Everybody who could afford it adopted psychostimulants in WW2. Go pills have been part and parcel since then. Some countries have adopted modafinil, but the US still uses amphetamine.
> In 1919, the Japanese discovered a more potent version of the drug — methamphetamine. The new drug was a crystalline powder soluble in water. In this form, it can be smoked, injected, snorted or taken orally. Users get an intense but brief high when they inject or smoke the drug, but if it's snorted or taken orally by capsule, the high lasts longer.
An army of tweakers. I don't think that this aspect of the War and the Holocaust are discussed enough. Certainly no excuse, but it is very interesting.
> Chronic Meth users have deficits in memory and executive functioning as well as higher rates of anxiety, depression, and most notably psychosis. [0]
In more recent times of horror:
> After the fall of the al-Assad regime in Syria, large stockpiles of the illicit drug captagon have reportedly been uncovered.
> The stockpiles, found by Syrian rebels, are believed to be linked to al-Assad military headquarters, implicating the fallen regime in the drug’s manufacture and distribution. [1]
Im sure eventually whatever pills the Germans were taking back then were bad for you but I would imagine smoking huge doses of not so pure street meth is quite a bit different than something created in a lab.
That being said if anyone uses drugs to avoid sleeping for many days straight I would imagine it's quite horrible for your mental health
Benzedrine (an amphetamine inhaler) was the first antidepressant marketed (although at the time I believe they used the term "psychic energizer" for antidepressants)
Just want to echo someone else's sub-thread:
Adderall is not at all similar to Huxley's description of Soma. Soma was about feeling good and not having to think of the evil things that make the BNW society possible, not efficiency.
That's also what I thought - Wasn't Soma more of a way to make people question less and just remain in a blissed out but maybe sort of out of it state at all times ? Seems very different than amphetamines
The link (including the transcript of Huxley’s lecture) doesn’t seem to be about Soma, unless I’m missing something. Huxley produced a lot of work outside of Brave New World, lots of it concerned with drugs and altered states of consciousness (so much so that personally I don’t think I’ve done enough drugs to understand his perspective, as I find him distinctly, and almost uniquely among such high-profile authors that I’ve tried, unreadable)
You are vey correct—the talk and link have nothing to do with Soma.
I can only presume, based on timing of the talk being 1960, that his thoughts here link to mescaline and the practical utopia he talks of in Island, whose inhabitants make use of a local psychedelic. So whatever he must have said here had more to do with his later perspectives than his feelings around the island.
I agree, soma definitely parallels weed much more closely, but I don't think it's a perfect match. Huxley imagines a drug a bit more insidious, without obviously negative side effects, and with somewhat unrealistic(imo) intended effects.
It is, you're right, and it's super weird what happens on the internet when you suggest weed isn't some gateway to enlightenment. I love cannabis, but it's a depressant that increases dopamine, it's not that complicated. Stoners on the internet sound exactly like alcoholics—they say it makes them more creative, helps them sleep, deal with anxiety too. We do such a shit job teaching about signs of psychological addiction.
The sedation is psychological - soma suppresses discomfort and boosts easy pleasure. It’s not introspective at all, which makes it much closer to MDMA than to cannabis.
pure racemic MDMA has very little stimulant effect. street MDMA can feel stimulating because it is either intentionally mixed with caffeine/speed/meth or contains residual precursor from clandestine synthesis.
my major state was one of deep relaxation ... MDMA does not work like Dexedrine ... I feel totally peaceful.
This article (and the title alone) is harmful. Adderall is not about increasing mental efficiency.
What Adderall is about is:
- helping with executive dysfunction for people who suffer from it.
- allowing people with ADHD like me to function. To do the things that everyone else does, things that we want to do and need to do, but can't do because of the way our brains are wired.
- increasing the lifespan of ADHD people who don't get help. Women with ADHD die about 9 years younger than those without ADHD [1].
- making our lives less painful, since every small task incurs pain, resulting in 3x depression rates [2] and alarmingly high suicidal ideation rates (50% of ADHD adults [3]).
Please, please, educate yourself about ADHD and medication for it before writing something like this title.
No, Aldous Huxley didn't. "predict" Adderall.
To understand more, I've put together a resource which, I hope, will be easy enough to digest. Here's my experience of getting prescribed Adderall for my ADHD:
If I have attention deficit and I could write it, I hope you (and the author of the text we're discussing) could spare some attention to it before talking about Adderall, amphetamines, and other stimulants prescribed for ADHD.
Yes, that image is so funny, because it really is the difference between me being able to make a meal for myself vs needing something immediate.
It also helped do wonders for my anxiety, which I previously treated with sertaline.
I'm not the hyperactive sort of individual who has ADHD so I didn't get diagnosed until late in life, around a year or so ago, I'm just the "Inattentive" type.
But finally I can take my meds, and do things that other people do without feeling like it's mental torture. And I can also remember to do important things, like my taxes, on time!
It's so weird comparing my days on it to off it, when I happen to run out. I start getting a backlog of little things that my brain decided it couldn't take one minute to knock out.
