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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.
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.
That sounds like what I used to say when I was dropping lots of acid and eating oodles of mushrooms in the '80s! Worked for me and never affect me in any way... gotta run, the xmas tree is breathing again.
Trolling is a art,
Caffeine.
Commodore64_love: I don't comprehend people who're so frightened of death that they'll bankrupt themselves to stay alive
Did anyone else RTFA just to see what they should be taking to enhance their brain?
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The underlying assumption here is that being smarter helps people be successful, but the correlation between intelligence and success is relatively small.
So, many of the drugs may not be doing a whole lot to help people achieve more success.
how hard we try to 'fix' ourselves.
Most of us aren't really as broken as we think.
So the sports product must be controlled with dress code, drug codes etc, and when the sports product does something wrong, something that any normal person would do, the product is released so as not to tarnish the lilly white reputation. The drug thing is not about the product, it is about the image of the product. This goes to non sports products targeted as family and conservative friendly, like the Disney creation Hannah Montana who commands a premium as the product is "wholesome".
Now, if these other mental acts every become marketed as uber conservative family friendly, and the entertainers in these acts every become products, then we are likely to see them crack down on drug use, but that will be the smallest problem. Right now classical performances, art museums, indie public television, all of this type of entertainment, can get away with all sorts of stuff because they now the people who watch are not looking for the bland uber conservative family 'I am afraid of my body' entertainment. Bad or Good, the product is marketed toward a people with a wider view of the world, included families. For instance, parents send their kids off to these top rate colleges, and they must know full well that mistakes will be made in relationships and controlled substances, among other things, so there must be faith that the child has enough intelligence and a sufficiently good upbringing so the parents can let do.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Thankfully your safe from coffee being outlawed as it isn't a threat to the rope industry.
Paul Erdös seemed to be quite productive on uppers:
His colleague Alfréd Rényi said, "a mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems", and Erdös drank copious quantities. (This quotation is often attributed incorrectly to Erdös.)[3] After 1971 he also took amphetamines, despite the concern of his friends, one of whom (Ron Graham) bet him $500 that he could not stop taking the drug for a month. Erdös won the bet, but complained during his abstinence that mathematics had been set back by a month: "Before, when I looked at a piece of blank paper my mind was filled with ideas. Now all I see is a blank piece of paper." After he won the bet, he promptly resumed his amphetamine habit.
what about places like MIT where they use norm referencing for grading their students? I would certainly be pissed off at a doper because it directly affects my grade in the class.
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?
Oh, you mean like Apartheid or the Belgian Congo or Imperial Egypt or Imperial India or.... (list goes on FORVEVER...)
Retard, Hispanics are descended from European culture, ever hear of Spain? Conquistadors? Get a clue. Won't bother responding to the rest of your diatribe because I already proved you don't know what you're talking about, and thus anything that follows out of your cowardly mouth is unreliable.
(%i1) factor(777353);
(%o1) 777353
I have experimented with Nootropil.
It worked, in a subtle way. And bear in mind the down is bigger than the up, useful for getting out of a dopey mood. Could be a lifesaver if you had to perform. However, you should be able to make yourself alert without drugs.
However:
- it doesn't fix confidence, just the ability to think quick if you want it
- you can still feel sleepy or lazy. If at a party it just prevents that mind freeze
- the next day I felt as dopey as I felt alert before; i.e. the low is a little greater than the high so you have to be prepared for this
- it creates dependency. You notice the times of not being on it more, obviously, the drugs don't work
I now keep just a few half tabs in case I need to drive back from somewhere for work / prevent getting stranded and for emergencies.
That's my experience on the subject.
A blog I run for the wealth
You assume people care about the use of steroids by athletes. I don't think they do. As far as I can tell, only sports media and athletes care. Athletes care because they don't want to have to take dangerous drugs to stay competitive.
I take piracetam, vinpocetine, adrafinil, and methylphenidate. Of course it gives me an "unfair advantage". That's why I take them. It also benefits society, because it makes me orders of magnitude more productive as an engineer and a scientist that I would be otherwise. It benefits my family, various people in need in my community, and the many children in third-world nations that I can support because my income is freaking enormous. If I were good at something more lucrative than what I do, I might feel less pressure to enhance my performance, but I doubt it. With power (to produce income) comes responsibility (to distribute income).
