Read this article at New Scientist magazine for everything you ever wanted to know about Modafinil and other cutting-edge drugs for manipulating sleep, turning it on or off on demand.
Personally I think there's gotta be a downside. In my experience, there's a certain "meta-side effect" of stimulant use that subtly changes people's personality over time. This was once crassly summarized by someone I know who asked someone else about his use of Modafinil, "Does it make people into even bigger assholes than they already are?" I would rather look at something a bit more subtle than that. If you're using a stimulant, you're most likely engaging in a pattern of behavior, broadly speaking, that seeks to put you more In Control of your experience. You're transcending your physical limitations, making yourself more powerful, more potent, more durable, more sharp, more intelligent, whatever. I don't think there's anything wrong with being more powerful
per se, nor with staying awake, nor with activating dopamine, etc. What I
do think can be problematic is at a deeper level: the belief that you are, ultimately, In Control is simply not true, and the reinforcement and reification of that belief puts you more and more out of sync with reality in a way that eats away at your heart from the inside.
I don't want to write a whole dissertation here, but one thing that occurred to me is that this could be tested fairly straightforwardly with an experiment that could even muster up federal funding from NIDA. There are a whole slew of neuroeconomics paradigms that test cooperative versus competitive behavior; for example, I believe that it has already been demonstrated that oxytocin increases cooperative behavior. It seems like it would be very straightforward to test coke or meth in this way. In fact I really should look up whether that's been done before; a cursory search revealed nothing but I should look harder. I suspect that those drugs in particular might tend to cause more selfish behavior. I'm sure I'm not the first one to think of that.
The interesting thing about generating this kind of research result is not that it would fuel someone's "drugz are bad" rant, but rather that it would help create more of an understanding of just how
important drugs are to society overall. How much richer would our understanding of history be if we studied a culture in a particular place and time in relation to the drugs that were in that culture? The Greeks would make more sense with an open discussion of the possibly psychedelic Eleusinian mysteries and the real dynamics of the induction of the Delphic oracle through ethylene gas. The sixties, seventies, eighties, and nineties make a lot more sense understood in terms of LSD, MDA, cocaine, and MDMA. And so on.
Drugs are not good, drugs are not bad; drugs are, however, very important in many ways and as a society we're shortchanging our ability to understand ourselves by refusing to think about them and talk about them openly.
Hmm, this was realy two separate topics. Oh well.
