My gateway drug was coffee. I started using it daily when I was twelve, which sounds considerably worse phrased like that.
I wasn’t drinking it because I appreciated the delicate aroma of freshly roasted Arabica beans. I was twelve. My culinary standards consisted of whatever could be eaten directly in front of a computer. I drank it because I’d discovered something strange: coffee made me dramatically better at Counter-Strike.
Not slightly better. At least subjectively, I became ridiculously better. My reactions felt faster, I concentrated harder, I stopped drifting away mentally, and I got calmer instead of more agitated. I could lock onto what I was doing for hours.
So naturally, being twelve years old and having accidentally discovered psychopharmacology through competitive gaming, I drank coffee every day. And for years that was what caffeine was to me. Not a beverage. A performance-enhancing drug.
Coffee wasn’t coffee#
This is probably why I never understood people who said they drank coffee “for the taste”. For the taste? What the hell do you mean? You’re drinking a psychoactive stimulant every morning and the exciting part is the flavour?
People would casually tell me caffeine didn’t really affect them, and meanwhile I could practically feel the drug entering service. There was a noticeable before and after. Before caffeine I was tired, unfocused, restless and mentally scattered. After caffeine things clicked into place. Calmer, sharper, awake, interested, focused.
That made me wonder whether I was unusually sensitive to it, or hyper-aware of psychoactive effects in general, or whether my terrible sleep just left more impairment lying around for caffeine to paper over. Maybe it was correcting something in me that didn’t need correcting in everyone else.
I don’t fucking know, and I’m deliberately not going to diagnose my twelve-year-old brain retroactively because I drank coffee and played Counter-Strike well. But I noticed the difference, very clearly, and once you’ve noticed that kind of difference it’s difficult to forget it.
What caffeine is actually doing#
I understood none of this at twelve. It’s worth explaining properly anyway, because the rest of the story doesn’t make sense without it.
Every hour you’re awake, your brain accumulates adenosine, a byproduct of spending energy. It builds across the day and clears while you sleep, and when it binds to its receptors it turns things down: tired, slow, less interested in anything. That is sleep pressure. Think of a bucket filling from the moment you get up.
Caffeine doesn’t empty the bucket. It’s an adenosine receptor antagonist: it sits in the receptor without activating it, like a key that fits the lock and refuses to turn. The bucket keeps filling exactly as before. You just stop being told about it.
And the signal it blocks sits right on top of the reward system. In the striatum, adenosine A2A receptors and dopamine D2 receptors are coupled, and adenosine binding on one side makes the dopamine side less responsive. So block adenosine and you haven’t added dopamine. You’ve taken a hand off the volume knob of the dopamine you were already making.
Compare that to amphetamine. I’ve described dopamine before as a trough that drains and refills to stay level, with amphetamine flooding the trough and blocking the drain at the same time. Caffeine does neither. It un-mutes a signal that’s already there.
That’s why it makes you alert and interested rather than euphoric, and why it can’t rescue you when the trough is empty. Tired and curious becomes locked in. Tired and empty just becomes tired and jittery.
It also explains the part nobody enjoys. Block a receptor for months and the usual story is that the brain builds more of them, so skip a day and you’re running a normal adenosine load against an abnormal number of receptors. Headache, fog, flat mood, the feeling that somebody unplugged you.
Caffeine is a mild drug, not a free one.
Then caffeine changed my life#
Despite drinking coffee, I was terrible at school. Not intellectually incapable, just terrible at actually doing school. I barely passed, and my grades were mostly 2s and 3s, which in the Norwegian grading system is roughly the academic equivalent of “technically alive”. Eventually I failed upper secondary school badly enough that I had to retake a year.
And that was when something changed. I started making ridiculously strong coffee every morning. Not artisanal coffee, not some elegant little espresso with tasting notes of chocolate and hazelnut. I wanted caffeine, lots of it, every single morning.
Suddenly my grades exploded. The same person who had been getting 2s and 3s started getting 5s and 6s. I went from struggling to pass to being one of the people other students considered smart, and that did something to me psychologically, because suddenly I wasn’t “the dumb one” anymore. I was the smart one. And from where I stood, there was a molecule sitting right in the middle of that transformation.
