What's remarkable to me is that modafinil is less toxic than caffeine[0], and possibly even less addictive[1], but we all know which is illegal for recreational use and which is coffee.
Regulations are sticky. The FDA follows the precautionary principle. Political game theory incentivizes restricting what the electorate can do rather than giving them more freedoms, and being blamed for whatever harm may fall upon them from their licentiousness. Reversing drug laws specifically seems to require both clear evidence of benefit, and widespread support from the public and media. This leads me to believe that modafinil will takes ages to be rescheduled.
Caffeine would be illegal to possess, if it were invented yesterday.
80% of people couldn't distinguish I.V. cocaine from I.V. caffeine in some study I am unable to locate at the moment, which I think involved Nora Volkow from NIH, either as PI or collaborator.
> 80% of people couldn't distinguish I.V. cocaine from I.V. caffeine in some study I am unable to locate at the moment, which I think involved Nora Volkow from NIH, either as PI or collaborator.
All this tells me is that I'm clearly consuming caffeine incorrectly in the form of coffee and/or tea.
Or, and hear me out, people outside of cocaine's traditional region are using it wrong.
The past being a different country, I was fortunate in the early Noughts to be able to purchase Bolivian coca tea bags from an early online drug dealer called Amazon dot com.
They were a fantastic addition to the tea shelf. I would favor a cup of the coca tea when energy was low going into an evening with social plans. Even, bright energy, short acting (duration is two hours roughly) barely feel it fading.
How does that compare to refined cocaine taken intranasally? Remarkably, I can't tell you, I don't touch the stuff. Sure wish I could still buy mate de coca though.
It should not be insufflation. Intranasal administration is a synonym for nasal administration you'll find in many papers, it's older.
Insufflation is actually a misnomer for nasal administration, insufflation is blowing something into a person for medical reasons, not using vacuum to pull it into the body.
Now, it's a common misnomer, which I generally let pass without correction. But sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander!
I quit caffeine about 8 years, only having a white tea on occasions. But I love a cup of decaf every so often. One day at work, one of my coworkers swapped the decaf pot with the regular pot and I drank a 16oz mug before I realized what was going on.
I was absolutely lit up and it was an incredible experience. I felt utterly amazing. Like I could take on the world. I had a hard time focusing at work, because I just wanted to be talking to people (not an extrovert) or going for a 10 mile run.
I can't compare it to cocaine, because I've never tried it, but I'm guessing the reason for your perception of it is because of your tolerance to caffeine.
> I felt utterly amazing. Like I could take on the world. I had a hard time focusing at work, because I just wanted to be talking to people (not an extrovert) or going for a 10 mile run.
In all seriousness, taking it sublingually might actually be extremely effective. Sublingual delivery tends to be more effective with lipophillic substances than hydrophilic substances. Caffeine is a bit weird in that it is hydrophilic, but, it is sufficiently lipophyllic to cross cell membranes and penetrate the blood/brain barrier, which is what makes me suspect it would work out well.
Huh. Technically, that would probably be considered buccal (via the cheek) delivery, but, close enough, right? I had no idea caffeinated gum kicked in significantly faster than pills or drinks.
Yep, good catch. "buccal administration" is a bit more obscure so I often just refer to sublingual unless I know the audience.
Mucosal absorption is definitely way faster than pills (unless you chew them) or drink.
One time a friend and I tried making caffeine patches with DMSO as a transport, and put it on our arms with a cotton ball and tape...NOT PLEASANT. Extreme pruritus and erythema at the administration site. Hoo boy were we alert though. Nowadays the gum is perhaps a bit too fast even, it's easy to overdue and I get palpitations.
Follow me for more horrible ideas and biohacks. /s. I don't actually have a channel for my misadventures and shenanigans...maybe I should?
I have a friend who can't stand the taste of coffee but of course likes caffeine as do we all, and had to import it via mail drop to Denmark in order to get his espresso-equivalent shot in the morning.
As I heard it from him, although I haven't tried anything personally, in Denmark there are some restrictions about importing liquid caffeine, he hates to drink coffee and also soft drinks, but getting caffeine from bubble gum does not provide the same level of caffeine and the water with caffeine drinks you import do not have as high a level of caffeine as soft drinks for some reason so he had to import his own and make his own.
Also as I understand: it is against the rules to import it so it will be stopped if caught but not against the rules to have it so you do not get fines or anything on record. Thus if you buy it abroad you can bring it into country with you unless caught in which case they confiscate it. This used to be the same case with Modafinil / Adrafinil and I suppose it is still the same.
well this is second hand from him, so that also makes it about 12 years old, but I figured it seemed like the kind of thing they would keep if not get stricter about.
The problem of course is that they want to make sure you don't take too much caffeine and have a problem, so they want to limit the strength of what you can get and my understanding from him was the strength was limited so that it was hard to get anything into you with the strength of a cup of espresso, as ridiculous as that sounds but nanny-statism is a thing.
Never done anything IV, but I do plenty of drugs (cocaine included) during basically every weekend, and have been doing so for the last ~30 years more or less.
Sure, some people do fall down into the trap of doing something too much, this is true for lots of things, including video games (which I've been more addicted to than drugs at some points in my life). But if you have a kind of normal life during the week that you like too much to lose, then it's not that hard to keep your drug usage to where it's accepted, for your sake and others.
I do love cocaine, but seeing what happen to others when consuming things too much, is a great tool to avoid liking it too much so it takes over your life.
The same way you cope with anything, really: You consciously develop a personality that handles whatever you face in life. Some people call this process "growing up". I think it's more spiritual than that.
I've had cocaine a few times now and while everyone is saying it's euphoric, I keep saying it's the most normal I've ever felt. Not "euphoric", I've done other stuff that felt suuuuper good (in an actual euphoria sense) so I believe can compare.
But normal. The cloud of thoughts gone, I am able to make myself do anything with one thought, I have energy, the aches are gone, the tinnitus is gone, I don't second guess, I don't overthink. I just am and I do. It's amazing. This is what people like Bezos and Musk must be like lol
Amphetamine probably feels like this, too, although many say it's actually quite distinct. The price, (un)availability, very short duration and the comedown are big negatives, sadly.
But yeah, comparing it to caffeine... nah. Can't comment on IV, but I can compare it to insufflated caffeine. It has some similarities, but the important parts are missing. Or maybe I'm just desensitized to caffeine. At least I'm a good fake coke detector lol
> But normal. The cloud of thoughts gone, I am able to make myself do anything with one thought, I have energy, the aches are gone, the tinnitus is gone, I don't second guess, I don't overthink. I just am and I do. It's amazing.
Have you been evaluated for ADHD? This is one of the classic tells. Methylphenidate is structurally and chemically very similar to cocaine.
Vyvanse is definitely the best when it comes to duration and classical stimulants. Modafinil has even longer duration, but it isn't always as effective at targeting ADHD symptoms. Vyvanse is kind of stupid expensive, but you can get a savings card. It would be $330 for me even with a good Rx plan, and the card knocks it down to $45/month. Sounds like you would also respond well to Concerta (extended release methylphenidate). I don't like it because I apparently have the metabolism of a honeybadger and get like 4-6h of otherwise "all day" meds like concerta. I have to split my vyvanse and take it in two doses to get a full day.
> This is what people like Bezos and Musk must be like
My headcannon is both these guys are ADHD and/or on the spectrum, have a doctor's script for vyvanse, adderall, modafinil, and/or whatever else, and have figured out how to ride the tolerance curve properly to maximize productivity.
I have no idea why people like Vyvanse so much. It’s just time release with a fancy mechanism and paranoia around abuse potential of instant release formulations, which work just as well in most, if not all.
However, Ritalin is less neurotoxic than amphetamines that can indeed hike your risks of Parkinson’s (and probably few other things)
Because it's been life-changing for me, and countless others? It's not just time release; that's the old school drugs like Concerta.
The chief problem I have with all stimulants is too fast of an impulse response. It comes on too fast, crashes too fast. For me, for instant release drugs, I experience the following half-lives:
- methylphenidate: 60-90m
- amphetamine salts/dexedrine: 3-4h
- caffeine: 3h
- modafinil: 6-8h
Once a drug reaches about 1.5 HLs (about one Tau/time constant, conveniently), I start fading hard. There is a hysteresis effect: peaking/crashing/re-dosing is not the same as plateauing at some in-between value. Once my brain checks out, that's kind of it for the day.
So what Concerta, Adderall XR, and similar do for me, is give me what feels like two randomly spaced doses of instant release over a 4-6h window. This is unpredictable and thrashes my mental state. It peaks too high and crashes too low. The companies market these drugs based on averaging the plasma profiles of individuals to show a nice smooth curve, but I dug into the literature and this is NOT what you see on an individual level, at all. Concerta just doesn't do it for me.
Vyvanse is way smoother. The plasma peak is already low-pass filtered by the pharmacokinetics of hydrolysis of the lysdexamphetamine. As a result, my subjective experience is basically a 6h plateau. I split my dose to basically get a nice, actually smooth profile over 8-12h with a gentle taper instead of a crash. That also means lower peak plasma conc, and peak plasma is the greatest risk factor in neurotoxicity.
If you actually dig into the literature on neurotoxicity of amphetamines, you basically don't see any until you start getting to the equivalent of 50-100mg IR, and even then it's basically within the noise floor until you get to hundreds of mg per day.
Sure. The early history of ritalin was the first sign to me that pharmatech industry owns their regulators. Check out the follow up research on 8-hydroxyguanine glycosylase as an indicator of oxidative DNA damage in response to the 2005 nih publications asserting no increased biomarkers, its somewhat surprising on both sides for Ritalin and the popular amphetamine alternative as well.
> The aim of the present study was to examine the effects of drugs (amphetamine, methylphenidate and atomoxetine)
> We observed decreased expression of this enzyme for all applied substances.
Yeah no I'm not buying it. Amphetamine, perhaps, but atomoxetine causing DNA damage? That sets off my "spurious results" detector, hard.
