Ask HN: How true is it that most founders are taking drugs like Modafanil?

This is the key, I think. If you're not close enough with your co-workers that they'd offer you weed after the office Christmas party/do lines off the table in front of you/tell you about the time they bought ketamine in Slovenia[0], why would you know about their non-recreational drug use?

[0] hypothetical examples - all my office Christmas parties have been staid and family-friendly - but examples based to some degree on reality

I was on Adderall for mild ADHD for 10 months in 2016. Software Engineers in my late 20s. I found that I was not finishing any of my side projects. Was working (and still do) for a FAANG. Consulted a real doc i.e Psychiatrist in San Francisco and he diagnosed me with very mild ADHD Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder)

Apparently this is quite common in adults these days, esp. in high intensity brain-work related professions like Software Engineering, Finance / Wall Street and such.

My prescribed dosage was 5 mg / day of Adderall, the lowest possible dose. I was very concerned about long term side-effects and the doc assured me that it was perefectly safe. He said that it's not the same as crystal meth like the media would have you believe. In my last outing , I mentioned the "Take my Pills" netflix documentary and his take was that the documentary featured extremes cases of very high dosages (the 3 people featuered were on atleast 50 mg / day, = 10x my dosage) and also that 2 of the 3 didn't have any ADHD or ADD symtoms - the football player and the girls in school.

Now for the effects, I can say it's incredible. The first day I felt lazor like focus. I walked into work, and finished a javascript library that I'd been stuck on for days, in like 4 hours. I even helped a super-star Russian coder fix a nagging complex multi-threaded bug. I didn't (and still don't feel) "high" from it. What I feel is extremely sharp focus, like I notice very small things out of order and correct them, in codebase and outside in my daily life. In the first month or so, I also got lot of "life-things" that I'd be procrastinating on done, like I did my TRUST, Living Will etc.

> is this actually common?

My experience has been that it's trivial to get a prescription of adderall in America. Doctors have tried to give it to me even when I've said that I don't want it. So (I assume) anyone with health insurance that wants it can get it.

> do you need them to survive?

Yes and no. If I were to immediately stop, I think it would take me 6 months to 4 years to redevelop coping strategies to manage work and my own life properly. I grew up taking it, thus it's my primary coping mechanism. Certainly possible, but certainly unpleasant.

I think it's probably the safest investment I can make. The cost of going to doctors and filling prescriptions is mostly in time, but the payback is huge. I think my life would have taken a very different path without adderall.

To clarify, when I say adderall I mean Adderall XR. My experience with other, similar drugs has been much worse.

Here's how various similar drugs affected me:

- Adderall instant release reliably caused psychosis for me (paranoia and hallucination primarily) and the come up and come down were too sharp. It worked, but benefits - Ritalin works for me, but it's closer to being unmedicated than it is to being medicated.

- Dexadrin works the best but is both easy and tempting to abuse. I think the benefits - Vyvanse feels much "dirtier" for lack of a better word. It causes too much PNS stimulation. At lower doses, it's a bit less effective than adderall, at higher doses it just makes me feel bad.

- Modafinil is very different from any of the above. It does what it says it will, but cheating sleep is a losing game (and that's all that it's really good for), with or without drugs. Thus, benefits - Caffeine doesn't help with focus much and has a lot of nasty effects.

For various personal reasons (the stigma and laws of foreign countries), I do want to taper off/stop, but it's been extremely difficult. Even with adderall, the modern world is just so crushingly attention-grabbing that I find it hard not to feel mentally exhausted and overwhelmed constantly. Honestly, I think getting rid of my smart phone and not keeping my computer connected to the Internet all day would be better for my health than stopping adderall.

I don't, though I've known people who do (not in SV, FWIW); mostly those are taken for quality of life reasons, not immediate survival needs (though obviously quality of life does have potential survival impacts.)