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Legal stimulants to stay awake4/11/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() Approval of the drug would also open the door to ''off-label'' use, allowing doctors to prescribe it for other conditions. 31, the Food and Drug Administration is to decide whether a new compound called modafinil can be marketed as a treatment for excessive sleepiness associated with narcolepsy, a severe sleep disorder that afflicts about one in 1,000 Americans. And once the effects wear off, users soon crave more of the drug.įearful of lawsuits, drug companies largely stopped trying to improve alertness, and for 20 years have devoted their efforts to developing new sleep-promoting drugs, seeking to maximize high quality sleep while minimizing day-after hangovers. The drugs keep people awake, but they also produce euphoria and the jitters, revving up the central nervous system and causing the heart rate and blood pressure to jump. And staying awake supports a multibillion-dollar industry that serves up a variety of stimulants, legal and illegal, and sleep promoters, offering hope that a good night's sleep will bring alertness the next day.Īmphetamines, the wonder drugs of the 1950's and 60's, quickly opened a Pandora's box of side effects and abuse. Jet-lag sufferers, all-night workers, the elderly and the multitude of Americans with disorders like sleep apnea and narcolepsy wage a continual battle against excessive daytime sleepiness. These are the sounds of the struggle to stay awake, a major enterprise in a country that long ago exchanged the effortless biological cycle of sleeping and waking for the tyranny of electric lights, job-plus-kids living, graveyard shifts and packages that absolutely, positively have to be there overnight.Ībout two-thirds of workplace accidents in the United States are caused by human error, studies show, many of them the result of a failure of alertness at critical times. It is midafternoon on the eastern coast of a chronically sleep-deprived nation and if you listen carefully, you can hear the whoosh of cappuccino makers and the ripping open of No-Doz boxes and the yawns of night-shift workers and the sighs of pilots as they check their watches to see how much longer they must keep their aircraft aloft.
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