There are so many kinds of chemical stimulants why are amphetamines the thing ADHD patients need?
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Cocaine lasts like 15 minutes, is super expensive, and is refined from a plant.
Amphetamines can last 8 hours if used with delayed release coatings and are cheap and easy to produce.
It’s also a different kind of high than you’re thinking. The amphetamines they give to people with ADHD are more “sit down and read this book” and street amphetamines are more “i want to claw your face off so you stop staring at me about the spiders under my skin.”
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Stimulants used for ADHD treatment have a really high potential for abuse. Using stimulants that are more attractive for abuse increases that risk.
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Ritalin actually works in a similar way to coke… it’s a reuptake inhibitor that stops dopamine getting mopped up.
All drugs are trialled and *re-trialled* to find potential uses. Frequently, a medication developed for one purpose is found to be very effective for another, and many medications are designed to be variations on an existing medication. How effective a drug is directly plays into how often we prescribe it, but there are other major factors such as the cost, safety record and availability.
Amphetamines were discovered in the early 1900s and showed promise for treating a wide range of disorders, one of the first of which was narcolepsy. This led to “safe” medications like Benzedrine, which could then be tested as potential treatments to other disorders like ADHD. Unfortunately, they turned out to be highly addictive and began being abused, so they became heavily controlled. Adderall was developed as a longer-lasting and less addictive version of amphetamine specifically for ADHD.
Cocaine, in contrast, only has very limited medical use as a local anaesthetic. We never developed a form of cocaine that could be tested for ADHD so we didn’t. It’s also clearly not very attractive as a potential ADHD medication because it’s half-life is simply too short; nobody is going to try developing a cocaine-based drug for ADHD knowing that it’s only going to last 15 minutes.
One thing I haven’t seen anyone mention is that Wellbutrin (Bupropion) is an anti depressant with a similar action to cocaine and currently I am using it to treat my depression and my adhd (far less effective than amphetamines for adhd but better than nothing and less heavy side effects)
I would say there are probably no cocaine-like drugs prescribed specifically to treat adhd for the reasons pointed out by others, wellbutrin is better at mood-boosting than focus, it just helps ME with both. I still need amphetamines to do paperwork.
Sure they are chemically very different but Cocaine and Bupropion are both Norepinephrine and Dopamine re-uptake inhibitors. Wellbutrin just lasts much longer so it is medically useful and it doesn’t come with a crash. It is even abused in lue of cocaine in some places (don’t do this, it is designed to not be an abusable drug, it will fuck you up)
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Because heaven forbid you actually enjoy your meds. It’s why they no longer prescribe Xanax and Klonopin, but stick you with half-effective beta blockers for anxiety these days. It would be awful if I not only didn’t have anxiety but also enjoyed my life temporarily to make up for the shitty times I’m anxious (ie most of the time I’m not medicated)
I think the biggest distinction that can be made is that of clinical safety. When Amphetamines are prescribed and used correctly for the treatment of neurological problems such as ADHD, they rarely result in an addiction that extends past “I need these to function normally.” This is unhealthy when it is applied to many other substances/products, but you wouldn’t call a cripple unhealthily addicted to their wheel chair.
Medical amphetamines have been chemically designed to significantly reduce the potential for adverse effects, overdosing, addiction, and unintended physical/chemical responses and changes. In essence, when used CORRECTLY, you could arguably say that it is a safe version of other street drugs as a way of explaining to a lay person;however it is more apt to say that Methamphetamines are a dirty version of Amphetamines. This is similar to the way PTSD survivors have been seeing increasingly positive results from CBT (cognitive behavioral therapy) and Ketamine therapy whereas buying street ketamine will often result in a near instant addiction followed shortly by destitution and death. Methamphetamines, such as cocaine, are in essence, a dirty version of amphetamines. MAs are synthetic Amphetamines that are “cut” (synthesized/mixed) with toxic substances to increase the “hit” they provide to the neurological system which is extremely dangerous, damaging, and deadly.
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