3 thoughts on ““Journalists” on Drugs”

  1. I can believe it. If I had grinded through a MA from a journalism school to be “qualified” for a lousy job that used to be for junior high graduates, I’d want to alter my mind too.

  2. The generic name for Adderall is amphetamine salts. When Ann talked about the wide eyes and exaggerated hand waving I immediately thought of AOC.

  3. They have to be ingesting large quantities of the stuff, and not actually need it. I’ve been on Adderall XR, 30 mg a day, for about four years. For years, I had been fairly certain I had ADD. So I got myself tested for. My neurologist sat down, looked at the printout for a couple of minutes, and his eyes widened. He finally looked up at me and said, “You are profoundly ADD…um, frankly, I don’t know how you made it this far in life.” I was about two standard deviations below average attention span. With it, I’m well above average, and able to read and do other things like a regular person. My wife can attest to how big a difference it has made. Every so often, the effect seems to be wearing off. My doctor said that this happens occasionally, and that people have found that stopping the medication for two to three weeks, then resuming, generally returns normal functioning. I found that to be the case myself.

    It produces none of the effects in me that Ann writes about. Nor, obviously, is it addictive. Every once in a while, I forget to take it, and discover the fact only when it comes time to renew the prescription, and I find that I have some left. And the three week reboot is never a problem. Part of it, I’m sure, is taking extended release. There is no perceptible physiological effect, as there is when I take a regular pill – a small rush, like a caffeine jolt, which dies away with a half-life of about two hours. If I liked that, I might find regular Adderall addictive. But it’s annoying, so I don’t. The XR is a wonderful invention for someone, like me, whose career has always depended on the ability to focus on reading and other tasks for extended periods, but has extreme difficulty doing so.

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