[N]o other class of medications in virtually all of medicine inspires more baseless fears, intentional disinformation, and wild beliefs as do the stimulants used to treat ADHD.
Interestingly, these fears are almost entirely an American phenomenon that hardly exists elsewhere in the world.
[H]aving ADHD lowers a person’s estimated life expectancy by 12.7 years.
From other articles on the site:
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ADHD medication use lowers risk of death by 19%, risk of overdose by 50%, and it reduces hospitalizations
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[T]he risk of substance abuse decreases substantially when [ADHD] patients are treated with stimulant medication
Hah great question.
I guess it honestly depends on what you have available to you. The reason why I phrased it this way is because:
If you need to produce the lye, etc. yourself then you are right that coffee is easier (depending on your region I guess). But this was not the situation in most countries that developed a taste for speed.
Maybe I should add to my original comment that there are similar drugs with an effect between those of coffee and amphetamines, for example khat. While khat consumption has a long and storied history it is also more euphoric than coffee (khat releases dopamine directly while caffeine acts on adenosine and has a lesser downstream effect on dopamine) and it has been increasingly banned with the evolution of the modern nation-state.
If I’m not mistaken Khat has to be used super fresh though, like same day it was picked. I don’t know if there’s even anyway to get it in huge chunks of the world.
I think there are some exceptions to that rule, but that it is mostly true.
Where you can’t get it fresh, there is often a more local alternative available - kratom, coca, betel nuts, ephedra, etc. These too have been facing similar criminalization pressures.