If this all goes wrong and I die, don’t blame Johann Hari. Sure, it was after reading Johann Hari’s article on Provigil that I decided to do my own experiment with attention increasing drugs, but I want you to know that I am fully responsible. Don’t blame the person who told me about Olmifon (Adrafinil), the cheaper alternative to Provigil, and where to get it. Information is innocent, it’s only your decisions that are good or bad.
It’s not as if I didn’t have numerous occasions to change my mind. The process of getting my hands on Olmifon was extremely laborious, despite the fact that they are available over the counter in France. I could have given up at any point; although, of course, you could argue that the challenge and cost do act as an extra incentive to consummate the process. But after such a rigmarole I almost forget why I wanted the drugs in the first place. Why did I want them again?
Hmmm. I believe I was going through a period of extreme sluggishness, my brain was clouded — it was a dark winter this year. Now I am overflowing with energy and am sharp as a tack, except in the evenings, which are frequently squandered in procrastination. And it was on such an evening that I plucked up the courage to pop the pill.
I am incredibly bad at taking drugs. There was a brief period, between the ages of 14 and 15 when I was blissfully happy and relaxed smoking dope. Those days of innocence soon soured. Something changed when I became self-conscious.
When I went to university I gravitated towards the dopesmokers, hoping to rekindle that lost innocence. Instead, I found myself gripped by body-consciousness and paranoia. I could feel every hair on my body individually, every corpuscle throbbed; any change — and change is constant in a homeostatic entity — was attributable to the drug. The mind magnified it until it became an all-consuming obsession. It wasn’t much fun.
This time round I told myself not to worry. Nothing much could go wrong. It had been used for years without many ill-effects. It wasn’t like ecstasy, where the scare stories would fill me with anxiety. It was simply a drug that disinhibted the chemicals in the brain that make you feel tired. The chance of me becoming like Charley in Flowers for Algernon were neglible.
Apparently it take 45 minutes for the drug to be processed, so I decided to watch an episode of Survivors to take my mind off my mind. When that had finished I went around the house tidying up, then did a few minutes learning Spanish with Michel Thomas. By this stage I was starting to forget I had taken it at all. My right toes were slightly numb, but that was the only slight worry.
I discovered that the effect of Olmifon is remarkable for its absence. There is a complete lack of tiredness, no yawns, no hazy sense of what to do. It didn’t make me more intelligent, but it did seem to make me more willing to do things that I had been putting off, like forms and administration.
Now, I am a firm believer that perception is reality and that, if you can change your perceptions then you can change your reality. The bad thing about this is that it puts extra pressure on you because you know that everything bad that happens to you is effectively your fault. If you feel bad it is because you are interpreting the world incorrectly. What Olimfon shows is that consciousness is a production of your synapses and neurons. Indeed, when John Moore stopped taking anti-depressants he started feeling electrical crackles in his brain, as though his formerly redundant glands were coming to life again.
It’s easy to imagine something similar happening on Olmifon, which is why I am reluctant to try it again. But here’s the thing, you have to take the risk occasionally, if only because it makes you understand the body — that is yourself — a lot better.
If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
Leave a Reply