We’ll keep this to legal over the counter drugs.
Have any of you taken a sleeping pill and a No Doz at the same time? What happened? I knew a guy in college that would do this (and then drink beer:eek: ) but I never did and don’t intend to. So, what is the effect of this? Your brain doesn’t know whether to go up or down so it goes sideways? What happens?
It usually turns me into a babbling idiot… no… wait… that’s without drugs.
I imagine it would be like when I put scotch in my coffee… it turns me into a babbling idiot… um… wait…
I dunno, but besides the basic question of “WHY would anyone want to”… I’m curious myself now to know.
I don’t know, but I would suspect it would make you drowsy with a really quick pulse.
I had a similar effect happen to me in college (before I found out that caffeine has absolutely no ability to stimulate my mental acuity) when I took like 7 No-Doze to try and stay awake while finishing a term paper. I actually woke up with my face on the keyboard and a pulse near 180 (a slight exaggeration maybe…). Anyway, I felt like shit.
Why anyone would want that feeling is a mystery. Obviously that wasn’t what your friend seemed to experience, so who knows?
According to my “Consumer Guide to Medicine”, the only interaction expected from combining caffeine based stimulants with sedatives, sleeping pills or tranquilisers is a decreased sedative effect. OTC stimulants like No-Doz contain (according to the same source) in each tablet about as much caffeine as an average strength cup of brewed coffee.
So if you’re taking them in combination, you’re looking to dampen the effect of the sleeping tablet I guess (can’t see the point myself).
It’s actually not uncommon for combinations of uppers and downers to be prescribed for people with various kinds of clinical depression : insomnia and mild mania can be side effects of anti-depressent medication and sleeping pills are often prescribed to combat this.
Just take Actifed to feel exactly the same.
Most over-the-counter antihistamines cross the blood brain barrier and have central effects – they make you very drowsy.
Actifed (and most other cold remedies) also have a bronchodilator called pseudoephedrine in them. Pseudoephedrine has the nasty side effect of speeding the heart and making you “jumpy” as well – it is a central and peripheral acting beta-adrenergic agonist IIRC.
When I take Actifed, I get a very quick pulse and very drowsy. I go to sleep and have weird unrestful sleep, but I wake up in the morning all dried out and with sinuses draining.