It took Peter Borden a while to come around to modafinil. He never takes prescription drugs. He doesn’t drink to excess. He’s into acupuncture and alternative medicine. But he was working two jobs—by day, he does quantitative analysis and project management for a venture-capital-backed B2B start-up; by night, he’s developing a proprietary high-­frequency trading system for a Wall Street start-up of his own—and what he needed was more time to work. 
 
 So a few months ago, Borden ordered a three-week supply by mail. (“It was a piece of cake,” he says.) He popped his first pill—“the maximum suggested dose”—as soon as the package arrived, and within a few hours he started feeling a pleasant fuzziness. “Not fuzzy-headed,” he says, “but crisp. A crisp softness to it.” Soon he was experiencing a level of concentration he’d never imagined. “My senses sort of shifted to the visual, and my auditory sense went down. Sounds didn’t even register. It was like walking around on a winter day when it just snowed. It was very easy to stay visually focused.” 
 
 Next came a head rush. “I sensed it was blood actually moving to the optic nerve. Your eyes start to feel very sort of engorged, and your awareness comes to the front of your face, which is kind of a freaky sensation. I would describe it as being very much like Adderall, but without the speediness.” 
 
 Tasks that were usually soul-crushing now had his undivided attention. He spent hours fine-tuning ad campaigns for his new business, and his output wasn’t just faster and longer—it was better. “I didn’t take as many breaks; I didn’t get as frustrated; the stuff came out with fewer errors,” he says. “I never felt, Oh, let’s just get it done. I polished things.” As long as he kept taking the pill, his focus never wavered. “Time took on an entirely different sort of quality.” He was even happier. “There were some very potent anti-anxiety effects. Which was strange. I didn’t think I was an anxious person, but I guess I was.” 
 
 Modafinil, which is marketed as Provigil in the United States, was first approved by the FDA in 1998 for the treatment of narcolepsy, but since then it’s become better known as a nootropic, a “smart drug,” especially among entrepreneurs. More recently, it has attracted traders like Borden who don’t just need a pick-me-up to get through a deadline; they need to be on, without a break, for months, even years at a time. 
 
 Modafinil Is Like… 
 
 Reviews From Online Commenters 
 
 
 
 “A Prius compared to a Ferrari … profound yet at the same time subtle and not overwhelming.” 
 
 
 
 “A digital camera that took perfectly recognizable pictures, but now had a few more megapixels.” 
 
 
 
 “A borderline anxiety attack.” 
 
 And that’s modafinil’s reputation. It is rumored to be the model for the fictional pills in the movie Limitless that allowed Bradley Cooper’s character to use 100 percent of his brain. Timothy Ferriss, author of the best-selling The 4-Hour Work Week, recently dished about its effects with modafinil fan Joe Rogan, the former host of Fear Factor, on Rogan’s popular podcast. Probably its biggest booster is Dave Asprey, founder of the Bulletproof Executive web forum, where he blogged about the drug’s powers (headline: “Why You Are Suffering From a Modafinil Deficiency”). Last summer, ABC News did a segment on Asprey in which he compared taking it to the scene in The Wizard of Oz where everything blossoms from black-and-white to color. 
 
 Last month, modafinil’s penetration into the culture was confirmed by the American Medical Association’s journal Internal Medicine, which published a University of California, San Francisco, study reporting that U.S. prescriptions increased almost tenfold over the past decade. Far and away, most of those were for off-label use. 
 
 In New York, Borden is hearing more chatter about it among traders and hedge-funders, though they don’t tend to boast about it in the same way as the tech guys. “There’s something, I think, about guys who write code for a living that makes them very interested in hacking things—finding shortcuts, stuff like that,” he says. “Whereas with guys on Wall Street, it’s more testosterone-fueled; it’s more just power through it.” In a conversation on WallStreet­Oasis.com titled “Viagra for the Brain,” one commenter gushed, “This is not like ­caffeine or 5 Hour Energy. This is the big leagues.” 
 
 Unlike Ritalin or Adderall, modafinil isn’t an amphetamine and doesn’t flood the body with dopamine in the same way. For this reason, scientists originally believed it to be non-habit-forming, though some are beginning to doubt this claim. Users on message boards talk about how modafinil doesn’t so much speed them up as clear their minds. “Most of the drugs that people do in our society are things like alcohol that make you stupider instead of smarter,” mobile-software entrepreneur Jesse Law­ler said in a recent podcast about modafinil for his website SmartDrugSmarts.com. 
 
 The entrepreneur Daniel Tenner used modafinil to launch his first company while still working for the consulting firm Accenture. “Every day,” he wrote on swombat.com, a site for entrepreneurs, “I would sleep at 11 p.m. sharp. I would then wake up at 4 a.m., work until 7 a.m., then nap for an hour before going to work at my day job. I then also worked weekends.” 
 
