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Comment by fmora | Hacker News Reader

I cannot believe that anybody would recommend a drug to be able to stay awake longer or work longer (with the exception of coffee). Any drug that is able to do this to your body will probably decrease your health drastically. If you really do have to work a lot the best way that I have found is to sleep 8 hours and work 16 hours. Unfortunately shower time will probably suffer so use plenty of deodorant. You will also be eating junk food for a couple of weeks but believe me, it is a much better alternative than using drugs. A cup of coffee would be the strongest drug I would use but that is it. Taking drugs like the ones mentioned is an extremely bad idea. You can end up being addicted to them.

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>Any drug that is able to do this to your body will probably decrease your health drastically. ... Taking drugs like the ones mentioned is an extremely bad idea. You can end up being addicted to them.

Modafinil has been in use for something like 30 years now, and has been taken on and off prescription by millions. Thus far, there are no reports of addiction, and just the usual rare nasty side-effects (which seems to be true of pretty much every drug in existence, and modafinil is better than most in having a really huge LD-50).

If you are going to scaremonger, then provide some studies.

Is common sense that if you drive a machine harder than its specifications then it will break a lot sooner. Why don't you drive your car at its maximum revolutions per second often enough and notice how fast it breaks down. Even too much caffeine is bad for you. Although comparatively speaking is a much reduced risk. Also, many of these drugs take years for the effects to show up. Just because you are able to use it for months or years does not mean that it is not damaging to you.

> Is common sense that if you drive a machine harder than its specifications then it will break a lot sooner.

It is also common sense that if you do something, and you do it a lot over a long time with a lot of people, and you don't see anything bad happening, nothing bad is probably going to happen!

Which is better, a universal weak probabilistic statement made in ignorance of specifics, or a narrow statement about one thing based on specific evidence?

> Also, many of these drugs take years for the effects to show up.

Again, provide numbers. I will grant that 'some' - as in, a non-zero number - drugs have long-term side-effects. However, I dispute 'many', or 'most'. There are many thousands of drugs which the FDA has approved, most of which do not turn up with horrible thalidomide-like long-term side-effects.

The same way that a lot of people used to swear that there was nothing bad happening to long term smokers?

Why do you think modafinil is equivalent to tobacco?

Why give caffeine special status over other drugs? Surely, you don't accept everything that society tells you?

Caffeine is addictive and has strong withdrawal symptoms, unlike many nootropics

I agree with you. But if you really want to take some drug to get your high (as many people will do regardless of their circumstances), you might as well use something relatively safer.

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