I'm wondering what the "side effects" of these drugs are, since I've never taken them. Does anybody out there know from first hand experience?

And what I'm wondering is, if everyone's on these "smart drugs" why isn't the culture getting any smarter? Maybe these substances are the culprit behind all the forms of behavior which have a tinny, paper-thin surface of "smartness" to them -- the endless petty-fact laden anecdotalism, the stiff-grinned, auto-chuckle "ironicalism" that suffuse so much quasi-intellectual commentary and analysis these days. Maybe what anxious pseudo-intellectual types find so relentlessly soothing about these drugs is the way they transform the irregularly organized, goofy rhythms of genuine human thought, what results from the deliberate effort of thinking out loud, into something smoother, more automatic and systematic, but also shallower, more tepid and, ultimately less original -- such as one finds with the greater part of the professional punditry in today's media.