> While these drugs will make healthy people high and overexcited, it will help ADHD patients calm down and focus.

It is my understanding that nootropics like Adderall are widely used outside of the ADHD-diagnosed population for their use in boosting productivity tasks in otherwise-healthy adults (see their popular use by students at colleges), and also for their high.

It’s strange to me to hear speed described as a nootropic, although I note that Wikipedia does list it as one. If amphetamine are a nootropic, does cocaine count?

I thought nootropics were supposed to have positive long-term physiological benefits. Amphetamine is a performance enhancer and maybe even a cognitive enhancer (evidence says otherwise) but it's definitely not nootropic.

If a substance improves certain cognitive metrics in healthy adults, then it qualifies a nootropic, even if it has harmful side effects. Purported nootropics are often also marketed as, or alongside, purported life extension products. Maybe that creates some confusion about what nootropics are.

Nootropics are drugs that boost cognitive performance: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/nootropic

From your link:

>and possesses very few side effects and extremely low toxicity.

Only if you take the pharmacological definition. The medical definition is exactly as I said.

What a weird hair to split, pharmacology is a part of medicine.

The "medical" definition is incomplete.

I’d have thought so too, but Wikipedia describes it as one, so who knows

The military has used speed to boost the performance of soldiers in war for almost a century, especially when in extended combat situations to stay alert and awake beyond an ordinary sleep cycle. The Nazis famously gave pep pills to their Panzer tank crews during the 'blitzkriegs' of Poland and France, and many militaries have given it to bomber pilots on extended runs, including the US.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_and_culture_of_substit...

> While these drugs will make healthy people high and overexcited, it will help ADHD patients calm down and focus.

And beyond that, this simply is a misconception and myth perpetuated by uneducated people. ADHD patients calm down when they take Adderall because they’ve been on it for years and have a tolerance. That’s just what happens. You don’t get the exact same euphoria that someone who takes it monthly feels. The underlying mechanism of action is the same for all humans.

My understanding is that ADHD patients are in a constant unsatisfying "underexcited" state, so they will do anything to find exciting things to do. Amphetamines pulls them up to normal levels.

Give the same substance to someone already at a normal level and he will become overexcited.

Just like putting weights on a scale can balance an unbalanced scale or unbalance an balanced scale.

I like that explanation especially the first paragraph.

I don’t understand pharmacology well enough to really know exactly what’s going on, but I’ve always thought today’s ADHD drugs are extremely broad, perhaps even crude solutions to a poorly-understood condition.

Kind of a super broad-spectrum antibiotic versus a narrow-spectrum antibiotic. Today, my (non-medical) understanding is essentially the same as yours, and that we use Adderall and other stimulants to do what you say - push them to the normal side of the spectrum - but at its core it's just messing with dopamine levels.

Having ADHD and being medicated for many years, it's not like the feeling of "being on a drug" ever goes away completely. It's not completely benign like, e.g. taking an allergy pill. It still curbs my appetite, so I have to be careful about scheduling doses (always eat before). There's a bunch of personality changes when the drugs are in my system, mostly stuff that makes you want to just work "heads down" and not talk to anyone, sometimes that's great, sometimes it's not. I wonder if I am less emotional and am more selfish because of being on it so long, I can't imagine telling someone "I miss you", for example, that just seems like an overly-sensitive emotion that I'm not capable of producing. Especially not in a world connected by iMessage and the Internet, where everyone seems like they are right beside you, even if they are thousands of miles away.

Not sure where I'm going with this, but I guess what I meant by "broad action" is that we are kind of killing one person by carpet-bombing. I wonder if in the future we'll have meds that work much better with less side-effects.

Maybe we even have them now in the form of the non-stimulant options, but my doc did not sound enthusiastic about switching from stimulant to non-stimulant ADHD meds.

Wow that first paragraph is an explanation I never heard before but nails the concentration part of ADHD

I'm in a weird position of taking both ritalin and celexa. It makes me both anxious and focused.