I'll look into it more but I've done deep research into all things psychostimulants and I have not seen any indication of genotoxicity of methylphenidate or atomoxetine. Amphetamine has a slight risk of increased oxidative stress due to making dopamine leak places where it shouldn't, and DA's electronic structure makes it prone to generating singlet oxygen and ROS, but it's typically only observed in really high doses, like the equivalent of hundreds of mgs per dose.
Like, maybe there's some increased ROS due to any drug that boosts DA/NA (oxidizing catecholamines produces ROS in general), but like, "ritalin causes DNA damage" is the wrong conclusion to draw from that.
Being calm and relaxed on stimulants can potentially mean there is some arousal disorder: sleep apnea, narcolepsy, delayed sleep syndrome, or just chronic sleep deficit. Maybe concussions (mild TBI), amphetamines work for that too. Even depression is possible.
ADHD is just most likely because it’s so common, with sleep apnea being close second. I would rule out ADHD and sleep disorders first.
Potentially also, UARS, which is also form of sleep disordered breathing but not commonly detected with current technology (and also not easy to treat), some physicians do a full nasopharyngeal endoscopy under propofol anesthesia. I believe it’s incredibly undiagnosed and probably accounts for more than 10% of apnea cases, but most patients are thin instead of obese and so nobody suspects apnea-like disorder. If you needed braces or needed corrective jaw surgery UARS should be ruled out.
ADHD can be somewhat objectively measured with some tests like CPT, but that would also often show abnormalities in sleep disorders.
If your measures of attention, and sleep study, along with wakefulness maintenance test, if warranted, are all normal, and your pulse and blood pressure is normal, and by normal I mean very close to ideal 120/80, with hr below 70 - maybe you are just a mutant.
See a good neuropsych that specializes in sleep disorders. Stanford is one of the better centres for that. They will know what to do if it’s not a sleep issue also.
dx of ADHD and good response do not preclude the possibility of other disorders.
you can obtain treatment that way, and investigate other causes later, you may have to wash out from stimulants for a few weeks for the CPT and WMT, and preferably for sleep studies also, because they increase muscle tone and if your sleep issue is due to some neuromuscular issue, stimulants may partially obscure it. (This is still in research, and most physicians won’t tell you this, as it’s not yet standard of care in most places afaik)
I know this is kind of an obvious follow up to your comment, but, have you been tested for ADHD? You described exactly how my brain reacts to mixed amphetamine salts (AKA Adderall). Caffeine doesn’t really do much for me, either, incidentally.
I was diagnosed last year and the psychiatrist I was seeing worked at a clinic that primarily sees inner city patients with much different health profiles than a mild mannered engineer. This is one of my favourite exchanges from the intake meeting:
“So, the first time you tried cocaine, were you surprised that you didn’t react the way everyone else did? Did it calm you down instead of getting you keyed up?”
“I’ve never done cocaine”
“Look, yes, some doctors might disqualify you for stimulant prescriptions for admitting to past substance abuse, but it doesn’t bother me at all. I actually do some research at $local_university specifically looking at how properly managed ADHD dramatically reduces the chance of substance abuse.”
“Serious, I’ve smoked pot, I’ve done mushrooms, but I’ve never tried coke. Had lots of opportunities if I wanted to, but it didn’t appeal to me”
“Huh! With lots of the patients that come through here, they see me for the first time after casually mentioning to a GP that they’re worried they’re weird when coke doesn’t work right for them!”
I was diagnosed twice, both times in adulthood. The first time was by a neuropsychologist who did something like 8-10 hours of testing over about 3 days. I’m not even sure if she ever asked me about any sort of drug use.
The second person to diagnose me was a physician at the student health center where I was a graduate student. Believe it or not, he was actually a pediatrician! I think he may have asked me about my caffeine consumption (excessive!), while also being impressed by my shockingly normal blood pressure (almost always between 110/70 and 125/83). I actually think going on Adderall might have lowered my BP overall, due to the increased ability it gave ume to tolerate and problem solve my way through stressful situations.
I've tried cocaine and it would make me feel like the "best" or perhaps much better version of me. Improved, but subjectively not overinflated self-confidence, sharper thoughts, better concentration, high energy and motivation, easier connection to people, without apparent intoxication or affected judgement.
I would agree with you that it makes me feel normal in the sense that's what it seems I should have been. The first time I tried it, I was like "so when I'm gonna feel the effect?" for a few seconds and then I realized I feel it and thought "That's the way it [life] 's meant to be played" :D
Gonna pile on with everyone else and suggest you get tested for ADHD. This is a pretty classic symptom from what I understand. This is basically how I feel with Adderall. I had no idea how "normal" things could feel.
If we imagine a study where the users have never had either I.V. caffeine nor cocaine, well, how are you supposed to reliably distinguish between two stimulants hitting your heart and brain directly, without passing through any sort of blood brain barrier, when having that experience for the first time?
Now, it would be a useless study for us. But not useless for the chucklehead who padded his or her CV with it.
Curious - do you have something to back that up? Caffeine is pretty toxic (
I think the LD50 is something like 200 mg/KG of body weight. 20 grams would kill most people) and I don't find it surprising that an IV mix would have pretty serious effects.
The question is whether the two are somehow indistinguishable (to 80% of people, at least).
IV bleach would also have pretty serious effects, but likely no one would confuse it for cocaine.
The onus is on inter_netuser to provide evidence for the claim, not for pennaMann to refute it. I would imagine that literally no study exists comparing the effects of intravenous caffeine and cocaine, because who would possibly fund that study, and to what end, and what review board would approve it?
Here is one similar study (I don't think is the right one though):
> Intravenous nicotine and caffeine: subjective and physiological effects in cocaine abusers
> The subjective and physiological effects of intravenously administered caffeine and nicotine were compared in nine subjects with histories of using caffeine, tobacco, and cocaine.
Since this study exists, why is it so far off the other study exists? I don't know why it got funded, or to what end, but I'm sure happy it did. We need to study drugs more, not less.
While it’s true that if the LD50 is 200mg/kg, you’d expect roughly 50% of humans weighing about 100kg to die from it, I kind of suspect it doesn’t quite work that way. Dose/response relationships are frequently logarithmic, which means that after a certain point, you have to increase the dose by a lot to get just a little more effect.
Also, LD50 values are always extrapolated from single dose tests on lab animals, typically rats or mice. Not only is that not how a human would end up ingesting 10+ grams of caffeine, the LD50 varies considerably from one animal to the next.
For instance:
> [S]ome LD50s for dichlorvos, an insecticide commonly used in household pesticide strips, are listed below:[0]
> Oral LD50 (rat): 56 mg/kg
> Oral LD50 (rabbit) 10 mg/kg
> Oral LD50 (pigeon:): 23.7 mg/kg
> Oral LD50 (rat): 56 mg/kg
> Oral (mouse): 61 mg/kg
> Oral (dog): 100 mg/kg
> Oral (pig): 157 mg/kg
As you can see, these numbers don’t seem to scale up in any intuitive way when you start crossing animal species.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7714788/
>“The mood effects but not the physiological effects of intravenous caffeine were similar to those previously observed with cocaine in studies using similar methods and subjects.”
https://archive.fo/bLX94
>This is obviously worrying. “Cocaine is one of the most addictive substances
of abuse,” says Volkow. “Ritalin we give to children.” She stresses, however,
that taking a stimulant orally is very different to injecting or snorting it.
Intravenous caffeine also resembles cocaine, she points out.
h/t to those with better google-fu than mine. all from this thread.
fwiw, caffeine is also the most common adulterant in cocaine, so chances are your iv cocaine also had a good amount of caffeine and lidocaine in it.
....but why would you even try pure i.v. caffeine though? cocaine i can understand, but caffeine?
> ....but why would you even try pure i.v. caffeine though? cocaine i can understand, but caffeine?
Sometimes when you're an IV drug user and you're out of real drugs, you do weird shit. I had a tub of anhydrous caffeine, had to try it.
I get that you think you can disprove things like this with science, and that's generally a good perspective to have. But cocaine and caffeine are nothing alike. It's the difference between a kiss on the cheek and a punch in the face. You could describe those two things in the same terms if you wanted to be abstract and clinical enough, but the idea that they are indistinguishable is laughable to anyone who has experienced both.
Caffeine is a moderate boost to wakefulness. You feel a little more energetic, a little more awake. Maybe a bit happier. Cocaine is every form of success you've ever felt multiplied by 100, rolled into one, and compressed into 3 seconds. You ever win a low probability bet, or be right about something when everyone you know doubted you? That's what cocaine feels like.
Shoot up caffeine and you might work a little harder for a couple of hours. Shoot up cocaine and you might marry a stripper you don't even know yet.
EDIT: What I will say is that, perhaps at a sufficiently low dose, they may be hard to distinguish. But at the doses consumed by recreational users, they very much are not. My guess is that these studies are using very low doses of cocaine compared to what a recreational user would take, for ethical/safety reasons. So, in that context, it may be true, but you should not take that to mean that cocaine and caffeine are in any meaningful sense indistinguishable.
Shooting in the dark here, but I imagine dose size is an important variable in a study like this. At 500mg, I'm pretty sure a member of the LDS* could tell the difference between coffee and cocaine.
[*] I'm only calling out the LDS community here because they don't consume coffee, or cocaine, generally speaking.
Mormon tea / ephedrine is not commonly consumed and as far as I know it isn't consumed at all by LDS faithful. It's just a silly colloquial name for a plant.
But, due to a lot of retroactive canon gymnastics, cold caffeinated beverages like soda are consumed in great quantities by Mormons. Actually, under the latest "official" stance, tea made from the "mormon tea" plant would actually be banned, as it's a "hot beverage" with mental effects.
You remember the topic and the name of the PI but still can’t find this study? I am relatively certain that’s because it does not exist.
The idea that caffeine is comparable to cocaine is pretty nuts. People murder to get cocaine. When’s the last time anyone murdered for Starbucks?
I can totally believe that if you give someone who’s never done drugs a high dose of caffeine and tell them it’s cocaine, they might believe you. But that’s not at all the same as the two actually being indistinguishable.
