Drug Use to Drug Abuse

Joe Vegas started down the road to methamphetamine addiction and despair when, at age seven, his mother first gave him a stimulant pill.⁵¹ This widely prescribed stimulant and "speed are the same thing whether people want to admit it or not," said Joe, now twenty-eight.

• Psychiatrists prefer to call their drugs "medications." Perhaps this word conjures up images of some benign cough syrup prescribed by a kindly family doctor. Psychiatric medications however, are all mind-altering drugs, many are addictive, and all are abused.

• The childhood use of mind-altering drugs is a major contributing factor to later cocaine dependence.⁵² The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) reports that taking the most used stimulant drug prescribed for ADHD, predisposes the user to cocaine's reinforcing effect—in other words, cocaine addiction.

• According to the DEA, the street abuse of methylphenidate has become a major problem. Introduced to American schools in the 1960s, the drug now sells for $5 to $10 a pill on the black market. Known also as "Vitamin R," "R-ball" and the "poor man's cocaine," it is abused by grinding up the drug and snorting or injecting it.⁵³

• In an analysis of a community based group of adults born in the 1960s, the DEA concluded: "Preliminary data indicated the medicated ADHD group had a higher lifetime frequency of cocaine use and a higher percentage that used cocaine more than 40 times…this preliminary data suggest that stimulant treatment of ADHD in childhood may be a risk factor for cocaine abuse in adults."⁵⁴

• A study in the Journal of Forensic Science in 1999, agreed that there is increasing evidence that methylphenidate is being diverted to illicit use by snorting or injection, with some fatalities, at least one from intranasal use.⁵⁵

• A 1998 study of Californian adolescents diagnosed with ADHD found that, as adults, those treated with the stimulant were three times more likely to use cocaine.⁵⁶



• Mary Ann Block reported that between 1992 and 1996 production of the main "ADHD" stimulant tripled for psychiatric use; at the same time, cocaine use among teenagers increased by 166%.⁵⁷

• In August 2001, the Journal of the American Medical Association reported that methylphenidate acts much like cocaine. Injected as a liquid, it sends a jolt that "addicts like very much," said Nora Volkow, M.D., psychiatrist and imaging expert at Brookhaven National Laboratory, Upton, NY. The drug is chemically similar to cocaine, the study says. The study also admits that although psychiatrists have used this drug to treat ADHD for 40 years, they and pharmacologists have never known how or why it worked.⁵⁸