Modafinil and speed

From Free Talk Live

Hey Ian,

I'm afraid I suffered from a slight bit of exaggeration on last nights show. I thought I would combine a small rebuttal to the modafinil email and my correction at the same time because they both address the same issue.

The military's study found that they could keep pilots going for about 3 days and keep them alert to with in 60% of reaction time (or something close to that). Not bad, but I bet that after 3 days that the pilot's performance degrades rapidly. This is also the same as speed. When I said "stay away as long as you want" what I really meant was "I never wanted to stay awake more than 3 days."

By the third day one would have to ingest a massive quantity of speed to stay awake, enough to impair function - the party as I referred to it last night. I bet the same happens with modafinil: one has to ingest a quantity that is very high. Even with these high quantities you can't beat nature forever and symptoms like psychosis can set it. I would not be surprised if the exact same thing happens on modafinil.

This leaves me thinking about the same tactic for using speed and modafinil: run in about 3 day spurts with some very short naps in between; then you crash out for a while and are drained the next day.

There is a reason I gave up doing speed and for those exact same reasons I wouldn't do modafinil. I hope my call into the show was not construed as encouragement to do speed; I was just trying to inform.

Triddle from Washington