The ‘smart drugs’ revolution: how pharmaceuticals will leave us ‘accelerating into a 24/7 society’

You probably know someone who takes cognitive-enhancing drugs. Pilots, heart surgeons, famous novelists, pressured city traders, renowned professors (and their students), as well as astronauts, soldiers and IT analysts, to name a few. If you asked them about their diphenylmethylsulfinylacetamide use, they’d stare at you blankly. But mention Modafinil, and they’d know that you know. ‘With the knowledge economy, a lot of people require long periods of concentration and are having to use their brainpower for long periods of time,’ says Barbara Sahakian, professor of clinical neuropsychology at the University Of Cambridge. ‘People are using [smart drugs] to keep competitive, to get into the best universities, and then to get the best exam scores.’ The use of smart drugs, like Modafinil, is at an unprecedented scale – and it shows no signs of slowing down. Between 2015 and 2017, people using substances for ‘pharmacological cognitive enhancement’ jumped from 5% to 23% in the UK alone, according to a survey of tens of thousands of people. It’s predicted the global brain health supplement market will reach $10.7bn (£8.3bn) by 2025. As a comparison, it was worth $1.74bn (£1.35bn) in 2016, the most recent figures available. Though not all of that money will be spent on Modafinil, it shows the public’s creeping appetite for drug-based brain enhancements. Aside from the medically-approved Modafinil, a vast, often unregulated industry is booming, from podcast superstar Joe Rogan-endorsed Alpha Brain to actress turned wellness expert Gwyneth Paltrow’s own Goop-branded Nerd Alert. And the future will see not just the amount of drugs consumed go up but the level of impact they have on the people using them. All these drugs fall under the broadly-defined umbrella of ‘nootropics’ – a term coined by 1960s Romanian chemist Dr Corneliu Giurgea, when he accidentally discovered apparent memory-enhancing effects […]

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