There are so many kinds of chemical stimulants why are amphetamines the thing ADHD patients need?
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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.
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