. Drugs are meant to be bad... right? So what about all the drugs that you get from the doc/chemist? Okay, so drugs are bad if they're illegal, but drugs from the doc/chemist are good, because they're legal... so it's actually breaking the law that's bad, and the laws MUST be right... right?

Wrong. "Just say no!" teaches ignorance, it says don't question, don't learn, just repeat after me. But the truth is that illegal drugs aren't all the same, and the legal status of a drugs makes absolutely no difference to whether it's "good" or "bad" for you. The difference comes when whether you've learnt how to use the drugs responsibly.

The only drug I've ever become addicted to was one I was prescribed from a doctor, because I trusted/just accepted what I was told. All other drugs I've 'experimented' (recreational only, I stear well clear of the big addictive one's such as smack/crack) with, I've researched beforehand, and not hand anything like the same kind of problems with. I've even managed to boost my work productivity (programming) with some, which has saved my ass at least a couple of times.

Whenever I've seen people having problems with these drugs, is because they don't respect them, think that taking more == makes you cooler, they get competative ("I can handle more than you"), or often believe that the drug will solve something that it can't. But guess what... you get the same problems with legal as you do with illegal drugs. Just because it's legal, doesn't mean you won't become addicted, or that it won't screw your liver or whatever, and just because something illegal, doesn't mean it will.

I've become far more successful in my life, both work wise and socially, since I discovering what levels of different chemicals have different effects on me, what I can achieve in different states, and importantly: my limits. I can use amphetamines (the family ritalin is in, as is speed) to slam out code for 24hours straight, but the brain needs to rest, so if I keep doing it, I just end up being awake, and can't be productive. I've learnt this, I use it wisely, I use it responsibly, I monitor my health (physically and mentally) very closely. There's no reason why I should stop (except legal status).

Take responsibility for your own life, for MORE of your own life, and you'll find you can be safer from most things, and see that some things are only "dangerous" if used irresponsibly (like powertools) but can be useful if used wisely (like powertools).

Surely more recreational?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd imagine recreational drugs would be far more appealing to programmers, in order to unwind after a long day at the codeface.

Re:Surely more recreational?

[quigonn]

That's right. I know a lot of programmers and hackers who smoke weed. Not every day, but e.g. on weekends. And it's not bad(tm), after all. They do their work, they're successful, so no real negative side here.

Re:Surely more recreational?

[misleb]

It isn't about what is more appealing, it is about what is sustainable. Stimulant abuse beyond caffeine really isn't very sustainable. Maybe it'll work for a college student for a couple of years, but a career programmer simply couldn't sustain it. They'd either burn out or get a nasty addiction on their hands. Stimulant addictions will mess you up pretty bad. Moderate recreational drug use like pot, on the other hand, is quite managable.

-matthew

New? Try old.

[akarnid]

Nothing new here, at least for Uni students. Back in the fifties and earlier, when amphetamines were over-the-counter andcould even be baought in vending machines in some places in Europe, Uni students cramming for an exam used to pop quite a lot of those. These new drugs may not come with the unpleasant side effects now, but we'll see what effects long-term use will have in a few years when use becomes widespread.

OMG I'm So Stoned Right Now

[Doomedsnowball]

Like, I'm sooo stoned right now. It's totally, like, helping me write a Google Homepage plugin for checking your MySpace notifications. That way I can keep in contact with the people who do my homework for me! I tried a few drugs to help me as a programmer, but pot is the best. I tried coke for motivation and to focus, but like, I totally ended up foaming at the mouth playing WoW online. I tried LSD, then tried to program my cat to feed itself. I tried snorting my Mom's Zoloft, but I felt so good about my programming, I totally like, stopped tweaking it and it's still full of bugs. But when I smoke pot, I lay around playing XBox until the last minute when I drink an entire pot of coffee and my panic driven code is the best I could ever hope to write sober. Like pharmies are so pill-popping '80's. Sounds like something babyboomers would worry about, like, for reals.

Re:Hm

[Faustust]

Step 1: They are getting them from other kids who have a prescription. Step 2: Their parents find out and punish them for taking others' prescription medications. Step 3: Parents find out it will help their kids in school and at home. They convince the doctor to give their kid a prescription. Step 4: PROFIT! Step 5: See Step 1.

Re:Hm

[kfg]

How are these kids getting drugs, anyway?

They buy them?

KFG

Drugs are no help

[mlefranc]

Drugs are no substitute for reading a lot, tinkering, listening to others and keeping classifying things with respect to what you already know. Learning is a very long-term process, certainly little understood, and no drug can kick you on that time scale. What drugs can certainly do is to make you think you are smarter and temporarily relieve the pain of learning. The problem is that anything that makes you different, smarter or otherwise, is painful in some way.

Re:Drugs are no help

[Durandal64]

I bought a pill of adderol once from a friend of mine in my sophomore year at college. I had linear algebra and EM physics finals the next morning. I've never concentrated that hard in my life. I was going from about 11:00pm to 7:00am straight (with regular smoke breaks) at the library, and my linear final was at 7:50. I nailed it too. When I was done studying, my hand was cramped up from all the writing, and my paper felt more like papyrus from all the hand-sweat that was on it.

Re:Drugs are no help

[Tetris Ling]

It's no surprise that healthy people want the same advantage, but just like with the extra time for the learning disabled and the kids on ADHD drugs, the real losers will be the students who would have done well on their own whose scores are now deflated compared to the enhanced population.

Pardon me if I'm mistaken, but did you just suggest that providing LD students with accommodations deflates the scores of other students?

Accommodations do not devalue test scores. If anything, it makes the test scores a more accurate comparison, because the students who would normally be discounted for external reasons (that is, reasons outside of the knowledge being tested) are now being fairly measured.

The use of psychotropic drugs by healthy individuals is all kinds of stupid, and they are, in a sense, deflating scores. But let us not suggest for a moment that allowing students with learning disabilities or ADHD to compete fairly is somehow ruining it for the rest of you. It is that kind of thinking that perpetuates the myth that ADHD is "just laziness" or that LD kids "just need to try harder".

Re:Drugs are no help

[mdpowell]

> Accommodations do not devalue test scores. If anything, it makes the test scores a more accurate
> comparison, because the students who would normally be discounted for external reasons (that is,
> reasons outside of the knowledge being tested) are now being fairly measured.

> The use of psychotropic drugs by healthy individuals is all kinds of stupid, and they are, in a
> sense, deflating scores. But let us not suggest for a moment that allowing students with
> learning disabilities or ADHD to compete fairly is somehow ruining it for the rest of you. It
> is that kind of thinking that perpetuates the myth that ADHD is "just laziness" or that LD kids
> "just need to try harder".

I'm not particularly athletic or adept at long distance-running. Let's say that gets me labeled as "atheletically disabled" and the school/courts/congress decide that I should be spotted an extra 4 minutes when running a mile. Now let's say the school is also required to report the times of all runners without noting who got extra time on the report. My four-minute mile (really an 8 minute mile) and a true athelete's four-four minute mile look the same on the report. How does that scenario not devalue the athelete's score?

I maintain that the same applies to academic schores. It devalues the scores of everyone who took the test under the stated conditions if some students are allowed to take the test with extra time or chemical enhancement.

I'm not against giving people with recognized illness extra time (or medication); I am against not marking the extraordinary test conditions in big red letters on all of their score reports. People receiving the scores would thus know the person did well on the test (because of the score) but not to compare that person unfavorably against someone who maybe didn't do so well but took the test under the required conditions.

Call it unfairness, discrimination, or whatever you want, but if I come into the ER with a life-threatening illness, I don't want treatment delayed half an hour because I get a physician who needed 30-minutes of extra time to pass an "illness diagnosis" exam in med school. The undergrad school, med school, and hiring hospital all need to know if the candidate's tests were given under extraordinary conditions.

Re:Drugs are no help

[NewbieProgrammerMan]

Did the knowledge stick with you any differently than if you'd just learned it the "normal" way? I ask because I've known once-upon-a-time-heavy smokers that swore up and down the things they learned while they were regularly smoking kinda faded away when they tried to quit. So if they needed to recall something they'd go take a smoke. Of course, it could just be them rationalizing their desire to take their first smoke in a few years/months. :) I was just wondering if anybody had any similar anecdotes for other drugs.

Re:Drugs are no help

[The_Wilschon]

Good heavens. ADD is not "being wild and unfocused". I have ADD. I was never wild. I was not hyperactive. Nobody looked at me on the playground and said "Oh that kid is soooo ADD" (Which phrase I positively detest). However, my performance in school did not at all match my intelligence. I was given some kind of IQ test (I don't remember anything about it, nor do I know what I scored on it.) The psych just went on and on about how intelligent I was. My grades (esp. the work habits section that was on our elementary school report cards) sucked. I was not just unfocused, I was unable to focus. In third grade, my parents finally found a doctor who didn't just say "Oh he seems to be emotionally healthy, and plenty smart, I don't know why he's sucking so much at school", and he said that I had ADD. I was given Ritalin, and suddenly, when I sat down to do my homework, I was actually capable of doing more than one problem at once without drifting off and thinking about who knows what for half an hour in between. Oh and by the way, my parents did make me sit down and work. I could spend three hours sitting at the kitchen table doing nothing but homework, and still only finish a single one page worksheet. And this was with my mom in the kitchen checking on me to make sure I was still working every few minutes. Oh yes, my parents made me sit down and work. On the other hand I never have had time advantages on tests or anything. I could at my college, but I don't because I don't need to, and if I didn't take my medicine, the time advantages wouldn't be anywhere near long enough.

