To be clear, we're talking about drugs here--if marijuana was legal, THC would be a "dietary supplement". FDA lets you get away with murder on "supplements"--if it's a chemical naturally present in your metabolism by biosynthesis (dopamine) or ingestion (food), or present in some kind of plant (even non-food, like Huperzine-A), it's a "dietary supplement" unless scheduled (then it's a controlled substance and called a "drug"). if it's completely synthetic or legally controlled, it's a "drug". Supplements you can make any claims you want on, as long as you use the words "may" or "believed to" and note that the FDA doesn't have a stance; unapproved drugs you can't say anything about, but you can sell and use them.

I will say first that the drugs are effective; but that certain ailments completely dwarf the effectiveness of drugs, with a few exceptions. The ailments you'll want to avoid are:

• Sleep deprivation - Treat with Modafinil or Adrifinil, or occasional use of Phenylpiracetam (phenotropil). Modafinil/Adrifinil are effective drugs to bypass the need for sleep for up to 56 hours wake/8 hours sleep cycle; Phenylpiracetam is very effective, not as much as modifinil though, and will create immediate tolerance--use it once every couple weeks (i.e. emergency). Phenylpiracetam is illegal under anti-doping rules for competitive sports, but legal in the US and much of Europe (Russia probably not--it's prescription). Phenylpiracetam is safe; Modafinil is less safe if you consider overdose (racetams are VERY well tolerated) but safe at normal use (100mg-200mg/day) forever, continuously, nonstop; adrifinil is stressful on the liver and thus less safe overall. My advice on sleep: Skip the drugs, get enough sleep; if you have sleep issues, take 1mg (not more unless 1mg is ineffective--the U curve shows more than your effective dose of melatonin is LESS effective) melatonin 1 hour before you want to sleep. Modafinil is friggin' awesome, but save it for if you can't get real sleep.
• Hunger - Replace with more food. You're going to need a lot of this in your life. There's no other cure for hunger.

So, in summary, you want enough sleep and enough food. You can take drugs to get around the need for sleep; unless you have a reason to shape out your sleep schedule, you should aim for getting the correct amount of sleep, possibly with the aid of (time-released if you can) melatonin.

If you've got that, then... on to the drugs!


Choline -- Alpha-GPC, Centrophenoxine, CDP-Choline

Alpha-GPC is cheap and is the best choline supplement. Just take this, don't question it. (That's bad advice--question everything)

Choline is important and people don't get enough of it. To frame this correctly and concisely: when you get a headache from studying too much math, that's a real thing. It happens because you depleted your choline levels. You need choline.

Research says between 500mg-3200mg per day is the correct dosage--the low end is what you should have, the high end is fine but is what you should not exceed. The best source of choline is highly concentrated soy lecithin (however that's spelled), and of course that relies on bioavailability--you might not absorb all of it. A serving of actual food--the best being soy, eggs, whatnot--doesn't contain much, but there's enough for you to get by. Clif bars contain a lot of soy and lecithin--they are a decent choline source. Not like dosing with Alpha-GPC, but they're not exactly trivial. Remember you need choline, it's definitely available from food.

A lot of good sources are available in capsule form. The best is theoretically Alpha-GPC. Alpha-GPC is highly bioavailable and crosses the blood-brain barrier (the others don't, not so much; but the three listed here are considered very high quality, and AGPC is just the top of the stack). This is desirable. 300mg-600mg doses per day is safe and effective. Realize: 300mg doses are effective for killing that "too much math homework" headache, and you need about 500mg/day usually; you're really getting just about the bare minimum from food.

May cause insomnia, take in the morning. If you're throwing 600mg or such down, take less. I take 600mg, but I have insomnia anyway (always have) and find that three nights on 1mg Melatonin set my sleep cycle semi-permanently and dismiss the insomnia for weeks or months if I don't stay up late ever.

By the way, if you take too much choline you might smell or smell like fish. Just reduce your dosage. Unless you're female and nursing--then you should definitely be taking more of a choline supplement, preferably a water-soluble one; ask your doctor, though you'll get different answers on who thinks which is best. Doctors are funny... they give answers based on experience, so they give different answers faced with the same patient and situation; and they don't know your body as well as you do, in the case of things you can measure (like response to a drug meant to treat, say, depression). Medicine is really freaking hard and I wish idiots would stop suing doctors for not getting it absolutely perfect :\


Caffeine and L-Theanine

I hate caffeine.