I had to quit Ritalin in year 11 because the anxiety was completely fucking ruining my social development, regardless of whether it was useful to get good grades. I'm unmedicated now (30) and still in some ways quite a difficult human to deal with due to erractic behaviour and unreliability and disorganisation, however, I don't think I could go back to the ritalin man.

Ritalin (methylphenidate in general) is a rough one, cause of its stupidly short half life (as short as 90min in some). On top of that, most extended release systems for it are garbage. Sure on average, the blood plasma level graph is smooth, but you look at individual profiles, and some individuals have way higher peak amplitudes. In my experience, MPH, even the ER/concerta stuff, thrashes your mental state too much to be productive. I actually had more stability dosing slivers of MPH IR every hour, but man, that's tedious, it's easy to miss, and once you drop, it's not the same, even if you get back to therapeutic range.

> ADHD patients calm down when they take Adderall because they’ve been on it for years and have a tolerance.

Speaking of myths, this is wildly incorrect. I've now been on methylphenidate -- AKA ritalin -- for a couple months. I do not and have not ever experienced a high or otherwise any euphoria. Partially this is indubitably because of the relative low dosage and low bioavailability. But partially it's because ADD makes me react differently to it.

There's roughly three effects I experience. Primarily it's way easier to stay focussed. The only side-effects I've been experiencing is some feelings of stress towards the end of the effective time of a dosage and some slight muscle twitching in my leg.

Anecdote aside, one of the possible side-effects of these sorts of medication is "a rushed feeling". Most people do not get this side effect, and if they do it's a cause for looking at different medication. It's definitely not the case that that's just something you build a tolerance to. Tolerance building is a thing, but it applies to the beneficial effects just as much as it applies to the side effects.

Agreed. I have built a tolerance to it before but know that I do not have ADHD. My friend who certainly does reacts to adderall differently than I do. We have discussed it in detail and seem to be effected differently despite taking similar doses daily.

This far beyond my understanding, but ADHD patients appear to have an imbalance between dopamine and norepinephrine in the mesocorticolimbic dopamine pathway and the locus coeruleus-noradrenergic system. There is more to this of course and I'm sure I botched even that part. Regardless, the point is that these medications actually treat their underlying issue instead of overdriving the same systems. Tolerance is mostly irrelevant in this regard as people without ADHD do not have these same differences which means they do not react to the drug in the same manner. Simply put, these medications tend to make ADHD patients more calm and focused and normal people tend to feel "tweaked".

In a way, calm and focus are the same thing as tweaked, but I guess you'd have to be on it to understand what I mean by that.

> And beyond that, this simply is a misconception and myth perpetuated by uneducated people. ADHD patients calm down when they take Adderall because they’ve been on it for years and have a tolerance.

Hmm I have to disagree here. Even with my first dosage of Concerta (Methylphenidate) on no tolerance, I started feeling calmer. Like a lot of the chatter in my head got muted and I stopped jumping from thought to thought like a pingpong ball. This experience matches with other friends that have ADHD.

On the other hand when I give them out to friends for trying more often the other person ended up not being able to concentrate due to restlessness or wanting to do a lot of things at the same time (kind causing similar things that it gets rid of for me)

>This simply is a misconception and myth perpetuated by uneducated people

I think it's less of a misconception and more of the fact that people whom stimulants noticeably calm down are a lot rarer than people with ADHD, if that makes sense.

I know personal anecdotes are not data, and I've not taken Adderall itself, but when I got prescribed Vyvanse (lisdexamfetamine) for the first time, and pretty high dose at that, the difference was immediate and notable. I went from being anxious, waking up a couple of times a night, generally sleeping badly when I did and always feeling tired to getting a full 8 hours of restful sleep and a nap during the day if I wanted (despite taking the strong dose of Vyvanse) and being a lot less shaky during the day. Before that, I had never taken any stimulants besides coffee, which never seemed to do anything for me anyway so I wasn't one of those people who "couldn't function without their morning cup of joe" so I skipped it most days because I wasn't feeling up to breakfast.