Yes, ADD is horribly overdiagnosed, and the typical "That kid is so ADD" reaction to undisciplined children doesn't help at all. However, in spite of this, it is a real problem, and it does affect numerous people, many of whom you would never suspect. It is worth noting that I am no longer taking narcotics like Ritalin, but am now on Strattera. Strattera is not a stimulant. In fact, there are large segments of the population on whom strattera doesn't work at all. This seems to correlate well with people who actually have ADD versus those who were just "wild and unfocused children". My doctor says that he'll put people on strattera, and they'll complain and want to go back to ritalin, because "It doesn't give me the same rush". Well, Ritalin never gave me a rush at all. In fact, that is sometimes used as a diagnostic test for ADD: a small dose of ritalin will make someone without ADD slightly high, but someone with ADD will not get high at all.

You say that kids with ADD are getting time and focus advantages. I can assure you that in cases where those kids actually have ADD that taking ritalin or whatever is not an advantage over kids without ADD. In fact, unless the dosage is pretty much perfect, it probably still leaves them at a slight disadvantage.

Now, all this is not to say that I think drugs like ritalin should be given out willy-nilly. In fact I am completely opposed to it. It would also be nice if all extant diagnoses of ADD could be required to go back and see an actual competent doctor this time and get rediagnosed (or, in perhaps most cases, not). Then, if those people could be convinced not to stupidly give out their pills, and to keep them locked up (my ritalin was stolen from the school nurse's cabinet several times when I was little), perhaps these drugs would not be a problem, ADD would be recognized as a real problem instead of being scorned as a cop out for bad parenting, and you wouldn't have to whine about kids getting advantages on tests anymore. Unfortunately, it's not going to happen.

Re:Drugs are no help

[slamb]

I bought a pill of adderol once from a friend of mine in my sophomore year at college. I had linear algebra and EM physics finals the next morning. I've never concentrated that hard in my life. I was going from about 11:00pm to 7:00am straight (with regular smoke breaks) at the library, and my linear final was at 7:50. I nailed it too.

As long as we're trading anecdotes, I skipped class for six weeks before my linear algebra final, then nailed it. [*] No drugs, no studying. For whatever reason (my natural talent in mathematics? low standards? the professor letting us use TI-89s to check our work?), I found the class and test really easy.

On the other hand, E&M was the real deal. Challenging material, demanding (but great) professor. I went to class, I studied, and I was proud when I got As on those tests.

My point is that anecdotal evidence is worthless. You felt more focused while studying. But was your studying actually more effective? Or were your finals simply as easy for you as my linear one was for me? What grade would you have gotten if you hadn't taken any drug? What grade would you have gotten if you'd taken a placebo? It's impossible to know.

Has anyone actually done any real scientific studies of the effects of these pills on healthy people? Our brains are complicated. While it seems reasonable at first to say you felt more focused, therefore you were more focused, therefore you were more effective, that's actually quite a leap. There are many drugs out there that will make you feel more effective, then discover afterward that your work was crap. Does a pill that turns an ADD patient into a "normal" person turn a normal person into a superperson? If even more of some chemical in our brains makes us even more focused and intelligent, why didn't natural selection increase the dosage? What's the catch?

[*] Okay, 98/100...forgot to normalize an eigenvector...though MathWorld says now that they don't have to be normalized, so I want my two points back.

Re:Drugs are no help

[radtea]

Drugs are no substitue for real learning, but they can provide an unfair advantage in an artificial situation intended to measure learning, such as a college exam.

This is the problem. College exams are terrible measures of learning. As an old prof of mine once said talking to some first-years in a physics lab: "If I tell you to measure this table, and you lay a tape-measure down on it like so and write down the number and hand it in, I WILL FAIL YOU. You never measure anything just once!"

As a prof I was even more uncomfortable giving exams than I was as a student taking them, because I came to realized that we were making a measurement in a way that we would never condone as scientists. We were making a single measurement on our students and saying it was a good measure of their capacities, which is nonsense.

If marks were objective they'd have error bars.

The "final exam" culture that exists in many modern universities is a product of mass-produced education, and I don't have any particularly good answer to it. We need some relatively simple way of evaluating students and reporting that evaluation to the world, but we take marks way too seriously given the shoddy, unscientific process that produces them.

But so long as we give such unrealistic and unreasonable weight to a few point-measurements of student performance, students will be tempted to use every means available to increase their performance to an unrealistic maximum at those few points.

Re:Drugs are no help

[Asklepius M.D.]

The description above describes my time in school perfectly, and there was a great deal of pressure put upon my parents by counselors, psychologists, and doctors to dose me with ADD. Fortunately, my parents paid more attention and realized that my "inability to pay attention" didn't extend to other things like leisure reading, playing with legos, tinkering with electronics, or roaming around the woods memorizing the latin names and of wild herbs. I could do these things for hours at a time, but was unable to complete a worksheet that required me to write complete sentences despite having tested well above average both in terms of intelligence and emotional maturity. So I wasn't "attention deficit" in anything but an educational system that values blind conformity over any style of learning. Sure, my GPA suffered, but I learned far more than most of my fellow students. Maybe this has hurt me in finding work, but I find I'm now capable of working in just about any field. While I'm sure ADD and ADHD exist and are real disabilities, I think the tests to determine diagnosis are nowhere near reliable. Further, as a former premed, I had to compete with many students who openly used these drugs to help concentrate for exams. This definitely led to an alteration of the curve to the disadvantage of those who would not or could not take the drugs, especially in classes that prided themselves on rote memorization and other "dry" styles of learning. The result? Tons of students with 4.0 GPAs who haven't learned a thing, and a bunch of students with 3.5s who learned and could apply their knowledge, but were shifted artificially down the curve. Guess my point is that there is abuse on both sides of the educational fence.

Stimulants don't do much for me.

[Visaris]

I've tried many "performance enhancing" drugs over the years. From caffeine to adderall, riddlin, cocaine, and methamphetamines. All these things have been reported to allow one to think and work faster and longer.

My experience? I perform much worse on these substances. Sometimes I'm jittery and cannot focus. At times I think and work so fast that I make many carless errors that end up taking me more time to fix than if I had done the work slower and did it right the first time. The drugs that kept me up and allowed me to work longer just took more of me the next day.

I can tell you all, from personal experience, that taking stimulants to try and help you through the day is a waste of money, is a health risk, and may actually decrease your overall monthly or yearly performance. Not to mention the fact that our over-reaching government would be more than happy to put you in jail for a very very long time for posessing many of these substances.

Re:Stimulants don't do much for me.

[zorander]

It sounds like you (or he) may be hypoglycemic. Protein contains the same cal/gram as sugars without the catastrophic insulin spike and subsequent blood sugar crash characteristic of people with "low blood sugar". I actually find that meat is just fine, even fatty meat, and works even better than nuts (which have more carbs than meat). In any case, I agree, but this may not be as helpful for some as for others.

Re:Stimulants don't do much for me.

[uniqueCondition]

I would recommend dexadrine. A great drug, this thing is prescribed to kids w/ ADD and special forces pilots often take it as well.

The drug is perfect for studying late:
1) keeps you awake (why special forces likes it)
2) you're not hungry (use to be a diet drug)
3) keeps you focused (why ADD kids get it)

Those three factors are perfect from cramming

Side affects:
1) sometimes you'll end up talking too much
2) can grind your teeth a bit
3) i'm sure there are some health side effects..

Re:Where would the line be?

[Doomedsnowball]

The line would be on the mirror.

Safe?

[Poppler]

These psychotropics seem fairly safe

These are amphetamines we are talking about. They're a lot less healthy than the recreational marijuana use favored by other students. Just because they have a brand name, doesn't mean they're safe.

Re:Safe?

[Poppler]

For that you need good old fashioned recreational drugs... SEE: LSD!!!

Maybe that was a joke, but check out this article - some people would agree.

Re:Safe?

[the_psilo]

Actually, not all of the ADHD medicines are amphetamines, and have slightly different modes of action. The primary action of amphetamines, such as Adderal, is to trigger the release of neurotransmitters (primarily dopamine) from both the axon (the "sending" side of the synapse) and the vesicles in the axon that are storing the neurotransmitters for the next signalled release. This occurs by the drug triggering a reversal of the "pumps" that take the neurotransmitters back up into the axon or into the vesicles in the axon for storage. This is actually the source of much of amphetamines' reported neurotoxicity, the vast depletion of the neurotransmitters to a high degree. Ritalin, as with cocaine, does not appear to reverse the synaptic and vesicle transporters like amphetamines do, but instead appears to block the uptake of neurotransmitters at the synapse (mainly dopamine). This lessens its potential to be neurotoxic, but not completely. Strattera acts in a similar way, but only on norepinephrine transporters.

Just because these compounds are prescribed by doctors does not mean they are safe by any means. Nor should you necessarily trust anything our government has to say about recreational use or other ingestion not overseen by a doctor. Too many lies and exaggerations have shadowed the really important information. Instead, find out everything you can about these compounds, from multiple sources, know what they will do to you and why, what the potential risks and side effects are, and weigh for yourself the consequences of your actions. Know yourself, know your source, know your drug.

aloha
psilo

Curiosity

[Sir Holo]

You can't buy curiosity.

