Oh how the mighty have fallen. Vice used to be fucking based. This makes me really sad. Especially disingenuous disinformation like this. Ask someone with ADHD how life saving stimulants like adderall or similar has been for them. It’s nothing like meth, which typically ruins lives.
I don’t know or care about Vice, but I’ve noticed that this particular issue, the comparison between Adderall and meth, seriously upsets people.
Is it that hard to believe that a substance can be therapeutic at certain doses AND easily abused at others? I get it, minor differences in chemical structure can lead to drastic differences in effects. But in this case? Doesn’t seem all that different. I knew a kid in college whose cocktail of choice for a night out was six 30mg Addys + alcohol—and the biggest difference between that and meth, as far as I can tell, is the part about going out.
They are absolutely nothing alike. Adderall is ridiculously easy to get in college and that is why that kid did that. That shit gets spread around like candy on college campuses.
You can’t even smoke adderall. Comparing the two is like comparing 16 fl oz of decaf (like 40mg of caffeine) to 16 fl oz of espresso (1,040 mg). They are not even close to comparable. Nobody outside of college is doing adderall for fun and the ones that are doing that in college are retarded because there are better drugs that are still readily available on campus.
Adderall is almost exactly the same as European speed. Plenty of people do it recreationally and I’d honestly say it’s better than most stimulant drugs for casual use
I know! I used to love their reporting, now it’s rare to find an article that isn’t straight up trash. I don’t have ADHD but I take stimulants to counteract severe lupus-related fatigue. I used to have “mega sleeps” where I’d sleep up to 30 hours at a time (waking up for a pee a few times). It was no life.
Ritalin/concerta (the other big ADHD drug) is literally methylphenidate. “Meth” is in the name. Adderall is an amphetamine, the other half to “methamphetamine” …
There’s actually chemical similarities between the drug. Fact is: though similar, there’s a large gap between taking a drug as prescribed by a medical professional in a controlled dosage, versus hitting the pipe behind the dumpster…
I would argue that these drugs like many psychoactive drugs, when abused, could be just as hazardous as their illegal counterpart, however, in clinical use cases, they can be life changing.
There’s an ocean of difference between results if you compare what’s found on the street, to what’s in the bottle from the pharmacy.
This is the case for a lot of chemicals. Even pure cocaine has a place in medicine. The difference between something like methamphetamine bought from a street dealer, and the contents of Adderall or Ritalin/concerta, is huge. Minimizing that difference is doing a disservice to the public and only serves to spread FUD.
Amphetamine and methamphetamine are not that similar. Just because a chemical has a similar structure does not mean it is exactly the same. Buproprion is chemically almost exactly the same as ephedrine but have wildly different effects. Adderall is an amphetamine, vyvanse is an amphetamine.
These other drugs often leave most people feeling like shit, nobody is doing adderrall or these other drugs recreationally. Crystal meth gives you such a ridiculous dopamine rush that you feel like you are on top of the world, like you can conquer anything, but it will give you delusions and eventually that starts to go away.
As someone who takes Vyvanse 70mg (lisdexamfetamine) daily, and have smoked meth a few times, they’re quite different. Vyvanse does give you energy, but it doesn’t make you feel ecstatic. To me it just feels like a really strong coffee but I don’t feel like shit and I can sleep at night.
I’ve been through Vyvanse withdrawals twice, and it sucks, but its nothing like meth withdrawal (I haven’t experienced it myself, but I know people who have). People with a meth addiction are desperate enough to commit crime. Vyvanse withdrawals are so bad, sometimes us neuro-atypicals forget to take our addictive and dangerous drugs.
“nobody is doing adderrall or these other drugs recreationally” wtf. It’s extremely common to take these recreationally. I’ve done this multiple times, great with alcohol and better with alcohol and weed.
Water is “almost identical” to hydrogen peroxide.
Food and poop are both composed of atoms, so there’s essentially no difference between them.
I came here to talk about methyl groups and no one gives them a mention :(
A methyl group is the name given to single carbon (with 3 hydrogens attached) when substituted onto a larger chemical moiety (a structure or motif in chemistry). When people speak about methyl groups they’re mostly speaking about those single carbon methyl group being attached to a heteroatom (atoms other than carbon and hydrogen in organic chemistry, like nitrogen, oxygen, sulfur, etc.).
