The Speed of Hypocrisy: How America Got Hooked on Legal Meth

this is required reading for everyone who's ever been prescribed speed or taken it. psychological genocide on generation y

http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-speed-of-hypocrisy-how-america-got-hooked-on-legal-meth

*required reading for everyone, ESPECIALLY those who've never touched amphetamines.

so required reading for everybody then

Whining about adderrall and ritalin is as annoying as the Adbusters hippies who claim that all SSRIs/etc. are pure evil.

did you read the article?

i dunno. i'm sympathetic to the idea that ADHD is over-diagnosed and adderall is over-prescribed, but the author's argument that the effects of meth are the same as the effects of adderall falls flat. it would seem to be the most important part of the article, actually, and this is it:

Aside from some foul cutting material, Winnebago methamphetamine and pharmaceutical amphetamine are kissing chemical cousins. The difference between them boils down to one methyl-group molecule that lets crank race a little faster across the blood-brain barrier and kick just a little harder. After that, meth breaks down fast into good old dextroamphetamine, the dominant salt in America’s leading ADHD drug and cram-study aid, Adderall.

This is not exactly a state secret. After legal speed started its comeback as a treatment for Attention Deficit Disorder, The Journal of Neuroscience published a study that functioned as a polite tap on the shoulder. Amphetamine and methamphetamine, the researchers wrote, are “about equipotent” and “produce qualitatively similar behavioral responses.” Both excite the central nervous system in nearly identical ways, flooding and blocking dopamine, serotonin, and adrenaline receptors. Also, meth is meth is meth. The brain responds the same whether it’s produced by the Sinaloa boys and slung by the gram-baggie as glass, or made by Lundbeck Inc. and sold in orange bottles at CVS as the meth-based ADHD drug Desoxyn®.

uh...nuh uh. i hate to give the bad and hated anecdotal argument, but...i have taken adderall myself, i am familiar with lots of people that take adderall, my significant other takes adderall. and growing up in the middle of nowhere, missouri, i have known my fair share of methheads. the effects are not the same. i don't know what else to say about it. so that's a deeply misleading/false thing to lead an article of this nature off with, especially if the reader doesn't have firsthand familiarity with the meth or adderall sides of the equation. and then the author spends the rest of the piece using "speed" to refer to both ADHD medication and meth, equating the effects of the two.

again, i'm not saying there are zero problems with overprescribing adderall, or that there aren't negative consequences that are foreseeable as a result of overprescribing it. but i have trouble taking any of the arguments seriously when i don't agree with the fundamental point at the beginning that meth and adderall are virtually the same. the DNA of humans and chimpanzees is very similar as well...anyway

sloppy reporting by Vice magazine?!????!??!!!!

i'm actually disappointed with vice because they occasionally do good stuff (some of their HBO episodes are amazing), and of all topics, you'd think that they'd make sure an article on drugs would pass the laugh test

I love how dude is all high-and-mighty about buying his Adderall illegally from his drug dealer instead of getting a prescription.

related but better/less hysterical http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/06/30/adult-women-are-the-new-face-of-adhd.html

man this vice article is horseshit

If there were a "theraputic dose" of meth we'd have an apples/apples comparison but the thing is that very few people using a drug for illicit purposes are taking such a dose.

Karl, can you try snorting twice your significant other's adderall dose and get back to us?

that still wouldn't be apples/apples at all because meth is made from fucking household cleaning products and probably not even composed of a majority of amphetamine by weight most of the time

brb, gonna go fuck some household cleaning products to make little methlets ;)

back in law school i knew someone who said she used to do meth. she had an adderall prescription and she'd grind up and snort the pills to get high. she said adderall was about as close to meth as it got. i remember one time she snorted a couple of ground up pills, let out a sigh of relief, and said "now i feel normal." like krusty the clown freebasing moon rocks.

Yeeeah, I had another sentence about dosage/purity that I axed. xxp

Thousands die every year from inhaling too much dihydrogen monoxide. And yet, you don't even need a prescription to purchase bulk quantities of it.

back in law school i knew someone who said she used to do meth. she had an adderall prescription and she'd grind up and snort the pills to get high. she said adderall was about as close to meth as it got. i remember one time she snorted a couple of ground up pills, let out a sigh of relief, and said "now i feel normal." like krusty the clown freebasing moon rocks.

― Spectrum, Monday, June 30, 2014 4:51 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

exactly. >50mg of Adderall is an insane amount of speed and a whole generation is being force-fed this "medicine" while at the same time being inculcated in school with the disgusting and grotesque effects of street meth. adderall is just clean speed. doesn't make the way it's been deceptively marketed to parents and kids any less of a human rights and public health abomination. an ad for adderall in 2002 showed a happy looking kid and mom with a caption along the lines of "Now he takes out the trash."

i think the main takeaway is the unspeakably evil scam by the pharmaceutical complex and their beneficiaries, by pushing speed as "medicine" for an over diagnosed disease, while at the same time stigmatizing and distancing Adderall et al. from street speed. yes, obviously pharmaceuticals are clean and most meth isn't these days (no more biker speed), but there seems to be a concerted effort to separate pharmaceutical amphetamines from street amphetamines that has worked wonders - being shown pictures of "meth mouth" and faces of meth in Drug Ed, then taking your "medicine" for your history test. it's psychological genocide by the pharmaceutical complex that is driven only by profit - about as fucking evil as anything i've ever heard.

unspeakably evil scam by the pharmaceutical complex and their beneficiaries

you could just stop right there and I would have no need to disagree with you. no need to go into false equivalencies.

what if this is a concerted plot to turn us into Ayn Rand

psychological genocide? get a grip son. big pharma is super evil for sure but therapeutic doses of amphetamines are a really effective way of helping those with add/adhd do the shit they need to do.