Someone who is curious continues to mull over material long after the test has been passed. Someone who only cares about the grade will forget about it after the test.

Smart employers can tell the two apart.

Re:Hm

[idonthack]

Usually from a friend with a prescription. Parents usually have no idea because there are no signs and the kids don't have to go anywhere special to get it.

I do it

[luckynoone]

I do it. I have ADHD, but the Adderall does a heck of a lot more than keep my ADHD in line. It has been extremely beneficial to me at work and in my personal projects with programming and coming up with ideas. It is like caffeine x 10 without the jitters and with the ability to focus that amazing energy at whatever you want. Then again, since I have ADHD, maybe that is just normal to everyone else but something new to me? I think it has given me an edge over the average person. However, that is a side effect of the drug. I don't think I should be discriminated against for that. I am not abusing it, and it is working as the doctor hoped at keeping my ADHD in line. Before I found Adderall, nothing I had tried worked in terms of meds. I would not want to get out of bed and I had no energy, focus, or drive. I don't like the thought of people without actual medical need taking it to get ahead. I look at that as the same thing as teens smoking pot. Cancer patients smoking pot to alleviate pain and keep their food down is a hell of a lot different than Harold and Kumar getting stoned so the sliders at White Castle taste wicked and so they can "feel" the music.

Re:I do it

[rrohbeck]

Could some of the drug (ab)use in schools and universities be self-medication to some extent?

I just read "The Omega-3 connection" by Andrew Stoll.
Facts:
- Omega-3 fatty acids have therapeutic effects on ADHD and other psychiatric conditions like depression and bipolar disorder (plus non-psychiatric conditions like atherosclerosis too), and they improve learning in animal experiments (there's insufficient research data on children)
- Groups with traditionally high Omega-3 (i.e. fish) intake (Inuit, some Japanese populations) have virtually none of those conditions
- The average American diet has only about a tenth of the Omega-3 intake that is considered healthy by nutritionists
- The body holds on to Omega-3s tenaciously, over years. A baby's initial Omega-3 store comes 100% from the mother. This may cause Omega-3 levels to decline over generations. And, OBTW, post-partum (after pregnancy) depression is rising steeply, so one hypothesis is that pregnancy depletes the mother's body of Omega-3s if she doesn't have enough. And (drum roll...) children that were bottle-fed have a signficantly higher rate of cognitive/learning issues like ADHD etc. Baby formula supplemented with Omega-3s has only been available in the US since 2002 or so, so the jury is still out on the effects.

Pretty convincing research IMHO.

NoQuestionIt'sHelped

[Anonymous Coward]

EversinceI'vebeenusingAdderallI'vegottenmuchmorewo rkdone.Moreworkthanever.Ithinkeveryoneshouldtryit. Imeaneveryone.Regularol'coffeejustwon'tcutitintoda y'soutsourcedworld!Yougottatakewhateveredgeyoucanf indnowadays.Gottago.Morecodetobewritten!

No. The "War on Drugs" was a failure.

[Anonymous Coward]

Reaganisms aren't a suitable way of dealing with such problems. Face it, the "War on Drugs" failed. It failed for a number of reasons, but it mainly has to do with the fact that "drugs" aren't an enemy that can be beaten via a war.

This is a case of people using drugs to bring them some sort of an advantage over their peers. That is often done for economic reasons. Instead of cracking down in a police-state fashion, the best way to deal with these problems is to make them unfeasible in an economic sense.

First of all, if a company wants their staff to be fuck-buzzed on some stimulant, then so be it. That company may see benefits in the short-term, but in the long-term their income will suffer. In the world of software, they may be the first to get their product out there, but it will likely be a piece of shit. Most companies can't pull that sort of stunt off. Chances are people will end up having a very negative image of that company, and will likely avoid their future products. Of course, such future iterations of products will be building on a base of dung, and will likely be of a very low quality themselves. Soon enough, companies will realize it is better to hire employees who aren't high on various substances. There's no need for government regulation when the free market will punish those who wish to partake in such drug use.

Two overlooked items

[Tom]

Two things are getting overlooked in the comments so far:

One, the comparison to pro athletes is flawed because in those cases the steroids are in addition to hard training. Same way, none of these drugs replace the problem that you can't know what you never read. So no, the dumb kid won't beat the smart kid. It'll just score a-little-not-quite-so-dumb.

Two, aside from what medicine tests (and currently denies) in side-effects, there's always one to be aware of: Habit. If you go into every test pumped up, you will lose your ability to pass a test without your little helpers. Which means that since most higher-up jobs nowadays are essentially continous crisis management, you'll never be without them until retirement.

I'll add a third: You probably miss out on the incredible drugs your body can produce on its own...

Old School

[Quirk]

The most overeducated man I know insists that 45 minutes is tops in terms of all out mental performance to be followed by a 10-15 minute break. Da Vinci was known to sleep in small amounts inbetween work bouts that lasted in the 45 minute range. I can still pound out 14 hour days but I need a break every 1-2 hours. Sometimes I consider going on a 45 minute on 15 minute off program but I find I can't let go of a successful run and cool off my jets while risking loosing impetus.

I've a standing approach to legal and recreational drugs. I don't touch anything new to the market until it's been in wide use for at least 5 years. Let the military, professional jocks and paid lab rats take the initial risk. Drugs might jack you up but it's still rigorous logic and imagination that get the job done. A few years ago when a doctor asked me to write some tests I scored a 161 in a standard IQ test. I know 161 isn't first string but I also got an above average memory and I find I can move across most problem spaces. I very much doubt any drugs are going to improve on what I do now.

Meth amphetimine is dangerous cheap and plentiful. Long term use includes symptoms very like schizophrenia. I can't imagine why it's so widely used.

Recreationally beer, pot and mushrooms keep me amused and their long linage pretty much tell me what I need to know about harmful side effects.

just my loose change

modafinil, etc.

[Rage Maxis]

theres lots of new players out there too. i'm bipolar+etc. and part of how I discovered this was that I started to go wacko when I was taking speed to be able to work 100+ hour weeks. unfortunately I just about nuked my brain in the process, but thats another story completely. now I need to very carefully control my dopamine levels with several different medications, but thats life as I know it.

But I did this at one time, taking amphetamine and methamphetamine as well as ritalin, modafinil, adderal and any number of other substances at work in order to be able to work longer and care less about doing other people's bidding. Don't forget the flipside, the taking B-vitamins to deal with the burnout, tyrosine to fix the receptor loss, benzodiazepines to deal with fact that you can't really sleep properly anymore. counselling to deal with the psychosis and the weird mental states you get into from the fact that your brain can't cope with being up for many days straight.

The slant of this post was that there is something inherently UNFAIR about this, that "we" need to test against people doing this. There isn't a big worry because the people doing this all end up at one time or another like me, running on borrowed time means massive burnout. I aged biochemically about 10-15 years in the space of 3 years. Mileage may vary, but its not a smooth move. Ironically taking amphetamines to study isn't even a great strategy. Just going to class and paying attention is a better plan. Being on amphetamines reduces memory retention so much that its not worth the effort.

The big issue here, to me - is that people feel the need to self improve just so they can put out like whores for other people. Learn to live cheap and work less. Why do people feel the need to work harder and longer? I'm not sure why I did it, most of the money I was making was just going into the very drugs I was taking just to make more money for more drugs. Now I live on almost nothing and what unhappiness I have is mostly from the things lacking from my life from when that lifestyle caught up to me. Living on borrowed time catches up to a person. And when your employer finds out you're not just an eccentric hard working savant and really you're tricked out on speed you find out just how little they really care about you.

A good drug

[mlefranc]

The drug that does marvels for me is practicing judo twice a week. Nothing worked better for being able to focus attention in a very short time on something important and going to the core at once. Mind will serve you only if you are the one that controls it. However, it took several years to be a nidan.

A deficient diet?

[Colin Smith]

First thing to do is make sure you're eating a diet which provides everything your body and brain needs. The western diet is... abysmal... mostly; mediterranean isn't bad.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/4511759.stm

The body and brain are chemical machines, they need certain quantities of certain substances to run at their maximum potential and if you're not consuming the right substances, they'll be artificially limited to a lower performance. So you're wasting your time if you eat crap then try to boost your performance with drugs.

Re:this is nothing new

[Martin Blank]

Now they're moving on to modafinil (aka Provigil). In tests, they can stay up for several days at a time without fatigue, jitters, headaches, nausea, or loss of alertness or attention span. At the end of the test, 10-12 hours of shut-eye seems to reset their sleep clocks, and they move on, largely without any apparent side effects.

So now I wonder about it, even though I shy away from taking most pills aside from the occasional Advil or Rolaids. I have my day job, which is getting a little tougher because aside from training on a sudden influx of new technologies, I also have to help make up for the quarter of our team that went elsewhere. I have some side work that I do for extra money. I'd like to get back to learning C/C++, and pick up Perl as well. I also want to go for Cisco and Linux certifications, and come this fall I'd like to go back to school and get back on the path to my degree. Being able to slice out even half of the nights that I currently use for sleeping would be a tremendous assistance.

But is it fair? If I'm able to use this time to ramp up like that, will it force others to do so as well? Is it fair to my colleagues if I'm able to do half of their jobs (time permitting)? If I'm awake 24 hours at a stretch, and don't mind putting in an extra four hours since I have eight more than usual, am I putting their jobs at risk? And what happens to me when the next person comes along who is not only taking modafinil, but also a memory booster?

