It’s a soggy Friday evening in south London, and something is not normal. It’s not the weather that’s different, or the traffic noise of the A23 outside. It’s my brain.
Ideas, which normally emerge from my head with the urgency of an episode of Countryfile, spurt like a shower head. In fact, I actually have to get out of the shower early to note down five before I lose them.
Time is going extra fast, spiralling away at a worrying pace. But I’m writing with a sense of flow and connection that I haven’t felt since I wore school uniform and my brain was all fresh and shiny.
I’ve taken modafinil, and I think it’s working.
Modafinil, if you’re not familiar, is a psychostimulant drug used to treat the excessive sleepiness that comes with narcolepsy, shift work sleep disorder and sleep apnea. It also has a growing fan base on campuses across London.
It’s not known exactly how it works, but research shows it leads to an increase in the neurotransmitter dopamine, whose job is to relay messages from neuron to neuron. The result, put simply, is that people who usually fall asleep too much don’t fall asleep.
Its eugeroic (wakefulness-promoting) properties are part of what make it so appealing to users who don’t have sleep disorders, and according to a review of the studies relating to the drug, the range of off-label use is outpacing research on the subject.
Special forces personnel, surgeons, pilots, Oxbridge students, lawyers and other alpha types have been using cognitive enhancers for years now, but modafinil – which was developed in the late seventies in France – is starting to filter down below the stratum of the hyper-functioning, aided by its perceived lack of adverse side effects. The MOD has spent £78,760 acquiring stocks of Provigil (a brand version of modafinil) over the last ten years.
You see, it’s no ordinary stimulant: It has a more complex mechanism of action than amphetamine based ADHD pills, which used to be the speedy-feeling performance-enhancer of choice for essay-writers and investment bankers alike.
Neurologists say this means it has a lower liability to abuse and a lower risk of adverse effects on organ systems than its addictive, brain-chemical-addling predecessors.
It’s also less illegal to possess it without a prescription: better known ‘smart drugs’ Ritalin and Adderall are both Class B, which means the penalty for possession is up to five years inside. In contrast, the big M is only illegal to supply.
A study of modafinil’s effects on cognitive performance found that it improved “fatigue levels, motivation, reaction time and vigilance,” while a 2013 review carried out by King’s College, London in collaboration with the Universities of Cambridge and East London concluded that its use in conjunction with anti-depressants relieves depression more effectively than anti-depressants alone.
A quick Google of the subject throws up stories about students working for thirty hours solid and bashing out twenty page reports in one sitting – no wonder then, that its use is becoming increasingly commonplace among London students, who call it moda.
The University of London, which has colleges all over the city, declined to comment on the issue, but I tracked down some of their students who would.
As most people seem to, I first heard about it by word of mouth, from a friend at said university. Sam*, a 20 year old student at the prestigious Imperial College London, was trusting it to get him through a batch of revision for an exam on “really hard physics shit” at a time when he only had a few days free because of work commitments. “I’ll be able to just sit there for four days and rinse it. Moda in, distractions out,” he said.
Sam found out about it from his friend Luca*, 21, who buys it online from China and sells it for less than a quid per pill. Seeing as he’s often selling it to his peers, Luca is one of the few people who have a good idea about the scale of moda use – most people tend to treat it with secrecy, preferring to let others believe their success is organic.
“As far as I can tell, more and more people are relying on it. Probably around thirty per cent. I get lots of calls from people freaking out around deadlines and exam times, so I created a calendar of all the different dates on all the main courses when I’ll be in demand. That means I can stock up ahead of time and I’ll never run out.” Drug dealing, over-achiever style.
He’s seen exponential growth in his customer base from word-of-mouth recommendations. “Someone who uses it sees their friend struggling to keep up with the workload, and they feel bad. They suggest it. The friend tries it, benefits from it, and suggests it to another struggling friend. The whole thing just snowballs.”
Another seller, a 23 year old Bristolian who’s been supplying for more than three years and studies at University College London (UCL) thinks there’s a different reason for the recent, noticeable upsurge in ubiquity.
“This year is the first time that people paying the new £9,000 fees are in their final year. They feel more pressure to succeed because they’ve sunk far more costs into their degrees. When you’ve spent nearly thirty grand on tuition, I guess you want to get a good grade. I’ve noticed it socially too; the nine-granders don’t party as hard.”
As a resentful 9K kid myself, this resonates with me. The idea of getting a bad degree classification is almost three times more horror-inducing than it would have been at the old fee levels. I might as well try a bit of this so-called wonder drug for the purposes of research then, see what all the fuss is about.
I order a batch online from the least shifty looking website selling the drug, taking care to avoid the one with a ‘welcome’ video featuring an American woman with unsettlingly assertive diction, who claims to ship directly from – of all places – Sheffield.
