Could America’s Adderall shortage have harmed its productivity?
economist.com
economist.com
Focusing on an Adderall shortage is not seeing the forest for the trees. The root cause of a disruption is bound to be the cause of several other disruptions too. Correlation does not imply causation and all that jazz.
The amount it did to productivity as a whole is debatable and I wouldn't even care to debate it--who cares?
If it was your job to make an argument in favor of increasing production limits next time this happens you could tailor data showing a bigger impact anyways.
The -2.7% in the article is indistinguishable from noise.
Drawing any conclusions from such data is incompetent at best.
Coincidence? Probably. Lots of other things could have explained the productivity dip. Equally, though, many of America’s most productive people rely on Adderall to get the job done. It often seems like half of Silicon Valley, the most innovative place on Earth, is on the stuff. And surprising things can cause gdp to rise and fall, including holidays, strikes and the weather. What’s more, the economic history is clear: without things that give people a buzz, the world would still be in the economic dark ages.
Maybe we cannot conclude this. I think some of the backlash is due to kids being prescribed Adderall.
> without things that give people a buzz, the world would still be in the economic dark ages.
I doubt the economic history is clear on this point.
Prescription meds are not _anything_ like party drugs, either in dose or in isomer. Comparing them to meth is a reactionary talking point regularly brought up among those upset a previously-underdiagnosed illness is suddenly being treated.
The main problem with meth, which Adderall solves, is that the supply chain is some hobo in a trailer rather than nice, government-regulated pharmaceutical plants.
>A report in Britain’s Sunday Times said a dozen sites inside the Palace of Westminster, which includes the House of Lords and House of Commons, tested positive for traces of cocaine.*
* https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/12/06/british-parl...
Edit: We're talking about amphetamine based production being non sustainable - by comparing with tea and coffee I imagine you mean that we should expect people to take amphetamines to the same extant they take other stimulants (ie: to wake up, to work longer, to focus, etc). We shouldn't expect everyone to be on stimulants, we should lower the workload.
This has been a problem for years in academia and in medecine - people taking amphetamines and cocaine to be able to compete in their field. Without talking about expectations in other fields - I've seen my fair share of cocaine and speed in kitchens and in service - I don't think it's sustainable.
If you need speed, the workload is too much for one individual. Speed is not a long term solution.
There's never a chance to resolve any issue with having an honest objective conversation.
Beyond the fact that our society doesn't like those conversations in general, you're never going to have the conversation that needs to be had in this particular case as long as legislators are in bed with the pharmaceutical industry.
I’ve been very gradually decreasing my dose, but the underlying ADHD hasn’t gone away, and the chemical dependency just makes dealing with it that much harder.
I should have just stuck with coffee. My sleep was terrible, and I could only focus on things I was very interested in, but at least I wasn’t permanently addicted to an expensive, highly controlled stimulant that I have to take every day of my life to remain a basic functioning adult.
I cannot possibly imagine becoming addicted to stimulants. It's a chore to remember to take them. Tolerance builds quickly so I have to take regular breaks (or reduce the dosage) or the effects simply disappear. I treat myself to a "cheat day" every once in a while where I just don't take any and it's always extremely not productive but otherwise fine. I'd love to find an alternative but the alternatives seem strictly worse.
When I was younger I would frequently let my Adderall prescription lapse (because it's such an ironic chore to maintain) and sometimes would go months without any medication without any discernable negative effects.
It’s as if my original ADHD has been dialed up to 100.
If you can go months without Adderall, and struggle to even remember to take it, I seriously doubt you ever had ADHD in the first place.
We're in the same boat, I assure you. What I do not understand is that stopping medication makes everything significantly worse. I've been on a lot of different medications and I've never experienced that. Are you at a high dose? It took me a long, long time to realize a lower dose is ideal, but I build tolerance rapidly. Managing this has been significant.
Kicking Adderall cold-turkey can take from six months to upwards of a year, during which you’re uselessly crippled by the combination of your chemical dependency and your underlying ADHD.
Is the hard part for you overcoming the chemical dependency, or trying to adapt to living with untreated ADHD symptoms? My claim is that people who don't have incapacitating ADHD can get off amphetamines fairly easily (possibly with a taper); it's certainly nothing like trying to quit benzodiazepenes, SSRIs, booze, or cigarettes.
4 weeks of class pass by and I was struggling. I could feel a near complete disconnect between looking at a scene and making marks on the paper. At first I thought it was my inexperience with drawing that precisely, but realized that this disconnect felt an awful lot like some other things I had trouble with before my diagnosis. The next week, I split my afternoon dose up and took half right before class. It was like an entirely different activity. My working memory now held enough data to reason about making the marks on the page after looking and before drawing. A fellow student who I'd never spoken to approached me after class and said "I was watching you work today and it was like something opened up inside of you." I went on to become one of the only students in the class to get an A, and another professor from the fine arts drawing program saw a portrait I did hanging in the hall and told my teacher "make sure you tell whoever drew that they're really, really good."
Don't glibly talk about people treating attention deficits like people downing Dexadrine so they can work all night long. My dose is so small I can take it two hours before bed and still sleep— while I haven't been able to have coffee after 2pm for years— but it completely transforms how my brain functions in some very specific and important ways.
tl/dr: you have no idea what you're talking about so stop being a jackass.
In any other context these people are probably fine with marijuana legalization and libertarian-esque drug policy in general ("What you do with your body is none of my business..."). When it comes to Adderall, suddenly everybody becomes moralizing and sanctimonious.
I don't think anybody is proposing prescribing marijuana to children and forcing them into a lifelong dependency on it. If Adderall is just available, sure, whatever - but a lot of current users of it were initially forced into it without a clear understanding of the consequences.
We live in an odd moment where you can get legal, high-quality amphetamines online by speaking on video chat with a nurse practitioner who will ask a bunch of leading questions and conclude the five minute interview by prescribing you a highly effective stimulant. Just like with marijuana in some states, you have to observe the proprieties and treat it as a medical intervention. And just like with marijuana, there are some people for whom this really is a life-changing medication.
The only area where I'd moralize about Adderall is that we give it to so many kids. There are grade school kids taking a daily dose that would keep me up for three days, and doing so for years. That's beyond messed up. But adults, if they want to, should have at it while they can.
The regulatory situation in the US is truly a mess. In other countries I have had the exact opposite experience, such that it took years of tests to justify a prescription that was laborious to maintain. What's the point of a drug schedule if it can be abused so openly?
I agree, and this was largely my point: if you think it's ok for adults to take drugs just for fun, then you should be ok with them taking drugs for any purpose whatsoever.
All we can do is these large, scattershot system-level shifts that result from various drugs. Pretty much every drug makes some things worse and some things better. We don't have an understanding or a technology level that would allow it to be any different.
Despite all that, people often find that, on net, certain drugs are a benefit to them more than they are a detriment. Until we live in the bright shiny future where we can understand and remedy the root causes of mental dysfunction, it seems to me it's a good idea to let people get what relief they can in the meantime.
> some people choose to live with the issues rather than deal with the side effects or on effectiveness of drugs/therapy.
Many, many others would be unable to be a normal member of society without medical intervention.
No one is saying drugs are the only option, but they are an incredibly, consistently effective one. By comparison I'm unaware of any behavioral therapy for any underlying condition that is predictably effective anywhere close to "most of the time."