Posted by fachad on June 18, 2002, at 21:44:50
In reply to Just curious- do all of you use speed (ritalin et , posted by judy1 on June 18, 2002, at 20:45:27
First, the preferred nomenclature for these medications is psychostimulants, or pstims, not "speed".
Pstims are medically prescribed medications; speed carries a connotation of illegal street drugs.
What do you mean by "routine use"?
Your example of the housewife did not really make sense to me. If a housewife was trying to keep a clean home, bring up children, etc, and depression was keeping that from happening, and she was given Prozac to help her feel better about her life and get her old self back, is that the kind of thing you are talking about?
The psychostimulants are being used more frequently for depression and other conditions because they work very well for some people. It is because of drug abusers that some pdocs are reluctant to prescribe them, and some patients fear them.
As far as to your question about people "getting into trouble", I'm sure it's just like anything else. Some pain patients take their opiates for years without abuse; some start right off abusing them from the first day. Same for benzos, pstims, and anything else.
My pdoc says there are some people out there who will abuse anything. I've known people who drank a whole bottle of cough syrup to get off, or crushed and snorted Elavil, sniffed liquid paper, the gas from whipping cream, it goes on and on.
I have a big bottle of Vicodin from a back injury last year. It's sat around for a year and I've never said, "woohoo, party!". If my back hurts, I take some. Next to it is my bottle of Dexadrine. I'm supposed to take 2 tablets 2 times per day, but some days I forget, or I feel too jittery so I take less. That means I have extra tablets left over each month. But again, no party, no abuse.
What I've figured out from reflecting on this whole drug abuse issue is that the drugs themselves are not inherently evil or inherently addictive.
Drug abuse is a pathological tendency. It is not a feature of the normal, healthy personality. That statement is not meant to be judgmental to people with drug abuse problems, nor is it meant to imply that normal people never experiment with and enjoy the effects of psychoactive drugs.
What is does mean is that, in the absence of an addictive personality, a person can be exposed to psychoactive drugs, they may even experience pleasant subjective sensations from those drugs, but they will not develop a compulsive pattern of life-destroying drug abuse.
But the critical thing to keep in mind is that it is not ever the drugs themselves that cause problems or get people into trouble. The drugs are just the particular way a personality disorder, whether biologically or character based, or both, becomes manifest in the behavior of the affected individual.
This becomes very clear when you see how an addicted person can be removed from one thing, only to have the addictive traits clamp onto and manifest through another behavior.
> al) for ADD and not for routine use? There was a news story about middle aged women who are trying to be perfect moms- children, jobs, immaculate home- and can only achieve it using speed. They said somthing like 40% women vs 25% men were getting jail time for possession, etc. I see a lot of posts using it for depression- has anyone gotten into trouble or do most of you use it at recommended doses like panic disordered patients use benzos or chronic pain people use morphine? This is a curiousity question, and by no means accusatory. Thanks, Judy
poster:fachad
thread:110237
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20020617/msgs/110242.html