It arrives about a week later, in a little jiffy bag postmarked Hong Kong. On that wet Friday I crack one of the white, unassuming looking tablets in half and wash it down my throat.
The resultant feeling is not what I was expecting. The internet had promised a cerebral land of infinite focus and productivity. Real life people said I would be acutely antisocial and wee a lot. Apart from frequent dashes to the toilet, none of the above is true.
On me at least, modafinil has a subtle, multi-faceted impact. The most useful effect is a compulsion to carry on working after several hours on the same task. The urge to complete whatever I’m working on is compelling.
However, if I do get distracted, it’s pretty engulfing; diversions are treated with remarkable diligence. I spend at least an hour on Amazon studiously comparing the reviews of various ceramic kitchen knives. Screens suck at my eyes to an uncomfortable extent.
Becoming focusedly distracted is an occupational hazard, apparently. The UCL guy says he once spent a night that he had intended to work on an essay sorting through the cyber-wilderness of his Gmail account, deleting marketing emails and archiving everything from the last two years into arbitrary folders.
When I do stay on task, it feels like there are somehow more connections within my brain, like a tube map that suddenly has twice the number of underground lines. Lateral thinking is improved; parallels and links between pieces of information and ideas reveal themselves when they would usually remain hidden. When I’m writing, unconventional metaphors fight to become permanent sentences.
It keeps me awake too, though not in a high, conspicuous or caffeine-jittery way. At 2.45am, nearly ten hours on from when I started, I’m still working away in the same spot; although nothing much of any use is coming out of my cranial shower head anymore.
If it sounds a bit too good to be true, that’s because it is. For a start, it just doesn’t really work for some people. One London College of Fashion student who took it to try and make headway with her dissertation said, “I was hoping for some moment of epiphany that never happened. It just felt like my brain was tensing/frowning.”
For others, it’s a gateway drug. Sam says: “There was a guy in my year last year who moved on from moda and got addicted to amphetamines and couldn’t work without them. Then he got addicted to cocaine and ended up in rehab.”
Sounds like a rumour mill, friend-of-a-friend scare story, right? Nope. “He tried to sell me a £50 engineering textbook for a tenner so he could use the money to get ‘one last hit’ before rehab.” He’s now retaking the year.
Then there’s the inherent danger of ingesting internet-sourced pharmaceuticals from markets that tend to be laxly regulated in comparison to the UK. Poor quality generic drugs – created by substituting ingredients for cheaper alternatives and inadequate quality control measures – have blighted the reputations of the Chinese and Indian industries in recent years, and the provenance and purity of drugs bought online just can’t be relied upon.
Since the start of 2014 the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has imposed import bans on six Chinese pharmaceutical plants for failing to operate “in conformity with current good manufacturing practices.” In India, that number is eight, including one of the plants operated by the company that ostensibly produced the moda I used, Sun Pharma, which caused its share price to tumble.
Although that’s not the plant that my stuff came from – the factory that made mine is in Sikkim state, nestled in the mountains between Nepal and Bhutan, while the FDA-blacklisted one is nearly 2,000 km away on the shores of the Arabian Sea – it doesn’t inspire much trust in the company. It’s risky at best to welcome drugs of such sketchy origin into your bloodstream.
It’s not particularly safe to provide websites that operate outside the law with your bank details either. I was careful to use a credit card that was just about to expire, but the UCL seller has had countless fraudulent transactions up to the value of £200 on the card he uses. “You can get them reversed, but if you’re not the sort of person who checks their statements, you definitely shouldn’t be buying from these sites.”
Despite the prevailing wisdom in moda-acquainted circles, there are side effects to contend with too. One day I take two tablets and suffer uncharacteristic anxiety. My boyfriend, who’s currently working in West Africa, fails to reply to a text message and I imaginatively conclude that his team has been attacked by Boko Haram.
Then there are the stomach cramps. The organs in the upper part of my chest feel like they’re constricting, dry tissue on dry tissue. They make muffled noises like big bubble wrap pockets popping. My oesophagus feels unnervingly rigid. At one point, my resting heart rate increases from my usual fifty beats per minute to ninety, and I’m clenching my jaw like a pill fiend at a warehouse party.
This is where I tap out of my experiment. However pervasive the trend is on campuses around the capital, however many IQ points the average user has, taking modafinil isn’t clever, and it won’t make you cleverer.
As Sam, who’s gone cold turkey after realising he had an insidious habit taking root says, “If you’re dependent on something external for your success, you’re just digging yourself a hole. How are you going to sustain it in the future when the drugs run out?”
Illustrations by Amanda Ahopelto
* Names changed by request