This has been the greatest change in quality of life for me and if you had told me 5 years earlier that I would feel this way I wouldn't have believed you.

Improved quality of sleep aside, I don't really get euphoria when I'm taking stimulants. If I had to compare it to anything, when I started taking ADHD meds (I started with Straterra but it was only partially effective) it was like no longer being drunk.

Well, there is that story of an elephant taking 300 milligrams (not micrograms) and dying, which might or might not have been caused by the acid itself...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tusko

Enough of anything can be hazardous.

"I don’t know anybody that’s ever died from smoking pot. Had a friend of mine that said a bale fell on him and hurt him pretty bad, though." - Willie Nelson

how would you even make 300mg of LSD? the precursors like ergotamine are extremely hard to get, especially in that kind of quantity

Depends on your location. I know that in Germany the derivatives like 1P-LSD or 1sP-LSD are not banned.

They are in a zone where you can buy them for “scientific research, not human consumption”, but do not trust me on that: I did not try it and am not a lawyer. I have friends that did that exact scientific research, and they basically received them in a mail from some website.

Just googling “LSD Deutschland bestellen” shows established shops with range of options.

> and that LSD proves effective doesn't mean healthy people will get benefits

There have a number of studies showing that psychedelics (often psilocybin, which has similar effects to LSD) can have significant benefits for healthy people in a carefully managed setting.

>First, it just shows that it is safe. It is expected, LSD is one of the safest drugs out there.

Yes, certainly. A drug that can trigger a psychosis after taking it only a single time and that can give its users persistent hallucinations[1] is one of the safest drugs out there. The drug propaganda gets completely out of control.

Edit: Not to forget that taking LSD can permanently change your personality.[2] In most cases these changes may appear positive, but there is probably a potential for permanent negative changes.

[1]: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/09/11/lots-of-people-going-a...

[2]: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00213-017-4733-3

Yep over the years I have met many people with the story about the person with latent schizophrenia who switches from functional to extremely ill after a single LSD trip. I knew someone like this in my youth, and have since heard about many other cases. One of the more famous examples is the musician Daniel Johnston.

LSD is powerful and not to be messed around with lightly. Yes, it's not heroin or meth. But it's a powerful chemical whose effects can vary wildly from person to person and setting to setting.

And I totally agree... But I meant it in a "not a poison" sense, meaning it won't kill you. That's why I explicitly mentioned "LSD poisoning". I should have been more clear.

I have heard of HPPD and looked it up, but found nothing conclusive. I don't deny that it is real but we really don't know much about it. One problem is that we know that it happens to LSD users, but that's usually not the only drug they use, and due to its illegal nature, we are not even sure that's really LSD. There are LSD substitutes like NBOMe that have similar effects but are much more unsafe. To my knowledge, none of it happened in controlled studies.

I agree with the changes in personality that can be negative.

But an important part is that the study is about microdoses. Doses that are not enough to give you hallucinations. My personal theory is that the life-changing effects of LSD come from experiencing the hallucinations. These can be really intense, they are nothing like you ever felt before, and unlike dreams, they are memorable. And like any intense experience, they are bound to affect your life, for the better or for the worse. In fact, "flashbacks" have a lot in common with PTSD, so much that I think they really are PTSD, with the (usually bad) trip being the traumatic event.

But microdoses don't create these kinds of intense experiences. So combined with the fact it is essentially non-toxic for your body, I am not at all surprised that it passed all the safety tests. The really interesting part will be about effectiveness.

Any studies that show an increased risk for psychosis after a single dose?

MKUltra and similar programs brought LSD into certain academic/nerd circles many years ago and broke their brains. This is why you are being downvoted (ironically enough).

How I saw it explained is that LSD shuts down a system in the brain.

Once it's off, it can't be any more off, so nothing special happens with an overdose.