Astral Codex Ten

selegiline

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selegiline

Article

selegiline is a recurring brand in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between November 16, 2022 and May 15, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as “none of the 17 patients they found were taking selegiline”; “was he taking the selegiline and adrafinil at the same time?”; “patient who took selegiline and lisdexamfetamine”. It most often appears alongside effective altruist movement, @AutismCapital, @the_megabase.

Metadata

  • Category: Brands
  • Mention count: 2
  • Issue count: 2
  • First seen: November 16, 2022
  • Last seen: May 15, 2024

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

The Psychopharmacology Of The FTX Crash
November 16, 2022 · Original source
Milky Eggs reports a claim by an employee that Sam was on “a patch for designer stimulants that mainlined them into his blood to give him a constant buzz at all times”. This could be a hyperbolic description of Emsam, a patch form of the antidepressant/antiparkinsonian agent selegiline. The detectives at the @AutismCapital Twitter account found a photo of SBF, zoomed in on a scrap of paper on his desk, and recognized it as an Emsam wrapper.
Inline links: @AutismCapital, an Emsam wrapper
Emsam is a brand of selegiline, a medication used since the 1960s to treat Parkinson’s disease. Selegiline is a MAOB inhibitor2. MAOB is an enzyme that breaks down dopamine3. If you inhibit it, you get more dopamine. So in a very broad sense, selegiline gives you more dopamine.4
Inline links: selegiline, 2, 3, 4
Selegiline is an even less magical bullet than usual. People call it an antidepressant, anti-Parkinsonian, and stimulant, and all of those descriptions are accurate. It also does one unrelated thing: it disables a key digestive enzyme that prevents certain foods from killing you. For boring technical reasons, some pharma companies thought this might not happen if you delivered selegiline through a patch on the skin. For other boring technical reasons, the FDA disagreed and said people on the selegiline patch still shouldn’t eat those foods. The pharma companies decided to release the patch anyway, in case some people liked patches better than pills - and so Emsam was born.
Profile: The Far Out Initiative
May 15, 2024 · Original source
Pearce says: solving poverty and curing disease is very hard. And even if we did, it wouldn’t end human suffering. And even if it did, that wouldn’t end animal suffering. Suffering is a fundamentally biological process which requires a biological solution. Pearce found a biological solution to his own suffering; he alleviated his severe depression with the antidepressant selegiline. Selegiline isn’t for everybody; it can take the edge off negative experience, but it hardly makes you perfectly happy forever. To make people perfectly happy forever, we need to take this principle and build on it.
A partial near-term victory would look something like a universally available drug that could make people happy and pain-free with no side effects (so, for example, it wouldn’t turn you into a lotus-eater who sat blissed out on the couch your whole life, any more than seligiline did to Pearce himself). Total victory would require some kind of long-term change to the brain/body system that let it do all its normal work - growing, learning, working, changing - without pain, suffering, or any other negative emotion.