@PopularMechanics JULY/AUGUST _ 201 85
concentrations vary wildly, and many for-
mulations contain THC, even if they say they
don’t. After a couple of drops, I felt like I was
wearing a particularly cozy sweater on the
inside of my body. It distor ted my percept ion
of time in a similar way to marijuana. Also:
It was way too popular around the oice to be
as non-intoxicating as its proponents claim.WHAT IS IT?
Speed, basicallyIS IT LEGAL?
If you’re being treated for
narcolepsy, obstructive sleep
apnea, and shift work disorderHOW MUCH DOES IT COST?
About $1 per pillWHAT DOES IT FEEL LIKE?
Slightly mellower speedMODAFINIL
t was unclear, from the web-
site, where we were sending
our Bitcoin. The transaction
record seemed to suggest
China, but days later, an
email came through reporting that the par-
cel was coming from Mumbai. The drugs
themselves came in two silver blister packs
in a square white envelope. The box labeled
“gift” was marked on the customs form. And
what a gift! Twenty thick white pills of a wake-
fulness-promoting agent called modainil,
which the FDA approved in 1998 to treat nar-
colepsy. It wasn’t until the Air Force tested
whether it would enhance performance in
fatig ued F-117 pilots in 2004 (shor t a nswer:
sort of ), that its of-label use skyrocketed. A
2013 report in the Journal of the American
Medical Association’s I n t e r n a l M e d i c i n e
publication said the number of people tak-
ing the drug increased tenfold over the
previous decade. One of those people? Molly
Maloof, the doctor from San Francisco.“I was just like, Oh my god, ighter pilots
are taking medicine that can make them not
have to sleep. If I didn’t have to sleep, I could
do so many things,” says Maloof, who took
modainil a handful of times four years ago.
To hear Maloof explain it, the drug
appeals to the kind of super-high-achieving
people who make it to the top of industries
such as inance and technology. The kind
who power through ifteen-hour work days
and then train for a triathlon. The kind who
think sleep is for people who are lazy or dead.
I learned the hard way in college that you
can always take more of a drug, but never
less, so I took a quarter of a 200-mg pill.
Thirty minutes later, a cocaine-like rush
zinged through my upper body. This is great,
I thought. Oh, this is great, great, great.
Sound died down and I could multitask as
easily as toggling between computer screens.
I made calls I’d been putting of for months. I
googled directions between Osaka and Kyoto
because I realized I didn’t know where they
were in relation to one another. It was like a
clear forest path had opened ahead of me,
which led only to the joyous, peaceful occa-
sion of learning facts and answering emails.
I very much enjoyed modainil. But it also
made me feel like a crystal space robot that
was confused by human emotion. Maybe
I’m not good at drugs, but everything I took
for this story felt like tuning a piano with
a sledgehammer. Did I want to be better at
email? Great. Here were some drugs from
India that could make me stay awake through
an entire day of work, a two-hour dinner, and
then a whole three-act opera. Did I want to
go to sleep afterward? Good luck waking
up within fourteen hours of taking these
innocuous-seeming over-the-counter sleep
supplements. Modainil was like a hyper-
literal genie in a fable—the kind that would
set up a deer conservation center at your
house because you asked for a million bucks.
I told Maloof that the drug made me
feel like Bradley Cooper in Limitless—all
loating equations and brilliant quips and
visions of promotions, along with some
mild dizziness.
“What have you noticed with your
memory though?”Excuse me?
“It makes you feel super-human, but I
was starting to get memory lapses,” she said.
“That’s why I stopped using it.”hen I agreed to become a bio-
hacking test subject, I’m
not sure I realized how hard
it would be on my body. I
didn’t worry if I might still
feel strange weeks later. I just said yes. The
promises sounded so good. Sleep four hours
a night like Tim Ferriss, author of The
4-Hour Body. Lose a hundred pounds like
Bulletproof Cofee’s Dave Asprey. Control
your body temperature like Wim Hof, a
Dutch athlete who climbed Mount Everest
in a pair of shorts. How could I know what
would happen? There aren’t pills to make
you psychic. Yet.
All things considered, I feel good, although
ever since keto, a tiny bubble of heartburn has
blazed st ubbornly at my sternum. I went to a
regular, boring doctor, who gave me a regu-
lar, boring diagnosis: acid relux.
Here’s the thing about trying to hack the
human body the same way you’d hack a com-
puter: There are people who know how to
build a computer. Nobody knows how to build
a human body. While it’s intriguing that we
may, a s a cu lt ure, be on the verge of some ver y
exciting medical developments, many of our
own workings remain occult and mysterious
to the smartest people on earth.
But as time marches on—our arteries
hardening, tendons fraying, career options
narrowing—the only certainties are get-
ting older and slower and, eventually, dead.
Can you blame anyone for wanting the tini-
est measure of control? For researching the
latest biological science and transforming
it into a plan?
There’s something to be said for believ-
ing a new, untested treatment will help you
overcome your problems. Over the years,
taking a sugar pill, receiving a sham injec-
tion, or even just visiting a doctor has been
shown to reduce pain, lower blood pressure,
and relieve depression. Doctors call this the
placebo efect. We call it hope.Running
□
The paleo diet
□Standing on a
vibration plate
□□Vegetarianism
□Swallowing a Fitbit
□