This reminds of the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers strip where the government try to head off a recession by adding amphetamine to the water supply on the grounds that "Doctors use it to treat a depression, so why don't we"?

If I recall they end up sending everyone manic and have to add lithium to the water to try and cancel it out.

Good post - this is likely the case. Maybe the supply of uppers dried up along with all of the business and credit on Wall Street?

There is evidence to suggest that prolonged use of very strong stimulants leaves people increasingly unhinged and strongly impairs their overall judgment. Hence the current economic crisis and the inability of these financial types to deal with it because of their very fried/confused brains.

The idea that the Wall Street financial mavens are all speed freaks and have diminished judgment as a result is believable.

The Japanese are known to consume lots of speed. They even have a special law, called the Stimulant Control Law, that bans the non-medical use of speed.

Perhaps we should ask an expert like Robert Lindsay.

Huxley has surely arrived -- "Towards responsible use of cognitive-enhancing drugs by the healthy" - http://www.nature.com/nature/jou...ll/ 456702a.html

Every time I watch CNBC it's not difficult to tell that many of the news anchors on there are jacked up beyond belief on all kinds of uppers.

Now it seems college students, academics, writers, journalists, and others are getting in on the game, all of them hoping to be the verbally quickest, the wittiest, the most clever...all because of the desire to snatch a bigger piece of prey in The United Sharktanks of America.

Amphetamines, ritalin, provigil, etc. will need to be in the briefcases of all government leaders. We are entering a new age of national and international affairs.

Aren't there other mental performance-enhancing drugs around? It would be interesting to look at common failure modes for thinking under their influence, and then look for similar patterns in various academic fields.

I'm a moderately productive researcher in cryptography, but my only performance-enhancing drug is caffeine. (OTOH, I have a tendency to get up to elephant-killing doses of caffeine if I don't watch myself--I'm sure those doses aren't good for me.)

As an informal question, it's interesting to ask if you'd accept, say, a ten year cut in expected lifespan in order to move a sigma further to the right on the intelligence distribution. (I want to say no, but then, I'm probably accepting a cut of that size in my expected lifespan through my diet, and I'd sure as hell give up quarter pounders, or even meat, to move right that extra sigma!)

I have no problem with cognitive-enhancing compound in principle. I just don't think the existing compounds are safe for long-term use. I do believe that the social acceptance of such enhancement will accelerate the research into neurobiology and the development of safer, truly effective neuro-enhancement. Everyone should support this because neuro-degeneration is an ugly side-effect of the aging process and one would think that we all want to get free of this.

That's interesting, amphetamines don't seem to do much for me. Ritalin, and even caffeine, have a significantly greater mood and creativity enhancing effect. That may be a factor of the low number of trials (unlike caffeine, the other two are not continuously available), but I think there's something going on there.

I suspect differences in expression of the dopamine transporter are at least partially to blame here, as they seem to be in mice. AN interesting idea for a study, if it weren't for the general squeamishness of the political world to anything stimulant (except, ironically, when they are provided to school children whose brains are still developing, or to them in their younger days that they have now conveniently forgotten).