Adderall – drug for ADHD – Addiction on US Campuses rising

Kids and youth need to focus in this age of lots of information.  So what are they doing? Abusing a medicine that is used for a particular psychological ailment.  This could have long term impact and situations for the youth who are caught in this web!

The United States has four percent of the world’s population, and produces 88 percent of the world’s legal stimulant drugs. Including Adderall, the amphetamine-based drug widely prescribed for ADHD, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. Impressive numbers.

But visit an American college campus, and really pay attention, and they add up. Lots of young Americans, many with no ADHD, taking Adderall just to focus.

To read. To write. To perform. Now there’s Adderall addiction and suicide in the news, but it’s bigger than that.

One kids death has woken people up to the night mare that this addiction creates:

Every morning on her way to work, Kathy Fee holds her breath as she drives past the squat brick building that houses Dominion Psychiatric Associates.

It was there that her son, Richard, visited a doctor and received prescriptions for Adderall, an amphetamine-based medication for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. It was in the parking lot that she insisted to Richard that he did not have A.D.H.D., not as a child and not now as a 24-year-old college graduate, and that he was getting dangerously addicted to the medication. It was inside the building that her husband, Rick, implored Richard’s doctor to stop prescribing him Adderall, warning, “You’re going to kill him.”

It was where, after becoming violently delusional and spending a week in a psychiatric hospital in 2011, Richard met with his doctor and received prescriptions for 90 more days of Adderall. He hanged himself in his bedroom closet two weeks after they expired.

Here are the guests:

Donald Misch, assistant vice chancellor for health and wellness, and director of the student health center at the University of Colorado Boulder. He’s a psychiatrist and internist.

Alan DeSantis, professor of communications at the University of Kentucky. He’s spent the last decade researching the illegal use of ADHD drugs on college campuses, gathering interview data from 300 students and survey data from more than 10,000 students.

Emma Diehl, student studying journalism at Lehigh University. Reporter for the student newspaper there “The Brown and White,” where her piece “Students Resort to Study Drug Adderall” ran last month.

Image Credit – (Flickr/Alex Dodd)