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This article is heavily one-sided. The reality is that there is a lot more to this than simply finding drugs "more effective than caffeine." Heck, even caffeine has been shown to have negative side effects (and long-term effects). It's silly to try and rationalize (ab)use of addictive and potentially harmful drugs by pointing out that a few rogue scientists (whose relevant credentials are not even mentioned -- simply that they are ethicists) supposedly support this.
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<p>"I would be the first in line if safe and effective drugs were developed that trumped caffeine"</p>
<p>Clearly, efficacy is not the only factor under consideration. Artificial stimulants, like the narcolepsy drug Provigil, have been shown to induce all the benefits sought after, while having almost no harmful side effects. We all take stimulants, from caffeine to sugar, and foster habits, like sleeping well or meditating, that change the chemical interactions inside our bodies. Some of these may be harmful or addictive. Too many simple carbs can lead to a sugar rush. Gambling can be addictive. As active stewards of our body, we weigh the harms and benefits of these actions. The same principle applies to brain drugs. The salient difference is that many people are likely to group these "brain drugs" as riskier or more dangerous than what is "natural". This is certainly true to a degree - caffeine's effects are time-tested, and the world itself is unbeatable as a testing ground - but I think it's inappropriate to lump "abuse" with "use" and/or relegate "addictive" and "potentially harmful" uniquely to artificial stimulants. Caffeine is an apt comparison.</p>
<p>No one doubts that caffeine has many ill effects that are both known and yet to be discovered. But if millions of people are going to take caffeine anyways, why not have them try a safer and more efficacious alternative? Often, as with Provigil versus caffeine, the differences are enormous: Provigil has no physical withdrawal effects, no feelings of jittery-ness, and no other regular effect besides increasing "wakefulness". It may be premature to claim that scientists have totally isolated the chemical for this one particular, yet still very complex, symptom, but so far it seems like they're close.</p>
<p>The reason I know so much about Provigil is because it's been prescribed to me. However, I don't take it (but then again, I'm a purist in general and avoid caffeine and large amounts of sugar too). Now what's interesting about my prescription is that Provigil started out as a narcolepsy drug. Narcolepsy is very easily tested for by measuring the amount of time it takes for someone to fall asleep in a series of naps. Someone over the benchmark has narcolepsy, and someone under it doesn't. But I got it for idiopathic hypersomnia. What separates narcolepsy from hypersomnia is just a matter of degree of sleepiness, measured by the very same sleeping test. So in addition to the arbitrary marker dictating a narcolepsy diagnosis, there's now an arbitrary gray zone between narcoleptic and normal, between "disorder" and "healthy". Disturbingly, the associated cut-off points, from normal to hypersomnia to narcolepsy, involve convenient factors of 5 - how odd that nature would work so anthropomorphically. I hope you see how nebulous these distinctions are, which I think even the medical community would grant given their adoption of the gray zone that I inhabit. I would think that most people exist on a gradient of wakefulness, and thus it's hard to draw the line and relegate these drugs only to those who are "sick".</p>
<p>I see "safe and effective" stimulants as a general good. The ethics of fairness, however, is nonetheless contentious.</p>
<p>Oh, and this is hardly a rogue fancy. The quoted scientist in that article is a professor at UCSB.</p>