7 ms·
Aldous Huxley predicts Adderall and champions alternative therapies
Audio: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ld2E9LWIYJk&list=PLhQ_EZYXXSe8Ymj_JlriRG3Bk4SM5cuEc&index=9 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ld2E9LWIYJk&list=PLhQ_EZYXXS...
Transcript: https://www.organism.earth/library/document/realizing-human-potential https://www.organism.earth/library/document/realizing-human-...
- gnatman 1y agoSubstituted amphetamines were already very popular in the 1950s.
- cassepipe 1y ago... and I didn't know about them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substituted_amphetamine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substituted_amphetamine The most famous in that family seems to be meth(amphetamine)
- Nursie 1y agoYou've probably also heard of 3,4-Methylenedioxy-N-methylamphetamine, though its abbreviated name (MDMA) is likely more familiar. It's a huuuuuge family of substances though, particularly if you go one step more generic and start with Phenylethylamine as the backbone (amphetamine is a shortening of alpha-methyl-phenethylamine), the family includes hallucinogens like mescaline, empathogens like MDMA and its close cousins, the whole 2C family, the cathinones and their derivatives ('mephedrone' had a cultural moment 10-15 years back). And some real nasties like PMA, PMMA and bromo-Dragonfly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substituted_phenethylamine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substituted_phenethylamine
- cassepipe 1y agoInteresting, I didn't know they were cousins !
- mhurron 1y agoAnd had been researched treat symptoms of depression and what would eventually be called ADHD in the 1930's.
- RobotToaster 1y agoBenzedrine (an amphetamine inhaler) was the first antidepressant marketed (although at the time I believe they used the term "psychic energizer" for antidepressants)
- thatoneguy 1y agoMethamphetamine was invented in Germany in 1937 and the German military at the time was very quick to adopt its use.
- consumer451 1y agoAn army of tweakers. I don't think that this aspect of the War and the Holocaust are discussed enough. Certainly no excuse, but it is very interesting. > Chronic Meth users have deficits in memory and executive functioning as well as higher rates of anxiety, depression, and most notably psychosis. [0] In more recent times of horror: > After the fall of the al-Assad regime in Syria, large stockpiles of the illicit drug captagon have reportedly been uncovered. > The stockpiles, found by Syrian rebels, are believed to be linked to al-Assad military headquarters, implicating the fallen regime in the drug’s manufacture and distribution. [1] [0] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3764482/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3764482/ [1] https://theconversation.com/what-is-the-drug-captagon-and-how-is-it-linked-to-syrias-fallen-assad-regime-245935 https://theconversation.com/what-is-the-drug-captagon-and-ho...
- Melatonic 1y agoIm sure eventually whatever pills the Germans were taking back then were bad for you but I would imagine smoking huge doses of not so pure street meth is quite a bit different than something created in a lab. That being said if anyone uses drugs to avoid sleeping for many days straight I would imagine it's quite horrible for your mental health
- DANmode 1y agoSo…not that different.
- 3eb7988a1663 1y agoConsidering the soldiers were already extremely high risk for lead poisoning, might have been low on the list of concerns.
- 1y ago
- kragen 1y agoAdderall is just regular amphetamine, not even a substituted amphetamine.
- temp0826 1y agoIt's a mix of 4 different amphetamines
- kragen 1y agoTwo, but those are just the enantiomers dextroamphetamine and levoamphetamine. Neither has any atoms extra or missing. It looks like four amphetamines because those two cationic isomers are in salts with two different anions.
- temp0826 1y agoEach enantiomer exhibits different effects so I don't know if that is relevant. (Even if you count dextroamphetamine sulfate and amphetamine sulfate as one, I'd still probably call it 3 because dextroamphetamine saccharate and amphetamine asparate monohydrate (the other two parts of adderall) do indeed have different forumlas).
- kragen 1y agoIf you synthesize amphetamine through the usual pathways, as I understand it, you get a racemic mixture, which is what is normally meant by unqualified "amphetamine", and is very close to Adderall. It's true that levoamphetamine is not really active at all in this context. As I understand it, the aspartate and saccharate still dissociate in solution. If so, there isn't much of a plausible reason to consider them different drugs. If not, they might act more slowly or not at all. None of this puts Adderall in the class of substituted amphetamines like MDMA or Desoxyn or exotics like ALEPH: https://www.erowid.org/library/books_online/pihkal/pihkal003.shtml https://www.erowid.org/library/books_online/pihkal/pihkal003...
