Charles Fain Lehman at The New Atlantis:
Americans can’t find enough Adderall. In 2021 pharmacists filled over forty million prescriptions for the popular ADHD drug, a sixteen percent increase in just two years. But this explosion in demand, likely driven by lax telehealth prescriptions during the pandemic, has run up against available supply. Because Adderall is a controlled substance, its production is carefully limited by the Drug Enforcement Agency. Some patients now ration their pills or drive hours to fill their prescriptions. People who have taken Adderall daily since they were children find themselves struggling to operate without it.
Americans find it only too easy, by contrast, to obtain methamphetamine. Of the 109,000 American drug overdose deaths last year, a third were caused by psychostimulants, mainly meth. That’s a more than tenfold increase in a decade, making methamphetamine second only to synthetic opioids, principally fentanyl, in driving the overdose crisis.
more here.