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Aderall Or Nothing: Anatomy of the Great Amphetamine Drought
pigrabbitbear writes "To prevent hoarding of materials and their potential for theft and illicit use, the Drug Enforcement Agency sets quotas for the chemical precursors to drugs like Adderall. The DEA projects the need for amphetamine salts, then produces and distributes the materials to pharmaceutical companies so that they can produce their drugs. But with the number of prescriptions for Adderall jumping 13 percent in the past year, pharmaceutical companies claim that the quotas are no longer sufficient for supplying Americans with their Adderall. The DEA contends that their quotas do, in fact, meet demands, and that any shortages arise from pharmaceutical companies selectively producing only certain, typically name-brand and more expensive versions of ADHD medications."
Is there no enterprise you can't utterly fuck up?
Perhaps we should have this dept dissolved.
At the very least, can we start a movement to find constitutional justification for such a Federal Agency?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Considering how those that are actually being prescribed Aderall and need it to function are the most likely to be affected by this, I do.
The DEA imposes an artificial scarcity on a chemical, and the drug companies crank that though their models to maximize profit. What's the surprise here? That the DEA doesn't have any non-partisan economists on staff?
Yes, the total amount of the raw material might be enough for the demand, but people have been making fortunes profiting from local shortages since, like, forever.
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
I agree. When my son was in grade school, one of the teachers mentioned he should be tested for ADHD. My wife and I both agreed to take him to his doctor but we also agreed it was a load of crap. (Since been proven over time since he's at university and doing fine.)
Legalize and Tax. No more war on drugs.
I'm 48, and I don't use any recreational drugs (including alcohol). But I've long held that legalizing and simply taxing all drugs would eliminate far more problems than drugs currently cause.
Drug dealers? No need. Buy what you want at the local pharmacy. Made by real labs, with quality control standards. Warning label on the bottle: "This drug may kill you. Use at your own risk." No illegal pipeline if what you can buy at CVS is cheaper and better quality than from the guy on the street. How much of organized crime is based on the drug trade? From import to manufacturing to distribution to people stealing crap to feed their habit?
Dirty Needles? Nope. Buy those when you are picking up your consumer grade heroin. There go HIV and HEP-C transmission rates.
Drug addicts? Use the previously mentioned tax money on education and rehab programs. Even a hefty tax on the drugs would still leave them at a lower cost than street drugs.
Never happen. There are too many vested interests in keeping the "war on drugs" alive.
Every single person I've met (which are dozens) that regularly takes Adderall clearly does not "need" it to function, but they may think they do and exhibit classic signs of addiction.
However, medicines like this fit into most medical/social science methodology in that, if someone starts taking Adderall, of course they are more productive and may even feel better (e.g. euphoria) etc, so measuring those effects usually produces positive results.
Interceding variables like having doctors prescribing amphetamine salts like candy seem to be ignored in these methodologies.
How much suffering is the DEA willing to inflict for the, pardon the metaphor, pipe dream of a drug-free America?
You can't swing a dead cat without hearing about under-medicating pain and how that one of the primary drivers of that is physician fear of a DEA investigation or worse, losing their license to prescribe.
Now it's this -- and while I'm sure there's some pharma holdback for brand-name drugs, that wouldn't matter if the DEA wasn't so restrictive of the chemistry.
So now we have another group of people at minimum inconvenienced at at maximum with negative health consequences because of the relentless pursuit of an unobtainable moral goal.
Thanks, DEA.
The dea and war on drugs has only been around for about 90 years and has caused nothing but problems. by your own reasoning we should go back to a state where the governents don't try to dictate what we should and should not consume. Seems reasonable to me, I would like ot have juridstiction over my own body! I mean seriously, next they'll be telling us we can't consume milk if it doesn't come from a farm that homogenizes the milk.
Wow, tough call who to side with on this one - The pharmaceutical companies that would rather let women miscarry and kids die of leukemia than leave any money on the table; Or the government agency that would rather watch cancer victims die in agony and puking their guts out than let them toke up.
Can we just line both sides up against the wall, as a lesson to whomever we allow to replace them?
Truly spoken like someone who doesn't have a medical need for it. How very civic minded of you being so willing to let other people suffer so that you don't have to worry that people you don't know might take a drug they don't need.
I'm guessing you're also OK with people not being properly treated for their debillitating cluster headaches or chronic pain as well (as long as you don't have those conditions, naturally).
Yes, they just didn't function. Kinda like before antibiotics, people with serious infections just died.
Sure, there are abuses, and it's over-prescribed. However, there are people who actually do need it to function well and they should be able to get it. The DEA needs to butt out of medical practice.
There's good evidence that all these "attention-deficit" drugs are only of real benefit for a few weeks, after which continued use only makes sense for avoiding the sometimes-serious withdrawal symptoms. In other words, while use of aphetamines for ADD appeared to make medical sense once upon a time, more recent research shows that they whole thing is a bit of a fraud being run for the profit of the drug companies, with no net contribution at all to public well-being, or student performance, or anything else beyond maintaining a large, profitable population of addicts. Sure if you stop taking it you feel worse for a while, and if you start again you feel better. That's what addiction is.
