Case in point. I talked to someone because I was falling behind at work who recommended a specialist. They gave me a prescription. Guess what? I got more work done. Of course I did. I was on speed. Baseball players take it to work harder. Is it because they are all ADD or is it that it simply makes you concentrate harder and apply yourself more? It did improve my work so the specialist now assumes that I have ADD since the ADD treatment helped my "problem". Now, in my way of thinking, most everyone's work output would improve on amphetamines. That's why it is called speed.
If that's true, maybe we'd all be better off if most everyone did take it.
Anyway, there's one little wrinkle. Take a normal person that's at work 8 hours a day. He's probably actually working diligently for 6 of them. Put him on "speed", as you call it, and he can work diligently for 7 or so. Not bad, but not exactly earth-shaking.
Someone with severe attention problems might average up to 3 hours a day. On a good week. Get him running on all cylinders for 6 or 7 hours a day, and his whole life changes. Throw in a similar boost to his short term memory (his RAM, if you will... think about what happens to a machine that doesn't have enough RAM, and how much faster it gets when you remedy that shortcoming), and it can easily mean the difference between a wasted life drifting from failure to failure to a happy, productive life that one can be proud of.
I think there have always been plenty of people that needed psychoactive drugs of various kinds. Their survival rate tends to be higher nowadays so we notice them more. Especially as such a person has to actually put effort into killing himself, when in earlier years, he might have wandered off and never been seen again or simply starved to death without anyone taking particular note of it.
a fine and enviable madness, this delusion that all questions have answers, and nothing is beyond the reach of a strong left arm.
