But I know for a fact that without adderall, I wouldn't have done a damn thing. I've tried for a few months. Shrugged and went back. There's an underlying assu

But I know for a fact that without adderall, I wouldn't have done a damn thing. I've tried for a few months. Shrugged and went back. There's an underlying assumption here: that the medication either makes things better, or makes things worse. It may have different effects on different axes, but it has those effects while it is active, and they go away once the drug is metabolized. This way of looking at things makes the logic of using many psychoactive medications inescapable from a school and career perspective (Maybe less so from a social point of view). But it's not the only way to look at things. What if, for the sake of argument, we posited that that the drug has not one, but two kinds of effects: 1. Constant effects, like we are assuming right now, and 2. Derivative effects. Effects that change not how good you are at work today, but how good you are tomorrow. This could be either an adaptation to the medication, or a suppressive effect the medication has on learning. If that is so, then we would expect type 2 effects to dominate in the long run, but type 1 effects to dominate in the short run. At any given two week window taking the medication is a huge win (because of type 1 effects), but on a longer time horizon of perhaps two or three years the prognosis could be better off the medication (because of type 2 effects). The devil is in the details, ofc: do type 2 effects exist? How large are they? Is there a crossover point? Is it two years, twenty years, or two hundred years? My personal experience with stimulant medications is that type 2 effects do exist, and that the crossover is something like two years. That means that getting off them requires one to put up with two years of being worse off than one was on the medication.