If you're an adult taking them yourself, make your own judgment. If you're cooperating with a school in dosing your kid though, seriously consider setting a time and place for the kid to go cold turkey. You're doing nobody a real favor by keeping your kid on speed.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
I don't think anyone disagrees that there are cases where it actually does help and is needed. What people are saying is that its use is too widespread and most of the children on it just need parenting and discipline. Your child may well be one of those who do actually need it. The question is how do you discern one group from the other and prevent those who don't need it from being placed on it.
What you DON'T do is give that decision to a governmental agency that has a narrow focus on just saying no. While there are legitimate social and medical arguments for and against amphetamine (and other drug) use, letting the DEA essentially control it is a very, very bad way to go.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Well, hopefully they all die. That way demand will dry up.
The crowd at a Republican debate cheered this approach for uninsured sick people in need of health care.
Well, one or two people in the crowd, but even at that I agree that was still a WTF?! moment.
I found it to be not a "WTF" moment, and instead more a "wow, they're being really honest about their 'fuck everyone else' attitude..."
I'm no fan of either of the major political parties in the US -- both appear to be full of unprincipled mercenaries perfectly happy to sell the country down the shitter for the right price. That said, the Republican party seems much more the party of bald-faced sociopaths, actively courting like-minded authoritarians, selling the theme of anti-social, anti-public policy, and cultivating and capitalizing upon their audience's near-complete lack of cognitive dissonance. "I've got mine; screw you!" could well be their rallying cry.
As widely reported in the US media, such as the NY Times article, "Even Critics of Safety Net Increasingly Depend on It", the common people self-identifying as Republican are very often the very people being hurt by the espoused Republican approach to policy. More disturbingly, they've been so successfully hoodwinked that these very people have absorbed the Republican talking points about dismantling the very systems that keep themselves afloat, and happily parrot them back to anyone that asks.
That's some masterful propagandizing. I doff my cap, I really do.
So then having even a few people in a crowd, let alone a whole room, cheering for the idea that all those sick people will die off and thereby "solve" the problem of healthcare, that's just more evidence of how successful the pro-corporate, pro-wealth, anti-public idea machine has been.
All this really just helps the rest of us still capable of more rational thought to see the signs of where this might go. And it's not a pretty outlook.
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
Wrong, they opt to make the most money with a supply ordained by the government, and not any sort of actual physical restrictions. If the government didn't artificially limit the supply, the companies would opt to make more money by filling both the more and less profitable markets, because both are still profitable.
If the supply of precursors weren't limited, then other companies could step in and manufacture the generic drugs, and thus the companies that are limiting these drugs would end up sabotaging their own sales.
However, since supplies are very limited and there are high barriers to entry due to DEA rules, there isn't much competition and companies can lock up the entire supply of precursors.
When you talk of gov't supply, it sounds like you are still talking about the adderall case. You have not explained the free market failing on methotrexate, which does not have the gov't precursor problem you speak of.
Of course, we all know that there is no free market for drugs in this country. If you think there is, just rent some floor space and machinery, hire some chemists, and get to work manufacturing the drug. Oh wait, there's now months (if not years) of forms, inspections, permits, etc. you need before you can get started. I won't pretend that I disagree with these. I'm simply stating that the market isn't free to move as it otherwise would.
Similarly, the pharma patents (and patents in general) are another restriction on a truly free market. Do you think it likely that existing giants like Eli Lilly or Phizer are likely to re-tool to create a cheap generic drug while a free, government-enforced monopoly (and its associated high profit margins) is available on other drugs they produce? Of course not. Again, it seems that temporary monopolies are necessary in this space simply to encourage massive R&D spend by these companies. Still, artificial monopolies don't exist in a free market.
But what about the companies that already thrive providing cheap, generic pharma products. Why aren't they filling the gap? The answer seems simple (I'm just reasoning below - no citations available as I don't sit on the boards of these companies).
1. Companies already producing the drug haven't ramped up production because they know that a) there is a high barrier to entry to new drug production and b)contraction in supply is likely to increase price, thus increasing their margin - at least in the short term.
2. Existing companies won't re-tool to produce the drug right now because the cost of re-tooling and crossing the approval hurdles for production is too high to justify the effort. They can make more money selling the same generic drugs they do today. Of course, these companies will respond when the price of the drug in question rises to the level where it makes sense for these companies to go through the effort to re-tool and seek approval.
Bottom line here is that there is a significant barrier to entry that keeps free market forces at bay.
So, the reason free market forces aren't at work here is because the free market doesn't exist in this space. That's good for a lot of reasons (I, for one, appreciate that I can assume my pharma products are safe), but bad for the reason you see above.