> it induces hyperactivity and harms concentration in healthy people
This is wrong. They don't like to talk about it, but air forces around the world have been giving amphetamines to pilots since WWII. They're used to enable pilots to maintain focus for long missions. The US Air Force conducted studies on amphetamines in the 50s and concluded that they do indeed improve pilots' performance.
>I let some non-ADHD friends try a low dose of Ritalin when I had switched off of it and had some left over, and they were bouncing off the fucking walls -- I would strongly not recommend taking stimulants unless medically necessary.
>For people with ADHD, they can be truly life saving. For recreational use, avoid.
Just so you are aware, amphetamines are and have been used widely, and successfully, by people without ADD/ADHD. It has addictive qualities for sure, but I appreciate that people are allowed to try whatever substances they would like to try.
> For folks without ADHD, you should know that stimulants, like Ritalin and Adderall, do not usually cause the same response as in non-ADHD people.
I can confirm; I have ADHD and this even applies to stronger stimulants like cocaine. Cocaine doesn't do much for me, so I never understood why my friends were always bouncing off the walls while I was just chilling, like "what's the big deal with this drug". I didn't get it until I was diagnosed with ADHD and understood how our brains are wired differently.
> I suspect I also get hositility from pointing out a lot of people think their medication is helping them but they really don't know about long term effects, but don't want to hear that they might be, you know, bad.
Except it appears as though it's actually pretty good. Long-term treatment with amphetamines appears to decrease abnormalities in brain structure and function in people with ADHD and improves function in several other parts of the brain. Wikipedia provides 3 citations for this, but only one study appears to be available online: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3801446/
> It’s amphetamine. The energy is from the amphetamine.
Energy still comes from food, and if you forget to eat on stimulants your body will eventually catch up with you.
Like coffee, stimulants let you better tap into that energy.
> The mechanism of action (norepinephrine and dopamine reputable inhibition) isn’t far from that of cocaine or methamphetamine.
Yep, they’re all stimulants. ADHD meds however, are manufactured in very controlled conditions, and taken in specific doses. Street drugs are more variable in quality, ratios, ingredients and strengths, and so not relevant to the treatment of ADHD.
Methamphetamine is a legitimate treatment for the most severe ADHD cases, it’s often a last resort. It’s sold as Desoxyn. It’s rarely used, but it _is used legally and successfully_.
> Let’s be real here. Amphetamine is known to skew one’s self assessment of their performance while on the drug.
If you don’t need it, stimulants are going to have a different effect.
People with ADHD are in my experience, going to be able to self-assess performance on their meds better than off them.
Don’t assume one experience is universal, especially when we’re talking about neurodiversity. Even among those with ADHD, experiences are not universal. We may rhyme, but we don’t always repeat.
> I would at least try the meds for a couple of months.
Whether or not you have ADHD, amphetamines will improve your life if you measure quality by how much you get done.
So I think the real question is: Are you prevented from functioning according to your expectations without daily amphetamine use, or not? And do you even see that as a problem?
I've used various (legal) amphetamines and modafinil variants for years, and they always made me very productive and happy, because I like getting things done. They also make me very high-energy.
Disclaimers:
- Amphetamines are physically addictive
- Being productive is psychologically addictive
- Take time off, or the productivity effect will even out, just like too much coffee.
>Neurotypical people actually get a kind of high from amphetamines
This is intellectual dishonesty to the point of nausea.
Amphetamine is very well understood as far as drugs go and affects those with and without ADHD in the same way. Neurotypicals also experience increased focus at therapeutic doses, just ask anyone who's taken it as a study aid, and ADHD-sufferers also experience a high from the flood of dopamine.
The most damning evidence for me is the absolutely obsessive relationship many ADHD patients have with their medication. It's immediately obvious and unlike any I know of.
Society (American society in particular) has just decided that the medical benefits of amphetamine outweigh the risks for people with ADHD vice versa for those without.
> Lastly, I've recently been diagnosed with ADHD and I'm trialling dexamphetamine, yet another phenethylamine, and it's been life changing the effect it's having on me.
What have you noticed since starting? I also have recently started treating ADD with this, and I'm starting to become much more in tune with my mind, and my emotional regulation issues are practically non-existent.
> I can personally attest to being at least 50-70% more creative / productive as an engineer when I'm using stimulants in low-doses and eating right.
