Amphetamine.

Amphetamine can be *abused*, yes, but it's not addicting.

Take it from a long, long time user of such meds. I can't tell you how many times I forgot to take my daily dose.

Many dear friends have been very addicted to become addicted, few of them gone through hell. Some people can smoke tobacco without becoming addicted to nicotine. But as far as I know, speed ain't cool.

My test is this: I'm OK with my kids taking mary jane, shrooms, etc. all the shamanistic shit if and when they feel like it. Coke, speed etc. egogoosters I would not be OK.

the article says.

Such users in such 'professions' are ruining everbody's lives and the fucking planet itself!

so that I could think in a linear fashion when I needed to. If you have ADD the meds actually slow the racing thoughts and voices enough that you can set goals and accomplish what you set out to do. I used to take it when I had a project with many steps to it, so I could work on one step at a time. Sadly, I can't take it anymore as it raised my blood pressure more than was safe.

This is in the current issue of Z Magazine. It's not about Adderall particularly, but about how the psychology and psychiatry professions serve the interests of power generally. Pretty interesting I thought.

How Psychologists Subvert Democratic Movements By Bruce E. Levine

Over the years, I discovered a handful of other psychologists—and even a few courageous psychiatrists—who were also speaking out against mainstream psychology and psychiatry. Most of them had paid the severe professional price of marginalization. I also came across psychologist authors who were not routinely discussed by mainstream mental health professionals, but whom I respected. One such psychologist author/activist was Ignacio Martin-Baró, a social psychologist and priest in El Salvador who popularized the term “liberation psychology” and who was ultimately assassinated by a U.S. trained Salvadoran death squad in 1989. One observation by Martin-Baró about U.S. psychology was that “in order to get social position and rank, it negotiated how it would contribute to the needs of the established power structure.” We can see that in many ways.

...

On the obvious level, we can see psychologists meeting the needs of the power structure for social position and rank in the recent policies of the American Psychological Association (APA). For several years, the APA not only condoned but actually applauded psychologists’ assistance in interrogation/torture in Guantánamo and elsewhere. When it was discovered that psychologists were working with the U.S. military and the CIA to develop brutal interrogation methods, the APA assembled a task force in 2005 to examine the issue and concluded that psychologists were playing a “valuable and ethical role” in assisting the military. In 2007, an APA Council of Representatives retained this policy by voting overwhelmingly to reject a measure that would have banned APA members from participating in abusive interrogation of detainees. It took until 2008 for APA members to vote for prohibiting consultations in interrogations.

One major area that concerns me is the everyday pathologizing and diseasing of anti-authoritarians. This is quite scary because anti-authoritarians are absolutely vital for democracy and democratic movements. I want to talk about how this is being done, but first let me define authoritarianism and anti-authoritarianism

...

Authoritarianism is unquestioning obedience to authority. Authoritarians in control demand unquestioning obedience and authoritarian subordinates give them that unquestioning obedience. In contrast, anti-authoritarians question the legitimacy of an authority before taking it seriously. Does the authority know what it’s talking about or not? Does it tell the truth or lie? Does it care about the people who are taking it seriously or is it exploitative? And if anti-authoritarians assess an authority to be illegitimate, they then challenge and resist it. By pathologizing and “treating” anti-authoritarians, psychologists and other mental health professionals are taking them off “democracy battlefields.”
...

Two socialists I know are a psychiatrist and social worker, respectively. They think capitalism makes people need mental health services.

The article in the OP is about people who take Adderall off-list and not for prescribed ADD symptoms. Last week groovedaddy posted a story about Dr. Anderson who prescribes Adderall to working-class school-children who are also not ADD or ADHD, but simply to keep them productive and on-task in the highly competitive and stressful testing environment found in public schools these days.

I guess I found it interesting that this so-called "natural" system of capitalism requires chemical boosting to produce an unnatural level of work. To what eventual end?

with painkillers everyday just to make it through the work day. Either people might not have access to health care, or the health care system didn't provide a solution, so they are forced to work through the pain.

I've known a few college students who have taken ADD meds (non-prescribed) to supposedly help them through exams.

It's all about drugging people up one way or another to get them to meet the needs of the system, regardless of what their real health needs might be. Or defining their needs in a way that serves the interest of power.

