Bromantane — Mostly Disappointing

What is it?

It’s on the International Olympic Committee list of banned substances, so it must be good! Well, maybe, maybe not. It was developed in the Soviet Union in the 1980s and came to prominence as a “cheat drug” in the 1996 Olympic Games and under the commercial name Ladasten in Russia a decade later. As such, there are no patents on it and it is not a prescription drug in the USA, where it is listed as a food supplement. I reside in the UK and bought mine online from a UK source, at a price of about £1 for 100mg. So it’s around twice as expensive as Modafinil.
If you head over to Wikipedia you will see that it is described as a mild psychostimulant and physical performance enhancing drug with very few side effects.

It is an anxiolytic (reduces anxiety), is claimed to increase libido and generally falls into the category of nootropic drugs. If you go to YouTube or Reddit you will find descriptions of how amazing it is, and people to whom it has “turned their life around” (in a good way), decreasing ADHD symptoms, increasing focus and wakefulness while increasing verbal fluency and so forth.

I do not doubt their stories, but…

Here is the problem. Almost everyone who takes drugs like these are looking for some way to improve themselves and their mental wellbeing. Typically the authors suffer from one or more of anxiety, depression, ADHD, OCD etc. They are also usually quite high IQ. In other words, they are not “normal.”

I, on the other hand, while being high IQ do not have any of those problems at all and having taken Bromantane at a dose of 100mg per day for a week can report that the effects, if any, are barely beyond placebo. My go to drug is Modafinil and that most definitely has a quite noticeable impact — see my article.

This highlights a problem with almost all nootropic drug reporting — normal people do not take them and so we get a biased picture.

So, whether you find it useful or a waste of money depends entirely on your physiology.