The timetable was almost pharmacokinetic#
There was another pattern I didn’t fully appreciate until later: my morning classes tended to have much better grades than the classes later in the day. An enormous amount of coffee before school, excellent performance early, gradual deterioration afterwards. Caffeine’s half-life runs around five hours, so a big morning dose is well down by the last lesson while the adenosine it was covering has been piling up the whole time.
Obviously school performance has dozens of confounding variables. Different teachers, different subjects, fatigue, boredom, time of day. I’m not claiming my old report cards are a randomized controlled trial. But the pattern was suspiciously neat.
Morning Henrik was apparently a promising academic. Afternoon Henrik had been discontinued due to declining plasma concentrations.
The Counter-Strike experiment#
Gaming was where I’d discovered all of this years earlier, and competitive Counter-Strike gave me the strangest demonstration of it. Around 2015 my team went to a tournament. I didn’t sleep for roughly three days, barely ate for roughly three days, and essentially existed on Red Bull.
For reasons that should offend every textbook on human performance, I played some of the best Counter-Strike of my life. We finished third, we beat a team whose players would later go professional, and somewhere I still have clips of commentators screaming my name. I remember feeling incredible. Not euphoric in the traditional sense. Functional, locked in, fast, every bit of attention pointed at the game.
To be clear, sleep deprivation absolutely destroys cognitive and physical performance, and three days without sleep is not a hidden esports optimization strategy that Big Sleep doesn’t want you to know about. My subjective sense that I was improving doesn’t mean my brain was benefiting. The mechanism says the opposite: the bucket kept filling the entire time, and all I’d done was arrange to stop being told about it.
But what I took from it had nothing to do with whether I actually played well. I could take a substance and seemingly override biology. Tired? Drink caffeine. Can’t concentrate? Drink caffeine. Need to stay awake for three days? Drink more caffeine. That lodged itself very deeply.
Three tablespoons per cup#
Which brings me back to that morning coffee, and to the part of this story I’ve never actually written down.
Three tablespoons of coffee per cup felt almost identical to low dose amphetamine for me.
I mean that plainly. Not reminiscent of, not some pale version of. The same shape: background noise settling down, a willingness to start the boring thing, effort getting cheaper, that slightly forward-leaning state where working is the obvious thing to do rather than a negotiation you have to win against yourself.
Years later, when I took low dose amphetamine, part of me recognised the state immediately. I’d been there before, on coffee.
I can’t give you an honest milligram number for those cups and I’m not going to invent one. Three tablespoons of grounds in a single cup is a genuinely large dose, a few hundred milligrams is a guess and nothing more, and grind, brew method and bean move that figure enormously. I never measured any of it. I’m giving you the spoons because the spoons are the real unit I used.
Now the honest half, because subjective similarity is not mechanistic similarity. Caffeine is primarily an adenosine antagonist, which means it takes a brake off. Amphetamine is a monoamine releaser and reuptake inhibitor, which means it forces the release and jams the recycling. Genuinely different things, happening in genuinely different places.
But whatever is going on across billions of synapses gets reported back to me in about a dozen words. Alert. Calm. Focused. Motivated. Wired. Flat. Two completely different mechanisms can converge on the same handful of labels, and when they do, my brain doesn’t file them as “different neurochemistry, similar readout”. It files them as the same thing, one weaker.
That convergence is interesting, and I think it’s also the dangerous bit. If very strong coffee and low dose amphetamine land in the same place on your internal dashboard, amphetamine stops looking like a different category of thing. It looks like the next notch on a dial you’ve been turning since you were twelve.
That’s a belief my brain formed, not a pharmacological fact, and I could easily be overfitting one person’s memory to a story that flatters the story. But it’s what I think actually happened.
You can modify yourself#
I think this was the actual beginning. Not drugs. The idea behind drugs.
Your mental state is editable.
I had discovered that there was “me”, and then there was “me after caffeine”, and I strongly preferred the second one. Caffeine didn’t merely make me feel good, which honestly would have been less dangerous. It appeared to make me better. Better at games, better at school, more focused, calmer, more capable.