“I feel like my heart’s going to explode and I can’t stop moving!” “That’s the cocaine.” “Not what I would have expected, but okay!”
OK, I don't have any data either but I'd be pretty surprised if there were a lot of murders by people trying to acquire cocaine. I mean, it could be true?
If you were seriously addicted but not high at the time, I expect you might feel agitated, but also kind of sorry for yourself / miserable and not so much in a murdering frame of mind.
Large amounts of money (which large amounts of cocaine can be exchanged for), on the other hand...
Honestly I don’t know how prevalent murdering for drug money is at all. My belief that this happens with some regularity for cocaine is based on suspect info now that I think about it.
The DARE program told me that definitely 100% of illegal drug users eventually turn to murder to acquire more, but that might have been an exaggeration.
This. Drug industry has to settle disputes outside the law because it can't use the courts (and by proxy, threat of state violence) to deal with business disputes. So it's necessarily more violent because there aren't state level resources around to fund expensive stuff like due process. Being inherently criminal probably also ups the violence just from selection bias.
Someone rips you off in the drug industry you and your buddies go beat them up and take their stuff of value. Someone rips you off in above the table business you sue them.
There certainly would be very few, and likely none, murders to obtain cocaine by end users. It does not cause dependency in a way heroin and gabaergics do.
Heroin withdrawals are quite painful (literally), and many users are also simply suffering from endogenous depression that responds to almost nothing, and in fact used to be treated by morphine.
Same goes for alcohol and benzo withdrawals that WILL give you seizures and quite possibly death.
Psychostimulants (cocaine, amphetamines, cathionines, other assorted alkaloids, including caffeine) withdrawals means being very tired, lethargic and sleeping a lot, they are not life threatening.
> People murder to get cocaine. When’s the last time anyone murdered for Starbucks?
If people could buy cocaine at Starbucks (or get cheap stuff at a dollar store), would supply be such a problem for users that they resort to crime?
If caffeine were banned tomorrow and prices rose a thousand-fold, to what lengths would millions of addicts go to postpone the dreaded headache, constipation and lethargy for another day?
Given now we have dedicated facilities withdrawals from social media, I suppose it is pretty addictive, maybe even as bad heroin, but at least as bad as stimulants.
>The idea that caffeine is comparable to cocaine is pretty nuts. People murder to get cocaine. When’s the last time anyone murdered for Starbucks?
I don't know, when's the last time Starbucks was selling pure caffeine injectable via IV?
on edit: another day, another downvote, but that doesn't change the fact that the whole discussed comparison is between IV versions of the drug, and as such it's ridiculous to compare cocaine against Starbucks coffee as if that disproves the assertion.
I have high confidence that you will never find this study, and that it doesn’t exist. I’m not accusing you of malice, but I think you must be misremembering something.
But I’d love to be wrong. That would be a very interesting result.
> if you want to find it, you might have to crawl thru every reference of volkow's 100+ papers on cocaine.
If you want to use the reference, I suggest you find it and validate it exists before trying to make some claim.
I also don’t think anything malicious but think it’s more likely that you misunderstand something than the paper exists and you can’t find it.
As a reader trying to determine if your claim is bullshit it’s not worth the risk that you’re wrong for me to exhaustively review all 100+ papers to make sure it doesn’t exist.
As the saying goes, “If you hear hoofbeats outside your door, it’s probably a horse not a zebra.”
I suspect the dosing might explain the equivalence. I’ve not come across the study, but if the conclusion was “a 1/100th of the normal dose of cocaine is equivalent to 3 cups of coffee equivalent” I could believe that.
dosing usually would be dialed-in to provide roughly identical autonomic effects (at least) and then graded increased doses. otherwise it would be a pointless study.
5mg/10mg amphetamine sulphate vs 300mg and 600mg of caffeine (all oral). The study scales ended up being skewed because one subject had paradoxical response and felt relaxed instead on amphetamines, lol.
If you have access to the full text, check out page 89: fig5 and fig6.
Volkow's lecture may have referenced multiple studies, I've heard that in the context of her lecture on various findings on psychostimulants. amphetamines and cocaine have been fairly repeatedly shown fairly consistent substitutes, so it may have been a study on amp vs caffeine.
She just loves to study and talk about cocaine for some reason, has literally a hundred+ papers on it.
It’s an old study, from 60s. No OCR. You can get the full text from other sources but it will be useless for your purposes, they don’t spend any time on that at all.
Being calm and relaxed on amphetamines can potentially mean there is some arousal disorder: sleep apnea, narcolepsy, delayed sleep syndrome, or just chronic sleep deficit. Maybe concussions (mild TBI), amphetamines work for that too.
ADHD is most likely because it’s so common, with sleep apnea being close second. I would rule out ADHD and sleep disorders first.
Potentially also, UARS, which is also form of sleep disordered breathing but not commonly detected with current technology (and also not easy to treat), some physicians do a full nasopharyngeal endoscopy under propofol anesthesia. I believe it’s incredibly undiagnosed and probably accounts for more than 10% of apnea cases, but most patients are thin instead of obese and so nobody suspects apnea-like disorder. If you needed braces or needed corrective jaw surgery UARS should be ruled out.
ADHD can be somewhat objectively measured with some tests like CPT, but that would also show abnormalities in sleep disorders.
If your measures of attention, and sleep study, along with wakefulness maintenance test, if warranted, are all normal, and your blood pressure is normal - maybe you are just a mutant.
See a good neuropsych that specializes in sleep disorders. Stanford is one of the better centres for that.
Your hypothetical situation defines caffeine as being illegal and as in demand as cocaine. So basically you said if caffeine were exactly like cocaine then it would be exactly like cocaine. This is technically true but also vacuous.
Is this the study? “The mood effects but not the physiological effects of intravenous caffeine were similar to those previously observed with cocaine in studies using similar methods and subjects.”
Cocaine was isolated long before current drug laws, so I'm not sure I buy the argument "if it were invented today". Cocaine wasn't invented today and was banned.
modafinil was invented today and is scheduled, aka illegal to possess without prescription.
however, modafinil it's actually cleaner and even safer than caffeine. That's the point. a less toxic, safer drug is illegal to possess (w/o rx).
How would you justify making a much more toxic drug completely unrestricted, what would be your argument? We'd just have cops showing confiscated bags of big bad evil drug caffeine to kids in DARE classes.
Caffeine and modafinil shouldn’t be compared, as they have vastly different activity, history of use, and understanding of effects.
This is merely an anecdote, but I was prescribed modafinil for narcoleptic symptoms. Compared to traditional psychostimulants, I found it to be ineffective with a more severe side effect profile. Of course, YMMV.
My brother has narcolepsy, and finds modafinil much better than amphetamines. He says he has zero side effects with modafinil, and it makes him much less jittery than amphetamines.
I have CFS, and sometimes need a stimulant if I must stay awake. I've tried amphetamines, but they make me really jittery and a bit anxious and snappy - I feel "tweaked", and it's not pleasant. By contrast, modafinil keeps me focused and awake, with the only side effect being a small increase in blood pressure.
I've found that the people who say Modafinil does nothing for them are people experienced with high powered stimulants who are expecting the same kick. This is mostly due to a misunderstanding of what the drug actually does.
Modafinil is a "wakefulness" drug. My favorite comparison is the feeling that you get when you have to pee in the middle of the night, and your body sends out that hormone to wake you up. Modfanil just kind of keeps that process going continuously. There is no "high" or any hyperactivity, just an extra layer of wakefulness.
> My favorite comparison is the feeling that you get when you have to pee in the middle of the night, and your body sends out that hormone to wake you up.
Really? I had no idea! Thanks for teaching me something new.
Paradoxical and other unusual effects can occur with any kind of drug. Brain drugs in particular seem to be prone to a wide variance in the effect profile. I speculate that in part it is due to the heavy "reuse" of neurotransmitters for various purposes (neurotransmitters themselves being mostly reused modified amino acids). For example, dopamine modulates motor activity, reward pathways, attention, and error correction, and more. Serotonin modulates smooth muscle, appetite, uterine contraction, mood, visual salience, and more. Both can affect circadian rhythms. NMDA/AMPA and GABA are widely present and are the basic "wires" for excitatory/inhibitory signals, so drugs that affect these can do all kinds of zany things.
Neurotransmitters tend to be context-depended, so when you wash over the whole body with a small molecule which hits in a neurotransmitter-specific rather than context-specific way, you can get some funky effects. Most of the activity comes from the coincidence that there are some domains which correlate well with context: dopamine tends to affect anything resembling taxis, so physical movement, but also goal seeking, prediction, etc.
On top of all that, receptors and enzymes are physical things, and thus different folks have different affinities for transmitters and drugs. Pharmacokinetics - how your body distributes and clears drugs - is a huge variable.
Modafinil in particular is interesting because it's what drug chemists call a "greasy brick" - highly lipophilic, low solubility, to the point where ensuring consistent bioavailability is hard. Cephalon has put in a fair bit of work ensuring a certain particle size and excipient profile (emulsifiers to facilitate absorption) and personally I've experienced quite the difference between name brand and generic, the later often does jack-all for me.
td;dr - small molecules act on broad regions and impact many subsystems at once. Biology is complicated and crufty.
Sorry for off-topic, but: why are there many different neurotransmitters instead of a common single one? (I mean, sure, evolution, there's no "why", but I'm asking from an hypothetic engineering standpoint.)
Neurotransmitters are often synthesized from amino acids. They have different functions in the body, often either inhibiting or exciting the neuron that it targets.
There are a bunch of different aspects to being awake. Caffeine works on adenosine, which has to do with wakefulness. But also things like adrenaline have a different aspect of wakefulness that amphetamines target. Modafinil targets orexin receptors I believe, which involve wakefulness as well as eating.
If anyone tells you they understand the brain - they are lying.
The only certainty we know is it’s located in your head and weighs a few pounds. That’s pretty much it.
