Christopher H. Foreman writes on FB to Michael Fumento: “If memory serve you also wrote a science-based piece decrying the tendency of some to think that Ritalin was poisoning America’s kids.”
Michael Fumento: Nailed right-wing extremists who were convinced schools were trying to turn little boys into little girls. Fact is amphetamine is one of history’s true wonder drugs. It literally makes you smarter, hence the illegal trade on college campuses; it’s the only drug that can cause significant weight loss; it’s an anti-depressant that can work with the first pill as opposed to waiting five or six weeks. As far as over-stimulation goes, my dose is 40 mg a day. I’d guess I’d be better off taking an extra 30 mg one day than popping two caffeine tablets at the same time.
Were I a parent, I would try to get my kid a FALSE ADD diagnosis just to get my kids on it!
But from a career viewpoint, here I was criticizing cherished conservative writer/thinkers (most specifically Mary Eberstadt, wife of Neil). They don’t take criticism lightly. They bide their time and when they can hurt you, they do. Looking back I guess my decline and fall was inevitable, though nobody could have guessed how hostile the US would become to both the intelligentsia and to free speech. This is what you see in an empire in dramatic decline.
Christopher H. Foreman: “Interesting! My son once said to me that he can feel his IQ drop 50 points when he is off the meds. I assumed that he was exaggerating.”
Daniel McCarthy: “Bill Buckley used amphetamines his whole life to help him write his columns. That’s one reason he was so prolific. His son, Christopher, describes this in the book he published about his father and mother a few years ago. WFB used benzedrine in the old days and Adderall later on. But take a look at some of those columns: even before old age got to him, the column was often unfocused and just terrible, a mad jumble. Not sure I would exclusively blame the drugs for that, but they probably made him think he was more coherent than he was. Too much confidence, too little old-fashioned concentration.”
Michael Fumento: I actually watched WFB write a column and when he claimed he took no more than 20 minutes, he was telling the truth. I think that rule hampered him later on. I was also personally involved in a bizarre event in which he
had a column that had 95 percent overlap with an article of mine in NR! Now, he couldn’t have thought he could get away with that. So either he had hired an unscrupulous or stupid ghost or something gummed up his
works. But amphetamine doesn’t do that.
I think one reason for the tremendous increase in ADD/ADHD diagnoses is that amphetamine is so effective for EVERYONE and relatively benign. It helps EVERYONE focus, but its affects are most apparent in those who have the most trouble focusing. Students also like it for its stimulant effect; allowing them to cram that much before a test even as it also helps them perform better during the test. You don’t get “high” on amphetamine, or in any case not like you do with any number of other drugs.
Amphetamine just got a bad rep. For example, you often see it called “addictive,” yet it fits no such definition. Sudden withdrawal just makes you sleepy, as I know from experience. So you sleep about 12 straight hours and then you’re good to go. CAFFEINE is mildly addictive. You also hear about wives in the ’50s using it to keep their weight down. So what? As I’ve said, it’s the only truly effective weight-loss drug there is. Otherwise you can pay a fortune for something that’s been shown to cause three pounds of weight loss per year in people weighing 350 pounds! NOBODY should undergo bariatric surgery who hasn’t been put on amphetamines first.
Likewise, other than experimental ketamine, all anti-depressants take weeks to kick in assuming they kick in at all. The most popular ones tend to clobber your sex life. How many people commit suicide each year during that 5-6 week period whose deaths could have been prevented with an amphetamine Rx?
All this suffering because of urban legends — the kind I used to dispel. Two years ago I read where a dad in Australia wanted amphetamines more severely regulated because his son had a car accident while using them.
Never mind that he took a month’s dosage at once! Take a 10-day dose of Tylenol at once and if your body doesn’t vomit it up, expect to die. Chronic aspirin use kills over 10,000 Americans a year. Number of Americans killed by amphetamine? Probably zero.
Every doctor I’ve had this discussion with agrees with me on all this, whether in the US, Mexico, or Colombia, but here small amounts of cocaine are legal while getting ADHD medicine is a bitch! Call me crazy but I hate seeing people suffering terribly and dying for no reason other than urban legends.