 Of course, its ascendancy is also cause for some alarm. No scientist has conducted a study of its long-term effects on healthy brains yet. At the very least, doctors have warned that modafinil can bring about sleep deprivation (or, in the words of the Internal Medicine paper, “hypersensitivity reactions and neuropsychiatric adverse effects”). The modafinil moment has even prompted a secondary conversation among sociologists and economists about the anxiety of staying ahead in today’s competitive economy, and microeconomic predictions about a future in which everyone sleeps less: fewer mattress sales, more dollars spent at bars and nightclubs, more sex, and more children. 
 
 For Borden, life on modafinil really did feel like a real-life (if somewhat toned-down) Limitless. Things get hairy for the character in the movie—there’s addiction and withdrawal and tragedy before the tidy Hollywood ending. The first downside Borden noticed was in line with the film: He couldn’t drink. “I went out for a drink, and then I had another drink. And because I was so energized and focused, I got drunk faster. It kind of freaked me out, because time would sort of fly by. I’d be here, and then I’d be here. Almost like mini-­blackouts. I very quickly cut out alcohol.” 
 
 Then he ran into an even bigger problem: Skip a dose, and there would be hell to pay. “I really would feel it. It was sort of like being thrust into dirty, messy reality, as opposed to a clean, neatly organized place. It was like crashing, and I actually found what would happen is the anxiety that got dialed down on the way in, when you were coming off it, all of a sudden you went through the reverse. So I got incredibly anxious. Eventually that concerned me.” He stopped after three weeks. He says he’s more comfortable trying to get the same effect through meditation and, of all things, getting a good night’s sleep. He remains a little in awe of the pill, though. “It’s a great hack.” ||||| BERKELEY  
 
 Cocaine can speedily rewire high-level brain circuits that support learning, memory and decision-making, according to new research from UC Berkeley and UCSF. The findings shed new light on the frontal brain’s role in drug-seeking behavior and may be key to tackling addiction. 
 
 Looking into the frontal lobes of live mice at a cellular level, researchers found that, after just one dose of cocaine, the rodents showed fast and robust growth of dendritic spines, which are tiny, twig-like structures that connect neurons and form the nodes of the brain’s circuit wiring. 
 
 “Our images provide clear evidence that cocaine induces rapid gains in new spines, and the more spines the mice gain, the more they show they learned about the drug,” said Linda Wilbrecht, assistant professor of psychology and neuroscience at UC Berkeley and lead author of the paper published today (August 25) in the journal Nature Neuroscience. 
 
 For mice, “learning about the drug” can mean seeking it out to the exclusion of meeting other needs, which may explain how addiction in humans can override other considerations that are necessary for a balanced life: “The downside is, you might be learning too well about drugs at the expense of other things,” Wilbrecht said. 
 
 Using a technology known as 2-photon laser scanning microscopy, researchers made images of nerve cell connections in the frontal cortices of live mice before and after the mice received their first dose of cocaine and, within just two hours, observed the formation of new dendritic spines. 
 
 “The number of new, robust spines gained correlated with how much the individual mice learned to prefer the context in which they received the drug,” Wilbrecht said. The findings provide clues to behavioral and environmental factors in drug addiction. 
 
 Previous analyses of postmortem mouse brains have shown that repeated cocaine use and withdrawal changes dendritic spine density after weeks of exposure. But this is the first time that 2-photon laser scanning microscopy has been used to make images of spines in the frontal cortex before and after the first cocaine exposure in living mice, Wilbrecht said. 
 
 Over the course of a few days, male mice were moved from their cages to a “conditioning box” comprised of two adjoining compartments. Each chamber – one smelled of cinnamon and the other of vanilla – was decorated with different patterns and textures so the mice could differentiate between the two. 
 
 Initially, the mice were free to explore both chambers, which were connected by a small doorway. Researchers recorded which side each mouse preferred. The next day, the mice were injected with saline, which has no stimulant effect on mice, and were placed for 15 minutes in the compartment for which they had shown a preference. The door between the two chambers was shut. 
 
 The following day, they were injected with cocaine and placed in the chamber that was not their preferred side. Again, the door between the two chambers was shut and they were inside for 15 minutes. On the fourth day, the door between the two chambers was open, yet the mice overwhelmingly picked the chamber where they had received and presumably enjoyed the cocaine. 
 
 “When given a choice, most of the mice preferred to explore the side where they had the cocaine, which indicated that they were looking for more cocaine,” Wilbrecht said. “Their change in preference for the cocaine side correlated with gains in new persistent spines that appeared on the day they experienced cocaine.” 
 