The author of this piece—which I am—is reporting on Huxley’s MIT talk. He predicted a drug that improves mental efficiency/focus. And the talk discusses alternative non-pharmacological approaches.
You are welcome to either actually read my piece or, better, listen to his talk. There is no judgment against the substance but a call for additional approaches to enhance a person.
It's long, but I listened to this podcast a while back with Peter Attia and Trenna Sutcliffe discussing Autism, ADHD, and Anxiety, and found that it really reduced the stigma I associated with medication for treatment of ADHD. In particular, understanding the risks of not effectively treating ADHD, in comparison with with the potential risks/benefits of the medication. That's not to say that we should only rely on medication - behavioral therapy (with parents involved too) should also play a part.
You could draw a parallel with GLP-1 agonists: people like to grandstand about how you shouldn't need it and how it's somehow cheating. As if it's not addressing a condition that people are suffering from right now, today.
The stigma also seems to accidentally admit that things like executive function and food noise aren't equally distributed, thus some people could benefit from intervention.
For example, if you've never been fat or you never binge eat or you've never procrastinated 15min of homework until 2am despite, then you're missing the irony when your solution for people who deal with these things is to try harder and to do things that you don't need to do.
Therapy, and most of all, understanding how our brains work make all the difference in the world.
It's like realizing that the reason you've been getting stuck in the mud is not that you're a bad driver.
It's just that people who don't are driving 4x4 trucks, and you've had a Nissan Z series sports car.
Turns out, farms and off-road are simply not the right environment for your vehicle, and when that environment has some accomodations, like the paved surface of a highway or a race track, you're literally running circles around people in the most common vehicles.
One profound effect of taking Adderall was feeling the clarity to understand that difference, and seeing the road instead of the endless mud fields in front of me.
It does help to get things done, but around 30% of ADHD'ers aren't responsive to it.
Understanding that you're getting stuck because your brain wasn't meant for that kind of driving, however, is universally useful.
That's why I made that ADHD wiki [1], and keep posting links to it.
It's an compilation of information that has helped me tremendously to understand the above; and I know this resource was helpful to others too in their journeys.
My perspective is that of a late-diagnosed adult who's been completely unaware of what ADHD is, and thought that they can't possibly have an attention deficit because to get anything done, they have to hyperfocus on it.
Again, learning that hyperfocus is a symptom of ADHD and understanding how it works)l had a profound impact. And medication helped with that too: it's easier to not get stuck hyperfocused on the wrong thing with Adderall.
Getting Adderall was like spraying WD-40 into rusty steering components. The immediate effect is that I can go where I want to go to, not the random direction my vehicle happens to face.
The long-term effect though was understanding what makes it difficult to steer, and how to maintain it better.
And even if I don't have power steering all the time like everyone else, I'm still better off with that experience.
My point here that it's never about medication VERSUS therapy and knowledge.
Medication is not an alternative, it's a BOOSTER.
When it works, it's just dropping the difficulty from Nightmare to Medium/Hard. It doesn't play the game for you.
The said, I'm very much happy the Nightmare mode days are behind me, and I'm very sad that the only reason I've been living my life that way is stigma and lack of information.
When I took Adderall, I unexpectedly had to grieve the future I'll never get to have after being held back by all the pain I've been needlessly subjected to over the preceding three decades.
That grief, too, is a common experience in ADHD late-diagnosed adults.
Thank you for sharing that link, and contributing to the discussion and awareness <3
Adderall has no positive relationship to my mental efficiency. It can in fact be a negative once your passed the 8 hour windows where its still in your system.
At the end of the day, it makes it easier to not bounce between different things. It doesn't help me be smarter. It helps me drive to work without needing to listen to music and be on my phone.
Here here. I also have ADHD though I couldn’t use stimulant medications due to bad reactions to it, but I’ve had success with non-stimulant medications (Straterra aka atomoxetine [1]).
A big thing I struggled with prior to medical treatment that I don’t often hear discussed about ADHd was rejection sensitivity.
For those unfamiliar: imagine a time someone said something that hurt your feelings or caused a strong emotional reaction.
Now imagine that as a routine emotional response to day to day interactions. Feeling intensely sad, irritated, insulted, etc. to extents completely o it of proportion to whatever was said or even implied.
It’s brutal. It contributes to a lot of depression and social anxiety for folks with ADHD. It doesn’t matter if you’re aware of the response being disproportionate—you get to go on that emotional roller coaster whenever somebody says they don’t care for your favorite food, accidentally cut you off in a conversation, or the day just turns out differently than you were expecting.
Medical treatment makes a huge difference—in my particular case the difference between feeling like I had the emotional regulation of a toddler and not needing to constantly question every emotion I felt prior to responding to things I was reacting to.
Stimulant medications didn’t work for me, but they do this for most people with ADHD (more effectively, too!) and like alterom it saddens me whenever FUD like this crops up.
I'd argue that it is nonsense to treat symptoms instead of the cause (of an issue) , but actually doing just that is quite intellectual when a bunch of money stands to be made
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