I'm not saying that ADD/ADHD aren't a thing (as it happens, I'm pretty on the fence about that), but I just wanted to point out that pretty much everyone will be more productive/creative when using stimulants and eating right.
> Before going down a road that involves powerful stimulants that have a high likelihood of abuse or misuse -- the danger is that they're fun, and one develops a tolerance, just like other similar illegal drugs -- it might be worthwhile to investigate a mediation practice, or other exercises to improve your attention. If you're already high functioning its likely not as bad as it seems.
Sure sounds like advice to me. You're not just throwing this stuff into the ether for a purely academically interested observer.
> However, being on stimulants is very exhaustive for your body, and it temporarily stops the racing thoughts many people struggle with, even some time after taking it.
Exhaustion is not the mechanism by which stimulants calm people with ADHD, as far as we understand it. Very approximately their internal world is less stimulating than that find restful so they’re constantly looking for more stimulation to reach a pleasant level. The stimulants let them reach that level without more environmental stimulation. One of my friends doesn’t drink anything with caffeine in it because it puts him to sleep.
> I can have a low tolerance for working on things that do not interest me, finding it almost physically impossible to apply myself.
It sounds to me like you're describing the human condition more than ADHD. Amphetamines have been shown to increase performance on a wide variety of tasks for most people, the fact that they help you should definitely not be taken as a sign that you have ADHD.
> What if amphetamines (or some other stimulants) were to become a thing in the IT industry and that workers had no other choice to take some to meet standard performance or be unemployed? All for the benefit of the employers?
There is a culture of amphetamine use in the IT industry. I haven't seen articles on it in a while, but I thought it relatively accepted that a lot of people who go find ADHD diagnoses don't actually have the disorder, and are just looking for a dextroamphetamine scrip.
> and to motivate an action to be performed vs procrastinating
I’ve watched several peers go down the path of trying to use stimulants for motivation starting in college and again later in my career. There’s no denying that it works at first. They are stimulants, after all, and they stimulate people especially well when they first start taking them.
The problem is that the motivation from stimulants is famously prone to tolerance and rebound effects. It’s also very prone to habit-forming associations. I’ve noticed several people try to use prescription stimulants in an “as needed” fashion when they need to get a lot of work done quickly and they don’t really want to do it. It doesn’t take long before it’s obvious to their friends and coworkers when they’re having an off day or an on day, even though they might deny any rebound effect. It gets scary when they do this so long that they forget how to self-motivate without taking stimulants because they’ve built such a strong mental association between “I have a lot of work to do” being a trigger for “I should take another pill today” or even “I’ll save this work until tomorrow when I can take a pill”. It gets even scarier when tolerance sets in (to the motivating/stimulating effect, not so much the intended attention-enhancing effect) and they’re now flirting with escalating doses, double doses, combinations with ‘nootropics’ to boost effects or ‘reduce tolerance’ and other slippery slopes.
The short-term productivity boost shouldn’t be denied, but I think it’s also short-sighted to hold these drugs up as a free lunch productivity boost. Let’s be honest: A little experimenting here and there isn’t going to show tolerance, extensive rebound, psychological associations, or other effects, but that’s also what gets people in trouble when they start to think it’s a free lunch. There’s a reason the traditional ADHD treatment approach involves taking the same dose every day rather than encouraging the patient to build psychological associations between taking the drug to alter their mood state.
The strange part about this conversation is that if I wrote all of the above text about drinking 2 energy drinks at the start of a work day, few people would argue with it. The tolerance, rebound, and dependence effects of caffeine seem to be well known in pop culture. For some reason people with a little exposure to prescription stimulants seem to think that the normal rules don’t apply to them, at least at first.
A lot of people who have minimal or sporadic experience with stimulants seem to think they’re no-strings-attached productivity boosts, but there’s no free lunch. The brain will adapt over time.
Yea stimulants probably don't really offer much of a performance boost to an already healthy brain - but if your brain is already defective from fatigue they can keep you going beyond what's humanly possible.
The Germans didn't ply their soldiers with speed in WWII because it improved their reflexes or their tactics - they did it so a soldier could fight when his brain would otherwise be mush from not sleeping in days. Anyone can benefit from just having more usable hours in a day.
the germans tried this with their troops in ww2 - hint: it didn't go so well for them.
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