A lot of people don’t realize that all the original ADHD drugs are amphetamines. And virtually identical. All I tried had the same effect. But it’s become a dirty word.
Daniel, the Wikipedia entry on benzedrine mentions Bond. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benzedrine It notes that amphetamine doesn’t give you feelings of euphoria — for better or worse! Just today as an experiment I took three instead of two, and don’t feel any different. Not much of an experiment, but I don’t have much extra to play around with. It is of course a chemical cousin of Benzedrine, as well as ephedrine such as in Bronkaid and methamphetamine. When I’ve fallen short on amphetamine I take Bronkaid to not feel so sleepy, but it has no effect on ADHD.
Ironically, Bronkaid is illegal in Colombia because it can be converted to meth — again, noting that cocaine is NOT illegal! Aargh! You also can’t buy caffeine pills, but I suspect that’s because they want to force you to drink their coffee to get your fix.
Finally, you may have heard of Modafinil, which is approved for narcolepsy and some have touted as being somewhat similar to amphetamine for ADHD. Not in my experience or that of the doctors I’ve consulted with. In fact, caffeine appears to be better for keeping awake! But pharmaceutical companies have no stake in selling OTC caffeine tablets.
Now for my lecture on date rape drugs . . . Actually, I had a specific Colombian variety used on me in Medellin. Wasn’t pretty. Pretty awful, actually and there’s no doubt it could be used for raping as well as theft. But that’s another story. A million stories from The Planet of the Colombians!
…The idea that science could somehow contradict their worldview of how things should be. Ultimately it did me in because I could write two dozen articles that somebody liked but eventually would have to write one that disagreed with their worldview, such as that vaccine hysteria is just that. Then they’d contact the editor who would agree to never run me again. Donors to think tanks feel the same way. They want somebody they can always count on. That means sticking to a very limited field, say, global warming, and always coming to the “right” conclusions.
Add in the tremendous decline in professional journalism and especially investigative AND the rise of cronyism somebody that a lot of people think contributed so much to the discourse of ideas for 25 years ultimately became an untouchable. Yet the kind of myths I debunked continue to pop up, with no me around anymore to debunk them. All of them impose a hidden tax on the nation; like throwing wealth down a well. To this day, AIDS gets more research money than any disease save cancer, yet virtually nobody in the US dies of it! AIDS “deaths,” as CDC admits, are deaths of anybody with an AIDS diagnosis. If you have AIDS and are flattened by a failing UFO, it’s categorized as an AIDS death.
“An estimated 15,529 people with an AIDS diagnosis died in 2010, and approximately 636,000 people in the United States with an AIDS diagnosis have overall3. The deaths of persons with an AIDS diagnosis can be due to any cause—that is, the death may or may not be related to AIDS. ”
Did YOU know that? Nobody does, outside CDC. That was my job. Now it goes undone.
…Of COURSE you didn’t [know]! You’re very smart and well-read but can’t know about every important issue, anymore than you should be able to fix anything that goes wrong in your house. We all specialize, even if some of us like me have many specialties. But something I excelled at was smelling rats where nobody else did, then digging up massive amounts of research to make my point rather than just blabbing or name-calling. There were any number of issues on which I knew more than any other JOURNALIST/academic in the country. From AIDS and ethanol on down to “runaway Toyotas.”
I could smell mis- or disinformation from 10 miles away and provide facts to counter it in a way NOBODY else could, as evidenced by nobody else doing so. Now that’s gone. Toyota just paid a record $1.2 billion to Uncle Sam for doing nothing wrong except complaining too loudly about being led to the stake. Beyond the immediate issue, it showed just how far “justice” goes at the Justice Department. Couldn’t place a piece on it. Now DOJ has carte blanche, under either party, to fine the living crap out of any company for basically asserting its innocence. Yes, I find that horrifying.
Hard to explain but I’m hardwired to tell the truth. If offered a million bucks to lie in print I’d do it and spend the rest of my life in psychological agony for doing so. And potential employers know my rep. I can’t lie to them about lying!