The absolute best neuroscience program at the absolute best university would essentially read from an outdated curriculum (which means it’s from the last semester, in neuroscience that’s ancient history), supplemented with current studies, and you will be told that you will not be penalised for using answers from six months ago that have been invalidated now, and are absolutely wrong, but were the textbook dogma last semester.
It's true that we don't know everything there is to know the brain, and critically we have zero idea where consciousness actually comes from; where 'you' exist within your brain.
But we do know a whole hell of a lot of details. A bunch of the different chemicals inside of the brain, how they influence behavior and mood. We know a whole bunch about different receptors and have drugs to modify their behavior. We're now able to use transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to stimulate nerve cells in the brain and are able to use that to help people suffering from depression, OCD, and to help mathematical cognition [1].
Our knowledge is hampered by the difficulty of research in this area. The cost of imaging techniques - specifically SPECT scans which use 5-7 Tesla machines which use liquid helium which is super difficult to work with. This means there's not really a way to test exactly which medication will help a given individual other than to give it to them, but don't mistake that for a total lack of knowledge about how things work. We do actually know the method of action on how those drugs work, which ones are agonists and which ones are antagonist and which don't mix.
Better real-world treatment options would be really awesome! It sucks that we can't do any better. Cheap and better imaging options would really change the status quo and allow better real-world treatment for mental illness. But what we do know takes years, if not decades for a person to learn, so even though things are still changing in the field, even though we can't answer some fundamental questions about consciousness, we understand a whole hell of a lot more than "it's located in your head and weighs a few pounds".
I don’t disagree, there is of course a body of knowledge, which rapid churn implies that we are accreting that at a good pace.
And yet, despite all this, no better treatments that amphetamines have been found for so many cognitive disorders.
100 years old drug, and to prescribe which you don’t even need to know how much the brain weighs.
What is the use to the laity of all this research, if half of the time the answer is stimulants, the other have is SSRI?
I think we will be seeing the most promising area in sleep, because it’s so underserved and you can collect a lot relevant data inexpensively and un-intrusively.
It's quite different in most regards: I'm super-tired all the time, need a nap every afternoon, my endurance is extremely low (lifting a kettle feels like lifting a weight, climbing the stairs feels like climbing a hill) and simple activities tire me out waaay more than they should. If I do anything remotely strenuous, then it does kind of hit me like narcolepsy - within the space of a few seconds I become extremely tired, like I've been drugged, and I have to sleep.
CFS remains a diagnosis of exclusion, and it's quite likely that it's a label that actually represents several conditions, and people are affected to varying degrees - some are bed-bound, for example.
It isn't an "extremely careful" type of situation. It's a "take 50mg first and be aware that skin outbreaks can be caused by modafinil" type of situation.
This isn't well understood because there are so few cases, but it's believed to be effectively an allergic/histamine response, and I've never heard of a case of it developing after regular use (sensitization), only initial exposure.
In terms of how often modafinil causes Stevens-Johnson Syndrome (or whatever actually happens here) it seems to be about like aspirin and Reyes syndrome, but without susceptibility being limited to the very young.
A pill is 200mg and that's a lot of molecule (I find it a high dose as well, ymmv). Everyone has to find their own risk threshold, but "take a quarter pill at first just in case you're the 1/100,000 who gets a rash" is my safe bet for risk mitigation.
For context, my first -afinil was adrafinil, which I imported from France around 2000 on the strength of some blog about how it was a preferred treatment for ADD (the H wasn't a thing yet) there. Adrafinil metabolizes to modafinil, and France is a pretty big place with a unified modern healthcare system, if this adverse effect were more than very uncommon I figure it would have shown up strongly enough to have prevented that in the first place.
Apparently the skin issues from it can be so severe it’s being warned that Stevens-Johnson Syndrome is a possible adverse effect of it.
Initially first results showed that despite the warning there had yet to be an actual case in documented literature, but scrolling further showed a case in an early 20’s patient in 2018. Scrolled back up, & the first results were from 2017… so yeah I guess.
It does seem to be a thing with Modafinil - I got a rash on my forehead after trying it. You definitely have to be careful with it, productivity gains are insane, but it's a double edged sword and will easily knock your normal sleeping patterns.
Some of my friends as well had skin issues, not severe and it subsided after stopping. If I remember correctly, it was like dry red patches. Actually, I might have experienced it as well, for me the major downside were headaches.
I doubt that people consume coffee because of its cognitive enhancing effect though.
I don't really believe there are no side effects, ritalin and coffee certainly have some. I also wouldn't want to use cognitive enhancers to solve problems. That said, I think it shouldn't be illegal.
It's pretty easy to not know that coffee has monoamine oxidase inhibitors in it.
Most people can't answer the question "Is caffeine a xanthine or a phenethylamine" any better than chance. Good luck explaining there's a second drug that doesn't really get you high, but mildly inhibits the metabolism of a whole bunch of native 'drugs' in your brain as well as the caffeine.
No I mean that, good luck, it's fun to get as far as you can with that stuff. Just wanted to answer your second question.
Modafinil is a pretty amazing drug. The come down after one use isn’t too bad. But if you’ve been using it daily for a week, the comedown is BRUTAL: pretty much feel like you have zero energy and feel like laying prone for 8 hours.
Once did 48 straight awake on it and felt wide awake 36 hours in…
Distinctly remember the 1st time I took it. Was perhaps 8pm at night and I swore it was 8am in the morning and I’d just had an amazing sleep: felt completely wide awake and alert.
I took it heavily in grad school. Prescribed off label for adhd. You can be in any state of exhaustion, take a modafinil, and an hour later feel like you just woke up on a Sunday morning after sleeping in. It’s nuts. The military uses it for fighter pilots. You can take it for days and only lose minimal amounts of reaction timing. At my peak, I stayed up for finals for a week straight with maybe 2 hours of sleep total. Don’t lecture me, I know.
Anyway, it took 2 days in bed for me to recover after. Brutal.
Towards the end of that time period, my brain stopped processing information in the 30 degrees at the edge of my peripheral vision on either side. We were at a restaurant celebrating being done and the waiter kept teleporting into view at around 60 degrees off my center line. Very startling. Done with it now since I don’t have anything nearly that stressful in my life, but back then, it was a godsend.
Modafinil has a 15 hour half life so my main complaint was my sleep schedule was about 26-28 hours so I was constantly shifting. Adrafinil is only the active isomer in modafinil so it’s more potent. I didn’t like it as much. Even at a half tab it still kept me up longer than modafinil. Also modafinil makes your pee smell when it’s metabolized whereas adrafinil not nearly as much.
Am I the only one thinking there is something seriously wrong with an education system if students have to resort to drugs that keep them awake for a week to succeed in it?
I mean I'm not exactly anti-medication but... wow.
"Have to", maybe not. Will perform better if they do, probably. Will be outcompeted by others if they don't, many of whom only did better because they used drugs, yes.
It took me half a lifetime to really come to grips with it, but fact is, winners absolutely do use drugs. William S. Sessions' anti-drug arcade game ads lied to me.
Be careful with this line of thinking. It can lead you to justify some extremely unhealthy habits. You'll justify it by saying it's fine, you're getting things done. But the cost will always be there, either physical or mental.
Don't worry, I'm still taking it pretty easy. I'm just not surprised when I see someone who's very successful and seems far more alert and energetic than I could possibly be without some serious uppers—mystery solved, they're very probably on some serious uppers.
On the other hand, the cost of not using those things can be not getting a good job, or not being able to do your job, which has costs too. A small difference in work done can be the difference between keeping a job and getting fired.
School is just a part of life, and life has limited resources. There will always be winners and losers. At least, until (and if) we reach a point where the total sum of resources exceeds the total demand for them.
The score is supposed to be representative of your knowledge in a subject. And the entire point of going to school is to become more knowledgeable in a subject so you can apply it somewhere in your life.
If the score was not an indicator, then it serves no purpose.
Unfortunately, academic scores in most of the world stopped representing knowledge and started representing rote memorization long ago. They are a very, very poor indication of knowledge.
Capitalism has nothing to do with it. Schooling in China is and was even more competitive, making competition in American schools look like child's play. This was the case even before China opened up and introduced market reforms in the 90s.
Competition is a bad thing when it squeezes out cooperative strategies with superior outcomes. This can be expected to be more frequent in a society perfuse with pro-competitive and anti-cooperative incentives. Competition is conceptually aligned with defection strategies. The fitness landscape generally has fragile optima at cooperative strategies. That said, competitive substrategies may contribute to the beneficial outcomes of a cooperative superstrategy of which they are a part.
Not all life is competition. Ecosystems in general are a complex web of cooperation. One could say that all life is cooperation with equal merit.
The idea that competition should not exist and is some outcome of "evil" capitalism is absolute ridiculousness. I was responding directly to that asinine comment.
Life without competition doesn't exist, nor should it.
I did not say all my life is competition, it was a generalization that life cannot exist without competition. Reading comprehension bud.
It's a natural attitude that's innate to human survival. You need competition or you will be a miserable mentally unhealthy person. You're in denial if you don't realize this truth.
This ridiculous socialist utopia where everyone is at peace doing finger painting all day doesn't exist. It's a good way for your society to collapse though. Competition is not some artificial outcome produced by capitalist economic systems.
That is impossible because there is limited supply of the things you want to achieve with your education, e.g. a tenure track position, and the demand is always higher than the supply.
This is true only if your range of available strategies is constrained to a closed competitive subsystem. The actual range of available strategies is unbounded, given unlimited rationality.
My favorite thing is more often than not, the faces of anti-drug campaigns tend to be celebrities/athletes who were caught in a drug scandal, and do this campaigning to improve their public image.
It wasn’t a paper test and cramming. I had to create a product from scratch. I could have made a simpler product but I’m type a and challenged myself. 3D modeling, waiting for a 3D printer to complete, designing and manufacturing creating circuit boards, programming them, setting up a server, modifying the printed case by hand to insert glass, iterating when tolerances aren’t right. …it was a lot of work.
But now I get to make cool shit for a living.
