IBISWorld, a market research firm, has released a report showing that Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) drug sales are booming, and by 2020, will rake in $17.5 billion. It’s not just a loosening of diagnostic criteria that is making it so profitable. Workers can’t survive on the meagre earnings of a single job, and students can’t keep up in schools with failing budgets. We need to be more productive than ever before to stay above water. The answer has always been there, and we’ve been slowly progressing to it, but we’re barred from considering it by moral grounds: the ultimate life-hack, prescription stimulants.
Pediatrician Dr. Michael Anderson, outright admitted to the New York Times that he was not prescribing powerful stimulant drugs to treat ADHD, but to improve the academic performance of children. “We’ve decided as a society that it’s too expensive to modify the kid’s environment. So we have to modify the kid,” he said.
It’s not just students that need speed. Wages have stagnated since the 1970s; a $50k salary in 1975, would need to be nearly $220k to have the same buying power today. Those who want to work cannot find steady work with their jobs outsourced to China, outmoded by technology, or replaced by an army of temps in the “gig economy.” Millennials are moonlighting in huge numbers trying to scrape together enough to live and working a 16 hour work day is nearly impossible. Even on money soaked Silicon Valley and Wall St, the workers are pounding stimulants and eugeroics just to keep up.
We are unwilling to increase taxes to return a social safety net, or offer support to those struggling. We’re unwilling to put restrictions on our trade with the rest of the world to keep America fully employed. It’s clear to everyone that something needs to be done to address the fact that the majority of Americans, can no longer afford to live and work in America. In this global market, we need to work twice as hard on ever shrinking wages. Getting a full 8 hours of sleep a night, and not eating a sad desk lunch are now luxuries.
If this is where we are as a society, then lets drop the fucking ADHD pretense and just give everyone Adderall.
You ever picked up a classifieds? (Damnit I just revealed how old I might be). How about looked at the jobs section on Craigslist? Every job needs at least $100k worth of degrees or 3-5 years of experience. How are you supposed to get that when there’s no entrance level? An internship that pays nothing? How do you eat?
The free market has determined that we aren’t above chemically drop-kicking children in the head to keep them going in school, so lets expand that to everyone. Hell, let’s make it a right, Medicaid already covers the costs of cheap generic stimulants.
Drug companies are already splashing the airwaves with glitzy ads, recruiting the likes of Adam Levine of Maroon 5 to tell you “own” your adult ADHD. These ads, focused on improving work performance or school performance and deemphasized treating ADHD so much, that the FDA fined the drug companies. Lets make it so that you can, with just your driver’s license, drop into a pharmacy and pick up a pack of 25 stimulants to get through the month.
On stimulants, your need to eat is reduced, most people lose weight. They say Americans are too fat anyway. You also have a reduced need to sleep, so you can stay up all night working your 2nd or 3rd job with competence and full productivity.
The only way to survive in our capitalist dystopia is to pop pills.
How about a bottle of Ritalin (methylphenidate), strong enough to substitute for cocaine, or Concerta, the all-day version? Got a big project due? Grab a pack of Adderall (mixed levoamphetamine and dextroamphetamine) or Dexedrine (dextroamphetamine) if the levoamphetamine makes you feel like your insides are filled with fire ants. Or, if you have private health insurance, you can pick up the new, more expensive, hotness, Provigil (modafinil), or Nuvigil (armodafinil), smart drugs that have less side effects than traditional stimulants.
Sure these powerful drugs can be addicting and have severe side effects, but we’re willing to tolerate a suicide here and there. We’d probably be stuck in bed, sleeplessly checking our smartphones. We’d fret over the smallest thing, convinced that everyone would be out to get us. We’d hoard guns and think of crazy conspiracy theories of martial law or false flag attacks. The news media would descend into a shouting match. The slightest bit of social change or civil disruption would lead to an overwhelming police suppression out of fear. Wars would be started left and right over the smallest chance of danger to ourselves as our minds spin the worst scenario possible.
On the other hand, we’d probably have a manned mission to Mars, highly effective treatments for Cancer, and probably a whole new Green Revolution in biotech to solve world hunger. Bring on our cyberpunk nightmare world where we chemo-hack our brains in order to keep up in ever diminishing jobs for megacorps.
