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'Mind Doping' Becoming More Common
runamock writes "The Los Angeles Times is running a story on the growing use of 'mind drugs':
'Forget sports doping. The next frontier is brain doping. ... Despite the potential side effects, academics, classical musicians, corporate executives, students and even professional poker players have embraced the drugs to clarify their minds, improve their concentration or control their emotions. Unlike the anabolic steroids, human growth hormone and blood-oxygen boosters that plague athletic competitions, the brain drugs haven't provoked similar outrage. People who take them say the drugs aren't giving them an unfair advantage but merely allow them to make the most of their hard-earned skills.'" There's an interesting comment on this topic in Fresh Air's top cultural trends of 2007 broadcast.
Caffeine.
Commodore64_love: I don't comprehend people who're so frightened of death that they'll bankrupt themselves to stay alive
how hard we try to 'fix' ourselves.
Most of us aren't really as broken as we think.
Want the audience to feel sad? In goes some depressants. Want them to feel the adrenaline the protagonist feels in a car chase? In goes an injection of adrenaline.
This is equivalent to giving the media companies root access to the entire population of the planet. Sometimes natural privilege separation is a good thing.
But people are being told by the media that meth users get horrible skin lesions from the drug, that it rots teeth, causes crash and burn onset anorexia, that even one exposure causes permanent brain damage, etc.
If all this is false, then our drug laws are based on terrible lies, and we are putting lots of people in prison for lengthy mandatory minimum sentences for essentially nothing.
If all this is true, then we are exposing currently upwards of 200,000 5 to 11 year olds to a drug that is incredibly risky for adults, and counting on once-a-year doctor visits to control it. The pharmaceutical industry is expecting to see the number of elementary school aged children on Adderal rise to about 1 million in the next 4 years. Somehow, the medical difference between ADHD and normal brain chemistry automagically protects the child's body from all the horrible effects we see in the rest of an adult's body.
And yes it is exactly the same drug and not just pretty much - Adderal is a mixture of Methamphetamine and Benzedrine salts, with meth amounts similar to averages for adult recreational exposure. Parts of the pharmaceutical industry have tried to get around this fact by comparing the time release average dose in a child's system at any one time to the peak dose in a meth-junkie's system immediately after injection, which ignores three things.
1. many meth users at least supposedly addict without injecting the drug.
2. many adverse health effects depend on average dosage at least as much as peak.
3. elementary school age children normally have a much lower tolerance for just about all drugs than do adults. We generally assume safe exposures are much smaller even for non-perscription drugs.
Who is John Cabal?
Cut back on the caffeine. A gram a day is a bit much. Don't ask how I know this.
And if you want to really make a difference - try going ethanol free for a week. Eat dinner at least three hours before going to sleep, and during the two hours before bed drink three or four full glasses of water. Pee before climbing into bed. Go to bed eight and a half hours before you need to wake up, so you fall asleep over the next 30 minutes and still get eight solid hours of sleep.
I'm not saying I do this all the time, but when I do do it I'm in a lot better shape the next day.
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer