Lately, we're all living in the broken attention economy. The rise of ADHD diagnoses, the history of Adderall, and what it means for the modern workplace.
Everyone knows someone who is on Adderall: ADHD diagnoses are at an all-time high and trending on TikTok. Our guest, Daniel Kolitz, author of The History of Adderall for Pioneer Works, tells us about the rise of the medication, how it’s changed the way we work, and his own experience on and off the drug.
Also, Vass and Katrina self-diagnose via some questionable online quizzes.
This is Lately. Every week, we take a deep dive into the big, defining trends in business and tech that are reshaping our every day.
Lately is a Globe and Mail podcast.
Our executive producer is Katrina Onstad.
The show is produced by Andrea Varsany.
Our sound designer is Cameron McIver.
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Katrina Onstad [00:00:00] We're just getting started on Lately and we'd love to get your opinion. There's a brief survey at the end of the episode, and as a thank you for taking it, we'll give you a chance to win some prizes. More details at the end of the show. Hi, I'm Katrina Onstad. I'm the executive producer of Lately.
Vass Bednar [00:00:17] What's happening and I'm Vass Bednar, I'm the show's host. Katrina I need to ask do you ever take online quizzes to see if you've got a disorder?
Katrina Onstad [00:00:27] I'm not going to take that question personally but yes. Yes I did this a lot during the pandemic. And this is a true story. I remember a day in the depths of my quiz taking where I was doing one of these, and it was like ten signs you might have anxiety. Are you slowing down? Check. Are you leaning away from people? Check. Are you licking your lips?
Vass Bednar [00:00:47] What?
Katrina Onstad [00:00:47] That one did seem weird, but I was like, yeah, sure, I think I am. And then I looked and I realized it was actually a quiz about anxiety in dogs.
Vass Bednar [00:00:57] What?
Katrina Onstad [00:00:57] That did happen.
Vass Bednar [00:01:00] Well, I think you're not alone, except for maybe taking a quiz for dogs. Side note how do dogs even take quizzes? That's a future episode. Dogs who take quizzes online. There's so much self-diagnosis content online, especially on TikTok with the hashtag ADHD. On the one hand, this can be really great. People are sharing information, they're busting stigma, and during the pandemic and coming out of it, it did seem like there was a lot more chatter and maybe people self diagnosing with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.
Katrina Onstad [00:01:32] Yeah, so many people I know discover that they had adult ADHD during the pandemic, especially women. And I know that women have been underdiagnosed for ADHD. So that can be a fantastic discovery for people. What I thought was interesting about that was how many of them triggered their own diagnosis, like going to the doctor and saying, I was online and I think I recognize myself and we're not trying to denigrate that at all. I know that getting treatment and getting a diagnosis can be game changing, but I also admit to a little wariness about this trend, because the symptoms described often seem like a laundry list of what it is just to be a human in this online moment. Right? Difficulty with focus, broken attention. I think these things sound familiar.
Vass Bednar [00:02:14] It's kind of a dig. Yes, it does sound familiar. I mean, more adults than ever before are taking medication for attention deficit disorders in Canada, according to recent data from Manulife, which is a major insurer here in Canada, the number of unique claimants for ADHD medication for people aged 18 and older grew by nearly a quarter by 25% between 2021 and 2022 alone. So this is $1 billion industry. It affects millions of people around the world, a lot of whom are children, but more and more of them are adults. So we were really wondering, like, what does this mean? How does a world on speed? Because ADHD medication is fundamentally a stimulant. It's in that drug family.
Katrina Onstad [00:02:56] Yeah.
Vass Bednar [00:02:57] How is that changing? How we work, how we think and who we are? We found this really great set of essays about Adderall, which is the ADHD drug that was published recently under the banner of Club Med: Dispatches from the Adderall Epidemic. We will link to it.
Katrina Onstad [00:03:13] Yeah, this was a kind of a fantastic find. And one analysis really stood out in this selection. An essay called The History of Adderall by a Brooklyn based writer named Daniel Kolitz. It's an essay about how we got ourselves into what is essentially an amphetamine epidemic. His writing is really elegant. It's really funny. He writes about his own experience getting an Adderall prescription as a kid, and what it means when Adderall uses normalized in the workforce for an entire generation of workers.
Vass Bednar [00:03:40] It's such a good piece. When you read it, you feel like you're hanging out with Daniel.
Katrina Onstad [00:03:45] Yeah. And so we called him and we got him on the show. And you did get to hang out with him on FaceTime. It went a little bit sideways.
Vass Bednar [00:03:54] Just a little bit. I mean, he had a questionable internet connection that day, which you know, can happen to anyone, but it made for this really energetic, hectic, kind of low key, stressful interview that reflected our subject matter, which is our elusive attention and our ability to kind of roll with the punches and stay focused on something when not everything's going as perfectly planned.
Katrina Onstad [00:04:16] Yes, well put. And we did try to edit out most, most of that messiness.
Vass Bednar [00:04:21] No!
Katrina Onstad [00:04:22] So you might hear some of it. But before we get into the interview, we did want to say that for the most part, Daniel is speaking about Adderall. That's his area of expertise. But there are a range of alternative drugs that each seek to accomplish the same effects, like Ritalin, Vyvanse, Strattera. So just keep in mind that we're talking about this impulse to medicate our attention, not specifically Adderall.
Vass Bednar [00:04:43] Absolutely. We're not confining it to just one drug. We love those generics. Now, one thing that Daniel explores that I think is really fascinating is whether it's natural and even important to be distracted, whether these drugs nudge us towards being just a little bit more machine like. Our brains have so many tabs open. I've got tabs open right now, maybe too many. And this week we're talking about the challenge when, you know, maybe other people want you to focus on just one. Our guest is Daniel Kolitz. Join us, even if you're multitasking. This is Lately. Hey, Daniel.
Daniel Kolitz [00:05:33] Hi Vass, how are you?
Vass Bednar [00:05:34] I'm good. How are you?
Daniel Kolitz [00:05:35] I'm great. I've never been better. Should I be hearing myself right now? And now I will flag one problem, which is that it is saying poor connection. Try moving to get a better signal.
Vass Bednar [00:05:49] Why don't we turn off our cameras for a bit? Because you're right. It's it's delaying us.
Daniel Kolitz [00:05:52] Okay. Yeah. Are you talking to me? You're muted, I should say. I don't know if that's. Sorry I did that.
Vass Bednar [00:05:58] You muted me? No I'm just kidding. It's coming to blows Daniel. It's coming to blows. No I'm kidding.
Daniel Kolitz [00:06:03] The only problem is that my phone is at 19% battery and I need the headphones plugged into the charger.
Vass Bednar [00:06:08] It's bumping out for me, and I'm- I'm missing words from my headphones.
Daniel Kolitz [00:06:11] I would say, oh sorry, I'm now noticing there's leaf blowers outside. Are you? Is that being picked up?
Vass Bednar [00:06:17] Yeah.
Daniel Kolitz [00:06:19] Oh my God. Hello?
Vass Bednar [00:06:26] Is Daniel home? Can he come out to play?
Daniel Kolitz [00:06:28] Yes. Yeah. He's here. He's arrived. Now we're golden. This is great. Honestly, this is a very, ADHD kind of situation. This is- maybe we all have it.
Vass Bednar [00:06:40] All right. What does it feel like to take Adderall?
Daniel Kolitz [00:06:44] I would say taking Adderall feels like being high on Adderall. Which is to say, being high on speed. There's a kind of increased heart rate, a feeling of well-being. I mean, Adderall was kind of the first anti-depressant. That's how it was prescribed in the 50s and 60s. So there's definitely a mood lifting quality to taking the drug. If you combine it with work, you'll find yourself more motivated, more inclined to finish tasks more...Maybe on the ball, depending on how you interact with the drug. But really what it does is, you know, make you feel good. It's sort of a pep pill, famously is what these pills were called.
Vass Bednar [00:07:23] I want to talk about how it works. But first, what is it from a component perspective because you just mentioned speed.
Daniel Kolitz [00:07:30] Yes. Adderall is dextroamphetamine, basically a random assortment of amphetamine salts. It was not created as a formal or official ADHD drug. I think mostly it was created as a way to kind of get a competitive edge in what was a thriving speed market in the 1950s and 1960s. At the time, initially it was just a diet drug, but, I mean, there are a number of variants of Adderall and different kinds of amphetamines that you can get in the market. Adderall obviously is the most popular one.
Vass Bednar [00:08:01] Why were you first prescribed it?
Daniel Kolitz [00:08:03] Well, I was first put on it when I was like 8 or 9 years old. And it was really kind of the classic story. I was a pretty hardcore class clown, constantly misbehaving, getting into trouble. I recall a teacher taping me to a desk at one point.
Vass Bednar [00:08:18] What?
Daniel Kolitz [00:08:19] I mean, it was a different time. It was the mid to late 90s. In any case what I'm trying to say is that I was the prime candidate for this kind of medication, but, I didn't really take it in any kind of serious way because I hated it, and because I would show up to school and feel completely alienated from myself and from my peers, and I wasn't able to joke around or, have a good time in the way that I was without it.
Vass Bednar [00:08:45] Yeah.
Daniel Kolitz [00:08:45] But the diagnosis that I got when I was eight, nine years old, it's kind of a free Adderall for life card. And so when I hit 21, 22 and I had actual ambitions, I wanted to accomplish things. I was able to get as much Adderall as I needed, basically.
Vass Bednar [00:09:02] And what was the diagnosis?
Daniel Kolitz [00:09:04] The diagnosis was A.D.D., not ADHD, curiously. And there is a difference. It is attention deficit disorder. ADHD is attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and that would manifest with being fidgety and flailing around and not being up to standard tasks. So I had A.D.D., which is just an inability to pay attention.
Vass Bednar [00:09:21] You write in your essay that entire desolated towns can testify to the destructiveness of OxyContin. All that Adderall leaves behind are the phantoms of lives that might have gone otherwise, my own included. What did you mean?
Daniel Kolitz [00:09:36] Very grim statement. I guess what I meant is that part of the reason Adderall has not been the scandal on the level of OxyContin is that even though Adderall is a hugely popular drug of abuse in the United States, you can't die on it. Really you'd have to take a huge amount, like bottle after bottle to have an actual heart attack and die. And that usually is the outcome we look at when we say, is a drug bad? What is the drug epidemic? It's that people are, you know, dying. With Adderall, it can change the course of your life very subtly in ways that you might not even pick up on or notice in the moment. But these kinds of negative outcomes are not really accounted for in statistical data, which is looking at things like vitality, heart attacks. In the case of my own life, would I have accomplished a lot more had I not spent so much time taking Adderall? Maybe not. Maybe in fact, Adderall is the only thing that has allowed me to do anything in my life, and otherwise I never would have written the word. I don't think that's true. But again, it's hard to say. What it really does is introduce an element of uncertainty into your life about how things might have gone otherwise, and you know, I'm not so old and things could go in any number of directions. Who knows? But it does feel like through Adderall, while I've wasted a lot of time that I could have been more productively spent otherwise, maybe.
Vass Bednar [00:10:54] Daniel, it's been called a quote unquote smart drug, but is it that smart? Do you think it works?
Daniel Kolitz [00:11:00] I think it can work for certain applications some of the time and for limited periods. There's not a lot of evidence that Adderall works beyond, let's say, 1 or 2 years. Now, part of that is that it's rare to have any kind of drug study that lasts more than a year or two. But there is an assumption when you read editorials or you read newspaper articles, they start from the premise that Adderall works, it's a smart drug. When in fact, you know, this drug is 100 years old. It has all kinds of downsides and side effects. It doesn't always work for its intended purpose. It can help you, like, assemble a spreadsheet really effectively. But even that after weeks or months or years of Adderall use, you might see the effect basically disappear. I mean, it's an addictive drug, which means that you develop a tolerance to it, which means that a lot of the people using Adderall, especially if they're taking the same amount every day and not taking more and more, might have stopped actually experiencing any benefit from it long ago. And whatever remains is just placebo.
Vass Bednar [00:12:02] Oh, wow. Well, maybe you can give me more of an overview of the origin of Adderall. Why does this drug exist at all?
Daniel Kolitz [00:12:10] Okay, that's a very good question. And it's kind of a crazy story. So amphetamine is invented a little bit before World War II. Becomes hugely popular during World War II. It's given to soldiers. And then later on, becomes popular as a diet aide, housewives are taking it in the 1950s. Things escalate to the point that there is basically a full on amphetamine epidemic in the United States in the 1960s, the early 1970s. In this period, you have basically dozens of fly by night amphetamine manufacturers putting up a shingle and trying to get an edge in the market by putting together any kind of random collection of chemicals that they can. One of these was a drug called Obetrol. It was favored by Andy Warhol. He was actually going to pick up his prescription when he was shot by Valerie Solanas.
Vass Bednar [00:13:01] Oh, wow.
Daniel Kolitz [00:13:02] This company, basically from the beginning, was in trouble with regulators because they were selling pills in unbelievably high doses. The FDA had been trying to get the DOJ to prosecute them for a long time, without success, until the amphetamine epidemic got to the point that Congress had intervened. There was an understanding that they needed to take some action about speed. And what happened is that in 1971, amphetamine was basically banned in America for all uses except for narcolepsy, which a very, very small proportion of the populace had, and then something that was then called minimal brain dysfunction. Over the years, minimal brain dysfunction, which was a kind of attention disorder in children, was rebranded, renamed A.D.D. or ADHD. So basically, Obetrol's manufacturers went underground more or less. They basically changed the formula, which had contained meth before, swapped it out for just amphetamine salts. In the 70s and 80s you can find newspaper articles where you see doctors getting arrested for selling like hundreds of thousands of these Obetrol pills. By the early 1990s, the market's basically dead. Obetrol's looking to sell the company, and they find a buyer and someone named Roger Griggs, who was a pain pill entrepreneur before that a high school football coach. When he looked at their accounting sheets, he saw that Obetrol was being prescribed by basically one doctor, $40,000 a year, one doctor in Utah.
Vass Bednar [00:14:35] Wow.
Daniel Kolitz [00:14:35] And he went to talk to this person to figure out what he was prescribing it for. And it turned out that he was prescribing it to kids that did not take to Ritalin, which was the ADHD drug of choice at that time. Roger Griggs is very excited by this. He decides to buy the company, decides to rebrand a Obetrol as Adderall, A.D.D. For All and put it on the market. Kids are on it by the time the FDA catches wind of the fact that this amphetamine is being sold and prescribed by psychiatrists. There are all kinds of complicated discussions. The drug is finally approved by the FDA in 1996.
Vass Bednar [00:15:13] The FDA being, of course, the Food and Drug Administration, the U.S. government agency that regulates, among other things, drug safety.
Daniel Kolitz [00:15:19] That's right.
Vass Bednar [00:15:19] So let's go to 1997, when pharma giant Shire purchased this company for $185 million. Yeah, it seems like they had a drug looking for a market. And that market was kids. How did they tap into that?
Daniel Kolitz [00:15:32] Well, they talked into it in a variety of ways. I mean, there's been amazing reporting on this front by Alan Schwarz of The New York Times, but I spoke to some of the pharma reps that they had in the early days, and they were just pounding the pavement. I mean, a lot of it is just drudge work, going door to door, developing personal relationships with physicians, sitting in offices for 4 or 5, six hours, waiting to talk to the doctor.
Vass Bednar [00:15:55] Wow.
Daniel Kolitz [00:15:55] And making the case that this drug's better than any other drug for ADHD. Now, the initial pitch of Adderall was this drug is better than Ritalin, more effective than Ritalin at treating ADHD. There was no evidence for that. There's not really evidence for that now, but a lot of it was just great marketing.
Vass Bednar [00:16:10] Adderall is now the most popular psycho stimulant used to treat ADHD in North America.
Daniel Kolitz [00:16:16] Yes.
Vass Bednar [00:16:16] In 2016, The New York Times called millennials generation Adderall. What is the picture that that phrase paints? Do you think it's fair?
Daniel Kolitz [00:16:27] It's fair enough. It paints a pretty bleak picture. The term generation Adderall also, of course, speaks to the many millions of millennials who were put on Adderall as children, myself included. And so they've had experience with stimulants from a pretty young age, and have been possibly taking stimulants every day for 20 or 30 years. I mean, millennials are, of course, getting up there in age. We might be the first generation to experience our entire working lives in this new precarious economy, or certainly the information economy. Adderall was approved more or less at the moment that the information economy was beginning to flourish when the email job, quote unquote, was taking off and becoming one of the main ways that college graduates made a living. And it does happen to be the case that if your job is to sit in front of a laptop 8 or 9 hours a day doing extremely repetitive ish tasks, tasks that are basically a kind of elevated drudge work, Adderall can be very useful. So I think that some of the characteristics of contemporary work are working more for less, working ten, 12 hour days, I mean, I don't know if this is a millennial specific phenomenon, but this big performance of work, of sitting and eating at your desk, of making the most spreadsheets. You know, these kinds of activities can really be enhanced by taking a bunch of speed. But what Adderall really is, is a boredom killer. And a lot of contemporary work is extremely boring.
Vass Bednar [00:18:07] How did Adderall affect your work?
Daniel Kolitz [00:18:10] Positively and negatively. Positively in the sense that I could do a lot more of it in theory. I was sitting at the desk for long, long periods of time. I mean, entire days and nights.
Vass Bednar [00:18:20] How long?
Daniel Kolitz [00:18:21] Well, the day ended up starting later and later because I was waking up later, and later because I was going to bed later or later because I wanted to get more work done. I mean, when you're really in a kind of Adderall binge, when you're really locked in, you never want to stop working. And also it makes it very hard to sleep. I think the quality of the work that I was doing did kind of suffer because A) you're sleeping worse B) you're just sort of burning out your brain by sitting there.
Vass Bednar [00:18:44] Yeah.
Daniel Kolitz [00:18:45] And C) I mean, a lot of the work that I was doing was creative work or trying to be creative work. And I think and this is sort of under discussed, Adderall can be kind of bad for creative work because creative work involves all kinds of lateral free associative thinking. It requires daydreaming. It requires a kind of distraction. And if you're so relentlessly locked in to whatever you're doing, if you're only focused on the task at hand and not able to kind of break out of whatever your thought patterns are, it will probably harm your work. If you're trying to do something that is creative. And that applies not just to writing, but to any kind of work that requires some abstract, imaginative capacity.
Vass Bednar [00:19:22] Yeah, maybe it's market is limited not to kids, but to people with desk jobs that are factory like.
Daniel Kolitz [00:19:27] Yeah, exactly.
Vass Bednar [00:19:29] So if we accept that premise that we live in an attention deficit economy, then Adderall and its fellow stimulants are sort of necessary to corral this broken attention. But there is a kind of chicken and egg question here reporting that you mentioned suggest that Silicon Valley is flooded with Adderall, and in fact one study from the University of Michigan documented this, that the prevalence of amphetamine use was so popular amongst programmers and coders. So if the internet was built by people who were on stimulants. Is that why the internet is so stimulating?
Daniel Kolitz [00:20:03] Yeah. Well, first I would of course like to credit my brilliant friend Danielle Carr, who wrote that contribution to the Club Med Adderall package, in which my essay was part. And who is a brilliant scholar. And yes, her thesis was that the internet was basically built by people who are on speed and is designed to be consumed while on speed in some respects. You know, I do see the connection. I mean, I personally, in the peak of my Adderall days, I was spending most of my time reading physical books. I mean, listen, I love going on Twitter. I love reading amusing tweets. You know, the times I've been sucked into sort of internet, whatever, losing five hours of the day. Adderall has definitely facilitated that to one degree or another. So yeah, sure. I definitely think there's a connection there.
Vass Bednar [00:20:45] And given the Adderall shortages that have been sort of rolling through the U.S. for a couple of years, that has implications for the 40 plus million Americans who have a prescription and might be handling this. How do you see people reacting when there are these shortages?
Daniel Kolitz [00:21:03] Well, I mean, again, it is an addictive drug. And so when you lose access to an addictive drug, you feel terrible. You do go through a kind of withdrawal. Now, it's not as intense as opiate withdrawal or as benzodiazepine withdrawal, but it does actually drastically affect your daily functioning.
Vass Bednar [00:21:21] I found some Redditors who were talking about losing their jobs as a result of the shortage.
Daniel Kolitz [00:21:26] Oh yeah. Sure. I mean, I don't know if we're seeing that on a macro level. I'm sure that a lot of people are struggling with the shortages. They seem to be kind of variable and location dependent. I mean, I know people who've had no trouble getting Adderall throughout this entire shortage, and I know people who haven't been able to get it for months and months.
Vass Bednar [00:21:44] What's the secret? Who do you have to know? Who's in the group chat?
Daniel Kolitz [00:21:48] Really, a lot of it is brute force calling up pharmacies, trading information, this kind of thing. The places that seem to have it seem kind of random. It is out there. It does exist, but yes people are still struggling to access their medications.
Vass Bednar [00:22:01] So do you think sometimes it's becoming illegally procured or people are just sort of shopping around for that prescription?
