#idk im not an expert i've read a handful of studies and one pop science book

[vamptastic]

so. people make the 'taking ADHD medication is just doing meth, just say you like taking stimulants' point as a shorthand. like the argument they're essentially making is that you can never draw a hard and fast line between good virtuous medicine and bad scary evil drugs. which is a valuable enough point to make, it gets people thinking about how they moralize the use of substances. it's a useful one-liner when it comes to getting people to not think that drug users are bad and evil and that we should restrict the bad evil scary drugs as much as possible. it is however, objectively wrong.

amphetamines are indeed chemically addictive, and the evidence that they work fundamentally differently for somebody with ADHD vs someone without is shaky, given that we do not have a clear understanding of what causes ADHD and how it affects the brain and body. fair points all.

but there is in fact a big difference between taking a substance at the same time every day in the same dosage and taking it as-wanted in highly variable doses. set and setting matter. this is a fundamental talking point in drug legalization. even people who think every substance should be freely accessible (like carl hart, or me) think that informed consent matters and that part of that is understanding that when, where and how matter in drug use, as does your individual health and psychology. i kind of think most people on here don't actually like, read about the things they believe.