Caffeine has so many negative side effects: hypertension, a loss of thinking ability (it's a stimulant, it creates some stress), dependence, insomnia. I hate caffeine.

You can completely erase the negative effects of caffeine by taking it in 2:1 ratio with the L enantiomer of Theanine. An 8oz cup of coffee is usually 95mg, but this isn't standardized; standardized L-Theanine tablets are often 200mg, and there are 100mg tablets and chewables. L-Theanine powder is readily available. L-Theanine is an amino acid and highly bioavailable orally (with food, especially), but also readily absorbed directly into the blood sublingually (under the tongue)--good strategy with powder and chewables. L-Theanine transports across the blood-brain barrier and acts directly on the brain.

Combining L-Theanine with Caffeine improves mental accuracy, focus, and memory (storage and recall). The recommended maximums by the US FDA are 600mg/6hr and 1200mg/24hr; the dangerous dosage levels are hypothesized to be 1000 times that level. Drugs have a U curve, and so--beyond the 2:1 synergy, which is a good guide when intentionally leveraging drug interactions--you should be mindful of how L-Theanine affects you and try to keep from overdosing past what works best on you.

L-Theanine is considered a "Supplement" because it's derived from tea. It's one hell of an awesome drug. Basically no negative side effects, no real toxicity, safe for long-term use, no druggy effects like hallucination or other stupidity. Anxiolitic (counters stress effectively).


Piracetam

Piracetam is a synthetic drug. It's the original nootropic.

Piracetam improves focus and memory directly by improving communication between neural hemispheres. It's neuroprotective--even against concussions, which is more than we can say for helmets (helmets protect against death from breaking your brain case open, not concussion from accelerating the brain into the skull)--and cardioprotective.

Piracetam particularly will cure cardiac arrhythmia. Yes, that's a real thing. Known side-effects of piracetam (it's specifically a nootropic) include not only headaches (take more Alpha-GPC), insomnia, and other minor crap; but also a reduction of athlerosclerosis, improvements in blood cholesterol levels (less "bad" more "good", moving toward the optimum levels of each type), lowered susceptibility to heart disease, and a regular heart beat in people prone to cardiac arrhythmia.

In experiments it's been found that about 4.6 grams of Piracetam is more effective than either 1.4 grams or 9.2 grams--again, U curve. Piracetam is well-tolerated (low toxicity) and not very strong; typical doses are 1600-2400mg 2-3 times per day (so, about 4.8g/day).

Piracetam is available online, and is not illegal; it is unapproved by the FDA. You can get it from a company in Chicago or from companies in Germany or wherever else, pick one. I favor Smart Drugs For Thought as my supplier.

Water-soluble (take with water, not necessarily with food).


Other racetams

Aniracetam synergizes (this means drug interaction) great with Piracetam. I usually take half the Piracetam dose (800mg) twice a day, but I've been on full doses recently. Notably, Piracetam is around 4.8g/day while Oxiracetam is more like 1.2g twice--similar sized dose (1600mg vs 1200mg), but only twice (2.4g instead of 4.8g). The synergistic effect is that it makes you significantly more socially aware and gives a lot better verbal recall--your speech flows more and you recognize and adjust to social undertones quickly. This means more social success--people enjoy being around you more. The effect translates poorly outside of face-to-face interaction (could you tell?).

Aniracetam is similar to Piracetam, stronger, fat soluble (take with food). Similar effects, different distribution--bolsters some cognitive functions more than Piracetam, others less.

Oxiracetam, Pramiracetam, Phenylpiracetam, have their own effects and are all similar. I get my Aniracetam, Oxiracetam, and Pramiracetam as Brain Octane from Superior Nutraceuticals. Phenylpiracetam isn't interesting to me because of rapid tolerance.

Again, FDA unapproved, legal, unregulated.


Noopept

Noopept is 1000 times as strong as Piracetam. It also releases a lot of BDNF and BNF, which causes neurogenesis--your brain develops more neurons and you become semi-permanently smarter. As with all the racetams, Noopept is neuroprotective and thus keeps your brain cells alive longer. Funny enough, physical activity--bicycling--also releases BDNF and BNF, and in experiments has shown that both rats and humans will learn twice as fast with better retention when exercised before and after activities such as repeated maze navigation or studying math or other pattern recognition things. That means Noopept is an awesome drug--but so is bicycling. Noopept has immediate benefits bicycling does not (i.e. a short-term mental ability boost); bicycling has long-term benefits Noopept does not (i.e. you'll be less fat).

