Comment by taxicabjesus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by taxicabjesus | Hacker News Reader

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I don't have a specific source, it's just the impression that I get from having talked to a few people who had trouble with meth amphetamine. One friend's husband brought cocaine home. That was nice, but it got expensive, so they switched to Meth. After a while she realized she didn't like what it was doing to her personality, so she quit. Then the anxiety started. Xanax helped her not care, then she discovered Alcohol...

Here's a random quote from a mainstream medical source:

"Mood disorders similar to hypomania and mania can be elicited during intoxication with amphetamines. Depression can occur during withdrawal, and repeated use of amphetamines can produce antidepressant-resistant amphetamine-induced depression. ..."

- "Amphetamine-Related Psychiatric Disorders" (emphasis added), http://emedicine.medscape.com/article/289973-overview

Mad in America makes the case that mental health treatment is a make-work endeavor. http://www.madinamerica.com/

Are you really comparing meth to ADHD drugs?

Whoever wrote the Wikipedia page on Ritalin [1] conflates Amphatamine and methylphenidate. "Amphetamine" appears on 24 times on Ritalin's page, 5 times as "amphetamine and methylphenidate"

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methylphenidate

Adderall [2] is an amphetamine.

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adderall

I know they're amphetamines, but surely there's a big difference between that and smoking street meth (which is what I assume your friend switched to from cocaine)

Well, if the ADHD drug in question is Adderall, which is an amphetamine, the mechanism of action and effects are largely similar. And Desoxyne IS meth. Methamphetamine actually metabolizes into amphetamine in the body.

Methamphetamine is an ADHD drug. I take it for my ADHD, with a legal prescription of course.

Ironically it's the most subtle and gentle of all the ADHD stimulants, at least at therapeutic doses. It has a bad reputation because of the abuse of illicitly manufactured meth available on the black market but it's completely unwarranted.

Oh good, an anecdote. Those are always indicative of larger data sets, and definitely not meaningless and heavily biased.

It's pretty irrating to support stigmatizing/banning a drug that millions of people use and get therapeutic effects from based on a few unrelated anecdotes.

true to form, user "too long didn't read" didn't read the links.

My position is simply that there is underlying causes behind people's complaints. Stimulant-prescribing doctors would rather suppress the symptom than investigate.

Robert Whitaker's Anatomy of an Epidemic discusses amphetamines on pages 64, 219, 228-29,236, "See also Benzedrine; Ritalin". Ritalin is covered in more depth: case studies, as cause of juvenile bipolar disorder, hiding the evidence, risks/side-effects, and silencing dissent.

More information about this book can be found through the Mad In America link above; I directly linked to its information page in another comment.

People tend to like the stimulants. They tend to hate the sedatives. Some stimulant users end up being forcibly sedated with "anti-psychotics" (courtesy of a court-order), because they couldn't keep their stimulant use under control and became psychotic.

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