You're talking about the study linked as "2006 study of 122 drugs", right? I can't find amphetamines in the tables or the text, what page is it on? (or was it maybe another paper linked in the article?)
I have a prescription for dexamphetamine, but I don't use/need it a lot, so I have some bottles left that are a bit old--not past the expiration date, which appears to be slightly less than 3 years (after the date of the recipe), on the bottle I'm currently looking at. So I was curious about the amphetamines in particular, and if it's just efficacy deteriorating a bit that's fine, because in my personal experience the effect (which is quickly and clearly noticeable) varies easily by 25% already, depending on so many other factors (like what/how much I eat, how well I slept, stuff like that).
Amphetamines are well known to induce mania, which is one reason they are no longer used, as there were formerly used, to treat depression.
I'd like to see some medical references for the statement "amphetamines don't cause brain damage," because study of long-term neurotoxicity or neuroprotective effects of most medicines is still in very early stages. What medical journal references can you cite on that point for amphetamines?
Prescribed medical use may have been higher, but was overall use higher? Assuming the anecdata in the tweet are true, I just can’t imagine 20-30% of people aged 16-30 were prescribed amphetamines in the 50s.
Anyway, given that medical use was probably high enough back in the day that we can draw reliable conclusions about its long-term effects, are there any studies discussing this?
RE: Quantity section. I wonder if the pharmaceutical amphetamines and/or novel 'research chemical' amphetamines metabolize into the same compounds that are being quantified in sewage. Are they detecting 'meth' specifically or amphetamines generally?
> only $1k per pound now.
Wow that's crazy. An equivalent quantity of generic adderall would cost ~$20k. Meth is effectively at commodity-level prices, if true - the drug war premium seems gone.
I'm skeptical about overdose rates being attributed to meth. Meth is fairly hard to OD on - it'll ruin your life and brain, but rarely kills acutely. I suspect meth being used as an adulterant mixed with other drugs (esp opioids), or novel non-meth psychostimulants, play a significant role in the increase of psychostimulant ODs by ~9x over the last 10 years.
I think a lot of this data is getting mixed up with the (at the time quasi-legal) pyrovalerones and cathinones that were widely available through the clearnet over the past 5 years. Those have much greater acute risks and were highly accessible to people without drug connections.
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However, I'm skeptical of the initial premise of the article:
> Ephedrine meth was like a party drug. […] You could normally kind of more or less hang onto your life. You had a house, you had a job. […] P2P meth was nothing like that. It was a very sinister drug.
Tweakers have been around for decades, I suspect this is just misleading anecdata.
According to wikipedia, amphetamine was first synthesized in 1887, has been used since 1927. Its been almost 100 years.
Ritalin was synthesized in 1954. In use clinically for 50 years.
How's that for data? Pretty good, I'd say. It is well known that these chemicals at high levels eat people's souls, but do not do much physical damage. At clinical doses they're harmless. Some caution in kids for heart shenanigans. They're very well characterized.
I expressed some of the same concerns you did to my doctor when he first prescribed me amphetamine. He told me about his speed freak patients, and how they returned to normal after coming off.
I have a feeling that the massive quantities of prescribed amphetamines we've dumped into the population, including millions of children, is going to age about as well as using radium for wristwatches. But I guess we'll have to see the "evidence" for that.
This is an important topic, not only from the perspective of drug dependency and substance use disorders (SUDs) research, but also re: potentially misleading statements which may discourage use among people who could benefit from stimulant-class medication.
I have treated several hundred individuals with amphetamine, methylphenidate and related compounds, primarily for ADHD in adults and adolescents. Everyone should know that ADHD is a very common disorder, affecting >=4% of all adults. It is a disabling condition in many, perhaps the majority, of those who manifest its symptoms.
A troubling aspect is that only about 1/5 of sufferers seek treatment, and often treatment is suboptimal for a variety of reasons. Staying on topic, the most effective medication strategies remain the "stimulant" drugs.
The article contains errors re: drug effects and history. First of all amphetamine was synthesized well before 1929. What we now call amphetamine was created by a Romanian chemistry Ph.D. candidate, Lazar Edeleanu, in Berlin, in 1887. It was rediscovered in 1927 by Gordon Alles who was unable to patent the compound because of Edeleanu's work 40 years earlier.
Amphetamine was initially marketed in the 1930's as Benzedrine. Significantly the remarkable efficacy of amphetamine in what's now call ADHD was described in 1937, and to this day no other class of drug has been demonstrated to be as effective as the stimulants.
As commented here, stimulant class medications have different effects in those who need them. At the optimal dose, ADHD patients are not "amped up", in fact typically feel calmer, thoughts and actions more controlled and deliberate. In people who don't have ADHD may indeed experience "stimulating" effects.
Furthermore, ADHD adults perform much better with appropriate treatment, whereas unaffected users experience a boost only with simple tasks. Stimulant use will cause decreased performance on cognitively demanding tasks. While college students are known to seek out amphetamines in order to "study better" for their final exams, in fact it's much more likely to decrement their results, myths notwithstanding.
Not to say that drug abuse is not a serious matter. Ethical practitioners prescribe stimulant class medications with great care to assure correct diagnoses and appropriate prescribing practices. No question that not everyone with a license is ethical. I firmly support taking steps to put those deliberately contributing to drug abuse out of business, and into jail.
It's imperative to avoid throwing babies out with the bathwater. Stimulant medications are an extremely useful tool when used along with due vigilance for misuse. Patients in my practice were carefully monitored, and were informed drug misuse could not be taken lightly. Over the years there were a few who were deemed too irresponsible to continue treatment with the medication.
This is a common misconception. Amphetamine was used to treat childhood ADHD going back to the 1930s. (Not to mention that amphetamine was widely used to treat sinus congestion and allergies in everyone, including children.) Medical amphetamine usage was significantly higher in the 1950s and 1960s than today. We’ve been on a long term secular decline in amphetamine usage (along with caffeine, nicotine and other stimulants).
I have a prescription for dexamphetamine, but I don't use/need it a lot, so I have some bottles left that are a bit old--not past the expiration date, which appears to be slightly less than 3 years (after the date of the recipe), on the bottle I'm currently looking at. So I was curious about the amphetamines in particular, and if it's just efficacy deteriorating a bit that's fine, because in my personal experience the effect (which is quickly and clearly noticeable) varies easily by 25% already, depending on so many other factors (like what/how much I eat, how well I slept, stuff like that).
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