Speeding to success

About one out of five high school boys "have" attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), which means we are now free to pump them up with performance enhancing drugs.

Make no mistake--Adderall is speed, and it works. If you want to do better at something, anything, that depends at all on alertness and reaction time, Adderall will improve your scores.

And that's what school is all about now.

You can look up the side effects of amphetamines, and find anecdotal stories detailing its occasional horrors. It's habit-forming, can induce hallucinations, and on rare occasions kill.

I was once a doc, even prescribed the stuff on occasion, and none of that perturbs me too much--the whole point of drugs is risk vs. benefit, and if there were no risks, there'd be no need for prescriptions.


Here's the scary part for me--we have a culture that worships competition, that accepts winning at any costs, and simply does not love children (or humans at any developmental stage) as much as it cares about numbers.


Numbers which, paradoxically, are rarely understood in our innumerate world.

Go ahead an dope up your kid. It will help her in school.
With a little luck, it will give your child the edge that gets her into that Ivy.

Hokey pokey parenting: That's what it's all about!