Honestly believe if you give me enough time and money I can make anything. Worth it.
> Honestly believe if you give me enough time and money I can make anything. Worth it.
Same, but it didn't take a week on modafinil to finish a crazy project for me, I just always just liked making cool shit ever since I was a kid. Currently more on the software/kernel side, but I've done my share of hardware projects.
For me, after bouncing around a few universities, I realized how much of a broken joke the system was and resolved to go the easiest route to get the piece of paper (an on-line university), which I'm glad I did because the one time in my life I needed it it was important... but uni never taught me anything I couldn't have learned more efficiently on my own.
I distinctly remember that time in a microcontrollers class where the book was wrong and teaching the exact opposite of the solution to the problem it was trying to teach, and I'd known about that one for like 7 years at that point, and when I offered to the teacher to write a little article about it so we could all learn about it, he said yes and never even read it...
Or that time where as a sophomore I was helping a team of seniors working on a project to build a CubeSat, and I designed the PCBs and all the firmware and we won the competition to get funding and actually launch... and the uni's response was to kick us out of the lab we were in because "we were using too much space" (about 1m of desk space there). That CubeSat never launched.
Also, there was one part of that board designed by a professor instead of me. It was the only part that didn't work. And I thought it was dodgy at the time, and with my current experience I can confidently say that design was utterly insane and broken and he had no idea what he was doing.
Meanwhile in Calc II they wanted me to memorize three dozen identities because... why? I liked math until I got to that class, because even though it wasn't exactly being taught in an engaging way, I could work out the underlying concepts and understand and appreciate it, and work from first principles. Then it got complicated enough that doing that at the exam was no longer viable and I was just expected to become a computer and memorize all the damn formulas (and it wasn't just a few), understanding be damned. I cheated my way through that exam ("yes professor, I promise this TI-84 emulator on my Zaurus PDA is exactly like the real thing and I don't have a little formula database app in another window"). I damn well know what integration is and how it fundamentally works and how to apply it, but storing rote trivially looked up information is what we have paper and computers for. I don't go around memorizing programming APIs, I look up what I need and whatever I use often enough comes naturally.
Chemistry was more fun. We were allowed one index card, handwritten, both sides for the exam. I developed an electrical arc sharpening mechanism for mechanical pencil lead, so I could handwrite it all in 4pt size or so. Give me limitations and I will make the best use of them :)
I had multiple classes in university where the professor didn't finish their syllabus for the term and so the TAs crammed the last few weeks worth of class into a study session.
Some students have ADHD or simply learn in a way that does not track with how school and university are taught. The rewards and incentives are typically orthogonal to what a person diagnosed with ADHD wants, and often times extreme measures must be taken to adapt to the rigid expectations.
That is a failure of the system to adapt to the needs of students. I have adult-diagnosed ADHD and school sucked for me too... and I'm on medication now, which makes me function normally, not stay up for a week.
Different effects on different people I guess. Whoever is reading parent, don't expect this to be true for you. It certainly wasn't for me.. if I didn't get proper sleep and then took modafinil I would get super anxious, fidgeting and just plain feeling bad. Certainly couldn't work on it.
Small correction: adrafinil is a prodrug to modafinil and is less potent, it turns into modafinil after liver action. It also makes your pee smell more, if anything.
I expect you're thinking of armodafinil, the isolated r-isomer. I've taken it a few times, it's more potent by weight than modafinil but I'm unconvinced the chiral group is anywhere near so decisive as it is with amphetamine, where the laevo-rotary molecule is useless unless you have a head cold.
> I stayed up for finals for a week straight with maybe 2 hours of sleep total
I’m confused when I read anecdotes like this. Are you staying you literally slept for 2 hours over the course of 7 days, averaging 17 minutes of sleep per night for a week? I think that’s very unlikely!
It's possible but unlikely. You physically cannot sleep on these drugs without something like clonazepam. So I have no doubt a series of bad decisions could lead to someone being up that long.
However,
psychosis usually sets in around ~96 hours of sleep deprivation. It is however possible that this individual is unique or resistant, or maybe just his youth helped him. When I was 16 and MTV still played music-- I could survive on 2hrs sleep a day for weeks.
I'm sorry, this is rubbish. One of the reasons Modafinil is useful is that it will help you stay awake and alert for long periods AND when you want to sleep you still can do. It isn't like speed.
Yeah, I'm afraid you're definitely wrong on this. I've used Modafinil extensively at several different doses. Even at a quarter pill (50mg) you will struggle to feel even remotely tired if you take it after 9am (assuming you go to bed at a normal-ish time).
You should probably be saying "I" instead of "you". Anecdotally, I've never had trouble going to sleep even a couple hours after having modafinil. If anything, it's a more peaceful transition to sleep too. Modafinil makes me feel relaxed and refreshed. Like going to bed after taking a shower, or being in a hot tub or something.
It is categorically impossible (for me) to sleep on Modafinil, or it is at least significantly harder than on amphetamines (which I'll grant you can sleep on... Sometimes).
~15 years of taking Adrafinil and then Modifinil on prescription and "recreationally" says otherwise. The actual effect of a drug and then the psychosomatic effect of those who expect it to have a certain effect are two very different things.
> You physically cannot sleep on these drugs without something like clonazepam.
Please tell my brain this. Around 50% of the time my ADHD meds (Adderall) make me sleepy because, for once, my brain is calm and focused and it's a very relaxing experience as opposed to my typical state.
I've once given it to a friend without telling him what it was exactly and he sure did sleep through it, he said he didn't feel anything at all and he was up from the night before (was in vacation). Asked him how he felt afterward and he reported no issues sleeping a couple of hours after taking it.
We were young and yes, he did trust I wouldn't give him poison. I certainly didn't have a reputation of using illegal drugs, he knew I dabbled with supplements like Piracetam / Ashwagandha etc.
Yes. I slept for 2 hours on Wednesday under my desk on a camping pad. You don’t have to believe me. If anybody on HN ever outs me, there were a lot of people who can corroborate this.
The rumour is Limitless (the movie with Bradley Cooper in the early '10s) was modeled on Modafinil, the side effects being "inspired by" as well. I didn't have the peripheral vision failures to register, but the death like fatigue is real.
Limitless is the film version of Alan Glynn's book The Dark Fields. It was published in 2001, so it would've been written before or at most a year or two after modafinil got FDA approval, and long before modafinil was popularized by Wired, etc in the mid-2000s.
The book is really, really good. Much darker than the film, however. The ending is completely different, particularly the implications of the last paragraph.
If you're on a Dark Fields kick, Ted Chiang's 1991 short story Understand is worthwhile. Geekier and not as philosophically weighty, but way more fun.
I had to make something. It wasn’t a cramming session. If it was a mental task, I would have taken a different approach. But I needed more hours and I got them.
I’ve used it once, for a week-long slog on an impossibly short timescale project - it just made sleep an absolute irrelevance, and I was able to just sit and code from Sunday to the following Tuesday. The delivery was on time, the client congratulated “the team” (lol), and our business gained a reputation as being able to pull off the impossible. I felt fine for the duration.
Two things, though.
One, that week does not exist to me. Like, I don’t remember it apart from the abstract knowledge that it happened. I learned C# and .net in the first 48 hours, having never used either before (we were a PHP shop - but some combination of naivety and hubris had us take the project on) - and a few weeks later when making some tweaks, I may as well have been looking at someone else’s code in a language I’d never worked with before.
Two, the comedown wasn’t awful, but I did sleep for about 36 hours straight, and woke up hungry enough to eat a bear.
Haven’t used it since - haven’t needed to - but I do keep a blister pack handy in case I ever find myself needing to function without cessation for a week again.
>I may as well have been looking at someone else’s code in a language I’d never worked with before.
Was there any memory or retention of C# and .net at all (e.g. if you tried to learn it later, was it easier to pick up, or was the memory completely gone)?
I'm curious about what happened after, too. Were you rewarded with a raise/promotion, or was there no reward so you moved companies? Faced with an impossible deadline, I've read it's better to just let the deadline slip because it's not worth the burnout or cost to mental health (because few deadlines are truly life-or-death), so I'm wondering whether pushing through was worth it in your case.
Nope, completely gone. I may as well have started from scratch the next time I looked at it.
It was my business. I was the idiot that signed us up for it - it was kinda out of necessity, as it was for the New York marathon, and their developers had evaporated on them two weeks before a critical deliverable - and we charged blood money for it.
I've run years on end on a 50/5 stack, 50mg 15 minutes after waking, 5 days a week.
Energy levels on the weekend could be low but hard to separate that from working hard all week. It was sustainable.
Now if you get a real streak going, the two days after discontinuing you'll feel like an idiot. Hyperbolic tapering is a reliable solution to this: go 200/100/50/0 instead of 200/0, give your brain a fighting chance.
By comedown you mean sleep debt or have you been using it like caffeine, got your required 8 hours but when you didn't use it one day you felt lethargic?
Not GP, but for me it really seemed to affect my sleep quality in addition to keeping me up later. I started by taking 100mg at 8AM and another 100mg at 12PM. Any later and I'd still be awake at 2AM.
The lethargy and brain fog went away if I dosed again, but that only compounds the problems.
I still dose when I need a guaranteed day of focus, but I really try not to use it on consecutive days.
I've taken it twice. Once for an overnight implementation, and once as a pre-workout for a strongman competition.
There used to be a vitamin for sale in the UK called Berocca that had the slogan "You but on a good day." Modafinil for me felt like me on a really, really good day.
Funny. The couple of times I took Modafinil, it might as well have been placebo. Absolutely no effect. I gave the pills away.
I have ADD, and am prescribed 60mg Adderall XR/day. OTOH, I have slept on 30mg Adderall XR a couple of times, so maybe I'm just "built differently" w.r.t. The Stimmies.
This is a interesting one. I once heard a psychiatrist ask someone during an evaluation: have you ever borrowed Ritalin from your friends? Follow up question: did it work?
I guess this is a really nice hack he had: Has used Ritalin illegally? Increased probability of ADHD. Does it work? Even more increased probability and he know knows the person tolerates it.