Daniel Kolitz [00:22:08] Oh, it's abs- I mean, it's illegal procured now and it's always been illegal procured. I mean, Adderall has always been an extremely popular street drug, the same way that speed has been an extremely popular street drug since it was invented. What is, I guess, unusual now, or unusual in the context of drug history, is that people are going to drug dealers to buy drugs, not to have a good time, but to work more efficiently. But people are absolutely acquiring it in the street. The reason that's dangerous is because, as we know in America right now, many of these pills are pressed for things like fentanyl, which are hugely deadly. So it is dangerous. It's a real risk that you take when you buy Adderall or any drug on the street.
Vass Bednar [00:22:46] Is the US the only country where we're seeing these shortages of Adderall?
Daniel Kolitz [00:22:50] To my knowledge, yes. But the U.S. is the only country where we're seeing Adderall prescribe at this level. So it would stand to reason it would be the only country that would experience these kinds of shortages. I mean, the level of prescriptions in America is not matched by any other country. I mean Adderall basically is not prescribed in Western Europe, not prescribed UK. All stimulants are banned in Japan. Canada seems to be making progress as far as getting a lot of people on Adderall. You guys are getting there, don't- you know, don't worry.
Vass Bednar [00:23:16] We're getting there. We're getting there. And we have seen more of a surge during and post pandemic, which some are chalking up to the rise of telemedicine. In Canada, we have data to prove that adults diagnoses of ADHD are on the rise, as are prescriptions of medications like Adderall to manage it. What other roles do you think technology may have played in this rise? I'm thinking of social media in particular.
Daniel Kolitz [00:23:42] Well, this is the problem that applies not just to ADHD, but to a whole range of diagnostic categories. There is a whole world of mental health stuff on TikTok, and that spans from influencers who have no credentials to actual therapists, where people talk about the symptoms of ADHD. It does seem that basically any trait can be recategorized as the trait that someone with ADHD has. And so I think probably a lot of people who otherwise would not necessarily have thought of themselves as having ADHD or A.D.D. are, through social media, developing some sense that they might have that problem. But there is definitely a lot of loose mental health talk going around on the internet. Some of it helpful, some of it probably ill advised or dangerous.
Vass Bednar [00:24:32] We're talking to Daniel Kolitz. He's the author of an article in Club Med called The History of Adderall. So what's the problem with a life on Adderall from a health perspective beyond just the mental health risks?
Daniel Kolitz [00:24:45] Well, if you have some kind of preexisting tendency toward severe mental health problems, I mean, schizophrenia or psychosis, it is totally possible that Adderall can surface that or exacerbate that. But just sort of speaking from my own understanding and experience with Adderall, I mean, it can certainly wear you down over time. It can lead to living kind of a tough life in the sense that you're not sleeping enough. You're not eating enough. You're so focused on your work, you lose track of everything else. If we want to talk about real potential long term consequences, I mean, this would only apply generally to a small subset of Adderall users. But because it is an addictive drug and because addictive drugs require you to up the dosage continuously, you can end up sort of in a psychotic state, certainly.
Vass Bednar [00:25:37] Wow.
Daniel Kolitz [00:25:37] Again, that's not going to happen to the majority of Adderall users, but it will happen to some small percentage of them.
Vass Bednar [00:25:43] So what's an alternative path for someone that's suffering from an attention deficit disorder?
Daniel Kolitz [00:25:49] I can speak to quitting Adderall myself.
Vass Bednar [00:25:52] Sure.
Daniel Kolitz [00:25:53] And the year that I did that, which I will say felt a little bit hopeless in the first few months, I mean, that first month, I could basically do nothing I'd been taking out for years and years and I could barely function. I mean, I wasn't unhappy and I could interact normally socially, but getting work done seemed very difficult. I think part of the difficulty of getting off Adderall is that it is very rare for an adult in the North American economy to have a month to hang out and reconnect with their body and figure out how their brain works without amphetamine. So you have to kind of manage withdrawal alongside the normal daily obligations of work that you built up while you were taking amphetamine, which can be very scary. But I think just having, I mean this sounds kind of corny, having more faith in yourself and believing that you can get things done without the pill, I mean, you can really become dependent on Adderall to the point where you think, I can't do anything without this.
Vass Bednar [00:26:51] When did you make that decision?
