Weed on the other hand will send me one a 1 month train to hell smoking every day falling deeper and deeper into a depressive haze and there's nothing I can do about it.
Everybody is different, I guess.
The answer to that question that I see is that the government is responsible to step in when someone else get hurt under humanitarian obligations. If you make someone responsible for an outcome then they will likely want to implement rules to reduce their own risks.
The rules should of course be proportional to the risk and balanced. It make sense that drugs and driving should not be combined and which outcome can't be fixed afterward. Parenting and drugs are also a pretty problematic area, but it is difficult for the government to make a law against that combination without banning drugs completely. If people took drugs while working with heavy equipment, makes decisions that impact people, work within health care or education, then there is an additional increased risk that the government is expected to manage.
ADHD medicine, especially the non-self medicated versions, have the opposite effect for the government. It reduces the risk that they have to step. If all the other alternatives have failed and you found a solution that do work then that is good and the law might then need to change to incorporate that success. It doesn't however change the reason why the government might still want to tell you what you can and cannot put into your own body.
Where I live we also have universal health care and meth stresses the heart quite a lot. The result is that when the heart start to fall apart it is the government that has to pay for repairs, and those are often quite expensive surgeries that need to be redone every few years. I am no doctor so I can't answer if 10mg is small enough to be safe, but if I was taking it I would find a doctor and do regular heart checkups.
"It doesn't work in the USA" is increasingly very poor evidence when it does work many other places, and often has for over a half a century.
Similar, I would want the government to step in and pay for healthcare when a victim get hit by a car driven by an uninsured driver. It is not fair to let the victim die just because someone else were unable to take responsibility for their own faults.
So to make a general theory, people should be responsible for their own actions when there is a high likelihood of repayment for wrong doing. For those things individual freedom is positive. For other actions which is irreversible and where individuals will sometimes be unable to take responsibility, and we expect the government to step in, then individual freedom may be balanced against risk.
Everyone (I think) did meth except me and one other guy, a Native American. It was expected. The pace was set by meth. Lunch was about 10 minutes. Often we would get to work like 3AM for pours. I lasted like 3 months and couldn't handle it any more.
After awhile guys would burn out and not show up. No big deal, replace them with another guy. I saw my supervisor later at a restaurant. He told me how he had tried at one point tried to commit suicide. The resulting impacts on the former employees lives (and the lives of their families and associates) wasn't the companies problem so long as the building went up fast.
That company is still around too. No, not going to name and shame.
While I'm generally in favor of people being allowed to put whatever they want in their bodies there is significant moral hazard and danger. Particularly with drugs like meth and heroin.
> I would argue the bad cases you’ve seen are from people with no self control.
Please reconsider this position. It is outdated and goes against all recent evidence about the science of addiction, and the chemical changes that occur in the brain to cause addiction. Addiction is a medical condition. It has as little to do with self control as having cancer does.
Compared to dexamphetamine:
- It has less cardiovascular impact (no cold extremities, no excessive sweating, less "fight or flight")
- It has a lower impact on sleep (I can take a nap while under the influence)
- It lasts longer (9 to 12 hours, compared to 4 to 6)
- It makes living a balanced live easier (dexamphetamine would feed perseveration, meth makes switching tasks much easier)
- No noticeable comedown
Some of the downsides of methamphetamine include:
- A much higher abuse potential (however, I have never felt the need to exceed my daily dose. I want to live a normal live, not experience some shallow euphoric bliss.)
- It is unclear what the neurotoxic properties are in therapeutic dosages.
- The social stigma
Methamphetamine is routinely prescribed for the treatment ADHD (also obesity and narcolepsy, amongst other off-label uses), and is sold under the brand name of Desoxyn (in the US). Meth IS medication!
On that note, maybe don’t believe everything you read about drugs online.
Isn't it Dexamphetamine that is the routine treatment for ADHD? As far as I understood, methamphetamine has much stronger effects than dexamphetamine, also meth been prone to cause more adverse effects and have more neurotoxicity than the dex counterpart?
Maybe I'm completely off base here.
A lot of the information about methamphetamine is, bluntly, propaganda. For example, there seems to be nothing about methamphetamine that is uniquely harmful to teeth, but "meth mouth" is a common trope. When taken orally at therapeutic doses it's not clear methamphetamine is any more harmful than dextroamphetamine, but it's certainly possibly it has more scope for abuse. It's certainly dangerous at high doses! Unfortunately it's hard to find hard data and not drug war propaganda.