This fascinates me. Some people seriously take stimulants at night to fall asleep, others in the morning to wake up..!
Recently I heard the story about how stimulants came to be used to treat ADHD and one thing that stood out except that this was an extremely suprising effect was the very simplified explanation that stimulants seems to stimulate the inhibitory parts of the brain most which seems to account for the increased self control.
As someone who has just gone through the ADHD diagnostic process in the UK - previously abusing stimulants is a risk factor they have to consider before prescribing you anything.
I have previously used Modafinil fairly extensively and considered purchasing Ritalin or Adderall on the dark web, but was very worried about telling the doctor in case it would cause me issues getting treatment.
A friend of mine has used this before and they did alternating low ~30mg doses that same someone had previously used a similar dose Adderall in highschool and early college and preferred the feeling of Modafinil.
They told me they had read multiple studies before hand as well as personal accounts (such as from the venerable https://www.gwern.net/).
That person told me that the feeling was less intense but enough to keep the significantly longer periods of focus without feeling complete lock-in like you might experience on other similar drugs. That said, they also did say the dehydration was heavy and to keep that in mind.
They said the reason they alternated was they had found that given the longer 15 hour-ish half-life they felt effects strong enough the following day that if they dosed again it started making them feel uncomfortable. That said they are typically very sensitive to most substances. They also felt that you should do your dose early enough, 7-8am, so that by the time 1am or so rolls around you can still get mostly a normal sleep.
They also told me that one time they had done multiple consecutive doses and the come down depressive like symptoms were just as bad as the same symptoms from coming off consecutive doses of Adderall. They thought that if you're prone to dangerous depression this one might not be for you.
They did not endorse doing this but to each their own.
If you do want to use stimulants to boost productivity, it probably has to be a somewhat rare thing. I've had a handful of positive experiences with modafinil when I wasn't taking it regularly. There was this one time, I had a lot of work I needed to do but I kept procrastinating on it. I cleared up my schedule for an entire day and took modafinil in the morning. I started working and just did not stop. I was more productive than ever, all the way until 10PM. At some point during the day my mom called me and I picked up the phone. I had a normal conversation with her that laster multiple minutes, while putting together a graph for a presentation I was working on, and I felt like I was doing both things at once without any loss in efficiency. Normally, I could never have a phone conversation while also focusing on a work task, I felt superhuman in that one moment.
BUT... I later got a prescription for modafinil, which I took daily for 3 months. My experience was that you build a tolerance, just as you do with caffeine or with any other stimulant. Initially, I would take it in the morning and feel very focused for most of the day. Eventually, the stimulation would only last until noon or so, at which point I would crash and get extremely irritable. I remember the guy I shared an office with telling me to "just chill" because I kept getting frustrated at a programming issue and cursing. I was getting super pissed off at really minor things. On top of that, there were also side-effects. It made my acne quite a bit worse and my hair much more oily. This is also typical of stimulants in my experience.
I reached a point where there was zero benefit to taking modafinil anymore. It just made me have annoying mood swings, so I discontinued it, and went back to coffee, which I gradually reduced to just one coffee a day, and I felt a lot better. I haven't used modafinil in years and I don't really care to push my body like that anymore.
My general advice for people who want to try this is that there is unfortunately no free lunch with stimulants. You can use them every once in a while to get an extra boost in focus and energy, but you usually end up more tired later, like you have to pay back a debt to your system. Even just taking a stimulant for one day will lead to a little bit of tolerance buildup. You'll probably feel slightly more tired and unmotivated a day or two or three later.
Yup. I have a prescription for modafinil, but I only use it when desperate times call for desperate measures. (Like having to lead a session but I'm having a terrible pain day).
I know whenever I use it I'm going to pay for it later.
Actually, given my first few doses always feel great, it probably isn't nocebo. If anything, perhaps the initial 'good' dose might be placebo (placebic?) in nature.
> They also told me that one time they had done multiple consecutive doses and the come down depressive like symptoms were just as bad as the same symptoms from coming off consecutive doses of Adderall.
Modafinil may be milder than traditional stimulants in some ways, but that doesn’t make it free of downsides or side effects. It actually has substantial effects on dopaminergic systems, despite having other additional actions.
The gentleness of Modafinil was greatly exaggerated all over the internet for a decade or more. This led some people to unhealthy use patterns. It’s definitely associated with rebound effects and extended use (especially redosing) will leave anyone in a below-baseline state the next day (even if not entirely obvious to themselves, especially with low doses)
Yup, definitely that's why they had read a lot of studies first and figured out the mechanism of action is largely the same to other stimulants and moved to a much lower dosage and larger spacing when they take it. You can do a lot of damage if you're not careful. The gentleness is definitely overstated.
I used to describe Modafinil as "the best sleep you ever had, in pill form". As someone with chronic sleep issues and ADHD, it allowed me to function during some of the worst months of my life.
The way I eventually settled on to 'dose' Modafinil is two pills (200mg) on Monday morning, then one pill on Wednesday morning; this kept my serum levels at a level where I got the positive effects for a whole work week, yet could still relax on the weekend.
I haven't been in a situation where I felt I needed this for a while, now.
If you're bipolar, you probably already know to be careful with drugs, but I just want to reiterate that it also extends to modafinil.
I'm type-II bipolar, so it's not too severe, but I could tell the moda was making my manic swings worse. It was subtle, and I didn't realize it until I had a few significant(for me) manic episodes. Stopping it seems to have helped. I was a little worried about 'kindling' and causing a permanent worsening of symptoms but that doesn't seem to have happened.
Modafinil had only major flaw in my experience, but it was significant enough for me to stop taking it; it made it very difficult to stick to a 24-hour circadian rhythm.
To illustrate, if I got a full night sleep, then took modafinil, I would be up for easily 18 hours without feeling any urge to sleep...which seems great until it's 5am, and you need to be at work again in 4 hours.
The apparent solution to the problem is just take modafinil again in the morning. This worked for a while, but there's a limit to how much modafinil can cover a sleep debt. While modafinil had a strong effect preventing the symptoms of sleep deprivation, it had an even stronger effect blocking the capacity to sleep. Modafinil can lead to a very strange and unpleasant feeling of desperately needing to sleep and not being able to.
Ha, I had a friend who had the exact same problem when writing up his PhD thesis. His solution? Take modafinil just before going to bed - he would then sleep through the first 8 hours or so and wake up fully charged. By the time he got to the end of the day it would be wearing off and he would repeat the whole process. He did that for about a month straight I think. Having said that he was a bit nuts in general!
Like most drugs, finding and sticking to the right dose is made more difficult by ever-increasing tolerance.
I'm not saying there's no way around the insomnia problem with proper planning and self-control, but for me the easiest solution was just stop taking it.
Very effective, but quickly diminishing returns for me. If I do one pill a week, that day is awesome. But as soon as I step it up to 2 I'm overwhelmed and might even take a nap I wouldn't have otherwise. This is only 100mg.
But the reason I stopped taking it is that I'm just a salaried employee. It doesn't matter if I'm super focused or not. I'm still getting paid the same amount. There's no point in artificially elevating myself.
I sort of fell down the rabbit hole of nootropics over the past year, of which Modafinil is a frequent recommendation.
I don't know if I would really recommend nootropics to the average person (because there is risk involved, and many of these substances have had very little in the way of human studies), but it's been an interesting journey. It was kind of a pandemic hobby I picked up.
My favorites are Aniracetam and Phenylpiracetam. (Both have become increasingly difficult to source though, despite still being legal in the US.) On top of a stack of supplements (magnesium, vitamin D, zinc, and fish oil).
The only thing that bothers me about nootropics is that so much of the conversation is about productivity. What a weird thing to focus on, especially when we're talking about un-researched brain chemistry impacts.
The best combination I found was magnesium, ashwaganda, and green tea extract. It caused massively vivid, lucid dreams.
I've never had more fun sleeping, and my sleep health was never better. It had nothing to do with productivity, and was literally just so I could fly and shoot fire out of my hands in my dreams.
500mg magnesium, 450-900 mg ashwaganda, 400mg green tea extract (or 400mg L-theanine) about an hour before bed.
It took about two weeks of consistently taking it at the same time with the same bedtime (or as close as possible) to get the dreams going.
That being said, legit it is like living two lives, for me. You get the boring daytime life, then you can fly and turn into a horse and shoot lasers and just generally fuck shit up however you want at night. Super cool.
They provide a mild amount of stimulation, motivation, and reduce the barriers for getting into flow. I also notice a bit of a mood boost and anxiolytic effect from both of them. This contrasts with a lot of other nootropics that seem to increase anxiety and irritability.
I've been using Modafinil daily for about 2,5 years and I am currently under its effect.
I buy it online and pay with Bitcoins.
I use armodafinil if I want more focus, and I use modafinil if I am tired.
I don't take the full dose, which is 150mg (armodafinil) /200mg (modafinil)- I break the tablets into 4 and pop them if I feel like I am unfocused or tired. In the course of the day, I rarely take more than 1 full dose. For reference, I know of people who take it for narcolepsy who routinely consume 8 full doses a day (200mg x 8).
For me it's been a clear net benefit without any noticeable side effects. I think it makes me about 20% "smarter"/"better", let's me learn and achieve more and generally improves my life.
I had a friend that liked the effects of Modafinil, but would complain of bad headaches every time they took some. Even less than 1 quarter of tablet would be enough to produce the bad effects.
Is that something that happens just to some people or is there a way to avoid the headaches?
I'm curious about trying, but since I used to suffer migraines (not anymore fortunately) I am worried that I will have headaches or trigger a migraine.
I suspect that his headaches might have been due to dehydration - Modafinil does indeed make me pee a little bit more/more often, but since I am drinking water constantly I don't consider this a negative side effect and I also don't suffer consequences such as headaches. But I am fortunately healthy, fit and relatively young (30) and only very rarely suffer headaches.