- earlyriser 1y agoI read champignons and it kind of fit even better. Adderall (Brave New World) and mushrooms (Island).
- brandall10 1y agoSoma in BNW is more analogous to MDMA as it's about sedated pleasure, not mental clarity/performance.
- gwbas1c 1y agoI seem to think marijuana is more about sedated pleasure than MDMA. Granted, it's been about 30 years since I read Brave New World.
- mfro 1y agoI agree, soma definitely parallels weed much more closely, but I don't think it's a perfect match. Huxley imagines a drug a bit more insidious, without obviously negative side effects, and with somewhat unrealistic(imo) intended effects.
- lukan 1y agoDisagree. Weed is somewhat psychadelic ... and makes people enjoy the colors and not work so much. Soma made people numbless working with a feeling of glow. So I always understood it as antidepressant and moodlifter with some amphetamine compoments.
- ProllyInfamous 1y agoWeed isn't really psychedelic (it can be profound, and sometimes you'll get extra giggly...) but really it's more about being okay with the numbness. It's also not really an antidepressant any more than it is an amphetamine (it's neither). Attempting to self-medicate in either direction is not beneficial, longer term. If your marijuana usage carries you through such wide-ranging symptomology, that's on you homey [holds-back next pass to you]. It's okay to ask for help.
- alterom 1y agoThis article (and the title alone) is harmful. Adderall is not about increasing mental efficiency. What Adderall is about is: - helping with executive dysfunction for people who suffer from it. - allowing people with ADHD like me to function. To do the things that everyone else does, things that we want to do and need to do, but can't do because of the way our brains are wired. - increasing the lifespan of ADHD people who don't get help. Women with ADHD die about 9 years younger than those without ADHD [1]. - making our lives less painful, since every small task incurs pain, resulting in 3x depression rates [2] and alarmingly high suicidal ideation rates (50% of ADHD adults [3]). Please, please, educate yourself about ADHD and medication for it before writing something like this title. No, Aldous Huxley didn't. "predict" Adderall. To understand more, I've put together a resource which, I hope, will be easy enough to digest. Here's my experience of getting prescribed Adderall for my ADHD: https://romankogan.net/adhd/#Medication https://romankogan.net/adhd/#Medication If I have attention deficit and I could write it, I hope you (and the author of the text we're discussing) could spare some attention to it before talking about Adderall, amphetamines, and other stimulants prescribed for ADHD. Thank you in advance. [1] https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2025/01/23/nx-s1-5272801/adhd-research-shorter-life-expectancy-attention-deficit-hyperactivity-disorder https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2025/01/23/nx... [2] https://add.org/adhd-and-depression/ https://add.org/adhd-and-depression/ [3] https://crownviewpsych.com/blog/adhd-increased-risk-suicide-mental-illness/ https://crownviewpsych.com/blog/adhd-increased-risk-suicide-...
- volf_ 1y agoExactly. Adderall has no positive relationship to my mental efficiency. It can in fact be a negative once your passed the 8 hour windows where its still in your system. At the end of the day, it makes it easier to not bounce between different things. It doesn't help me be smarter. It helps me drive to work without needing to listen to music and be on my phone. Modafinil... maybe.
- d4mi3n 1y agoHere here. I also have ADHD though I couldn’t use stimulant medications due to bad reactions to it, but I’ve had success with non-stimulant medications (Straterra aka atomoxetine [1]). A big thing I struggled with prior to medical treatment that I don’t often hear discussed about ADHd was rejection sensitivity. For those unfamiliar: imagine a time someone said something that hurt your feelings or caused a strong emotional reaction. Now imagine that as a routine emotional response to day to day interactions. Feeling intensely sad, irritated, insulted, etc. to extents completely o it of proportion to whatever was said or even implied. It’s brutal. It contributes to a lot of depression and social anxiety for folks with ADHD. It doesn’t matter if you’re aware of the response being disproportionate—you get to go on that emotional roller coaster whenever somebody says they don’t care for your favorite food, accidentally cut you off in a conversation, or the day just turns out differently than you were expecting. Medical treatment makes a huge difference—in my particular case the difference between feeling like I had the emotional regulation of a toddler and not needing to constantly question every emotion I felt prior to responding to things I was reacting to. Stimulant medications didn’t work for me, but they do this for most people with ADHD (more effectively, too!) and like alterom it saddens me whenever FUD like this crops up.