Adderall and ritalin ARE basically amphetamines

[morgan_greywolf]

And I can tell you all, from personal experience, that they are a complete godsend. The short story is I had serious learning problems at school, I had serious hobby problems at home, I had serious problems all up. I was interested in EVERYTHING and my mind wouldn't let me settle down and truly enjoy & work at any one thing in a productive way. Doctor wanted to put me on ritalin at age 9, my parents jacked up at that and called him crazy, then spent the next 7 years trying all kinds of alternative bullshit to help me.

Then I scored a constant supply of ritalin, and the world was a different place. I could actually DO things. I made more improvements to my schoolwork in the year after starting it than I had in a decade before. It changed my life. My parents still don't like it, they think ritalin = amphetamines = crack cocaine = me dead by age 30, but I don't live with them any more and that's their problem.

For those of you thinking about trying this stuff without the supervision of a doctor after reading this: don't. While they can be a godsend for those with ADHD, those who don't have the problem can have some serious trouble.

In non-ADHD subjects, Ritalin and Adderall are similar to methamphetamine in function. In normal individuals, they cause rapid increase in dopamine, just like amphetamines do. Really. If you don't believe me, this article on Ritalin from the National Institute of Health. The upshot of all of this is that in non-ADHD patients, addiction rates are very high due the increased dopamine levels.

Disclosure: my wife is a substance abuse counselor and deals with people addicted to this stuff all the time.

Re:Adderall and ritalin ARE basically amphetamines

[CrankyOldBastard]

And how I wish this post could be modded +10 vital reading.

Being a Cranky Old Bastard, I was a teenager in the 70's. I (and others of my vinatge) saw people go to hospital for amphetamine psychosis, and they're still there. My friends and I all agree, it doesnt matter how much speed you do, or how much, if you keep using it you'll one day have that switch in your brain thrown, and then you'll be searching for the hidden microphones that send you instructions about all the aliens and secret agents that are trying to control your thoughts.

I find the statement that this class of drugs is basically safe obscene. Taking them under medical supervision is one thing, but self-medicating with speed has a terrible cost down the line.

Don't get me wrong, I was a pretty wild kid, and there arn't many substances that were available back then I didnt try, and a few that I abused badly (and in still pay a price for the aftermath - fortunately not a price that causes functional difficulties except under very particular conditions, and the rainbows are nice) - this is what qualifies me, as I've seen exactly what happens to people who abuse speed. And abusing it doesnt mean boofing large doses, it means using speed without a doctor's supervision.

You dont need drugs made in a factory!

[cjmt]

You want the drugs made in your body instead. Running or any other proper endurance sport and the fitness imparted can make a huge difference (I find) to your ability to focus and deal with heavy workloads. Apparently cocaine and other similar drugs mimic the effect of endorphines, the drugs produced by the body under heavy excercise load. Why not cut out the expensive middle man and manufacturer your own?
YMMV of course!

Charlie

Piracetam

[caluml]

Piracetam seems to have few if any side-effects, and someone I know that took it says it really helped him cram info in before a tough Cisco exam.
(No, it wasn't me.)

Sincerely Doubt It

[bryanporter]

The ability to continue functioning in, for example, a sleep-deprived state might help a student in college, but it is by definition a short-term augmentation. Programmers, who might work on a project for months, prove their worth not by their ability to work extreme hours, but by their innate cognitive abilities. Their is no pill that will make you a great puzzle-solver. Alternatively, these drugs might do wonders to enhance the ability of a person to spend hours memorizing facts and figures, but those same people will fail to grasp the fundamental underlying science or concept.

As an example, I could teach a four year old that e^(i*Pi) + 1 = 0 (Eulers Formula) - furthermore, given a week or two, I could probably even get that same four year old to be able to repeat the entire series of steps to arrive at this formula. That child could then wow people with his "knowledge". But the child would have no idea who Euler was, what Euler's Formula means, etc.

At best, you'd end up with a person in your workplace who exhibits extremely erratic behavior.

There is no smart pill. Sorry.

drugs in college

[Anonymous Coward]

Posting AC because of drug talk.
I go to a college well-known for its drug culture (Ithaca). The most prevalent drug on campus is, by far, marijuana. But the second most prevalent is adderal/generic knockoff (adderal has 4 amphetamine salts, most generics are just amphetamine sulfate). Kids will rail addies to stay up to study, to stay up and be able to drink more, or before finals. (Other drugs make appearances too... psychadelics and opiates mostly, to my knowledge there isn't a very large coke/coca market at all.)

I'll preface this by saying that yes, I've done speed to do work, and even to party. I've found it to be an incredibly useful tool, if used well, though I very much dislike the effects of the drug. Speeding isn't very pleasant -- you're totally unable to relax or chill out, but rather you have enough energy to do whatever it is that needs to be done. 20-page term papers become 4-hour fodder... or 10,000 lines of code, or a semester's worth of reading for a class.

What could be better? Literally -- you eat a pill and have 6 hours of pure work-ethic, plus your brain is on overdrive so you're working faster anyway. I know kids who don't do work for about 2 weeks straight, and then rail some addies, and do whatever is owed in one night. I know kids who say "drugs are bad" but will eat 30mg before studying for finals. I also know kids who are addicted to amphetamines.

I can't say whether any drug is bad or not -- I firmly believe that a drug is what you make of it and how you use it. But the people who should be taken to task for the prevalence of these drugs on college campuses are the pharmaceutical industry, for its aggressive campaigns claiming far more people have ADD/ADHD than actually do, and the doctors who take the rhetoric and perscribe the pills the companies tell them to. Anecdotal evidence is a buddy of mine who is convinced he doesn't have ADD/ADHD, and yet has an 80mg/day perscription for adderal (he sells the pills he doesn't keep for his own scholastic use).

I'll never use speed to party again (with the exception of ecstasy, which is an amphetamine [methylenedioxymethamphetamine]), but for school I find it a very useful tool. I'm just very careful that I use it sparingly and have a safe place to come down [if you've got more tests to take when you're coming down, the only solution is to do more amphetamines].

As to its fairness... I think it is inherently unfair that one human differs from another -- we're not all on an even playing field physically or mentally. That's just the way it is, fortunately or unfortunately.

Just for reference, Adderal is so prevalent that either I'm handed pills for free, or pay around $2 a pill. During finals week, the price was up to $5, and I heard of people paying upwards of $10.

Re:this is ironic

[jd]

Sadly, you are correct. Many kids who are a "problem" are bored. Some because they're smart enough to plough through the material, others because they run into a problem, get stuck, and have to wait 10-15 minutes before the teacher can help. Assuming the teacher ever does, of course.

Based on my own volunteer work in school programs, I would say that class sizes should rarely be above 15-20 in total, and should have 1 teacher/assistant competent in the subject for every 5-7 students. I also think kids should be streamed per subject, with some flexibility for when certain groups of kids happen to work well together. (No, that does not mean cribbing the notes.)

The problem with the existing system is that it is geared around people learning as and when the teacher gets round to it, rather than pushing people as far and as fast as they are able. It is no wonder that kids use drugs, but my guess is that its more to zone out the inadequacies of the educational system as it is to improve learning. You can't accelerate much beyond the speed the material is taught.

Based on research that has been caried out, I think that I'd extend this basic concept by throwing in a second or even a third language, as it appears that the complexity of language is such that learning new languages young boosts the growth of neural connections and seems to improve the capacity to learn. Languages, therefore, may provide a safe alternative to these drugs in that they'll boost intelligence and have no risk of later side-effects.

It's not DXM that's restricted

[Sycraft-fu]

It's pseudoephedrine. That is, apparantly, one of the primary ingrediants in meth. So they decided that any OTC medication containing pseudoephedrine will no long be something you can simply walk in and buy. You still need no perscription, but you have to go to the pharmacist, fill out a form, have your ID checked, and then you may buy one box only.

Fuck that, too much effort. Next allergy season my doctor has said she'll just write me a 4 month perscription of Allegra.

At any rate, that's the only OTC component I know of that has any regulation. Though people can trip on dextromethorphan, I guess it's rare enough that there's not a serious concern about it. I mean hell, people can get high on whip cream propellant if they want. Pseudoephedrine is just a concer because meth is a rather problematic drug. If it honestly can push meth in to the category of too hard to make, I'm ok with the restriction, but I've a feeling it does nothing but inconcenicence most of us and does not deter the meth heads.

I wouldn't bother

[kimvette]

I once tried caffiene tablets to keep going at the office (working 12-16 hours a day for months at a stretch because an employer is too fucking cheap and shortsighted to let a QA director hire ample qualified staff takes its toll) but it didn't help. I felt better for an hour or two then I'd crash harder. I can only imagine that it would be a harder, more painful crash with stronger (and illegal) stimulants.

What does work is exercise and getting more sleep. I've been trying to burn both ends of the candle at my own business, but lately I've been eating fruits for breakfast and bicycling to and from work, so now when I do work long days I still feel tired, but not to the point where I feel totally exhausted. Soon I'll be bringing in more help and knocking back to 5 days a week. I still make sure I get at absolute minimum 6-1/2 hours or so of sleep per night, and I try really hard to get between 7 and eight (any more than that and I end up either groggy or get a migraine).

