[N]o other class of medications in virtually all of medicine inspires more baseless fears, intentional disinformation, and wild beliefs as do the stimulants used to treat ADHD.
Interestingly, these fears are almost entirely an American phenomenon that hardly exists elsewhere in the world.
[H]aving ADHD lowers a person’s estimated life expectancy by 12.7 years.
From other articles on the site:
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ADHD medication use lowers risk of death by 19%, risk of overdose by 50%, and it reduces hospitalizations
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[T]he risk of substance abuse decreases substantially when [ADHD] patients are treated with stimulant medication
Blitzed is a great reference, it was one of the sources that opened my eyes to the bigger picture iirc
Because it works lol. I’ve never tried it but it’s clear why it does: One of it’s two metabolites is amphetamine itself. At best you get additional therapeutic effect from the original form and the additional isomer, at worst (since the additional metabolite is not extremely toxic) you just have a prodrug for amphetamine.
For those whom it might benefit, a prodrug is a drug which does not have the targeted action but whose metabolite is the active chemical itself - these are sometimes used to bypass drug laws but they have other purposes too.
afaik there are two primary reasons why meth is seen so much worse than amphetamines even though they are both generally legal prescriptions where either is legal:
And so meth is relegated to a last-resort therapy in most cases.
There may be additional factors I’m missing here that aren’t described in the research that I’ve done. There haven’t ever been too many meth users in my social circles and science can often gloss over individual experiences. I don’t mean to say meth is great or even that it’s not bad for most people. I don’t really know. I just know that a lot of the discussion around it is severely distorted which has created some undue prejudices when it is a legitimate therapeutic compound for an illness that plagues significant numbers of the population in Western-styled developed countries where ADHD traits can be strongly discriminated against.
I think methamphetamine is less neurotoxic than amphetamine at the equivalent dosage, although that’s only what I heard - never looked into it to say that I know this for a fact.
Did you know that Ohler has a new book out called Tripped about psychedelics? It’s also up on TankieTube as an audiobook here although I haven’t read it yet but based on Blitzed I’d assume it’s pretty good.
I can see how that could be the case. It’s prodrug action through amphetamine is always going to be lesser on a per gram basis.
Yes but I didn’t know we have it on TankieTube! Maybe I’ll listen to it this weekend. Psychedelics are very interesting to me.
If you do give it a listen I’d love to hear your thoughts on it
I’m going to need more time to work through it. It’s pretty dense with facts, as expected.
Ohler starts by very quickly recounting the tale of William Pickard and his apprehension. I don’t think Ohler even mentioned that his base was in a missile silo. Maybe he comes back to Pickard later.
Then Ohler explains how his mother had Alzheimer’s and his retired federal judge father wanted to treat her with LSD. His father said something like, “if this is such a useful medicine, why can’t you just go buy it at the store?” This was Ohler’s inspiration for the book.
After that he jumps to divided Germany after the end of WWII. He explains what the war time drug policies were and how the situation developed after the collapse of government. He tells how US personnel were impressed with the Nazi policies and worked with former Nazis in their attempts to reassert control and to export those policies to the US. He clearly calls out the policies for being racist and racially-motivated.
Naturally Anslinger’s name comes up a lot and Ohler explains how he pushed UN members to enforce draconian drug laws to crush the market worldwide. Previously Anslinger had engineered a US stockpile on opium, and with production and trade cratered this stockpile became a monopoly. Anslinger used his financial interests in this monopoly to make himself the head of a global drug cartel.
The USSR refused to adopt Nazi drug policy for East Germany or for themselves. Because they continued to allow production (which threatened his plan), Anslinger fear-mongered to the UN that the USSR was planning to flood other countries with drugs. His intelligence sources did not support this conclusion.
That’s about as far as I’ve gotten. The book only really gets started once it jumps to the end of WWII, and this section hasn’t even mentioned psychedelics yet - it’s still focused on speed, opiates, etc. It reads like a direct continuation of Blitzed (so far as I recall it). Of course this is all very important context before jumping into the discussion of psychedelic criminalization. It seems clear that the direction it is going is that psychedelic policies were not based on the drugs themselves, but on the corrupt policies and strategies applied to drugs that existed prior to the psychedelic era.
Excellent summary so far. Is it meeting your expectations?
Yes, definitely. So far he manages to connect the dots in through history in an engaging way and gives enough glimpses into the real world through anecdotes that you can imagine the general vibes on the ground. The geopolitics are also explained enough to understand how the individual facts reflect the bigger picture. It is a bit dense but at the same time he keeps a pretty good pace even if it means skipping some details - it’s not written like an all-encompassing academic reference. It seems to be an honest, well-edited peek behind the curtains of history for popular audiences.
I’ll let you know!
Awww yis! We got a book review/infodump in the pipeline!!