Daniel Kolitz [00:26:53] It was a few years ago, at some point during the pandemic, that I decided to completely quit. And, you know, it was quite challenging. You really have to retrain your brain to function without it, because Adderall really does feel amazing even when you're not getting much done. I mean, that's the crazy part about it. Adderall can trick you into thinking that you are doing a good job, and that your work is good simply because you're high on Adderall and it feels good to be working. And when you lose that extrinsic motivation and you're left to your own devices and to your own natural dopamine supply, it can be a pretty scary thing.
Vass Bednar [00:27:36] And how does your brain feel now that you've retrained it?
Daniel Kolitz [00:27:39] Pretty bad. I mean, it feels fine.
Vass Bednar [00:27:41] Yeah.
Daniel Kolitz [00:27:42] It's interesting. When I was a kid, my father was always pushing the medication solution, and my mother was always kind of against it. And her argument, and I do kind of agree with this, is that being alive means feeling sort of sluggish and bad some part of the time. Being alive means spending entire days in a kind of fog, and there are things that you can do to mitigate that, I've never been much of an exerciser for instance, but even people that are in top physical condition will feel bad some portion of the time. We live in a world where that's not really permitted, where you have to be working continuously or expected to work continuously, and we live in a world obviously that is obsessed with optimization of all kinds. And so Adderall holds out this promise that, oh, you never have to have a down day. You never have to not be productive. Take this pill and you will be able to work continuously all the time, when in fact, it might just be the case that we're not meant to do that. I don't know. But, you know, it is appealing, the idea that you can be a super person churning it out.
Vass Bednar [00:28:46] Well, these drugs are huge and growing business. What is to change so that people have more freedom from these new and potentially dangerous dependencies?
Daniel Kolitz [00:28:59] You know, it's a really complicated question because I think in America, the cat's kind of out of the bag. Once you get a sufficiently large population on a particular drug, getting them off of it, saying you can't take this anymore, is extremely, extremely challenging. It would require basically the government to say we are drastically reducing Adderall quotas, which they are kind of doing I mean, that's partly what's responsible for the shortage, although I don't think that's motivated by any desire to necessarily get people off of Adderall. But it requires cutting the supplies. It would require more stringent prescribing practices or a different conception of what ADHD or A.D.D. are. Again, I don't want to suggest that that Adderall is entirely bad, but I do want to suggest that it's probably a bad thing that this many people are taking it.
Vass Bednar [00:29:52] You mentioned potentially strengthening the prescription protocol. Daniel, if you could reconnect with the person that first prescribed you Adderall back when you were nine years old, what would you say?
Daniel Kolitz [00:30:04] You know, I would say I get it man. I totally understand because you were really just sort of swept up in the prevailing psychiatric currents of your time, a time that hasn't ended. I mean, I still think that Adderall or Adderall, like drugs, are the go to solution for kids with attentional problems. I would maybe make the case that a lot of the behaviors that are associated with A.D.D., ADHD in children are genuinely just childlike behaviors that fade with time. I might have been an exceptional case because I really can't overstate one annoying student I was. I was making people laugh. I wasn't, you know, hurting anybody. But, I basically viewed my classes as stages for jokes. I hold nothing against my doctor. It makes complete sense to me.
Vass Bednar [00:30:50] I think I would have had fun being in class with you. Daniel, thank you so much.
Daniel Kolitz [00:30:54] Yeah. Thank you. This is great.
Vass Bednar [00:30:56] Your phone lasted that battery.
Daniel Kolitz [00:30:58] I know. We're at- let's see we're at-
Vass Bednar [00:30:59] 21% now or what?
Daniel Kolitz [00:31:01] 3%.
Vass Bednar [00:31:02] Oh my God. Okay.
Daniel Kolitz [00:31:04] Yeah.
Vass Bednar [00:31:05] That's amazing.
Daniel Kolitz [00:31:06] Yeah. We're at 3% and we're going to hold out until the very last minute here.
Vass Bednar [00:31:22] You've been listening to Lately, a Globe and Mail podcast. Our executive producer is Katrina Onstad. The show is produced by Andrea Varsany and our sound designer is Cameron McIver. I'm your host, Vass Bednar. And in our show notes, you can subscribe to the newsletter, where we unpack a little more of the latest in business and technology. A new episode of Lately comes out every Friday wherever you get your podcasts.
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