Do yourself a favor if you need to work long hours: MAKE a way to get exercise into your routine, and lay off refined foods. You'll find yourself able to work longer before you feel tired, and you'll feel better overall, and will probably lose any extra weight you're carrying at the same time.

Drugs (legal or otherwise) might give you a temporary lift, but there is no subtitute for sleep, eating right, and actually getting working your muscles from time to time. If there were a magic bullet, America wouldn't be full of fatties. I'm glad to say I'm no longer a fatty, and while I still have some more weight to lose, the first 25 pounds has made a huge difference and I only have a few more to go. :)

Need a lift? Eat a banana or drink some herbal tea, or just drink plenty of water.

Re:I wouldn't bother

[tilminator]

In my experience, moving my body for five minutes every hour or so gives a large boost in brainwork done. Drinking a lot of water is also important. (Dirty little secret: The walk to the restroom may be these 5 minutes.)

Aside from that, I used to do a variety of yoga (link in German) where other people would drink very strong coffee because it didn't make me jittery, nor did it crash me after a while. However, it took me a few months to really master it, and I don't know of any scientific study about its effectiveness.

deregulate almost all drugs

[m874t232]

I think we should deregulate almost all drugs. If you want to mess up your body or your mind with steroids or "smart drugs", that's your business. If you want to feel good through chemistry, that should be your decision. If you die 30 years before your time because of various kinds of drug abuse, that's nobody's business but yours--just don't expect exceptional measures from doctors to try to reverse the effects.

The only drugs that should be far more tightly regulated than they are are antibiotics and antivirals, because incorrect use by one person harms other people.

Re:deregulate almost all drugs

[HuguesT]

This idea, and other similar simple-looking measures having to do with taxes and govt control, would only work if everyone could obtain complete and unbiased information about all options adapted to their case *and* everyone were behaving rationally *and* assumes that everyone lives in a interpersonal vacuum.

I agree that everyone should be allowed to take Achilles' choice (a short life but unending fame vs. a long but quiet life), but it isn't usually that simple.

There are idiots or ignorant people who take drugs without realising the consequences. They might become addicted and start stealing etc to support their habit, they might take too much and overdose, costing society a lot, they might become psychotic with nasty effects to others like family, friends, etc. This is usually perceived as a problem by society. I'm not even getting into direct damage to others : would you like your father/your mum to turn to a life of drug and abandon you and your siblings while still at a young age ?

In other words antibiotics are not the only drugs with nasty side effects for other people than those who take it, and that is precisely the reason why they are regulated. I believe most people would not be able to cope with themselves in a society with very few laws (an anarchy), yet most people are under the delusion that they could.

If you have a workable solution to this, I'm sure many govt around the planet would like to hear it.

Re:deregulate almost all drugs

[loqi]

There are idiots or ignorant people who take drugs without realising the consequences.

There are lots of stupid people that do lots of stupid things without realising the consequences. It's not a justification for prohibition.

They might become addicted and start stealing etc to support their habit.

This is why stealing is already against the law. Nevermind that far more people are in prison for simple drug offences than theft. We're paying for 1 million peoples' annual room and board right now on account of prohibition. You'd better be able to show that that cost plus the cost of the drug war is less than the cost of letting people decide what to put in their own bodies, or all your financial arguments are out the window.

they might take too much and overdose, costing society a lot

This rationale could be used to outlaw everything dangerous, from McDonald's food on up.

they might become psychotic with nasty effects to others like family, friends

Good point. Let's add joining the Church of Scientology to the list of things that should be illegal along with drugs.

Re:deregulate almost all drugs

[m874t232]

There are idiots or ignorant people who take drugs without realising the consequences.

While there are many valid functions for government, protecting people from their own stupidity or ignorance shouldn't be one of them. Furthermore, with the amount of money that currently goes into policing, we could create informational campaigns that ensure that everybody knows the dangers.

They might become addicted and start stealing etc to support their habit, they might take too much and overdose, costing society a lot, they might become psychotic with nasty effects to others like family, friends, etc.

Given a choice, the drugs people tend to take are drugs that make them happy and make them feel good; legalizing drugs would probably reduce use of drugs that cause people to harm others.

I'm not even getting into direct damage to others : would you like your father/your mum to turn to a life of drug and abandon you and your siblings while still at a young age ?

Drug addiction doesn't generally cause parents to abandon their children; except for unusually severe cases, most people with drug addiction can function reasonably well and seem to overcome addiction after some time if support is available. It is the fact that drugs are illegal that results in children growing up without their parents, either because their parents got killed or because they got incarcerated.

I believe most people would not be able to cope with themselves in a society with very few laws (an anarchy), yet most people are under the delusion that they could.

I'm not a libertarian or anarchist; I just think that proponents of drug laws have failed to demonstrate that they work. Oh, people like you use lots of "mights" and "mays" and "think of the children", but, in the end, the reasonable conclusion based on all available data is that drug laws make the consequences of drug addiction worse, both in human and in finanical terms.

New levels of usage maybe...

[Cognitive Dissident]

but not the fact of usage.

Onpoint 09/2002: College Students and Psychoactive Medication

Never mind the old equation of college and recreational drugs, the parents' old tiptoe through pot and peyote. A new generation is arriving at university heavily armed with prescriptions for Zoloft, Dexedrine, Paxil and Prozac. Xanax, Adderall, Cylert and Ritalin. And it's not about weekend benders. It's about ADD, anxiety, OCD and depression.

Officials say that today that about 40 percent of American college students are on psychoactive drugs. Everybody knows the number is huge. But what exactly does it mean? Up next On Point: the Medicated Generation goes to college.

---

And maybe the reason for the increasing levels of usage is that they are learning this from their days in grade school?

Better Living through Chemistry? (Dr. Leonard Sax)

This year some six million children in the U.S.--one in eight-- will take Ritalin. With 5 percent of the world's population, the U.S. consumes 85 percent of this drug. Have we considered the consequences?

and...

Despite their stubborn refusal to medicate their children with Ritalin, these other countries do not lag behind the United States in academic performance. On the contrary: according to the most recent studies, France, Germany, and Japan continue to maintain their traditional lead over the United States in tests of math and reading ability.
---

This article dates to 2000, but it's about the very same crisis that we've been hearing about more and more the last few years. Children are being medicated in order to get them to sit still in school (where 'unproductive' things like things like recess are being cut in favor of more cramming). Maybe a whole generation has been raised to think of 'learning' as something you need drugs to accomplish. And now we are beginning to see the consequences.

Drugs are helpful...

[SomeRandomWag]

What drugs can certainly do is to make you think you are smarter and temporarily relieve the pain of learning. The problem is that anything that makes you different, smarter or otherwise, is painful in some way. - Nonsense.

The fact of the matter is, these drugs do provide a significant and beneficial effect when trying to cram for that next exam, or finish that scientific paper for submission to the journal of your choice. While I can't say anything about the long term effects on memory, it's the near-term deadlines that these drugs are getting used for. Several class-mates and friends of mine have resorted to taking ADHD and narcolepsy drugs during crunch time in grad school and I have seen them produce, in 24-48 hours, high quality work that would have otherwise easily taken a week or more. When you don't need to sleep but 4 hours a day, and you can be at full concentration for 16 hours straight without getting distracted or losing your train of thought, you can certainly get a lot more work done. As one friend described it during an all nighter before a grad-level physics exam, you feel "sharper" and abstract concepts that are otherwise difficult to wrap your head around just make sense. I'd wager that at least 40% of graduate students have used these drugs at some point in their academic careers...

grading on a curve

[magnamous]

Regarding the concern about drugged students having an edge over other students during tests: I would think that this would be at least somewhat less of a concern if you don't grade on a curve. That dampens the effect of "extra leverage".

Re:Hm

[krotkruton]

The trick isn't to just find a friend with a prescription, but to find a friend who doesn't need his/her prescription. I had a friend who was diagnosed with ADD but was prescribed more adderall than was necessary... much more.

What he didn't use ended up going to his friends who wanted it. I know its not really the point of the article, but I worry more about the kids who crush it up and snort it over the kids who take it to study for a test. I've never really bought into the idea of most "gateway drugs", but I've seen a lot of people make the leap from snorting adderall to snorting coke.

Drugs are good!

[FhnuZoag]

Most of the commentators have latched on to the drugs are bad conclusion, so maybe it's time for some devil's advocating... Suppose a drug is invented that has almost no adverse side effect - would it be ok to take it?

There's an assumption in most people's responses that drugs must inherently have a bad sideeffect. That the badness of the side effect is in general proportion to the benefits obtained. Hence, it cannot be good to take X, because X must have a hidden side effect that cancels out any advantages it may provide. Such reasoning may be true when we were kids and were having the 'Drugs -just say NO' message drummed into us, but they aren't going to be true forever. And it's not as though the 'healthy' alternatives are really perfect, either. Exercise to improve fitness is fraught with physical risks. Increased study to boost academics hurts social lives, and may well have a greater cumulative harm than impotence 30 years down the line. (At least, if you've been taking drugs, you've actually slept with someone in that time) How many teenage suicides would have been averted if the victim was taking recreational drugs, and kept taking them? (So no withdrawal symptoms...)

If we look at things in a certain way, there is no special evil associated with using chemicals to achieve some effect over carrying out some other activity. As technology improves, the lines are bound to blur even further.

the other problem

[petermgreen]

is that drugs can have nasty side effects both short and long term (yes I include caffine in this, but caffine is pretty damn mild as stimulants go).

the worrying bit is that people could feel pressured into using drugs without a proper understanding of any bad side effects they may have, I wonder if this was more of the reason for drug testing in sports than fairness considerations.

