Silicon Valleys Eating Up Super Ritalin. I Got the Best of It. - Daily Beast
In the months before a recent trip to Colombia, off to visit an expat friend living there, I had been hearing about nootropics. Or “smart drugs,” as they’re referred to. Brain enhancers. Depending on which site you’ve read that’s proclaimed them the new “It” drug for bio-hackers of every stripe, all roads lead to the same place. They’ll increase concentration, memory, attention span, combat sleep fatigue, and—in some cases—flat out change the way our brains work. Not in a fantastical sense, like in the way the miracle pill in the film Limitless allows Bradley Cooper’s character to achieve riches and glory. More like added grease for one’s cognitive gears—a synaptic lubricant that normally healthy people are taking to operate at optimal levels of clarity, stamina, and focus. Which isn’t to say, ironically, nootropics are not a bit confusing to the average person, Flintstone vitamin popper, or even general fan of recreational drugs. Others are a classified as Schedule IV drugs that require you to be a DEA agent to bring across the border. In 2013, the U. S. National Library of Medicine concluded that Modafinil—the popular, legal stuff—can reliably "enhanced task enjoyment and performance on several cognitive tests of planning and working memory, but did not improve paired... That doesn't account for some of the knockoff drugs sold under a nootropics label from unreliable sources all throughout the web. Source: www.thedailybeast.com
