"I was like a younger me after a very good night's sleep." I went from utter fatigue to feeling like me on my best day." Not to my psyche or personality, but it was dramatic. "So, did you feel any major difference, besides wakefulness?" "Only half a pill at first." He'd snapped a 200mg tablet in half, on the advice of the other writer. Maybe he sensed that I needed to know more. Maybe he sensed the importance of our chat. Most, except two drunk writers arguing about Iraq, had stopped talking, and that awful end-of-night mood seemed, as it so often does, to wreck all that had been good about the earlier laughter.īut Paul wasn't in a hurry to leave. The waiter had come to our table with the bill, and many of the guests were glum, counting out their notes and coins. "It was a long road trip and I was damned exhausted." But it's hard to explain." Paul smiled as though remembering something nice. "Did you feel euphoric?" I'd read that some users get a high from the drugs. "The effect was much more than purely physical." "Did they alter your mood," I asked, "or just pep you up? Like coffee or nicotine?" Although I knew that surgeons regularly use modafinil as a substitute for the ratty and short-lived perks of caffeine, and so, too, do hundreds of sleep-deprived domestic airline pilots, Ivy League students (both average and brilliant), many of the brightest minds in academe and hundreds of women and men in the US military, until that night, I'd never met anybody who'd used the drug – and I wanted to know as much as Paul was willing to tell me.Īs we drank our coffee, I asked if the drugs worked. Yet not a single GP, neurologist or nurse, and none of the MS websites, had mentioned the use of neuroenhancers for the treatment of neurological fatigue. These controversial drugs, strictly licensed for the treatment of narcolepsy, sleep apnoea and ADHD, have become immensely popular among users without prescription because they promote a keen sense of wakefulness and sharper cognitive focus.Īs is the case for many people with multiple sclerosis, the effects of weakened limbs, spasticity and fatigue had cut my working life in half. Talbot's article, like many published since the mid-1990s, turned, in part, on the fuzzy ethics of the use of neuroenhancers. That's when Paul told me he'd used the drug, and changed my life.
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