Fortune Favors The Bold

pegobry:

“Despite Quintn’s experience with Adderall [getting into fights with hallucinations that insulted his mother], the Rocaforts decided to use it with their 12-year-old daughter, Alexis, and 9-year-old son, Ethan. These children don’t have A.D.H.D., their parents said. The Adderall is merely to help their grades, and because Alexis was, in her father’s words, “a little blah.””

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Attention Disorder or Not, Children Prescribed Pills to Help in School - NYTimes.com (via nicolawilson)

“A little blah.”

Come to this article for the pill-pushing parents, stay for the “social justice” pediatricians who’ve been “forced to” prescribe addictive amphetamines to poor children because public schools are underfunded.

Somewhere in Georgia a pharmaceutical rep is buying the next round.

(via mwfrost)

I just vomited everywhere.

This story is gross.

On the other hand, no one was forced to prescribe me Adderall, and I wasn’t forced to ever take it. And it works for me - I have distinct problems settling into focused tasks in my usual mindset, but I have much better control and efficiency in these tasks when taking it… and no, I’m not using it to stay up all night or endure cram sessions. I nearly flunked out of college TWICE before finding it, and ended up as an effective, well-paced, non-manic student after it. (I even made Dean’s list at one point. Have you ever raised your semester GPA over 3 points in one year? That’s how amazing that was at the time.)

Yet no one gives a shit that

1. Government regulations prevent me from obtaining a prescription with any sort of routine ease, not even with a medical file indicating diagnosis and past prescriptions, not even as a mid-30’s adult with no criminal record
2. In order to obtain a regular prescription, I have to agree to a useless series of psychiatric evaluations as a condition of maintaining a supply of scrips, and these are billed at $300 an hour, natch. The last guy, after making a mistake on insurance matters, used my debit card number (on-file for charging co-pays) to bill me $1,200 without my knowledge. Almost bounced a rent check that month. Canceled my relationship with him. Now stuck trying to find a new psychiatrist in a city where open slots are as contested as rent stabilized apartments.
3. Getting scrips doesn’t matter anyway because the government regulates the SUPPLY of active ingredients in amphetamine salts, almost as if they were radioactive, creating severe availability issues. The pharma companies use their now-puny allotments of the active ingredients to make newer drugs with slightly different formulations (otherwise these drugs do the exact same thing) that are under patent protection and thus are priced at hundreds of dollars per prescription. These choices limit the supply of the existing and generic formulations that doctors are accustomed to prescribing, which means there was a 6-month COMPLETE UNAVAILABILITY of Adderall last year in pharmacies that was widely covered in the media. And no, the scrips are not interchangeable at the pharmacy, not at all. And definitely the costs are not interchangeable, either. 

In the end, I literally cannot obtain regular medical care that I’ve legitimately been prescribed by about a half-dozen doctors over the years because of the political backlash from these boogey man stories about (rare) random yuppies who abuse their children. Those are much more arresting stories than the reality that 80% of the ACTUAL problem lies in a faulty supply, care, and regulatory structure that needs reform.

Signal-boosting these stories does not indicate that you are an astute, careful person who wants to address issues of human suffering and find a better reality for us all. It’s merely proof that you let the media push your buttons. 

Pro-tip (and you, Pascal, work in the media, so I shouldn’t have to tell you this): if a news story is structured to provoke that instant alarm reaction from you (especially if it’s a short article in a magazine or newspaper, or a TV segment particularly), ask some deeper questions before wholeheartedly embracing the message, or you may be doing harm, not good.