I read an about the damage meth does to you and how it takes way too long to recover from it. How is Ritalin different even tho chemically they are cousins?
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Taking a drug to get high and taking a drug to have therapeutic effect depends on the dosages, getting high on a drug requires a high dosage and does more harm to the body. Ritalin or methylphenidate can be very harmful when used to get high as some people do although meth is more harmful because it’s often made on the street and has other cutting chemicals added or low purity and has solvent in the final product
They are also both stimulants but not really that related, phenidates are very different from amphetamines chemically. Methylphenidate works more by preventing the brain from taking back it’s dopamine and norepinephrine and leaving it circulating throughout the brain(ndri) amphetamines do this as well but also flood the Brain with even larger quantities of dopamine and norepinephrine.
dosage, frequency and purpose of use.
as an example the stimulants used to treat ADHD are dosed much smaller than what you take if you are trying deliberately to get high. Like I am on 30mg of Vyvanse. Which is tiny compared to how much a habitual user of meth uses in a day.
I only take one dose per day. Some people take a top up but even then they aren’t shooting or smoking 3-6 times a day.
Delivery is also important the next generation of ADHD stimulants are slower acting and longer lasting. Ritalin is really old and sort of like using a record player instead of a iPhone. I hated Ritalin it was a miserable drug to take.
Lastly the purpose of stimulants to treat ADHD are unsurprisingly not to get you high. Infact most people with severe ADHD don’t get upped the way a neurotypical person does when on stimulants. It tends to lead to higher amount of focus, less impulsivity and even a reduction in hyperactivity. It also increases the executive function which your brain uses to do things like prioritise information, memory development and a whole host of other things.
An addict or a user who is trying to get high is chasing a different thing all together. It’s a chemical feeling of a massive dopamine hit where you feel full body orgasmic pleasure. This is not what stimulants in prescribed dosages do to people who have ADHD. As people taking stimulants to improve executive function aren’t chasing a pleasure or preventing the horrible symptoms of withdrawal there is no surge of pleasure so no immediate need to go again and again and again and again…
Why is aspirin safe but fentanyl isn’t?
Short answer : it’s not. Ritalin ruins your brain, just slowlier.
In chemistry, similar aspect doesn’t mean it will have similar effect. I remember of a healing molecule that was synthetized upside down (mirrored) and the mirror image was highly toxic. It was the exact same molecule. Think of it as a house built upside down. It’s the same house but not usable and not even stable.
In this case, it isn’t even the same house. Ritalin has a garage, but no front door. And Ritalin’s pathway is dusty while Meth’s pathway is muddy. So everytime you get to Meth’s, you bring mud in the living room, unless you’re extremely careful. That’s why Meth is so dangerous. Ritalin on the other hand, you only bring dust, and mostly in the garage. But if you come everyday (and Ritalin is to be taken everyday) you’ll start dusting your house (=brain) for good.
The FDA and a clean manufacturing environment.
Ritalin is made is a factory where people are wearing approved clean suits and the workers have to wash their hands every two three hours or so.
Meth is made in an old trashcan under a stairwell in an abandoned building.
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Methamphetamine by itself isn’t terrible depending on dosage. It’s prescribed for ADHD in rare cases. If taken in the tiny amounts it prescribed in it isn’t that bad. It’s the taking tons of it not sleeping or eating for days on end that fucks people up.
Just like taking vicodine and spamming heroin are two different things.
Difference between safe and deadly when it comes to chemicals can be as small as one electron, like table salt.
Sodium blows up in water, chlorine is highly toxic, but move one electron from sodium to chlorine and smoosh the new ions together and you’ve got an essential mineral for staying alive.
So I tried ritalin but I found it does nothing to me, anyone knows why?
Meth and Ritalin are both molecules that acts on the release of dopamine in brain cells along the brain’s reward circuits. To understand their difference, I will first explain what normally happens in the brain and then their individual differences.
Normally, we experience pleasure when dopamine triggers our brain’s reward centre. The wanted end result is ‘high’ or the feeling of euphoria. However, overstimulation of the reward centers causes nasty stuff like hallucinations. The latter never happens in our brains because our brain has an internal regulatory system (a kill switch) to stop the upstream release of dopamine if there is too much of it.
What differentiates the two is that
1. Methamphetamine is a dopamine receptor agonist. (Think of meth as a dopamine copycat) This means it directly binds to and stimulates the reward circuit, and therefore bypasses the brain’s internal regulation. Thus, there is no way for the brain to regulate the reward circuit and meth sends it into overdrive. Meth’s effect only dies down when meth is washed out from the body. That is why meth is more potent, causes longer downtime and more pronounced side effects.
2. On the other hand, ritalin is a dopamine reuptake inhibitor. Thus, it slows down the clearance of dopamine released by cells upstream of the reward centres instead of directly stimulating it. Because it does not overwrite the brain circuits, the dopamine in the reward circuit are still subjected to brain’s internal regulation (via negative feedback). This means that the reward centres don’t go into overdrive, and thus it has (comparatively) milder effects, lesser downtime and no addictive potential.
Source: Am a doctor
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