Palfrey's life

Thing I forgot to blog about last week, and just got reminded of: had a really weird experience with a sudden cloud of little sparkly things appearing in the air in the middle of my office. Things of note here: they persisted for ~20-30 seconds, officemate couldn't see them, they went blurry when removing glasses. Given the last item, it was probably an actual physical phenomena and I'm probably not just going nuts. Alternately, some unknown reason is causing phosphenes (maybe I need to tweak my screen settings somewhat) *or* I'm just high on my own neurotransmitters. As this was a one-off (well, I haven't seen things like it for a few years) I'm not worrying too much.....

I wouldn't quite describe myself as addicted to caffeine (as I can currently get up in the morning without immediately requiring a cup of coffee), but it's getting there. Therefore, I occasionally start to consider alternatives to my current regime of fucking around with my neurochemistry. Now, I made a decision fairly on in my life regarding not taking any the various illegal recreational drugs (ironically, I'm the only one in my group of friends from back then who didn't smoke cannabis *ever*, and yet I'm the one who moves to the Netherlands....), which was initially for various "moral" reasons, and after I later got over those, mainly because I'd said I wouldn't. I'm now noting that there's another factor in there - the legal drugs get tested better. Hell, caffeine or alcohol aren't good for me by any long shot, but they've at least been fairly extensively tested in various experimental situations (as well as a considerable block of ad-hoc testing outside the lab), and so the side effects are reasonably well documented, and if I don't abuse the damn things too much I know I'm only at what I would regard as a level of acceptable risk. Now, if you start wandering into the illegal drugs, then we've not only got a whole world of not nice people (which I've seen enough of to know I want to stay the hell away from) but we've also got a wide variation in the product, and that's a problem. My daily cups of coffee are *reliably* evil....

Salon today had an article called "Life: The disorder", talking about people taking drugs for ADD and other "quasi-societal conditions" (their words). Mostly importantly, it started asking the question - Is it time to retire our moralistic distinction between "recreational" and "medical" drugs? The major drug they were focusing on is Ritalin, which is used mostly to stop ADD/ADHD kids from bouncing off the walls and let them keep focus on things for a bit. However, some enterprising folk (university students, medical residents, that sort of thing) have noted that the drug also has some good effects on "normal" people - they can sit and do work for long periods with less mental wandering about. So here's something interesting - it's a drug with good effects, available commercially (prescription-only at the moment) in a stable product, and it's been medically tested and so therefore there's a reasonable body of data regarding probable side-effects and chances of it killing you the first time you take it. Suddenly, they have my attention. Here's a drug that in the event I managed to get hold of some (unlikely, given I'm not planning on searching for it actively), I might actually be interested in taking a low dose (heck I can find out data on that from the manufacturer's website probably...) and finding out what it does to me.

I'm still waiting for a drug advertising "increased neuronal density!", but we're getting there.