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Comment by LoganDark | Hacker News Reader

> I still struggle to see how it's used recreationally.

- Adderall keeps you awake. Some people use that to be awake for very long periods of time. Long drives, marathons, etc.

- Adderall can make boring tasks seem engaging, so it can be used, for example, to help a student study. Combining that with no need to sleep that night, can become a bit of an unfair advantage.

- Adderall can cause a high, even though I've only ever experienced that with pure dextroamphetamine. For me it caused everything to feel warm and pleasurable somehow, the first couple weeks I was taking it.

Now I feel nothing except the wakefulness, although when I stop taking it for a while and then start taking it again, sometimes I will spontaneously do every chore that's been building up over the past months in a single day. That's just how it goes for me apparently.

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That's not recreationally. That's actually a good, useful drug effect (even if not specifically for ADHD).

I'm more than a little pissed that governments don't let us use drugs like this responsibly.

Governments treat their citizens like children to be watched over, not like adults capable of making decisions. Until that changes, expect to be pissed off.

> I'm more than a little pissed that governments don't let us use drugs like this responsibly.

I mean yes. Proper education and harm reduction is vastly superior to this "controlled substances" bullshit.

> Adderall keeps you awake

For many (not all) ADHD'ers, amphetamine or caffeine makes them sleepy.

> Adderall can make boring tasks seem engaging

This is true

> so it can be used, for example, to help a student study ... can become a bit of an unfair advantage

Unfair? This isn't sports. Nobody is being cheated by a study-enhancing drug.

> Adderall can cause a high, even though I've only ever experienced that with pure dextroamphetamine. For me it caused everything to feel warm and pleasurable somehow, the first couple weeks I was taking it.

Interesting. FYI ADHD people feel none of that. If anything, the opposite: on stimulants ADHD people feel relaxed and normal, bringing them down from hyperactivity and allowing them to focus on their life.

> For many (not all) ADHD'ers, amphetamine or caffeine makes them sleepy.

You're right, I was mainly speaking about people without ADHD using stimulants.

> Unfair? This isn't sports. Nobody is being cheated by a study-enhancing drug.

No, but it can lead to bad health effects for the student, and bad habits like dependence.

> Interesting. FYI ADHD people feel none of that.

I guess my ADHD diagnosis must be mistaken then? And my executive dysfunction must come from somewhere else...

ADHD is not a single neurotype. As even the most basic example, multiple different expressions of autism can each have ADHD.

> on stimulants ADHD people feel relaxed and normal, bringing them down from hyperactivity and allowing them to focus on their life.

Stimulants still help me regulate my sleep cycle and focus, but I don't think I experience hyperactivity from not being on them. (anymore at least; when I was younger I almost couldn't sleep without melatonin. That resolved itself before I ever touched stimulants, though.)

I have heard of people with undiagnosed ADHD self-medicating with meth. Slightly different than people without ADHD using stimulants recreationally. I personally hope to never touch meth because I heard it can ruin one's relationship with other stimulants, and I don't want my medication to become any sort of recreational thing because I need to depend on it and not seek highs, but I feel like self-medication can be perfectly valid if someone knows what they are doing. Big if though.

My blanket statement was perhaps too broad. There are less than 10% of ADHD people whom do not demonstrate the paradoxical response to stimulants. That said, the percentage of misdiagnosis is at least that high, which makes one wonder. Mild bipolar is often misdiagnosed as ADHD, for example, and often discovered exactly because stimulants don't work as expected.

I missed on first read that you said the stimulants only had that high for the first few weeks though. That sounds different from what I understand to be the neurotypical response.

> Stimulants still help me regulate my sleep cycle and focus, but I don't think I experience hyperactivity from not being on them.

You may have the distracted variation rather than hyperactive.

> You may have the distracted variation rather than hyperactive.

Well, I do have a dissociative disorder. Though I'm fairly sure I would be ADHD combined type, because I do have extremely hyperactive moments.

By the way, "the distracted variation" is called inattentive.

> Adderall can cause a high

> Interesting. FYI ADHD people feel none of that.

Please don't speak for a whole group of people when you don't know what you're talking about. Euphoria is very common when people with ADHD first start taking amphetamines, it just goes away after a week or so.

> Interesting. FYI ADHD people feel none of that. If anything, the opposite: on stimulants ADHD people feel relaxed and normal, bringing them down from hyperactivity and allowing them to focus on their life.

That is common myth. It's a matter of dosage over time. If one takes 120mg of Adderall in one go, then I can assure you they will not be calm nor relaxed. The relaxed feeling comes with a build of tolerance over time and with the lowest therapeutic dosage possible.

I won't deny that people with ADHD might perceive more benefits from stimulants than those without ADHD. I person with poor vision probably would perceive more benefit from eyeglass than I do with 20/20 vision. The glasses work the same for both of us, I just don't benefit from the effects. Also, stimulants do not work for about 10%-30% of people with ADHD, and if the reactions were truly that different, then there would be no controversy about testing for ADHD. It'd be as simple as just examining the effects of a pill.

In the beginning, I felt euphoric from stimulants and I am ADHD as they come. On the rare occasion, I still might get hit with a glimpse of it. Though that is typically after I take a break from medication for some time.

Back when I was in college, I cannot tell you how many people I knew with legitimate ADHD that used to rail Adderall and Adderall XR pills (yes, the XR are just as easy to abuse).

Check out this subreddit if you care. Search for the term "ADHD" and you will see how the medication affects a portion of the ADHD population:

https://www.reddit.com/r/StopSpeeding/

There’s a lot of myth in this myth-correcting post. I’ve doubled dosed by accident and although I felt like my heart was going to explode (and was very anxious over that), I still felt absolutely nothing resembling a euphoric high.

If you have good vision you do not benefit from glasses. In fact it makes things worse, as those with good vision are able to use their eye muscles to adjust focus but the glasses make that harder.

> I’ve doubled dosed by accident and although I felt like my heart was going to explode (and was very anxious over that), I still felt absolutely nothing resembling a euphoric high.

Doubling one's dosage does not mean much without stating the prescribed dosage. 5mg => 10mg is much different than 60mg => 120mg.

Also, the euphoric high tends to become lessened the longer one is on stimulants, even if the dosage is increased, due to neuroadaptation, i.e., a decrease in dopamine receptor availability and changes to downstream signaling effects of dopamine transmission.

Increasing the dosage on the second day of medication vs second year of medication may likely have significantly different effects in regards to the presence of euphoria.

> If one takes 120mg of Adderall in one go, then I can assure you they will not be calm nor relaxed.

If one takes 120mg of Adderall in one go, and they don't have a tolerance, I'd be surprised if their heart doesn't explode.

Unless you are a Finnish super solider like Aino Koivunen

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aimo_Koivunen

Notably, his heart almost exploded. It was 200bpm a week afterwards, and if not a conditioned soldier he likely would have died a long time before.

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