- greekrich92 1y agoJust want to echo someone else's sub-thread: Adderall is not at all similar to Huxley's description of Soma. Soma was about feeling good and not having to think of the evil things that make the BNW society possible, not efficiency.
- Melatonic 1y agoThat's also what I thought - Wasn't Soma more of a way to make people question less and just remain in a blissed out but maybe sort of out of it state at all times ? Seems very different than amphetamines
- phantasmish 1y agoThe link (including the transcript of Huxley’s lecture) doesn’t seem to be about Soma, unless I’m missing something. Huxley produced a lot of work outside of Brave New World, lots of it concerned with drugs and altered states of consciousness (so much so that personally I don’t think I’ve done enough drugs to understand his perspective, as I find him distinctly, and almost uniquely among such high-profile authors that I’ve tried, unreadable)
- Melatonic 1y agoGuess more of us should have read the link more carefully..... oops !
- angadh 1y agoYou are vey correct—the talk and link have nothing to do with Soma. I can only presume, based on timing of the talk being 1960, that his thoughts here link to mescaline and the practical utopia he talks of in Island, whose inhabitants make use of a local psychedelic. So whatever he must have said here had more to do with his later perspectives than his feelings around the island.
- greekrich92 1y agoFair enough, but I have read Island, The Doors of Perception, and BNW, and none of those books described using uppers or anything about efficiency. Island was psychedelics (fantastic book in my opinion).
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- IIAOPSW 1y agoDune also predicted it. The spice must flow.
- topherPedersen 1y agoThere's a schizophrenic vandal here in Austin that spray paints SOMA© all up and down Riverside Drive.
- devmor 1y agoWhy does a space engineering lecturer believe he has novel thoughts on ADHD treatment inspired by an author from a medical era he didn’t bother to do cursory research of?
- gishh 1y agoWhy does person with $job_title feel like they can write with authority on $subject_not_related_to_job_title? Is that your question?
- devmor 1y agoNo, my question is why someone with a job unrelated to subject didn’t bother to do enough research to find out something as simple as the fact that amphetamines were already used to boost productivity in Huxley’s era before writing as if he had some authority on the subject. One would think that if you are not an authority in a subject you want to write on, you should do at least the equivalent of a child’s book report research before espousing your opinion and immediately looking like an ass.
- gishh 1y agoSounds like you have unmet expectations. It’s not really fair to get mad at the author.
- devmor 1y agoIt is completely fair to expect an author presenting himself as an authority on a subject to have done cursory research on said subject. The title and premise of the article are a blatant lie.
- ggm 1y ago"predicts" must be a variant of standard english which projects the past tense into the present tense because .. reasons? He predicted. Absent an Ouija board, he isn't predicting any more.
- fy20 1y agoThe title is missing context, the full sentence would be "In his final speech, Huxley predicts Adderall". The context anchors the time frame, so "predicts" is present tense at the time of the speech. "In his 2006 paper, Roubini sees an upcoming global financial crisis" Journalists love to do things like this - cut out the context - as it makes the headlines seem more vivid, immediate and often alarming. "Roubini sees an upcoming global financial crisis"
- ggm 1y agoShakspear writes his next big drama. Germany invades Poland on trumped-up pretext. Shock murder in Roman forum. Details to follow.
- mistersquid 1y ago> "predicts" must be a variant of standard english which projects the past tense into the present tense because .. reasons? Literary criticism and philosophy cast actions in and from recorded media in the "eternal present" (a term of art that should yield search results). So, if Huxley (contemporary tense) wrote about a drug that resembles Adderall then a sentence cast in the eternal present would express "Huxley _writes_ about Soma in Brave New World which…".