I guess this would be a bad time to say that the women in the dailybeast article sound a lot like me and I've thought that before and been curious what the pillz would do for me

it's ok though, I have a GP who doesn't believe in ADHD at all, and all the psychologists I've ever seen have been like "don't be silly, that's for hyperactive pre-teen boys, not adult women who got OK grades at school despite doodling incessantly and always forgetting their books, then flunked out of university and drifted through the next 15 years, absentminded and depressed but just about employable"

not to make this all about me but I shall be reading with interest about whether what I'm missing out on is "psychological genocide"

psychological genocide? get a grip son. big pharma is super evil for sure but therapeutic doses of amphetamines are a really effective way of helping those with add/adhd do the shit they need to do.

― adam, Monday, June 30, 2014 5:20 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Absolutely. Same goes for benzodiazepines, SSRI's, etc. But the way kids are talked to about amphetamines and speed is horribly misleading. For one thing, those two words are never used - it's always "medicine" or on the extreme side as the author states, "stimulants." When most kids think of meth, it's a world away from Adderall, even though they're incredibly close in effect when abused - which happens quite a bit, because of plentiful prescriptions and the false notion that it's safer.

Your opinions on this would come across perhaps with a little more bite if your chosen username wasn't "spazzmatazz."

sign me up for some psychological genocide

of all the things I still have, I hate my brain the most

...doesn't that make my opinions on this more credible?

while i don't dispute that our shitty healthcare system makes hurried, ill-informed diagnoses and prescriptions the only economically feasible option for many primary care physicians and that unscrupulous marketing leads parents to believe that these drugs are something their kids need and thus demand from those same hurried, maybe-distracted, maybe-lazy doctors--is there really an epidemic of prescription speed-addled children and young people terrorizing our streets? or is that aspect of the article maybe naomi klein-style fearmongering in order to drive the less dramatic parts of his argument?

and while i think there is a value in preserving a sort of neurodiversity rather than plunging headlong into some grim future of emotionless medicated drones--surely it would be more productive to investigate the societal binds and pressures that leave the neuro-atypical in such a shitty place that they need drugs to be "successful" rather than to tell them to suck it up and that taking those drugs makes them an uncritical stooge.

fwiw i dont fuck w/ ADD drugs because they make me paranoid as hell

is there really an epidemic of prescription speed-addled children and young people terrorizing our streets?

yes

whoa whoa- not saying responsible use of pharmaceutical drugs makes those in need "uncritical stooges" - just the way speed has been reintroduced into our lives is dangerous and misleading, and yes, tons of kids abuse the shit out of amphetamines, partly because of availability, less of a stigma and distance between "hard drugs," and it's fucking addictive as hell.

yes

Damn! And here I thought it was all caffeine-addled young people, racing on Starbucks and Red Bull.

nah that's just me

Purely anecdotal: on and off Ritalin for years after being diagnosed with ADD as an adult (I guess I'd chalk up my lack of childhood diagnosis largely to incuriosity on the part of my parents), never suffered any ill effects (or even much of a speed effect) either while taking it or coming off of it, never had any sense of being in any way addicted. Massively, epically helpful when I've been on it (in terms both of clearing up the primary attention issues/brain fog but also the residual depression/anxiety comorbidity). That's all.

hmmm...sounds equivalent to meth addiction to me. ritalin and meth have a similar chemical composition you know

2014 - the year we all discovered we were addicted to meth

:)

http://i.imgur.com/6Tbqntb.jpg

iirc the point of comparison for ritalin was cocaine.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7771915

when i tried adderall it made me feel like some kind-of towering alien god, so i've made it a point to stay away from it. i'm sure ymmv. i thought it was pretty evil but i don't really need it/shouldn't be doing it anyway so whatever. it was really fun, though!

ADDERALL

NOT
EVEN
ONCE

IMO the worst thing about abusing rx adderall is it leads to pretty regular shortages in supply of the drug for people who actually need it.

I am refusing to read the Vice article btw, there's lots of legit coverage on this topic already.

Por ejemplo, I On Speed: The Many Lives of Amphetamine by Nicolas Rasmussen (highly recommended).

when i tried adderall it made me feel like some kind-of towering alien god, so i've made it a point to stay away from it.

I just got some new eyeglasses and they make me feel shorter and everything else lower to the ground. Glass, crystal, you see where I'm coming from.

Because I don't, I keep tripping over curbs.