Users
by David Atkins
These people really shouldn’t get within a 100 foot pole of dictating society’s needs.
Modafinil, which is marketed as Provigil in the United States, was first approved by the FDA in 1998 for the treatment of narcolepsy, but since then it’s become better known as a nootropic, a “smart drug,” especially among entrepreneurs. More recently, it has attracted traders like Borden who don’t just need a pick-me-up to get through a deadline; they need to be on, without a break, for months, even years at a time.
And that’s modafinil’s reputation. It is rumored to be the model for the fictional pills in the movie Limitless that allowed Bradley Cooper’s character to use 100 percent of his brain. Timothy Ferriss, author of the best-selling The 4-Hour Work Week, recently dished about its effects with modafinil fan Joe Rogan, the former host of Fear Factor, on Rogan’s popular podcast. Probably its biggest booster is Dave Asprey, founder of the Bulletproof Executive web forum, where he blogged about the drug’s powers (headline: “Why You Are Suffering From a Modafinil Deficiency”). Last summer, ABC News did a segment on Asprey in which he compared taking it to the scene in The Wizard of Oz where everything blossoms from black-and-white to color.
Last month, modafinil’s penetration into the culture was confirmed by the American Medical Association’s journal Internal Medicine, which published a University of California, San Francisco, study reporting that U.S. prescriptions increased almost tenfold over the past decade. Far and away, most of those were for off-label use.
In New York, Borden is hearing more chatter about it among traders and hedge-funders, though they don’t tend to boast about it in the same way as the tech guys. “There’s something, I think, about guys who write code for a living that makes them very interested in hacking things—finding shortcuts, stuff like that,” he says. “Whereas with guys on Wall Street, it’s more testosterone-fueled; it’s more just power through it.” In a conversation on WallStreetOasis.com titled “Viagra for the Brain,” one commenter gushed, “This is not like caffeine or 5 Hour Energy. This is the big leagues.”
Modafinil is supposed to be used by those with narcolepsy, or pilots and astronauts with incredibly important jobs requiring little sleep. It’s also been studied as a potential drug to combat cocaine withdrawal.
Use of upper drugs, particularly cocaine, by the big Wall Street boys is nothing new. But there is something very, very wrong with people who use a drug like this every day for months on end for the sole purpose of working some job that creates no value, purely for their own self-enrichment. They aren’t doing anything positive for society: it’s all about ego and wealth accumulation. Whatever overweening, propellant greed is driving these people is a social disease deeply detrimental to the public at large.
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