Before I decided to use Modafinil I did research its side effects as well as potential risks and every couple of months I check the newest studies to see if new data came up - TLDR: some people indeed experience some headaches and/or nausea and in very, very rare cases some people experience pretty bad allergic skin reactions. But then again some people die of peanut allergy so...
Modafinil has been there since the 70s, there are even some studies about its long-term use (10+ years) and its side effects and it looks pretty chill. I think the English Wiki Page for Modafinil is pretty well researched and a good place to start if you want to read more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modafinil
I'm also a frequent modafinil user (maybe 4/7 days a week) and luckily haven't experienced side effects. I also drink tons of water throughout the day so that could definitely be a factor.
My experience is that it keeps you wide awake for a very long time. Highly potent. Absolutely no focusing activity for me like dextroamphetamine / amphetamine / methamphetamine. As a result ADHD treatment value is low. Gave me some nasty joint swelling rather quickly so had to stop using it. If I were to market it I’d call it “clean coffee”
> My experience is that it keeps you wide awake for a very long time. Highly potent. Absolutely no focusing activity for me like dextroamphetamine / amphetamine / methamphetamine. As a result ADHD treatment value is low.
Same experience here. Went through a trial period of Modafinil with my doc. It's fantastic for eradicating any trace of tiredness, but it does nothing for focus
Same experience for me as well - fantastic if I'm extremely tired and need to be awake and semi-productive for an entire day, but does basically nothing for focus. Not even remotely comparable to Adderall. Also like others have mentioned, you need to be careful about when you take it (as soon as you wake up if you want to not sleep like shit at a normal bed time), and if you take it for more than a couple days the come-down can be rough.
I think it's best to schedule breaks and to set strict rules when taking modfinil. For instance I would not recommend taking it after a certain time period after waking up.
That's quite likely, because you do not have a clinically significant disorder that needs to be treated.
drugs have a U-shape response curve, where those who are already at their personal optimal/best, will usually find risks outweigh benefits. Some even have nothing but side-effects, happens, but rarely.
I used Modafinil almost daily for a few years. It was amazing at times, and some of my projects' success I can attribute directly to Modafinil. One of the main downsides was (what I assume was?) the lactose they use as a binder (if you get the cheap Indian variant at least) wreaked havoc on my digestive tract.
Over time I started to get panic attacks, culminating in a finaly, massive, life altering experience. I haven't touched it since. I don't think it was soley due to the drug alone--but it almost certainly didn't help.
Modafinil is awesome, but it's not a cure for whatever underlying problem you have.
I experimented with Modafinil back in 2013 when I was working on a startup like project, where I had a lot to do in different areas (hardware, software, backend, frontend etc etc).
Modafinil really helped me concentrate. But sometimes it was also a "miss". That is, I would focus on something totally unrelated to my project. For instance, one day I spent 6 hours comparing Vegas hotel room prices over different days of a month.
The side effects were annoying, to say the least. Itchy ears and eyes, dry mouth, occasional anxiety, talkativeness etc.
So weird... I just had a dream about Modafinil last night for no apparent reason and then I wake up to see this post on HN. What an odd coincidence.
I haven't thought about Modafinil in years but back when 'Limitless' came out and I was in my mid-twenties I experimented with it very briefly, along with a host of other "nootropics", but the risk of Stevens-Johnson syndrome put me off of it pretty quickly. It still shocks me when I think about how foolhardy I was to order this Rx drug from overseas.
from what I've read, SJS is actually triggered by a number of different pharmaceuticals including paracetamol - it's more of a person-caused condition than a medicine-caused condition, if you get what I mean.
Of all stimulants, caffeine must be the worst one to combine with THC.
Proper stimulants like amphetamine or methylphenidate on the other hand...
A word of warning though, it's much more dangerous and my normal Wednesday (1/8oz weed and 40mg mph) can be your psychosis.
Yes I agree, I once drank a load of coffee and did some THC gummies and it caused very unpleasant hallucinations and voices in my head. Also I couldn't fall asleep to make it go away :V
Mostly all true. I have taken modafinil quite a bit. You can buy it in India from a chemist for next to nothing. If you take it every day for a couple of weeks in small amounts the efficacy does get less. If you increase the dose you don't get more returns. Used sparingly for study or concentrating it is nice. It is also good if you are tired and have to do some long task that requires little but constant attention - driving or flying for example. Take as much as you need, do your job then sleep, all good. Piracetam is also to be recommended. Again don't do it all the time and be sensible. Smart drugs work but getting something for nothing is always tricky...
This echoes my experience as well. I take 100mg modafinil on an empty stomach around 10am 2-3 times / week and I feel alert and focused most of the day with no problem falling asleep at night around 10pm. I often "stack" it with 200mg L-theanine and normal amounts of caffeine in the form of tea or coffee. The key for me is taking 7-14 days off completely every few weeks. I don't feel the tired / hangover feeling others have described upon stopping unless I'm really pushing it for some reason taking it every day for a week or more. IMO modafinil is way better than the ADHD drugs which make me feel super stimulated and awake but jittery and less productive overall.
Yep. That sounds about right. Modafinil really works and if you are sensible and has not so many downsides. I had plenty and used it all up. Was about 40p for 50 tablets or more in India. 7-14 days off would be perfect. Ritalin was absolutely horrible, made me feel really weird. Moda just works.
I took it for years alongside Dexedrine for ADHD, then my insurance stopped covering it and the cost for Provigil was prohibitively expensive (like $1700 a month), so I went off it. I think the patent expired so you can get a generic now, but unfortunately, getting prescribed it again in addition to the Dexedrine has just been more of a pain than it’s seemed worth. I’ve been able to get Nuvigil (very similar chemically and created for the express purpose of extending the modafanil patent) scripts easily, but it legitimately doesn’t work for me, sadly.
Anyway, I feel like I was extremely productive on 400mg of Modafanil a day, and I understand why people have used it for nootropics.
I read this and cant help but think this man a highly irresponsible person.
I generally approve of anyone modifying their own consciousness on there own time. And I get what he did ended up harmless and even beneficial, but if you are going to experiment with psychoactive pharmaceuticals, do it on you day off for your first ever does. This guy not only went to work under the influence of drug that he didn't know what the effects on his person would be but did so in job were he is directly treating other people at a hospital. I get where we come form here there is a culture of move fast and break things but maybe not when those things are potentially other people.
Modafinil is a pretty common drug prescribed for a wide range of issues, it doesn't have wild sudden side effects, it won't make you go suddenly crazy, erratic or cloud your judgement, it's essentially between a very strong coffee and a very weak amphetamine.
+Plenty of people get prescribed medicine and go to work the next day even if they never tried it.
You never know if you'll have adverse reactions, even if it's safe for most people.
I have a good friend (who is otherwise reacting normally to stimulants) who took IIRC ~50mg of Modafinil for the first time for an exam in uni. They ended up having to go to the ER in the middle of the exam, got diagnosed with some form of allergic reaction. Doc said it can happen for many medications.
Whenever trying a new substance for the first time, do so in a way and context that minimizes impact of unexpected effects or adverse reactions.
So I agree OP was irresponsible and should at the minimum have taken one dose off work before their first work-day on it.
Would you say the same thing if it was the person's first time with caffeine? Because Modafinil is a stimulant and used to treat narcolepsy, one could argue that going to work tired and treating people would have been more dangerous. I agree with you that he definitely should have done it prior but this is relatively low on my scale of recklessness. It is not like the effects weren't known. Just the severity of his reaction.
Entirely different. Caffeine is a very well studied substance with widely known effects, it has been used for literally centuries by a sizeable portion of the human population.
The FDA has decided that this a substance the needs restricting from general consumption for a reason wrong or no. Was that the right decision or wrong I don't know. But I have to assume they have some reason but it would be enough for me to take seriously the possible consequences of having a adverse reaction when dealing with the lives of OTHER PEOPLE if he had started his self experiment on his own time that would be one thing but he was treating other people and that makes this inexcusable. had he tried it in a safe controlled situation, then determined it to be safe and used it at work then I wouldn't care but he didn't. bottom line he put other people at risk.
Your statement is essentially "given OPs current state and prior probability of him making a mistake on the job, and the action of taking modafinil, that probability increases given the OP takes that action.
Which is not an accurate statement.
Modafinil is a nootropic, which means that it can increase attention, therefore decreasing the chance of a mistake. The probability that someone will experience more wakefulness and attention is high in this regard.
And it being FDA approved lowers the probability of an adverse reaction that can cause someone to not be in the right mind and make mistakes to a very small number, which accounts for things like heart conditions.
Doing drugs doesn’t make you irresponsible. Caffeine is a drug, is drinking coffee irresponsible? I’d argue it’s more responsible to browse Erowid’s reports and see drugs’ effects before trying them out, rather than doing something and not knowing anything about it.
To give them the benefit of the doubt. They say " was dreading a lengthy day at the hospital", which makes me think they may be a MD resident, or similar with horrid schedules.
Only partially related, but I am so surprised that lack of sleep seems to be normalized in the medical industry (or at least appear to be, I am not a doctor). I would think we would want doctor's brains running at 100%
Just had a surgery. Was joking with the nurse that they will study the exact temperature for a warm air-blanket and every other variable, but will never study how much sleep a resident needs to get.
Yeah this is probably not too far from my daily routine, except replace coffees with energy drinks. Though I oversleep significantly on the weekends (normally aided by the effects/after effects of shit that’s worse for my brain).
It very obviously has major negative effects, but I just can’t bring myself to change it. I’ve tried once or twice, but I always return to this.
If life was a little more flexible, I think I could pull off biphasic sleep and be ok, but when I want to sleep I usually have meetings and when I’m wide awake it’s usual the middle of the night (writing this at 3:25am).
If you don't you're going to have burn out. not just emotionally but physically.
I had a fit that the Dr put down to poor sleep and eating habits. It took me weeks to get over the immediate effect of the fit, I felt like I'd been worked over with a baseball bat.