- ggm 1y agoI think this may ultimately be a cultural issue. American documentary style of presentation increasingly uses the present tense to describe things in the past. I am more used to historians with horn rimmed glasses and badly fitting tweed jackets talking in the past tense about past times so when they reflect on it's impact in the present time they can use present tense about past acts correctly. "German Troops conduct a false flag against Poland as a result of which the British issue a final demand, the echoes of which continue to the present day" is really not better than "The German troops conducted a false flag against Poland as a result of which the British issued a final demand, the echoes of which continue to the present day" when it comes down to it. And it leads to awkward sentences like "At the time, FDR believes that he can keep the war away from America, but Japan attacks pearl harbour and he has no choice but to declare war" when the use of "Believed" and "could" and "attacked" and "had" make it clear we, the owners of backwards looking syntax and historical documents, realise this all happened a very long time ago and can keep a hold of the sequencing. I must say matches on "the eternal present" are a giant bag of mystical wank, no disrespect to yourself intended. Perhaps you get better responses than I do but my top returns were flooded with mindfulness and cod philosophy and christianity.
- notepad0x90 1y agoamphetamines feel a lot like people putting NO2 on their cars, or overclocking their computers. You might just fine in the end, but the likelihood of wear & tear catching up to you increases. It should be treated just like any other medicine, don't use it unless you really have to, and expect adverse effect (known or unknown).
- NilMostChill 1y agoIsn't the whole point of amphetamine based treatement for ADHD to correct(or beneficially alter, depending on your point of view) an non-standard brain chemistry? AFAIK some neurodivergent brains deal with amphetamines differently and the baseline levels of chemical affected by amphetamines is different. Wear and tear might be a thing, i don't know, but the analogy of putting NO2 in their car feels a bit off. It'd be more like finally putting premium unleaded in your car after years of "back of the lorry" pseudo-unleaded.
- DonaldPShimoda 1y agoI believe parent commenter was referring to recreational use, i.e., use by people without such diagnoses who want a "performance boost". I heard about that sort of thing being popular when I was in college — people would take Adderall to cram for an exam or to study late into the night. You're right that, for people with ADHD and related disorders, stimulant medication sort of just adjusts their baselines so they can pay attention like a "normal" person.
- raducu 1y ago> You're right that, for people with ADHD and related disorders, stimulant medication sort of just adjusts their baselines so they can pay attention like a "normal" person. I have ADHD and take metylphenidate(I've tried many kinds of stimulants as well) -- and the NO2 analogy is an imperfect but better analogy than saying stimulants simply adjusts the baseline of people with ADHD to function like "normal" persons. I feel there is a narrow window of dosage and time where it might feel that way -- i.e. stimulants at the onset might calm you down, reduce anxiety, but all stimulants are very broad hammers. For me it feels like it's impossible to re-create chemically exactly the neurotypical focus that I've seen in other colleagues. Like spending 5-6 hours of continous work where you drill down just enough, get back on track, don't get distracted, don't get too anxious, don't get hyperfocused AND do that consistently, day after day after day. My non-chemical modes are either hyper focus for 2 weeks on a problem, immerse myself but then completely lose interest, most of the time without showing much for it OR procastinate it a long way, get extremely anxious and work really hard on the problem. With stimulants it's a bit like: - dosed just right:it evaporates anxiety, stressful situations feel easy to deal with, BUT there's always increased heart rate, grinding teeth and some tension at the end of the day - some stimulants make mundane things wildly interesting (on isopropylphenidate I spent a few hours playing with a PLSQL debugger because I thought it was really cool), but no sense of "GO, GO, GO, do it". - some make things seem urgent enough and help stay on track -- like the metylphenidate I'm prescribed. - some make going into a flow-like state easy and fun (like methamphetamine and phenmetrazine). - some are pure energy and urgency -- like modafinil. All of the stimulants have the potential to give me euphoria, all of them temporarily increase libido I still have to be mindful of not focusing on the wrong thing, the "normal" feeling is very fleeting, it's very easy to get hyper on stimulants, all of them feel like wear & tear at the end of the day, some more than others.
- bluebxrry 1y ago[dead]