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Comment by pitched | Hacker News Reader

The scariest (potential) downside to nootropics to me is an increased risk of cancer. Because if your normal cells are healthier, cancerous cells are also healthier. As a younger person, cancer is less of a risk so nootropics are less of a risk too.

So I was curious, with that in mind, where the free lunch drugs are? As in, which ones did you enjoy most and why stop taking them?

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In my opinion, a free lunch drug is something like lion's mane, a mushroom, which depending on the study we're looking at can induce neurogenesis, improve cognitive function and reduce anxiety. [1]

It's something I still take today.

I'm clinically prescribed modafinil for ADHD, which has immeasurably improved my life. I can guarantee I would not be employable as an SRE today without it. Low dose modafinil (50 mgs) is a free lunch for me and, if you believe the anecdotes, for tons of redditors out there. At the dose I recommend, it's all upside (I feel I must emphasize for me with a clinical diagnosis).

Those are the two I have extensive experience with that I see no downside to regular consumption of.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/MushroomSupplements/comments/h090ry...

Yes, that's a real risk. Check out this thread, which /r/Nootropics has wisely kept stickied for a while: https://www.reddit.com/r/Nootropics/comments/pbz9mx/warnings.... It's an anecdotal report of nootropic use not necessarily inducing cancer but potentially making cancer spread much more aggressively.

One definitely shouldn't try nootropics without very thoroughly studying the risks. I sometimes take certain (seemingly) low-risk ones, like racetams combined with choline supplements. (For example, oxiracetam + alpha-GPC.)

> So I was curious, with that in mind, where the free lunch drugs are?

Nothing in life is "free lunch", not even free lunch. At the very least you have to expand time to fetch it, eat it and deal with a slightly increased risk of food poisoning afterwards.

But that is often times a very fitting metaphor when comparing the upside of a lot of drugs to their downside: It does not have to be free, to be free. If you have an infection that would otherwise kill you, an effective antibiotic is close enough to free to be a no-brainer.

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