That Dr. Anderson story is nuts:

I didn't have the words to respond on the thread in Education...it's been weighing on me. What are we really assessing in our high-stakes education environment if the results are obtained through extra-natural means?

Makes me glad I teach an art. Even then it is really hard to get them to re-learn to slow down and not treat it as competitive.

Then this threads the needle to Wall Street, where the locus for capitalizing schools is located, and the working people there are going for stimulants to bring greater productivity to the finance sector. I guess I don't have an intelligent response--I put up the OP because I find this very distressing, and a statement on the great stress our entire system is under. Everything is under hyper-pressure. It's like some human equivalent of fracking.

From a worker, or from the earth. Everything is a commodity. That's not to say that a socialist society couldn't wrongly medicate people or have performance enhancing drug abuse. But in our world profit and fear of being poor do seem to drive it.

When it comes to school kids, I wonder how much the drug companies are pushing and marketing the stuff. Then from the demand side, all the high stakes testing and competition is probably fueling it. I bet it's kind of sad to have to work in the schools these days and witness these changes.

& contrast it to less aggressively capitalist situations i've experienced, the first of which was the small isolated farming community one of my parents was born into, which seemed to stay locked in a timewarp until the 70s recession, when things started to change. It's now pretty much like everywhere else, but it was so different there when i was a child, & even then i could tell the difference between the way people treated each other there and the way they treated each other in the suburbs where i was mostly raised.

In the 'unknown cultural revolution" video i posted, the speaker (who was born in rural china & spent the cultural revolution in a collective farm situation) talks primarily about the differences between the kind of human beings & relationships that situation produced v. the kind produced under capitalism, both in china & the us.

Many people responded on the their experiences with Adderall, which is fine. But the video was specifically about non-ADD people taking it off label for trying to maintain the pace of a Wall Street job and New York City lifestyle. I thought it was tragic that the hugest profit- making center in the US requires intense chemical stimulus to service.

And then the doctor prescribing it for school-children to keep them focused on our intense test-driven education culture (even though they are *not* diagnosed with an attention disorder). Instead of adapting society to suit our needs, we are being adapted for the purposes of the ruling class. I guess that's not very profound, but we keep doing it anyway.

the interesting studies like seligman's 'learned helplessness' and the experimental situations that led him to that thesis.

years later, reading articles like this, i realized that all those interesting experiments had been funded by the military industrial complex with the aim of learning how to better control populations at home and abroad, just like the drug experimentation going on then.

i had idealized those 'scientists,' but basically they were just careerists & whores, even when they weren't totally in line with the goals of the empire.

Got through; the attack is apparently only intermittently effective:

DSM III had a huge expansion of psychiatric disorders, with many more child and adolescent diagnoses and I immediately noticed that DSM III was pathologizing stubbornness, rebellion, and anti-authoritarianism. Some of these new diagnoses subtly pathologized rebellion, but one diagnosis was an in-your-face obvious pathologizing of rebellion—“oppositional defiant disorder” (ODD).

ODD kids are not doing anything illegal. ODD kids are not the kids who once were labeled “juvenile delinquents”—that’s “conduct disorder.” Rather, the official symptoms of ODD include “often actively defies or refuses to comply with adult requests or rules” and “often argues with adults.”

* * * * *

So, I went into private practice, where I received many referrals for teenagers diagnosed with ODD from colleagues who were uncomfortable with these kids. As I worked with the kids, I found that not only did I like most of them, but I also respected the vast majority of them, as they had real courage. They don’t comply with authorities whom they consider to be illegitimate and, most of the time, I concurred with their assessment. If they do respect an authority, they aren’t obnoxious and usually they clamor for adults whom they can respect and who genuinely respect them. Not only are these kids not mentally ill, many of them are what I consider to be the hope of the nation.

Over the years, I have worked not only with ODD teens, but also with adults diagnosed with depression, anxiety disorder, and substance abuse, and with psychiatric survivors who have been previously diagnosed with various psychoses. What’s impossible to ignore is how many of the individuals diagnosed with mental disorders are essentially anti-authoritarians. This was potentially a large army of anti-authoritarian activists that mental health professionals are keeping off democracy battlefields by convincing them that their depression, anxiety, and anger are a result of their mental illnesses and not, in part, a result of their pain over being in dehumanizing environments.