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Move over marijuana. Bye-bye cocaine. See you later anabolic steroids…The world is entering a new drug war, and the first big shot was not fired in the streets of border town Mexico, but in the prominent medical journal Nature, and this report, like a bomb, has produced a flurry of counterattacks from both sides.

Although the biggest causes of death worldwide are cardiovascular, infectious, and cancer-related, the push for new pharmaceuticals from many companies will not be cures for those top three killers, but will focus on three other areas: appetite/weight control, sleep, and memory. Some experts believe that in ten years, we will be able to, with the right drugs (if we can afford), fine-tune our weight, exact sleep duration, and memory functions as easily as we now tune-out commercials on our digital video Tivos.

In the drug underground—somewhere in that murky space between the legal and the actionable—a quiet revolution has been brewing in the use of so-called “smart drugs”. In the past few decades doctors have used amphetamine derivatives, like the ever-more popular Ritalin, to treat the ever-more established diagnosis of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). But Ritalin was just one of the first to tinker with attention and wakefulness, and in 1998, the first good drug treatment for narcolepsy (the uncontrollable desire to fall asleep at most any time) was released.

Modafinil (commercially known as Provigil) proved to be a wonderful advance for narcoleptics, and, as often happens with new drugs with brain effects, it was tested illegally in the underground of clubs and college campuses, and found to be very effective in keeping even normal people awake and functioning seemingly at a high level for long periods of time. The American military, which long relied on amphetamine-type drugs, soon adopted modafinil as the drug of choice for special op soldiers who needed to stay awake for days at a time. Many college students found modafinil as an especially effective study aid, and one survey estimated that on some U.S. campuses, 25% of students have used modafinil or similar.

But the use of this drug in many cases has been, at best, “off-label”; that is, used for problems not FDA approved, or illegal, especially by students who obtain pills diverted from friends with legitimate prescriptions. And a growing controversy: should these drugs, especially Provigil, be released for general use, to be taken by anyone who wants an extra edge? Advocates claim it’s safe, non-addicting, and that wider release would be good for society.

This call for liberalization of mind-enhancing drugs such as Provigil has been a minority opinion, considered highly questionable by the majority of experts who fear wider release would result in abuse, brain damage, addiction, or injustice (the argument is only the well-off could afford regular use, and the rich already enjoy many advantages). So imagine the uproar when seven high power scientists from Harvard, Stanford, and the Universities of Oxford, California, and Pennsylvania published this recent report in Nature saying, basically, free these drugs for wider use…it’s our right, and will be good, even advance, mankind. The article is very readable; you may or not agree with it, but I suggest it to you. Next week, more on mind drugs.