I’m skeptical of all this, since it seems like a way to make it easy for lazy people to be lazier 99% of the time, take these pills 1% of the time to help them get completely stressed and do okay and make it seem like a healthy way to live. But I’d like to see what you all think of it.
Edit: In other news, scientists also encourage the continued posting on excellent forums such as rpgclassics and preventing the banning of the poster of this thread. They say 10,000 threads just shows how great this place is. Very.
This is just asking for mass addiction cases and withdrawal syndromes, the latter being either because of real chemical reasons, or just people having trouble accepting their brains simply do not function like that when off the pills.
Maybe they haven’t seen what people addicted to amphetamines (like Adderall) look like one year later. http://www.methmadness.com/addictfacesofmethL.jpg. I’ll stick to an occasional Coke, thank you.
Nitpicking, aren’t we? The point is, what were they thinking?! Don’t they know the countless troubles that can arise from tampering with the body’s biochemical workings? The side effects from performance enhancers? If people are stupid enough to keep taking steroids and the like, then it’s their problem… but advocating that performance enhancing drugs become mainstream? People are already fucked up in the head. They don’t need to pump themselves full of Ritalin and the like to make it worse. Just because the drugs they’re advocating aren’t, say, used in sports competitions, the concept is still messed up.
P.S.: Could this be a percursor to Mentats? Time will tell…
So is this really necessary? I’ll agree with the fact that people are pretty fucked up as it is. And while some pills may help, most of them people really shouldn’t be taking. Now I’ve never had any of these pills or their ilk, but I know people can get addicted to that shit. And from those pictures I saw, it really doesn’t improve their looks…(what’s with the sores on their faces?)
Now for the Placebo effect, you’d be surprised of what it’s capable of. Though that just makes me wonder if it’s all in your head (no real problem, perhaps?).
I dunno about this. Barring the whole does this actually work thing for now, there’s an argument to be had for having the guy curing cancer tripping while doing so. If it genuinely affects performance, wouldn’t you want the doctor removing your tumor performing at his peak ability?
This isn’t like performance enhancing drugs in sports, nobody gives a shit if generic jackass 1 wins because of drugs or not, but when popping a pill can be the deciding factor in doing awesome research or not, there could be a lot of pressure on scientists to take their mentats, both from the public as peer pressure. I’m just as good as mad scientist guy B, but guy B is all addicted on shitty drugs and gets all the research grants and fine women because of it, maybe drugs need to become part of my breakfast.
Personally I’m fine with installing a hypothetical brain enhancer in my… brain, but I feel icky about taking drugs to achieve the same effect, and I can’t really find a difference in these methods to warrant said ickyness. It’s troubling.
Actually, performance enhancing drugs are a huge deal in sports, particularly American and Olympics. They’re seen as a bad thing because the people aren’t competing at the peak of human ability. Athletics, they would argue, is about seeing competition in its purest form, pitting people against each other in physical match ups to test who is the best physically. Performance enhancers detract from that because it is no longer being seen as these people being human and representations of peak human ability but rather drugged up monkeys, the result of scientific tinkering.
While I can understand the need to adjust your mind to a certain degree I still think that altering the way you think is like altering your very being. I quit antidepressants because I didn’t like the way that it was messing with my head (also made me really prone to violently suicidal outbursts, more so than without).
Its ridiculously dangerous for society, since if people become dependent on pills, the people who make and distribute the pills control everything. Plus, who says these pills don’t have side effects we don’t know about?
But I’d like to see what you all think of it.
