Modafinil and Startups

Modafinil on Silk Road is about twice the price of online pharmacies and most of the people selling it appear to be international.

that's how I justify my drug use, too

Interesting timing, just when I was about to swallow a 100mg pill of modalert to pull an all nighter and I find this on HN. I usually keep a few of them in drawers at home and work for one of those `rare occasions`. Tonight happens to be one of them.

It's worth noting that not everyone responds to modafinil. If you've had genetic sequencing done (I had mine done by 23andme), you can predict your response by checking your Rs4680 status. http://www.snpedia.com/index.php/Rs4680

  rs4680(G;G) carriers deprived of sleep respond quite well to 2x 100mg
  modafinil in terms of improved vigor and well-being, and maintained
  baseline performance with respect to executive functioning, whereas
  rs4680(A;A) individuals barely responded to the drug at all.

I'm A;A, and normally have almost no response to modafinil. I discovered, however, that I have significant modafinil response while on an MAOI (transdermal selegiline). I've stopped taking it recently, since I've finally tracked down the primary causes of my excessive sleepiness, (very deficient in vitamin D and cortisol). Modafinil has been a massive help both with fatigue and depression, and let me stay functional and productive through a difficult time in my life while I tracked down the actual problems.

Thank you for bringing up the Rat Park experiment.

The Rat Park experiment is often conveniently ignored because it essentially debunks a lot of common 'wisdom' regarding drugs. It's hard to villainize certain drugs as 'bad' and evil' while endorsing others in light of the Rat Park experiment, which shows that 'bad' drugs aren't chemically 'bad' - they're just taken in a 'bad' setting.

Fortunately, the theory is now becoming harder to ignore, because that's the basis of a lot of effective modern drug treatment, which tries to identify the underlying cause of drug addiction (the environmental/behavioral problems that cause an individual to abuse drugs), rather than focusing on the drug use itself. That's not saying that drugs don't have a physical impact - they do - but if drugs are being used as an outlet to compensate for environmental factors, then removing access to those substances will just cause the underying problems to manifest in other (potentially worse) ways.

It's the difference between treating the symptom of a disease and treating the disease itself. Yes, you might want to take cough medicine if you have lung cancer, since it'll help with your symptoms, but you'd be a fool to think that that's going to cure the tumor that causes you to cough.

This theory is very powerful, because it means that you can use the same techniques to treat drug addiction and other psychological ailments like PTSD, anorexia and self-mutilation, which are themselves often best thought of as psychophysiological responses to environmental factors.

Interestingly, if you really want to use physiological symptoms as the basis for determining whether a drug is addictive or not, then alcohol is probably the most addictive substance known to man. If you ever want to give yourself a scare, look up some of the symptoms of acute alcohol withdrawal (which can actually kill you, after a long and painful bout of delirium tremens and worse).

TL;DR: Addiction is best thought of as a mental response to environmental factors. So, in a sense, it really is 'all in the mind'. Or alternatively, not at all in the mind, and all in the environment. Whichever way you prefer to think of it.