A Stimpack for Gamers

Wednesday, April 22nd, 2015

I’m still surprised that so-called eSports — spectator video games — have taken off, but I’m not surprised that competitors have resorted to performance-enhancing drugs. It is rather cyberpunk though:

Hours before Steven* was due to compete in his second professional eSports tournament, another team-member offered him a pill. “I had taken Adderall for a while when I was younger to treat my ADHD,” he says. “So I knew from prior experience that it helps with stress and concentration.” Steven, who was 16 at the time and who is now a third year university student in Kentucky, didn’t hesitate. “I took it,” he says. “I shouldn’t have. But it was amazing — like a kind of legal speed. Before, I’d suffered from nerves when competing in front of an audience. The atmosphere got to me. But when I played on Adderall and I was only focused on what was in front of me. It made me a far better player.”

[...]

But Adderall is peculiarly well suited to the medium, where victory depends on a competitor’s alertness, ability to concentrate and hand-to-eye-coordination. As one StarCraft player wrote in 2011 on the game’s official forums: “Adderall is basically a stimpack for gamers.”

Comments

  1. Grasspunk says:

    “But it was amazing — like a kind of legal speed.”

    It is a kind of legal speed. Does he not know that?

  2. Isegoria says:

    Actually, it’s two legal kinds of speed, combined. More seriously though, how is this stuff handed out like candy, while “amphetamines” are vilified?

  3. Bruce says:

    I kind of like knowing there are legal drugs better than the illegal stuff.

  4. Gaikokumaniakku says:

    “More seriously though, how is this stuff handed out like candy, while “amphetamines” are vilified?”

    The bureaucrats get paid if many citizens are dysfunctional.

    If the citizens are not sufficiently dysfunctional due to natural causes, the bureaucrats must stimulate dysfunction.

    One way is to hand out addictive drugs to defenseless kids who don’t have the right to refuse them.

    Then after the kids turn 18, they become clients of the law-enforcement bureaucrats.

  5. Slovenian Guest says:

    I recommend Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, Marketing to Doctors.

    But my personal favorite is how tens of millions of Americans still take statin drugs, used to lower cholesterol levels, even though the lipid hypothesis, that dietary fat causes heart disease, turned out to be pure BS.

    Or didn’t you know that cholesterol is no longer even a “nutrient of concern”?

    Let me quite Karl Denninger on that:

    I’ll say that the so-called medical establishment willfully and intentionally ignoring contrary evidence on the lipid hypothesis along with what appears to be a bad etiological model for coronary artery disease that has become embedded in what’s sold to you is the true extreme position, much as is someone who claims the Earth is the center of the universe or is only 5,000 years old, despite plenty of contrary evidence that is easily accessible should one care to look, simply because “God” said so.

    From the F-35 to drugs, it’s all “keep the problem going so the money keeps flowing”…

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