A normal Noopept dose is 10mg-25mg; the daily dose is 30mg, although some people are up around 100mg. I would not exceed 50mg, but this particular drug has a lot of YMMV attached. Some people really do need 20mg sublingual 3 times a day; for others, pushing 50mg creates suicidal thoughts with no impulse to execute. Under 50mg is apparently universally safe. Rat and mouse models estimate that Noopept can't cause any kind of permanent damage or toxicity unless you exceed something like 7800mg in one dose--probably a lot more, because the primary mechanism of toxicity is NOS poisoning (brain activity produces oxidizers like NOS) and the human body has a damned good anti-oxidant delivery system which rats don't have. Experiments with rats and mice at 100mg/kg doses--which for a 170lb person means 7800mg doses--found no long-term toxicity.

Summary: 30mg/day is a good bet. Don't break 50mg/day.

That's not to say noopept is dangerous; it's just very, very strong. Popping an extra gram of Piracetam won't hurt you; popping an entire bottle of 120 800mg pills is a bad idea. Throwing a heaping teaspoon of Noopept down your gullet is going to be a bad idea; it's standard practice with Piracetam.

I favor Noopept from Superior Nutra or from Peak Nootropics, in powder form, at 0.3-0.5 cents per mg; you can get it from Smart Drugs For Thought in pill form for oral dosing at 5 cents per mg. Sublingual dosing is a better route, but I'd trust a mg scale (and learn to use it--they're very fickle) more than a scoop to measure powder.


Stimulants -- Adderall, Methylphenedate

Not the best thing for you, and not the best way to treat stuff like ADHD--but they're the best we have for some diseases. ADHD can be treated effectively in a subset of individuals with a lot of the stuff above--plus SAM-e (+B9 +B12, which SAM-e will deplete) and a number of other things. You'll notice Noopept is patented, profitable, yet hasn't been brought over here to treat ADHD--it's not going to work as a general treatment (or maybe it will and I'm just not willing to accept anecdote).

Adderall will provide focus, but not clarity of thought. Stims in general are bad for you. They're illegal without a prescription. With a prescription, they still have nasty side effects. If you can't function without Adderall, get a prescription; if your life isn't terrible and you're getting along fine without it (not "people tolerate me", but it's actually decent and you're not terribly troubled by the issues you have that would get you a prescription), avoid it. Same with Methylphenedate and all the other stims.

Modafinil is less dangerous, but--as noted earlier--it's better for you to just get enough sleep. Melatonin if you have insomnia; if that won't work, get with your doctor, maybe Melatonin + L-Tryptophan or something, or maybe hard-core sleep aids. Hard sleep aids are nasty--even Valerian (all-natural) may have ... unpleasant side effects. Side effects such as simply not registering what's in front of you--I drove through a railroad crossing barrier once while a train was coming 7 hours after a dose of Valerian, and I've seen someone do exactly the same 10 hours after a dose of Ambien (his metabolism didn't clear it in under 8 hours) except he hit a car that was waiting at a traffic signal. This is not a mental state you'll recognize--it's not something you keep alert for and go, "Oh, wait, I'm having this issue, I shouldn't drive." Unless somebody tosses something to you and you have a delayed mental reaction, you simply won't realize it's there. You'll just stare straight ahead, see things, nod, and fail to realize you should react somehow. "Oh, a stopped car at a red light" without "...I should stop too."

Really, stick to stuff that's safe in ridiculous dosages you should never take. Sleep is pretty safe. Noopept is safe. Piracetam is unbelievably safe. L-Theanine is safe to a degree that should be physically impossible. You need choline. I'm pretty sure you need food. Bicycling might not be safe, but if you're going to die from being outside it's probably not because you're on a bike; drunk drivers hit a lot of pedestrians. On that note, you might do well to avoid extremely high amounts of alcohol, and time your alcohol consumption to coincide with periods where you don't need to be entirely focused.


In conclusion

My only concluding thoughts are that maybe I'll stop using the "seminar-style rambling" style entirely. While this is all written exactly the way I wanted, it doesn't seem a very effective essay. The other mode is more dry and clinical. Will have to think on that. Sometimes I think people like less text more than dramatic prose.