Re:the other problem

[fyngyrz]

[the other problem] is that drugs can have nasty side effects both short and long term (yes I include caffine in this, but caffine is pretty damn mild as stimulants go).

Sure. They might have side effects. So can staying up late, studying too long, partying, overstressing one's self in the gym, not going to the gym, having a bad coach, facing a much better opponent, eating too much (or too little, or the wrong things), getting laid instead of getting sleep. Then again, moderation will help reach towards a balance — you can get laid *and* you can get sleep, for instance. You can study a reasonable amount of time. And, you can use drugs in a reasonable manner. The possibility of side effects cannot be justification for prohibition; if it were so, your meals would be controlled, your sex life would be controlled, religion would be forbidden, suntanning would be illegal... etc., ad infinitum. These are personal choices, no more, no less. There is no possible justification for prohibition with regard to them. The state is not your mommy, and there is no legitimate justification for it in its attempt to be your mommy. There is no basis for the state's attempt to be your mommy in the constitution, and frankly, you didn't sign or formulate the constitution so you're not ethically or morally bound by the state's interpretation of it unless you choose to be, anyway.

It is also very important to note that in many cases, the "side effects" are either vastly exaggerated (marijuana is the poster child for this) or outright lies (LSD's reputation for "damaging genes" was complete hogwash.) Sometimes side effects are beneficial -- for instance, aspirin can reduce the risk of heart attacks, marijuana acts directly to improve the state of the eye, and hash brownies taste really, really good.

The objective — of course — is to create performance enhancers without side effects, or minimal side effects. Everyone knows that, or would, if they'd stop to think about it for even a second. There is nothing inherently bad about the idea of a drug that insists there be side effects, and the presumption that all drugs will cause the user to experience nasty side effects is a false one from the word go. Moderation is one of the keys to avoiding side effects. Everything has side effects if taken too far. You can kill yourself by drinking too much water, for crying out loud. Should we forbid water drinking, or large glasses, or drinking water under age 18? Should we put additives in water that will force you to vomit before you get to a point where you've drank so much it will kill you? Or... here's a wild idea... should we let the citizen decide how much is enough? Oh, wait. ;-)

Moderation in all things is a much better guideline than the awesomely stupid "this is your brain on drugs" message put out by the drug war morons. Drugs are tools. Sometimes they are tools to beat other organisms in contest with us such as viri, bacteria, parasites and poisons such as snake, spider and scorpion bites. And... is that "fair"? Sometimes they are tools to save us from our emotional excesses, sometimes they are tools to make us more effective so we can work, or work better in the face of various challenges, internal and external (everything from aspirin to dayquil to more modern performance enhancers and symptom supressors fits here.) Sometimes they are tools to make life more enjoyable — viagra, alchohol, a nice latte, marijuana, etc.

...the worrying bit is that people could feel pressured into using drugs without a proper understanding of any bad side effects they may have, I wonder if this was more of the reason for drug testing in sports than fairness considerations.

(a) Teaching is the answer, not prohibition, to the informed, or not, status of drug consumers, and...

(b) your instincts are right — there is absolutely no fairness in sports. Nature deals bet

I'm a college student AND work in a pharmacy

[shaneFalco]

I work in a pharmacy and my expierence with the ADHD medications shows how insanely stupid these college kids are being. We had a pharmacist lose his licence for slipping some of the ADHD pills on the sly; there is a reason the FDA classifies them as controlled substances, they are highly addictive. Some of them (Ritalin for sure, maybe Allderal as well) are narcotics which are the most addictive and most highly controlled category of legal drugs. In the state I live in (I'm not going to reveal that because the pill popping pharmacist is still under investigation by the state) controlled drugs are required to be locked in a cabinet that only the pharmacist can access.

Now, for further insight- I am a college student, a soon to be senior political science and history major, I pull 4.0's with nothing more than Earl Gray tea doused in honey to help me write those term papers on Progressive politics until 3:00 am. I equate taking controlled substances illegally in order to gain an "edge" to writing notes on the palm of your hand before stepping into the exam room. I got my high GPA the honest way, I'm going to take my GRE the honest way, and I'm going to persue my PhD the honest way.

Before popping the controls in order to push up those scores realize they are controls because they are highly addictive. If they were safe for use without a prescription then I doubt they would be locked under the counter and subject to an insane amount of paperwork and redundant checks before dispensing. Besides, taking an illegal drug to get your edge reflects badly on you and cheapens the meaning of everything you gained.

Re:I'm a college student AND work in a pharmacy

[RexRhino]

Now, for further insight- I am a college student, a soon to be senior political science and history major, I pull 4.0's with nothing more than Earl Gray tea doused in honey to help me write those term papers on Progressive politics until 3:00 am. I equate taking controlled substances illegally in order to gain an "edge" to writing notes on the palm of your hand before stepping into the exam room. I got my high GPA the honest way, I'm going to take my GRE the honest way, and I'm going to persue my PhD the honest way.

I consider staying up until 3AM working to gain an "edge" the same as writing notes on the palm of your hand before stepping into the exam room. Lack of sleep not only can cause health problems, but can be dangerous to others if you are driving a motor vehicle or operating heavy machinery. What about the people who are narcoleptic or need their beauty sleep? What about the other students who are forced to engage in this reckless sleepless behavior in order to compete with you?

I think it is time the University and the Police step in. If you would have actually been learning from your Progressive Politics studies, it is that we desperatly need the government to legislate on this issue, and to criminalize the dangerous and reckless behavior that you engage in! And there should be a strictly enforce state-mandidated sleeping regime that all students should be required to adhere to!

Re:I'm a college student AND work in a pharmacy

[Vegeta99]

Do you even know what a narcotic is?

1. n. An addictive drug, such as opium, that reduces pain, alters mood and behavior, and usually induces sleep or stupor. Natural and synthetic narcotics are used in medicine to control pain.

Ritalin is certainly not a narcotic. You are correct that Vicodin is Schedule 3 - up to 15mg/dose, however. After that, it is Schedule II.

Other drugs on Schedule II that are not narcotics include cocaine (which does have legitimate medical uses), methamphetamine, amphetamine, and phencyclidine (PCP), among others.

Also note that FDA classification does not denote agreement with the medical profession. Marijuana is listed as Schedule I, the most highly physically addictive, dangerous category that is supposed to have no medical use, but most doctors would agree that is is not physically addictive. Marinol, a synthetic d-9-THC pill, is Schedule III, Nicotine, which is sometimes regarded as more addictive than heroin, is not scheduled at all. As a matter of fact, heroin is Schedule I, but fentanyl, which is even stronger, is Schedule II.

Drug laws will never be based on facts, and I hope you realize this.

Re:I'm a college student AND work in a pharmacy

[shaneFalco]

My academic focus is political philosophy, particularly the Enlightenment and the subsequent treatises on democracy, which stress playing by the rules. Anything you can do that makes you feel like you have a firm grasp of the material is fair game, provided it is legal. Most professors have a 'no notes' policy, and the federal government has a 'no abuse of controlled substances' policy making both of them out of bounds. Now I have used several tactics to get my 'edge'. For instance in junior high I found taking a drink of water before an exam made me feel prepared. In high school I found using my 'lucky pen' helped. In college I've become partial to studying with a group and explaining the material to them helps me feel confident. None of those are out of bounds because there is no academic or legal restriction on them. If you find taking an asprin helps you- go for it thats not illegal. But if the professor catches you with the dates of the Russian Revolution written on your hand chances are you fail as you have overstepped the bounds. Likewise, if it is found you took a controlled substance without the prior authorization of a medical doctor, you are in violation of law. Please note: It would be perfectly alright if you had a prescription for the substance in question.

Re:I'm a college student AND work in a pharmacy

[loqi]

You seem to place your own individual judgment over that of the government

Yes I do. How could anyone think so little of their judgment that they need to look to a noncorporeal entity such as a government for it? Multiplying people together doesn't make them more ethical.

However, Rouseau, writing in The Social Contract recognized that our individual will must become subordinate to a more embracing general will which expresses the views of society en masse.

Well, Rouseau can "recognize" all he'd like to, but I disagree with him. Since we're invoking arbitrary dead people to back up our arguments, I guess I'll toss this out (Thomas Jefferson):

No man has a natural right to commit aggression on the equal rights of another, and this is all from which the laws ought to restrain him.

appear quite willing to violate the law in order to make a statement

And indeed I am, although this has nothing to do with my earlier statements. If a law is unjust, people should not abide by that law. That's essentially the beginning of how many unjust laws get removed, believe it or not. The simple truth is that bullshit laws stick around on the books all the time (e.g., sodomy laws in the South).

Your posts suggest alienation and indifference to the political process.

No, I think that political processes are not relevant to the reality of what is right and what is wrong. They are a vehicle to ensure fair treatment of citizens in a civilization, and any time their treatment becomes unfair (e.g., indefinite copyright extension), I am by definition alienated.

This can of course be cured by becoming proactive in the political process by writing the FDA, Congress, etc.

Now this is just condescending. You know nothing about me or my involvement. You may be surprised to learn that many politically active people disagree with the law from time to time.

If you were to wake up tomorrow and decide pants were optional could you justify not wearing them? What if you woke up and decided you wanted to kill your neighbor's dog?

