Analysis: main benefit of Ritalin-type drug was in an area I least expected

My dealer scored a couple of tabs for me, which I dropped at 9.30am.

At least that was the language in the period when I last had any interest in drugs — round about the time that Commander Cody and the Lost Planet Airmen released the Down to Seeds and Stems Again Blues.

Since then I have noted with alarm the effect on my constitution of Panadol Night (out like a light, sleep for 12 hours) and worried about addiction when I wanted to take Nurofen two days running. So the suggestion that I might like to experience what the executives and students who are taking Ritalin-type drugs are experiencing was simultaneously intriguing and worrying. Suppose I hated them or, much, much worse, suppose I liked them?

Then there was the problem of suggestibility. Since I know that these drugs are supposed to aid concentration, wouldn’t I just attribute any sense of actually knowing what I was doing to the influence of the pills?

This wasn’t a scientific trial. Quite the reverse. What you are about to read is an impression, and nothing more, of what I think happened as a result of taking two Modalert 200 tablets yesterday morning, in a day in which I had a meeting, did an hour’s exercise on a machine, went shopping, did a radio interview down the line with a US drive-time show in Cleveland, wrote a 1,400-word article and answered myriad e-mails, before driving to the Spurs v Bolton cup tie.

About two hours after taking the pills I felt as though my brow was permanently furrowed, and my attention was fixed, gimlet-like on whatever I needed to think or talk about. In the meeting I gabbled relatively uninhibitedly, feeling myself to be bang on-topic.

It was odd, because I would normally associate this feeling with that caffeinated condition when the pulse races, and you feel your heartbeat, yet none of this was happening; I seemed to be getting the benefit of a mentally aroused state without the obvious discomfort. Though, now I come to think of it, I did feel as though I was staring at everything: screen, Starbucks barista, pushy buggy-pusher, newspaper.

Then, on the way home, I shopped without the usual sense that I was going to forget something, but also without the usual sense that it mattered if I did.

On the way back I climbed a very steep hill which generally, at its two-thirds point, has me a little out of breath. This time I sailed up it without even realising. When I got home I told a colleague by e-mail that an inquiry she’d made might take me a few hours to answer, and then just sat down and did it in five minutes, surprising her. I noticed afterwards that there were some unusual typos. I seemed less worried by my internal quality control — more easily satisfied with what I was doing, and quicker.

An unexpected by-blow was that I pushed myself harder on the exercise machine than I have for ages, with greater resistance and for a longer time, and afterwards wondered whether the pills help a dissociative process between thinking and physical action. If so, they’d be a useful mental aid to running half-marathons and to other endurance sports.

Strangely, I didn’t find any difference in trying to write the long, complicated piece that I’d been commissioned to do, and wished that I’d done it early in the morning. But perhaps by then the drug had worn off a little. My wife seemed not to think so. “Is that you or the Ritalin?” she kept asking me, peering hard into my eyes.

When I got back from the match I noticed that I had a completely unprecedented red flush across my nose and cheeks, and felt too warm.

This disappeared after an hour. I went to bed at 12.30am, but woke up at 5.20am — very unusually for me — without any chance of going back to sleep. Awake, I thought about the weirdness of taking a drug that was designed to treat a condition — narcolepsy — from which I have never suffered. Then I went and finished the piece.

So, strangely, the main benefit of the drug was in the area I’d least expected it. Whether I’d take it if offered before my next half-marathon is another matter. Tempted, yes. Actually do it? Not until I know a whole lot more.

David Aaronovich, The Times 26-02-2010

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