I used that recovery time to go cold turkey on caffeine (if I'm going to feel like crap i might as well have a good reason for it), I limit myself to tea only now, and only 1-3 cups a day. I eat a lot better and I go bike riding a few times a week. I get at least 6 1/2 hours a sleep a night, and aim for 7-8.
its worth noting that while there is evidence for sleep debt, there is no evidence that oversleeping helps correct it.
Studies show that moderate caffeine consumption (2-4 cups per day) has beneficial health effects. Excess consumption is linked to adverse effects. There is an optimal dose when it comes to caffeine. Building up tolerance to where you need six or more cups is where you get into trouble.
They work in a hospital. I hear 4 hours a night is normal in med school. If I'm not mistaken, that same culture of chronic sleep deprivation is also present in hospitals, so they don't seem like an outlier to me. Perhaps someone with more experience can confirm this.
I love modafinal. I was able to get a legit prescription for it from a doctor for "Adult ADD"
You are _awake_ but not the way caffeine or ritalin do it. You're not buzzing. Just _awake_.
However, it didn't do anything for my ADD so I didn't use it for more than a month. For a while I used my remaining supply to de-jet-lag myself after an international flight. (Pre-pandemic, I'd do an international flight about once/month.) It worked well for this. I'd use it to stay awake the first full day I landed, then my clock would be fine.
I experimented with modafinil for a week once. Early on, it seemed great—I was productive and had a good mood. By the end of the week, I really didn't feel any different from baseline, and it was exacerbating my bad habit of clenching my jaw during focused work, leading to soreness in my face by the end of the day. I did not perceive the benefits to be enough to continue.
Modafinil is great while you use it for some specific situations, but it’s a bad idea to take one everyday. From my experience, doing even half dosage everyday made my body feel sick, my muscles were tense all day and overly exhausted. There are other drugs that are way better than modafinil.
I think it's because of the long half-life: it's about 15 hours.
I have over half a bottle from when I was prescribed it (for MS fatigue) and I can definitely still feel in my system after a day. And yeah, if I take it more than, say, 2 days in a row, I start having a bad time.
I’ve wanted to try Modafinil for a long time but I’m too nervous to order it online. My doctor won’t prescribe it to me, saying it is only for extreme narcoleptics, though I think the real reason is that its street value is pretty high… because it works.
Preface this with whatever caveats necessary: adrafinil is a modafinil prodrug which is unscheduled in the U.S. In other words, it's effectively modafinil in vivo.
Secondary note: I was once prescribed modafinil for severe sleeping issues before I knew it had some street/techbro value (maybe it didn't then). My experience was not great. I only took it for three days and then stopped.
I would say the effect on wakefulness was very subtle. I think I stayed up until 11 or 12 each night wherein I'd normally be up until 2 unable to sleep. I suppose the difference is I didn't get the late afternoon crash.
However, I'd wake up at 4 or 5 with significant itching. To the point that it was hard to go back to sleep. There are some serious side effects to consider that are somewhat related to skin issues and when I reported this to my doctor he seemed concerned and told me to keep an eye out for another week. I just stopped.
I've worked hard on sleep habits and it's gotten a lot better naturally. Intuitively, better sleep = better wakefulness/happiness/productivity, but we all tend to fight these uphill battles sometimes. We think if we just put in an extra few hours tonight, we'll be ahead of the game. But instead we end up putting in low-value work and being exhausted the next day, starting the cycle anew.
I really didn't find much huge exciting value in my short foray into modafinil, though. If you can work on some natural sleep training or even 5htp/melatonin/whatever works for you, you'll be better off.
Thank you. Whenever I talk about modafinil with someone I always mention the potential skin issues and tell them to try low doses first. I wasn't sure how common it actually is but yours and the other's reports even being here suggests it's worth taking those precautions.
I did a lot of reading into this after learning my old medication had become the cool thing to do, and the difference between them is largely overblown. Yes, there's slightly more liver metabolism involved but both carry warnings about potential liver damage.
It looks like adrafinil is getting difficult to come by in the US. Mostly I’m curious if on my sluggish work days something like modafinil would give me a kick that coffee just doesn’t provide. Though I already have itchy skin issues messing up my sleep so if I had anything like the reaction you describe it would be a no-go.
I've purchased prescription drugs from Indian pharmacies online and they take a while to arrive, but they do make it through customs and arrive and they are legit.
The funny thing is, I mostly do it because I don't want to go to the doctor every six months to say "mother may I" for a very mild and safe statin. My insurance would pay for everything, but it's such a pain to do.
I always find it incredible that in our free and civilized societies an adult isn't allowed to decide what chemicals he can put in his body. He must first beg for them.
I live in a “third world” “dangerous” and “corrupt” country.
My food delivery app has modafinil from any of the local pharmacies or I can get it at the mall on the way back from the gym. In fact, I can get most medications this way and I don’t have to pay the 30$ it would cost me to see my doctor if I was in my home country.
That's why we are civilised. People value dignity, grovelling for drugs should make one feel shame, and acts as a decent filter for those not desperate.
Who said anything about grovelling? I have a feeling you feel like this about every drug, but why should one feel shame for consuming drugs? I agree that some people behave very bad on drugs, but that's no reason to forbid it for everyone.
Obviously importing regulated drugs may come with their own legal quandries. However, if you were to do such a thing, you would find information on what the pills and packaging should be, their ph, their coating and their weight.
Then when you receive you order, you'd sacrifice a pill to carefully weigh it, check the coating matches, packaging and so on. If you ordered a whole bunch, you would check batch numbers and sample each batch for testing.
Obviously this isn't foolproof, but if someone is going to sell a counterfeit they aren't going to practically spend a lot of time in making it a perfect one.
In many countries there are also testing labs that don't ask any questions nor contact the police if you hand over small samples of illegal drugs, for harm reduction purposes. If you wanna be 100% it contains nothing deadly, use those.
They come sealed from reputable manufacturers and pharmacies in India that you can read about online.
I suppose someone could create fraudulent drugs, but honestly, it's probably cheaper just to sell you the real deal. And just like other businesses they want your repeat business.
I know they are the real drug in my case because I take them for mildly high blood pressure. It's trivial to measure blood pressure, and I can see that they have the same effect as the American drugs of the same dosage.
The main things to look out for are mood swings (especially if you're prone to mania or psychosis). The milder, more typical manifestation will be irritability, impatience and restlessness, to the point of (temporarily) changing your personality so you don't want to relax and socialize but only work.
Well, that and the potentially life-threatening skin conditions. Those are apparently rare, but I discontinued use when I saw some large purple blotches on my skin.
In general, law enforcement only has a limited number of resources, and its going to use those to go after things that are seen as a "problem". People ordering drugs from online pharmacies (with legal prescription) happens on such a wide scale that its absolutely pointless to set up resources to try to find those that don't have legal prescriptions.
If you really are worried buy a prepaid visa card with cash, and use a vpn.
I took modafinil for years, through college and my first few years of work. I realized once I stopped that my pretty-intense social anxiety was basically 90% caused by modafinil, and I think I am a more effective person now. YMMV.
Modafinil was a bandaid for me when I had neglected what I had to do. Paired with the fact it seriously depressed social awareness and made me an unfeeling robot for 12-16 hours at minimum, I don't miss it. There are no wonder drugs better than good eats, good sleeps, good work time, and good breaks. Do all those things and you'll realize that (unless you're clinically in need of e.g. ADHD meds) you just haven't been treating your body right.
People tend to view drug use as a lazy alternative to healthy living, but I think it might be better to flip it around and say that drug use (ranging all the way from caffeine and nicotine through to heroin and meth) is a symptom of something wrong. Schizophrenics, for example, are known to self-medicate with nicotine prior to their diagnosis.
I think it's important to remember the hidden underlying problem won't go away just because the visible coping mechanism does. A severely depressed person using modafinil as a crutch has to treat the depression first and foremost.
Modafinil user of 4+ years speaking from experience, the benefits of this drug outweigh the risks and adverse reaction in my case.
I was prescribed Vyvanse but quit it (flushed the remainder of the pills in the bottle down the toilet), I had to stop when I felt the clammy hands, cold sweat and heart palpitations. On top of that, it made me feel like a zombie.
Modafinil provided me with the calmness to concentrate and ability to stick to something for hours on end without the feeling of depletion after hours of taken an amphetamine, with the only adverse reaction being a foul smell in urine.
I used to use this when freelancing and a big deadline was approaching, I found it very helpful. It felt like I could get at least twice as much done in a day.
However I stopped using it after getting into a minor motorbike accident. Another motorbike was driving on the shoulder (pretty typical in Thailand) and I didn't spot her while turning at an intersection, even after checking both directions. The tunnel vision side-effect is no joke!
Just to have a diverging pov, I tried prescribed off-label modafinil for ADHD, because I was concerned about potential dependency on Adderall. It wasn’t nearly as effective as adderall, and it gave me a general sense of unease, like something about me was slightly off but not in a way I could pin down. Very uncomfortable. Ended up throwing away most of the bottle.
I use modafinil occasionally if I know I have a lot of work to do that day, particularly if I'm low on sleep. I have to take it as early as possible, though, otherwise I won't be able to sleep that night until about 2 or 3. It gives me a focus and clarity I wish I have all the time.
I bought 160x200mg pills in 2016 and just ran out at the start of this year. Modafinil is fantastic in moderation, I take 100mg whenever I need to be awake for the next 12 hours guaranteed. For me, it's mostly just the anti-sleepy effect, with the side effect of extra concentration.
Honestly, where does anyone even get it in 2022 USA without paying $200 for a permission slip, and then $500/fill? It's like trying to buy "research chemicals" in the 90's :/
Regulations are sticky. The FDA follows the precautionary principle. Political game theory incentivizes restricting what the electorate can do rather than giving them more freedoms, and being blamed for whatever harm may fall upon them from their licentiousness. Reversing drug laws specifically seems to require both clear evidence of benefit, and widespread support from the public and media. This leads me to believe that modafinil will takes ages to be rescheduled.
[0] https://www.gwern.net/Modafinil#fn28
[1] https://www.gwern.net/docs/modafinil/2002-deroche-gamonet.pd...