New Drugs Enhance Performance, Eliminate Need to Sleep

this stuff makes crank look like candy

Gizmag reports on the further evolution of no-sleep performance enhancing drugs.

The original version of these substances was the “time-shifting” drug, Modafinil that enables you to stay awake for 40+ hours with close to full mental capacity and with few side effects. (produced by Cephalon as PROVIGIL®, MODIODAL® in France and VIGIL® in Germany, for excessive sleepiness associated with narcolepsy and for “shift work sleep disorder” - hear that you medical interns?- web site advertises free 7 day trial supply).  

This is precisely the substance the the former chief medical director of the olympic committee spoke to me of.  He asked - once this stuff hits the street don’t you think a majority of college students would use it to perform better on exams?   The military sure thinks its a god idea for soldiers and pilots.  You can read my thoughts on how far people will go in the future to enhance their bodies here.  If you think plastic surgery is the rage of body enhancement - wait until we get performance enhancing bionics and cognitive enhancing drugs and implants!

The drug is a eugeroic and offers improved memory, mood enhancement, improved alertness and cognitive powers without any of the nasty side effects and mass murder of speed and crank.

What’s a Eugeroic you ask?  - Literally the term means “Good Arousal” .  They are a class of novel stimulants that produce long-lasting mental arousal. They are unique in producing hypervigilence and alertness without peripheral effects or addidition of usual stimulants.  Strangely, they have minimal effect on sleep structure, and do not cause rebound hypersomnolence (crashing).

You might also be interested in Ampakines are similar but also cause memory enhancement (just a bit of abuse potential there).  One of these - a drug code-named CX717 from Cortex - reportedly enabled sleep deprived rhesus monkeys to outperform rested normal monkeys on memory tasks. 

Under carefully controlled conditions and constant medical monitoring, the monkeys were individually sleep-deprived for 30-36 hours and re-tested at that time. When monkeys are sleep deprived their performance accuracy is reduced by 15-25%, and their reaction times slow by at least 50%. A dose of 0.8 mg/kg of CX717 completely reversed the performance deficits associated with sleep-deprivation. In addition, specific brain EEG changes that occur after sleep deprivation were returned to the non-sleep-deprived state in the CX717 group, but not in the control group. Thus, CX717 counteracted the effects of periods of prolonged sleep deprivation when given immediately before testing  

Not surprisingly, DARPA had a hand in these experiments.

Man, I remember as an intern a 43 hour shift I once did (Friday AM straight to Monday afternoon).  By Sunday I was practically hallucinating, everthing was in slow motion , and there was a constant sound of running water…  I predict these drugs have an abuse potential greater than any drug since alcohol.

I hear there is a new super eugeroic called armodafinil coming down the pike with even more potent effects.