Then I'd do those things. If I woke up tomorrow insane, I'd do insane stuff. If you woke up tomorrow, robbed of your judgment, you'd make poor decisions too.

If it is change you seek- do it within the system.

Does this mean, "abide by the law"? Because from the looks of change in the past, that's piss-poor advice.

You my friend are merely being a fatalistic troll.

No, I simply disagree with you. I suppose I'm fatalistic because I don't have a rosy, comfortable view of the individual's relationship with government? I'll see your fatalism and raise you one accusation of complacent naivety. But thanks for calling me a troll, that says something about one of us.

Re:I'm a college student AND work in a pharmacy

[DeanFox]

The confusion is that the schedules were designed for the "War n Drugs". Before 1970 and the controlled substance act, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controlled_Substances _Act things were different.

Only congress can pass new laws (in theory). And drug laws need strict definitions. As in, this particular molecular structure know as "XYZ" is illegal. Change the molecular structure and the new substance is not illegal. Every time a new designer drug was developed, congress would have to go through the process of creating a new law making that new substance illegal.

Nixon changed all that. He gave the Department of Justice and the Department of Health and Human Services (which includes the Food and Drug Administration) power to create new law in what some call a side step around the Constitution.

Congress defined 5 categories of drugs. They also control the legality of each category. However, the categorization of a substance falls to the Justice Department and FDA. Now, a new designer drug comes out and the FDA is charged with categorizing it. They make it a Schedule 1. Wa-La, a new chemical becomes illegal. Some see this as a side step around the Consultation because it gives, in effect, the FDA law making powers reserved in the Constitution for Congress.

So the Schedules are less about science than politics. That's why a commercial drug from a powerful drug company with lots of lobby money gets fentanyl on schedule 2 even though it's more powerful than heroin on schedule 1. As if heroin has absolutely no medical value (profit) but fentanyl does?

Obligatory slashdot quote: They must be new here (to the USA).

-[d]-

hemp, er marijuana

[falconwolf]

The short answer is that a corporation doesn't make a profit on pot. Corporations do make a profit in opposing pot.

It was because of some businesses and wealthy people that hemp, aka marijuana, was made illegal to begin with. Prior to it being made illegal Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence on hemp paper. As a farmer he grew hemp on his estate and once wrote that he thought farmers should be required to grow hemp, he never did follow through with this because he knew such a law would be denying farmers the right to grow what they wanted. Rudolph Diesel designed his engine to run on most any vegeble oil including hemp oil. And on his Iron Mountain Estate, Henry Ford designed and built a vehicle that used hemp in the manufacture of it and was powered by fuel made from hemp. It was because of the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937 that hemp was made illegal. Several powerful people had pushed congress to have hemp made illegal because they saw it as a threat to their wealth. But even after made illegal the US government encouraged farmers to grow hemp during WWII. They went so far as to make a movie, "Hemp for Victory" to encourage farmers to grow it.

Falcon

This comment is so out of place here, but...

[Jugalator]

This sounds a bit corny, and is so out of place on Slashdot that it isn't even funny, but I've found being physically active (like at least 30 mins exercise a day) and maintaining a healthy lifestyle does good things to your concentration and studying abilities. You'll be less tired because your lung capacity improves and more, and there's of course other good side effects beyond the realms of studies, like better looks and health. Many feel they're too tired to exercise, but that's a bit of a vicious cycle in that the reason is often because you haven't.

So this would be a natural way to hopefully improve the studying situation a bit if you're into that sort of thing.

OK, so I've done it. Posted a health/lifestyle post on Slashdot. Feel free to mod me into oblivion! :-)

Re:This comment is so out of place here, but...

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

This sounds a bit corny, and is so out of place on Slashdot that it isn't even funny, but I've found being physically active (like at least 30 mins exercise a day) and maintaining a healthy lifestyle does good things to your concentration and studying abilities. You'll be less tired because your lung capacity improves and more, and there's of course other good side effects beyond the realms of studies, like better looks and health.

I tried that, it didn't work. In fact it failed miserably. I was more tired, had less energy, put on weight and my grades suffered. Reason, I hated exercise. It was boring, uncomfortable, embarrassing, unrealistic, tiring and unproductive.

Instead of cycling, running, or horror of horrors, going to the gym, I just took up walking down a few quiet country lanes. No people. Nice and quiet. Time to think. Walking normally, not "briskly" or whatever the hell those people waddling along in the wrong gait are up to.

Re:This comment is so out of place here, but...

[Frangible]

That is absolutely NOT out of place. The main thing ADHD drugs do is boost dopamine levels in the prefrontal cortex of your brain. Exercise does this too, as short term changes in gene expression result in increased calcium ion transport in the brain, which in turn raises dopamine levels. These changes last for about 56 hours. There is also some evidence of long-term favorable changes to dopamine receptors from exercise in animal models, but to what degree these studies apply to humans is unknown.

Bottomline: exercise absolutely helps concentration and mental function.

Also, meditation has been proven to increase dopamine levels in the prefrontal cortex as well.

However, these on their own were not enough to overcome my ADD and I still had to take drugs. But they help. I would greatly prefer to take nothing at all, but there are limits to "natural" cures.

Re:This comment is so out of place here, but...

[Overzeetop]

Different levels for different people. You are exersizing, you just don't feel like it. You might also be throwing in a bit of meditation to your regimen. Think about it - mild physical stimulation (walking) and "quiet country lanes. No people. Nice and quiet. Time to think." Meditation, baby. You'd just not sitting the lotus position and reciting a mantra to allow yourself to relax.

And I'm not suprised that exercise started to add pounds. The most dangerous thing for me is starting to exercise - my body starts asking for more energy - more than I can burn when I'm ramping up. It's doubly bad if I get into a time crunch and let my exercising go by the wayside. For a couple weeks to a month, my body still expects me to hop back on the bike or into the pool any day, and demands calories to compensate. But instead I drive a desk for 10-12 hours - not much caloric demand there. Also, I can understand the boring side, too. I really enjoy swimming, but there is just nothing to keep the mind active. My second choice is cycling, on a old road bike on a set of rollers. It takes a bit to get used to (it's like riding on ice), but it does a good job, and even a new bike and a set of rollers is less than a stupid spinning machine. Plus you can always take the bike outside if the weather is nice, and you've trained your muscles to the motion. Oh, and boredom on the rollers - yeah, crushing. Except if you get a good audio player and listen to books. Not only does it pass the time, but you can relax with good reading material.

It's late, I'm rambling, and I really ought to consider getting back into the morning workout routine.

I programmed once on DMT

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, Python was really scary. Chased me around the room for a half an hour.

Like any lawyer will tell you: IT DEPENDS

[Zaphod2016]

I am shocked that no one has mentioned the simple fact that IT DEPENDS on the person taking the drug.

I'll use food for my analogy.

I have a buddy who weighs about 120lbs (skinny), eats like a pig. I'm 205lbs (fatty) and I also have a terrible diet. Yet another friend is pushing 250lbs (fatty+), and he's a lifelong vegetarian. We're all about 6' tall.

I have no interest in splitting hairs between "food" or "drug"; both cause chemical reactions in the body, and these reactions are entirely dependant on any number of factors (diet, lifestyle, age, race, location, gender...I could go on and on and on...).

I for one think it is disgusting that we live in a country (USA) which advertises perscription meds to children every night during prime time, and then locks these same kids up a few years later for smoking dope. This isn't hypocritical; it's fucking asinine.

Call it "free markets", call it "the people", the verdict is in: WE LOVE DRUGS and WE LOVE FOOD. Both will affect each and every one of us in different ways, and legal or not, each must be used in MODERATION and with ALL DUE CAUTION.

Psychotropics

[neuroPuff]

Many people are seeing these types of drugs as performance enhancing somehow in children and teenagers, but the truth is selective seratonin reuptake inhibitors don't have an immediate effect, or when taken at a 'therapeutic' level, are not that mind blowing in effect. Benzodiazepines such as Xanax, Klonipin, or Valium are not likely to help anyone with their job unless the recreational intake and effect of euphoria 'helps' your job. Those are prescribed for those who have social phobias and panic disorders, otherwise they're not too useful.

Contrary to what the submitter says about Adderall "jacking your brain up", is also another gross generalization. Unless you have ADD/ADHD or narcolepsy its not likely to be helpful on a clinical level, but unlike most amphetamines it doesn't have too many side effects.

Most people who obtain prescription drugs are most likely to benefit from them and are relatively safe, and as far as SSRI's go, for example, recreationally students are better off without the drug due to sexual side effects, so they'd be more prone to be taking it for the actual label use.

Classic Formula

[illuminatedwax]

I use a simple shot of cocaine, seven per-cent solution, to keep my brain stimulated.

Re:New? Try old.

[Ungrounded Lightning]

You've covered the amphetamines.

But the whole POINT of the "psychedelic" drugs (which turned out mainly to be hallucinogens) was an attempt to increase mental ability - intelligence, creativity, empathy, intuitive pattern-matching, and perhaps obtain access to paranormal abilities (this being before Rhine was debunked).

The very WORD "psychedelic" was coined to reflect this. Means "mind-expanding".

The adolescents of the '60s and '70s were trying very hard to obtain exactly the sort of mind amplification that these new drugs actually produce.

Unfortunately, they only had what was available at the time.

