Stimulants can essentially directly increase your intelligence for a time. You think faster, answers can just pop into your head faster, you can code faster. Laser focus, a sense of unlimited capability, too. A more realistic version of the movie "Limitless".
They don't seem to help with creativity, and can do the opposite. It's easy to get concentrated on the wrong thing. I knew a PHP dev on pro vigil long term, and when he'd take an extra dose of stims, you could tell. A flurry of good idea emails in the morning, then disappeared into his office all day.
But... One time, he spent all day trying to optimize the platform for TLB misses. From PHP code, that made a MySQL call every ten lines. Without the hyper focus and drive of stims, no way anyone would waste a day chasing down such crazy thing. (What annoyed me even more was that this useless but "hard" work received a lot of respect from people that understood less...)
So simulants are best taken when one has a clear idea of what to work on and can get into that work right away. In many cases, I think they're a win, and for thought focused work, like students, mathematicians, programmers, simulants should be more widely available legally. Why should we not want most of the population to have performance enhancing medication? As you note, the state is well aware of the effectiveness.
Also note that stimulants can cause psychosis over time, so there is some risk in having everyone use them all the time. But a measured use, like an afterburner, seems like a good thing to have available.
The only counter example I have is professional high-level chess players. In typical tournaments they play seven games each taking three hours each. While it's just as competitive a "sport" as football, they don't take any stimulants stronger than orange juice and green tea.
This is why I don't think any performance enhancing drugs work for the average human. Because if there was, thousands of chess players would already have used and abused the shit out of them.
Chess orgs do have anti drug policies and test, although this mostly seems driven by nitwit ideas from the Olympics and Wada. If coffee works, it's likely amphetamines work too, although taking them during a game might be noticeable.
Yes there are very anachronistic drug enforcement rules in use in chess. My point is that no chess player has ever gotten caught using performance enhancers, nor has any chess player admitted to using any of the legal drugs. There are a lot of cheaters in chess (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borislav_Ivanov), and if there was any mind enhancing drugs that used for chess I'm pretty sure they would be used by a lot of players, legal or not.
They don't seem to help with creativity, and can do the opposite. It's easy to get concentrated on the wrong thing. I knew a PHP dev on pro vigil long term, and when he'd take an extra dose of stims, you could tell. A flurry of good idea emails in the morning, then disappeared into his office all day.
But... One time, he spent all day trying to optimize the platform for TLB misses. From PHP code, that made a MySQL call every ten lines. Without the hyper focus and drive of stims, no way anyone would waste a day chasing down such crazy thing. (What annoyed me even more was that this useless but "hard" work received a lot of respect from people that understood less...)
So simulants are best taken when one has a clear idea of what to work on and can get into that work right away. In many cases, I think they're a win, and for thought focused work, like students, mathematicians, programmers, simulants should be more widely available legally. Why should we not want most of the population to have performance enhancing medication? As you note, the state is well aware of the effectiveness.
Also note that stimulants can cause psychosis over time, so there is some risk in having everyone use them all the time. But a measured use, like an afterburner, seems like a good thing to have available.