And other people noticed. When you’re accustomed to struggling and people suddenly start describing you as intelligent, that is powerful reinforcement.
You don’t think “interesting, adenosine receptor antagonism appears to have transiently modified my arousal state”. You think holy shit, it works. That distinction matters, because drugs that make you feel pleasure are seductive, and drugs that make you feel competent are worse. Pleasure sounds like indulgence. Competence sounds like responsibility.
The rest of the tech tree#
Caffeine worked for years. Then nicotine arrived, and it felt almost purpose-built for somebody who already viewed stimulants as tools. Coffee took time to come on. Nicotine took seconds: attention narrowed, stimulation arrived with a strange calmness attached, a little burst of reward, mental punctuation.
Caffeine had taught me that chemistry could improve performance. Nicotine taught me it could do it on demand, and the brain adores immediate feedback. Press button, receive altered mental state. Surely nothing has ever gone wrong with this arrangement.
Then methylphenidate, which was where the whole thing became difficult to ignore, because this wasn’t coffee anymore. Things that used to require effort required less, and boring tasks became possible, sometimes even interesting. It felt like I had finally found the settings menu for my own brain. Energy: adjustable. Attention: adjustable. Motivation: adjustable. Wakefulness: adjustable.
Once you think like that, the category “drug” becomes strangely unhelpful. I wasn’t thinking I want to get high. I was thinking I want this parameter changed. That sounds almost responsible. It isn’t. It’s the same thought with better PR, and it survives every argument you can make against getting high, which is why it’s the most effective piece of self-deception I’ve ever run on myself.
Amphetamine followed naturally from the same logic: stronger stimulation, more drive, more confidence, more persistence. Methylphenidate had shown me what intense focus felt like. Amphetamine made it feel like focus had acquired a military budget.
And again, the dangerous attraction wasn’t pleasure. It was capability. You can tolerate an enormous amount of self-deception if the drug makes you feel productive, and there’s something compelling about an artificial version of yourself who seems more ambitious and more interested in everything. At some point you compare sober consciousness against a chemically enhanced state and conclude that sober you is inadequate. Not a fair competition, but brains aren’t known for maintaining rigorous experimental controls.
Eventually, cocaine. Which sounds like an enormous leap when you compress years into a sentence: coffee, nicotine, methylphenidate, amphetamine, cocaine. Very tasteful progression. Like a tech tree designed by Pablo Escobar.
But that’s the strange part. From inside the progression, each step felt much smaller than it looks written down. By the time cocaine appeared the taboo had been dismantled years earlier, and I already knew what it felt like to chemically alter energy, motivation, confidence and attention. Cocaine wasn’t introducing the concept. The concept had arrived when I was twelve years old, with a cup of coffee and Counter-Strike.
That’s what I mean by “gateway drug”#
I’m obviously not claiming caffeine causes cocaine use. If that were true, Scandinavia would have collapsed into a narcotics wasteland sometime around the invention of the office coffee machine. Most people drink caffeine their entire lives without becoming remotely interested in stronger stimulants.
The gateway wasn’t caffeine itself. It was what caffeine taught me: that there could be an enormous gap between my baseline state and my chemically modified state, that fatigue could be fought, attention sharpened, motivation induced. And eventually the obvious question shows up.
If this molecule can do this, what can another molecule do?
That question is basically pharmacology. It is also, depending on your level of self-control, a slightly hazardous hobby.
Looking backwards there wasn’t one great moral collapse. No dramatic moment, no sinister stranger in a dark alley. There was a twelve-year-old who noticed he played Counter-Strike better after coffee, then a teenager who noticed that three tablespoons per cup appeared to rebuild his entire academic identity, then every step after that inheriting the logic of the one before it.
And I’ll say the honest part out loud, because I don’t want this read as a tidy redemption arc: I still find all of it fascinating. That a plant alkaloid can take the brake off your own dopamine signalling is one of the more interesting things about being alive. The difference now is that I understand the invoice arrives eventually, and roughly what it costs.
Caffeine’s lesson was that if you don’t like the way your brain is functioning, chemistry might change it. It took considerably longer to learn the second lesson:
Changing it and improving it are not always the same thing.
Sample size of one, as always.
/Henrik