LSD, for instance, apparently reduces the threshold of patten matching - whether it's a real pattern or a false one - but simultaneously reduces the threshold of the "eureka" signal. So the user has a lot of odd thoughts, and every time he has a new one a his mind says: "That's RIGHT!". (You can imagine how this warped the minds of even well-educated and intelligent users, such as the emminent psychology professor Timothy Leary.)

Or amphetamines - which mimic various neurotransmitters, primarily in the fight/flight mechanism. You could achieve more focus and alertness (with some of them - at the cost of deep thought). But you paid for it later, as non-emergency systems (such as cell growth and even immune response) were put on hold to conserve resources for the "emergency".

Some use was also self-medicative. Psychology at the time (before the widespread use of Crack Cocaine led to the recognition of Freud's theories as typical cocaine addict ravings) was largely in a religious and black-art stage, and while there were a number of psychoactive drugs available that were pallative, but often mis-prescribed. People with mental problems often attempted to cadge prescriptions for, or buy on the black market, drugs that they perceived (often correctly) as improving their condition. And the Vietnam adventure resulted in a lot of people with injuries producing chronic pain, which could be alleviated only by narcotics.

And of course once a generation was "distracted" from government-approved "channels" into "self-actualization", the government started an ever-escalating drug war - which meant that the pure, pharmacutical-quality, drugs were supplanted by black-market concoctions of dubious ingredients, strength, and purity. This also warped medical practice, leading to under-medication for pain (which is still with us).

By the '80s the use of drugs in an attempt to increase intelligence had pretty much died out, and the remaining use of the remaining garbage-quality street drugs was mainly hedonistic, self-medicative, and the feeding of addictions.

Re:As a High school student...

[Short Circuit]

If your parents are rich and willing, you can go to college and just study. Otherwise, you work and study.

Or you take out student loans, and pay them off after you've got your degree. So you can work less, or not at all, while you study.

If you own a portable music player, you can listen to your own playlist of music as you bop around. Otherwise, you don't.

This is an advantage? Besides, you can get a cassette player for $20 at Wal-Mart. Or a cheap portable radio from a dollar store. We're not talking uber-expensive, here.

If you have (for instance) a Bowflex and a personal trainer, you now have the opportunity to outperform most of your fellow atheletes in terms of how long it takes you to reach your potential, and how close you are going to get to it.

Or you can use the campus gym, and ask advice of the phys-ed instructors.

If you have a car, you drive to school. Otherwise, you walk, sponge, or use pubtrans.

Or you can take online classes that allow you to do everything at home. (Except the occasional proctored exam.) Speaking from experience, I can tell you this frees up your schedule like you wouldn't believe.

If you have a laptop, you have many performance-enhancing tools. Otherwise, not.

Sure. You can type up your notes in class, and record your lectures. Nothing you couldn't do just as well with a Gregg shorthand textbook and tape recorder. Or bite the bullet and find an old 386 laptop with DOS that someone's trying to get rid of. (And believe me, that works fine for notetacking. MS Edit isn't a bad editor.)

All of these "advantages" have one thing in common: Money; the ability to purchase the advantage.

All of these "advantages" have another thing in common, too: There are cheaper alternatives.

It's not about money, or about the rich keeping the poor down. As for drugs, I won't take stimulants without talking to someone who's willing to prescribe them. There's a reason things like Ritalin and Adderall are perscription medications. They either have side-effects that can harm you, or they haven't been in use long enough to prove that they're generally safe.

Feel free.

[jd]

Actually, I'm not a teacher, I'm a software engineer. Now, my younger sister teaches molecular biology, my father was a (UK) professor of chemistry and my grandfather was a maths lecturer. Hmmm. Nope, no languages in there. Now, whilst it is certainly true that almost all subjects require brainpower, they exercise different sections of the brain and are therefore not equal in their impact. You cannot simply substitute one thing for another and expect the same results. In general, schools that provide so-called "Classical Education" do appear to produce a disproportionately large number of students with a high level of intellectual ability. This is not to say they are the best - they are actually quite feeble in many areas that "modern" education has mastered. The problem is to identify those elements of "Classical education" that are either inferior or missing from more modern methods that would account for the higher potential. Research in Europe has generally concluded that the element of interest is language. Polyglots have better minds.

I am not interested in qualitative studies for the most part and I have little regard for statistical studies. These are too easily rigged to suit people's preconceptions. Empirical research - where possible - where a definite pathway A-to-B-to-C can be demonstrated is the ideal. In education, empirical research is extremely difficult and it's only recently that technology such as fMRI even existed. Certainly, schools aren't equipt with such technology to routinely scan the kids' brains to determine how the school culture is influencing things. Virtually all other research is culturally biased and heavily statistical with no statement on the level of confidence used in the statistical tests, or indeed what statistical method was used, and how it was ensured that a genuinely representative random sample was obtained.

The understanding of the importance of language comes from a mix of research - some involving fMRI (which lends credibility to it), but most involving qualitative assessments of education and the impact on society from schools in Europe over the past 2,500 years. The amount of data is fairly impressive and there is therefore some credibility beyond the "hard science" to the argument that multi-cultural and linguistically sophisticated education is far superior to insular mono-cultures such as those found in many parts of the US.

I'll finish up with costs. I hold to the belief that skilled work generally produces more than it costs, whereas unskilled work is merely necessary to get any work done at all. If you eliminate unskilled labour as much as possible, transferring it to machines or whatever, and raise the educational standards across the board, the net value of the work done will rise. Since we pay taxes as a percent of our income, and corporations pay taxes according to their earnings, etc, the net value of taxes must also rise, if the populace is adequately educated. Now, the law of diminishing returns does come into play here. You can't improve education forever and expect the wealth generated to go to infinity. That won't happen. What will happen is that it will tend to some upper limit. There is therefore some upper bound where further investment will have no significant benefit. However, investment BELOW that point will generate a substandard return and investing further will reap enough of a return to be profitable all round.

(It's not a simple relationship. Greater education produces not only greater skills but better research, which means that the cost for R&D will fall, with respect to the value of the products developed. This will directly benefit the companies, but because you now have more money circulating, you also have more money collected in taxes. R&D is much more random, however, and therefore it is much harder to predict the impact of higher-quality work. This is something you can really only try and see.)

Total investment in education is as much a myth as the total employmen

Re:Am I the Only One?

[Eli Gottlieb]

That sounds a lot like me, actually. The strongest caffeine I ever use is English breakfast tea or really dark chocolate (I admit I'm chocoholic, just love the stuff but can't stand cheap Milk Chocolate). No drinking of coffee, at all, ever; though I do use it for flavoring purposes when cooking. I enjoy the effects of alcohol in smallish amounts, but can't stand the loss of coordination that comes with real drunkenness.

Frankly, widespread minority amphetamine use for studying alarms, not least because I was diagnosed with ADHD when younger. I go without meds for it out of principle, but it still angers me that kids who possessed normal mindless-studying capacity in the first place now take drugs invented for helping those without such capacity to get ahead. We're left behind, again; this time by people with no problem abusing our solution.

And what about the kind of society that demands this? Another comment states that the use of drugs by medical students for their residencies used to be routine. Why are we placing inhuman burdens on people that can only lead to the requirement of inhuman aide?

Btw, just friended you. Nice to know somebody else likes to run their own damn brain.

Don't bother with the article

[BigCheese]

I stopped reading when the quoted "statistics" from Partnership for a Drug Free America. They use long discredited studies and studies with questionable methodology along with pulling numbers out of their butts to push an agenda.

It is an interesting subject. I just want an article with research. Not propaganda from a shill group.

YAY!

[samantha]

I am all for good enhancements of all kinds especially mental enhancements with no or little side effect like Provigil. It is about time we got over the War on Some Drugs and the paternalistic feds telling people what they can and can't put in their bodies. If I can effectively work better and smarter for extended periods I can be way more productive and build more cool things in less time. What is not to like?

Re:You are on drugs-you are not able to self-monit

[x2A]

"However, from other little clues in his post I tend to lean towards thinking this particular guy may indeed be addicted"

No, in fact I've cut some out completely, and cut down on pretty much everything else (although I have drank a lil more caffeine than usual the past week). What you're likely picking up on is not a "need for drugs", but a passion for them, for the difference they have made in my life, and difference I have seen them make in so many other peoples lives. I've seen them bring people together, and open peoples minds. As many bad hypothetical stories most people have heard about drugs effect on people, I can give real stories about real people who have had their lives changed for the better.

I have learnt a lot through experimenting with various drugs (it's always been curiosity driven), combined the "field tests" with my study of the neurosciences, learnt a lot about the mind and the memory (even applied some of what I've learnt to software development), and had a lot of fun along the way.

More people use drugs recreationally than you know. They don't get into fights, or steal to support it, or any of the other things commonly associated with "drugs" (which are in fact associated with the highly addictive drugs, such as crack and smack, which *aren't* used in the same way, for the same reasons, or with the same attitude). It doesn't rip lives apart or do the damage so many people have been led to believe, and I hate the fact that so many people have been so mislead, and lump people like myself together with others such as crack/smack dealers/users, because they don't understand how there can be any difference. There is. And it's huge. I feel sorry that they will never have the kind of amazing experiences that I have had, seen things as incredible as I have, and I'm extremely annoyed that my such activities are illegal because people don't understand them (and thus fear them).

Please try and be open minded. You'll find that people can be more open with you.

Alex