Methamphetamine (N-methylamphetamine or N-methyl alpha-methyl-phenyl-ethylamine in full form) has a methyl group on it’s amine (nitrogen or N-position), which drastically alters its psychological effects and the way it’s synthesized by chemists (requiring methylamine). The methyl group there prolonges the stimulating effects, while also providing serotonergic effects (generally euphoric effects caused by interaction with the serotonin receptor transport protein), which gives it much greater addiction potential.
Methyl groups in general don’t “make drugs stronger” like the other guy said. To consider drug receptor interaction you need to take into account how well a molecule fits into the receptor you’re targetting as a whole.
Thats super interesring. It always amazes me how a small modification like a methyl group can so drastically alter the psychoactive properties of a substance. The body is such a nuanced and complicated system, its fascinating.
I really hope drug laws change so that we can see more research being done. Things like this help us learn more about not just the sustance, but the way our chemisty works & how our concious experience is shaped.
If you have any cool links on this topic, id love to browse them. Either way thanks for your run down on methyl groups :)
What exactly is methanol a good example of? Are you saying methanol is a “stronger drug” than some other type of alcohol? Honestly confused here.
I’m still waiting for someone to acknowledge my extremely lame pun in the title. It’s hard being this unfunny.
It made me think of Beth’s song from Dog the Bounty Hunter if that means anything. I finally realized its a Barnes and Barnes joke as well.
I mean, Methamphetamine is extremely similar, pharmacologically, with Adderall. Desoxyn is the ‘medicine brand name’ for meth, to treat ADHD.
Biggest difference between Crystal Meth, the street drug, and Desoxyn, the medicine, is dosage. A Desoxyn tablet is about 100x less methamphetamine than you’d take to ‘get high’. (not to mention, pills have a slower release than smoking it).
And yeah, there are other differences between Adderall and Meth; for the most part, Adderall is safer, less addictive, and less ‘makes you high’. So there’s very few people still using Desoxyn, but it is still out there. For reasons that aren’t really understood, Methamphetamine does work to treat a few people’s ADHD for whom Adderall doesn’t do much.
(and, for that matter, there are a pretty huge array of different amphetamines to treat ADHD and similar things, that are all subtly different in not very well understood ways, made messier by the fact that pharmaceutical companies making sure to push out a new drug, that might just be a new mix of existing drugs, every 10 years, for patent reasons. But Desoxyn is basically a ‘last resort’ to throw at the wall, if the patient hasn’t responded well to any of the others.)
I feel like the biggest difference by far is that most amphetamines are prescribed in XR formulations these days. The feeling caused by a slow trickle of product from a laser-drilled capsule or time-release beads over 8-12 hours is incomparable to the rush of smoking or snorting powdered amphetamine. For a lot of drugs the biggest addiction driver is actually the rise rate which causes the “hit”. i.e. compare addictive cigarettes with nearly harmless pipe.
That’s why when people abuse Adderall they usually crush it up and toot it, and they aren’t railing 100 tablets at a go.
Myself I have taken Adderall and now take Dexadrine (it’s cheaper) and have never felt any addictive pull from either. When I go camping I always take a multi-day break and never feel any ill effects other than a desire to chase squirrels and bother strangers with excessive chat.
I always bring some with me though so I can take one on the last day and effectively pack up my campsite without leaving anything behind, lol
I’m just putting this out there, that, cocaine also helps treat ADHD.
It’s not used in clinical treatments, but it has been observed that while neurotypical brains exposed to cocaine get an unfocused energy increase, ADHD brains tend to get a higher level of focus with that energy increase.
Theoretically it’s possible for someone to treat their own ADHD using cocaine.
… It’s a really bad idea, but it’s possible.
Ah yes, that’s what the methheads in my state are smoking, Adderall! Not methamphetamine (or are they, since they are the same thing now apparently?)
It’s so clear to me now, why wouldn’t you? Adderall is so much cheaper than methamphetamine and readily available!