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
- Sweeney Torvalds, demon coder of Fleet Street
It's the impurities resulting from home manufacturing methods that cause most of the problems you hear about. Plus, the therapeutic doses used in psychiatry are hundreds of times smaller than those used recreationaly. Speaking as someone who has taken Dexedrine every day for ADD for fifteen years, I can tell you that I get more of a buzz and more side effects from a double espresso. If i were to snort a whole month's worth at a time, on the other hand, I'd probably have some nasty side effects.
There is a world of difference between responsible use of stimulants for psychiatric purposes or even for cognitive enhancement and abusing them to get fucked up. At small doses cognitive functioning is enhanced and high doses it's inebriating. It's the difference between a cup of coffee and a box of no-doze.
But what if part of that "mental capacity" is really ... measuring how well you can concentrate? That'd be true for a professional poker player, and the same would be true for a student taking an exam. Yes, other mental faculties still matter, but ability to concentrate is an important one (and there is a whole lot of personal difference there).
The same exact thing you said about "mind doping" holds true for "substance abuse" of athletes. Steroids don't magically give you a bulkier body. You still have to work out. You could almost say that all steroids do is compensate for lack of hormonal inclination towards building higher muscle mass. The exact same way caffeine helps you stay awake more and other substances help you concentrate (beyond what you'd "normally" be able to do).
You can draw as many lines in the sand and split as many hairs as you want. There is a definite double standards towards "substance abuse" of athletes and substance abuse of other professions that are, in nearly all aspects, including health of participants, exactly the same.
The article is about using psychotropics like amphetamines and methylphenidate (Ritalin) to "improve" brain power. In the short term they do. Then they bring on rebound effects like chronic depression. Continuing after that stresses the dopamine system (that these force to work harder) and can bring on Parkinson's. The Alzheimer's drug does the same, but they consider the long term drawbacks to be less than the immediate benefit. Using these drugs for the purpose stated in TFA is called "off-label use". This (mis-)use has been going on since the first stimulants (cocaine among them) became available over a century ago. These are performance enhancers, not true cognitive enhancers. The distinction is important, and there but buried in TFA.
From TFA:
> "Whatever company comes out with the first memory pill is going to put Viagra to shame," said University of Pennsylvania bioethicist Paul Root Wolpe.
The first company to come out with a memory pill (a true cognitive enhancer) was Sandoz of Switzerland. The name is Hydergine. The person who discovered it was Albert Hoffman. If he hadn't also discovered LSD and become (in)famous for that, he'd probably been nominated for a Nobel for Hydergine (and a bucket full of other highly useful drugs of his day). He mentioned he takes Hydergine 4 or 5 times a day -- at his 100th birthday party.
There have been many such drugs (nootropics; noh'-oh-troh''-pics) created since then. All of them are owned by companies that are owned by people not from the U.S. and so no U.S. companies can make profit from them. Thus, the FDA won't approve them, and pretend they don't exist. As evidence I point to recent Nobel recipient Eric Kandel (for his work on the dopamine system) who claimed he'd use his award money to create the first cognitive enhancing drug (nootropic), essentially publicly and purposefully ignoring Hoffman's discovery and the subsequent inventions.
On my way to a PhD in neuroscience, I got a master's in healthcare administration. I learned way too much about the FDA and big pharma to ever be comfortable with them again. The above statement is only one reason for that. An excuse given for not approving it is that it can cause one to become dizzy if they stand up fast. In other words, it's an effective anti-hypertensive -- it lowers blood pressure. That's more a benefit than a drawback, and is more harmless than the "acceptable" side effects from recent drugs being advertised. Hydergine and the other nootropics have far fewer negative side effects than most drugs and virtually no interaction with any other drugs, and have beneficial side effects besides. These are approved in part by the FDA, but only for advanced brain degenerative diseases, where their benefit is fairly negligible and unrecognizable. Use by those without such disease is not approved, and actively discouraged.
The good news is that due to the 1989 AIDS drug law, one can import from overseas 90 days worth at a time of any drug approved there for the on-label use. The bad news is that the USPS will try to confiscate any drugs coming from outside the US -- even those allowed by the 1989 AIDS law. This is due to pressure from the FDA, the corporate welfare office for big pharma.
I myself took Hydergine and Nootropil for 2 years, instead of the levodopa prescribed for Parkinson's. After that I no longer needed the levodopa (and still don't, a decade later), which itself has a rebound effect, causing permanent and progressive degeneration of motor control. If it weren't for these nootropics I probably would never have been able to finish my PhD. They cost me about $150 per 90 days, sent from Portugal. I consider that to be the best value for money spent in my entire life.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B