 According to Wilbrecht, “These drug-induced changes in the brain may explain how drug related cues come to dominate decision-making in a human drug user, leaving more mundane tasks and cues with relatively less power to activate the brain’s decision-making centers.” 
 
 Much of the research was conducted at the Ernest Gallo Clinic and Research Center at UCSF. Other co-authors of the study are Francisco Javier Munoz-Cuevas and Jegath Athilingam from the Ernest Gallo Clinic and Research Center and Denise Piscopo of the University of Oregon. ||||| A drug that put nine young backpackers in hospital — including three who remained in intensive care last night—has been identified as a common prescription medication that is also known to be used illegally as a date rape drug. 
 
 The West Australian understands authorities were surprised by the test results which identified the drug as hyoscine, commonly used to treat motion sickness. 
 
 But the drug is also popular with criminals in countries such as Colombia because of its ability to put overdose victims into a “zombie”-like state, making them easier to rob or sexually abuse. 
 
 The seven men and two women who overdosed on Tuesday night were all aged between 21 and 25 and included five French nationals, two Germans, one Italian and a Moroccan. 
 
 There are fears more could be at risk as police try to work out what the drug was. The West Australian Play Video Video There are fears more could be at risk as police try to work out what the drug was. 
 
 The group became violently ill about 9pm after taking the drug together at the home they shared on Colombo Street, Victoria Park. 
 
 Within minutes they suffered extreme symptoms, including seizures, paralysis, overheating and hallucinations. 
 
 Doctors say it was lucky no one died as a result of the overdose. 
 
 The Italian victim, who only wanted to be known by his first name, Simone, said the drug had arrived at their house through the mail in a package addressed to someone who did not live at the property. 
 
 Camera Icon The Victoria Park home where numerous people were found in an unconscious or semi-conscious state. Picture: Mogens Johansen/The West Australian 
 
 Despite not being the intended recipients, the man said they decided to open it anyway and found a white powder that was wrapped in a piece of paper with the word “scoop” written on the outside. 
 
 Another name for hyoscine is scopolamine, possibly explaining the presence of the word “scoop”. Believing the powder was cocaine, the group divided it into nine equal portions before snorting it up their noses. 
 
 Simone said he became paralysed and was unable to scream for help. 
 
 “We were powerless, we couldn’t do anything,” he said. 
 
 The alarm was eventually raised by another housemate who had been out for the evening and came home to find her friends in urgent need of medical care. 
 
 Camera Icon Backpackers arrive at the Victoria Park property after spending the night in hospital. Picture: Mogens Johansen/The West Australian 
 
 Neighbour Mark Evans described confronting scenes as a string of ambulances arrived at the property and began ferrying the backpackers to hospital. 
 
 “It was carnage ... some of them were strapped to the stretchers and were totally unconscious. Two other guys were fitting and flailing around with their arms and legs and pulling strange faces.” 
 
 RPH emergency physician David McCutcheon said it was not yet known whether any of the patients would suffer lasting injuries, such as damage to their internal organs. 
 
 “They were brought to us in a state of agitated delirium,” Dr McCutcheon said. “They were hallucinating, their hearts were racing, several of them had to be put in a medically induced coma for their own protection and I really need to emphasise how seriously unwell they were. 
 
 Camera Icon A backpacker pays the taxi after returning from a night in hospital. Picture: Mogens Johansen/The West Australian 
 
 “Several of these people would have died I’m pretty sure without medical intervention and three of them are still in a critical condition. 
 
 “They are still requiring full life support in ICU.” 
 
 Acting Deputy Police Commissioner Gary Budge said the incident served as a timely warning to all drug users about the dangers of taking any illicit drug 
 
 “The message to anyone who is taking illicit drugs is that you could be the next one if you continue to take illicit drugs,” he said.
– Cocaine may no longer be the drug that fuels Wall Street. Instead, traders and start-up entrepreneurs looking to work hard rather than party hard are increasingly turning to a Modafinil—a "smart drug" said to have inspired the film Limitless, in which a writer pops a pill that allows him to tap into 100% of his brain capacity. The drug is intended to treat narcolepsy, but time-poor traders use it to stay awake and hyper-alert for long periods of work, reports New York. "I would describe it as being very much like Adderall, but without the speediness,” says Peter Borden, a former user. Prescriptions for Modafinil in the US have increased almost tenfold over the past decade, mostly for off-label use, according to a study published in Internal Medicine. It was originally believed to be non-addictive, but a 2009 study found that may not be the case. Borden says that for him, withdrawals were so bad he had to quit the drug: "It was sort of like being thrust into dirty, messy reality, as opposed to a clean, neatly organized place. It was like crashing."