The tolerance/withdrawal drawbacks for adderall are nearly non existent if you don't abuse it and take weekends off. Sure, after the well known honeymoon phase of a few weeks it's not the superman pill you might have expected would last forever, but otherwise responsible use will keep you more productive. People with little will power or addictive personalities (which a third party can't possibly always know) aren't usually equipped to deal with such moderation, so instead we let the "gotta work 7 days a week!" grinders stigmatize an otherwise safe and useful medicine/tool.

When used responsibly I can assure you it's more effective and has less side effects than caffeine IF you tolerate it well (not everyone can, just like not everyone can tolerate caffeine)

Unfortunately, most casual and first-time users associate Adderall with the honeymoon phase you spoke of, not the actual long-term therapeutic effects that come from proper therapeutic use and dosing schedules.

Generally speaking, conversations around using Adderall for productivity center more around the hyperactivity and unnatural engagement brought on by too-high dosing or acute use. Adderall is meant for long-term therapeutic use at reasonable doses, where the hyperactivity and super-focus aspects give way to tolerance and leave the user with just enough of a correction to offset their ADHD.

Abusers and non-ADHD users, on the other hand, tend to chase the initial euphoria and the hyperactivity that comes with sporadic, acute dosing and higher-than-normal dosages. Tolerance inevitably catches up to this manner of usage, and the downregulation of prolonged elevated dopamine and norepinephrine levels combined with compounded sleep debt inevitably catches up with them.

> sporadic, acute dosing ... tolerance inevitably catches up to this manner of usage

Out of curiosity, does a sporadic use still lead to tolerance?

i recently quit adderall after 10 years and experienced Zero withdrawal.

Everyone is different, of course, but after 10 years it would be reasonable to assume that your brain was well-adapted to many of the effects of the Adderall and that you were taking a reasonable therapeutic dosage with a proper, healthy dosing schedule.

On the other hand, those who abuse Adderall for the initial euphoric and energetic properties with sporadic dosing schemes are likely to experience unpleasant withdrawal as those effects disappear.

I can't imagine a withdrawal for amphetamine outside the come-down from a multi-day binge. The come-down lasts a day or two. Maybe a week of fogginess if you hit it fear-and-loathing hard.

If you're taking amphetamine at such a rate that you would call it a "withdrawal", then you might want to consider the possibility that you were abusing amphetamine.

It's common to double-dose on the weekend whether for a productivity spree or recreation (they're usually one in the same) even if you haven't taken a pill in months. You just have to pay a day or two penalty and you're good to go.

I try to take weekends off of my Vyvanse and do skip at least Sundays every week. If I go two or more weeks without a day off when I do finally take one I'm extremely lethargic. I just want to sleep for the entire day, and often will sleep an extra two-three hours in the morning completely unintentionally.

> Adderall is not the answer as these journalists like to claim though. It's useless for basically anything other than very rare usage and has difficult to manage loss of productivity during withdraw. It has an incredibly fast tolerance buildup. If your work requires steady output instead of rare bursts, it's questionable whether it even surpasses coffee because of these downsides.

The problem here is that Adderall isn't meant to be used in this manner, nor is it meant to provide the user with bursts of productivity or euphoria when dosed properly.

Proper usage, as in ADHD or sleep disorders, involves titrating the daily dose to a point at which the attention and/or wakefulness-promoting effects reach the appropriate therapeutic level over the long term. This process takes in to account the inevitable tolerance that comes with downregulation of the systems that are directly (norepinephrine, dopamine) and indirectly elevated by Adderall usage.

Casual users and abusers, on the other hand, are always chasing the initial rush of drug-induced euphoria and the associated productivity and mood boost that comes in the early phases of treatment. These effects are highly prone to tolerance and downregulation (as intended) and thus can't be maintained without constant dose escalation or taking frequent breaks to pay back the built-up tolerance. Neither situation is sustainable or healthy, which is precisely why Adderall should not be considered to be a substitute for the milder stimulants that people consume casually every day.

Beyond that, Adderall has some potential neurotoxicity issues due to the way it upsets dopamine sequestration in neurons (dopamine has neurotoxic metabolites and the systems that clean up these metabolites can be overwhelmed in certain Adderall dosing schemes). Coffee, on the other hand, is associated with a reduction of certain neurodegenerative diseases.

> Adderall is not the answer as these journalists like to claim though. It's useless for basically anything other than very rare usage and has difficult to manage loss of productivity during withdraw. It has an incredibly fast tolerance buildup. If your work requires steady output instead of rare bursts, it's questionable whether it even surpasses coffee because of these downsides.

If that's your experience, then you need to take an extended-release capsule and halve your dose.

It's amphetamine. Its dose-to-efficacy graph is linear.

If you're losing a day of productivity on off-days, then you're simply taking too much on on-days.

Why replace coffee? Coffee has evolved alongside the human organism and become a great fit.

There are also many other drugs (both plant and pure chemical) that may offer interesting and useful effects, but I don't think that any will "replace" coffee.

Coffee already has vastly superior alternatives if all you want is productive tunnel-vision.

But, of course, there are a lot of other nice things about coffee like how it's engrained in our culture, socially acceptable, something to grab a cup of on a date, its aroma as you sit tired in an airport terminal, when all you want is a cheap narcotic buzz with minimal come-down, etc.

Ephedrine and dextroamphetamine are already better than coffee, in small dosages. Sadly, it's gonna be a long time before they're legal, if ever.

The military ran tests comparing the efficacy of caffeine and amphetamine. Amphetamine was not shown to improve performance over caffeine, although it gave the perception that performance was improved.

That conclusion is about as silly as a study that concludes that snorting cocaine was not shown to improve euphoria over caffeine.

It's something you might believe until you actually try amphetamine.

I hope you're not referring to the 46 person study that states: *Our participants were not representative of the general population

There are other studies that show the same thing. One of the most recent is the one done at University of Pennsylvania

This was actually the study I was thinking of. I don't believe I've read any from the military now that I've checked, but I wouldn't be surprised if their conclusion was based on lack of sleep due to the military giving Dexedrine to pilots for alertness on long missions (which is to be expected; lack of sleep and not eating is not a safe way to use stimulants)