| Don't understand this to be showing off or upvote as karma baiting, but I really need to say this: I've written some marvelous code and completed gargantuan projects on my lonesome, battling thousands of lines of assembly and debugging hardware circuits and stuff.... and never used. It's stupid to think your brain needs an external stimulus to be creative. You can be creative and withstand by just willing it - it's just not the easiest way out. When you take drugs you're either lying to yourself and pretending there is no harm in fucking up your brain - losing sense of priorities, time, yourself, and the world around you - or afraid of how it would feel without them. Anyone can do anything without these drugs, and I'm speaking from experience. Staying up for 65 hours straight? Been there, done that with nothing more than coffee and cold showers. Write some brilliant hacks that do something genius in little lines of code? Check. Debug memory leaks and crashes across over 100k lines of C code going to and from different dynamically-linked libraries? Check. Writing your own OS Kernel? Check. I pity those that feel you need drugs to accomplish, because that's just not true. |
The other replies to your post have already covered what I would have said, I would just add that having a fixed belief that if something is illegal, that it must be bad for you, is ignorant at best.
Almost all of the illegal drugs are also prescribed in some form of the other. There is the massive painkiller industry built on opiates, ADHD and amphetamine salts, Air Force pilots in the USA are given 'go pills' as were SS troops during WW2. There is a terrible double-standard in our society when it comes to drugs, where for some reason we are expected to believe that these use cases are somehow fine, or are somehow safer, than an individuals own experimentation with using the same substances for their own performance gains.
The human body was designed thousands of years ago, and evolved its capabilities based on having enough energy to gather enough food to survive that day. With no additional substances to give us an extra push, we simply weren't designed to be able to concentrate on complex tasks for 16-18 hours in day.
If you are able to with just coffee and cold showers, then good for you - there are some of us who, like the Air Force pilots, seek a bit more of a push. I don't distinguish between coffee, vitamin supplements or any other drugs, they all have a purpose and we all should be free to use or not use each as we choose.