How The American Workforce Got Hooked on Adderall

Tracy Alloway (0:02)

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Joe Weisenthal (0:17)

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Joe Weisenthal.

Tracy Alloway (0:22)

And I'm Tracy Alloway.

Joe Weisenthal (0:24)

Tracy, I was gonna ask you a question, but I already know the answer to it. I was gonna say, like, oh, have you ever tried Adderall? But I already know you're not, so I don't wanna, like, fake the intro, whatever. But I'm just curious, like, what percentage of our colleagues do you think use some sort of stimulant, Adderall, something, some sort of performance enhancing workplace drug?

Tracy Alloway (0:42)

Like coffee?

Joe Weisenthal (0:44)

No, something a little stronger than coffee.

Tracy Alloway (0:46)

Okay, we've had this conversation before, and I think it's such an interesting one, because as you know, I have never tried Adderall. It is a complete cultural blind spot for me, but I am 100% sure that you and I, in the context of this podcast and our day-to-day lives, have absolutely spoken to people who have been on Adderall. In fact, a very famous one springs to mind right now.

Joe Weisenthal (1:12)

I don't know who you're talking about.

Tracy Alloway (1:14)

SPF, Sam Benman Free. But it is an interesting thought experiment to think about the proportion of people around you, sometimes highly productive people who may or may not be on Adderall or something similar.

Joe Weisenthal (1:29)

So here's my thought, which is that my big fear with Adderall is like, I'm not maybe against trying it, because I don't think I have the most focused brain in the world. In fact, I know I don't, and I get scattered.

I'm worried that I would be really productive on it. And then for the rest of my life, be faced with this choice of, do you want to stay on this drug forever, or do you just want to go back to your old self, knowing that you have this other potential state in you? That's my big fear.

Tracy Alloway (1:55)

I feel the same way. I am deeply concerned that I would start writing a book and be successful at it. No, that's a joke.

But I think to me, it opens up kind of interesting questions about fairness and access. And if someone next to you is getting an edge because they either have a prescription that maybe they don't need or maybe they do need it and we can get into the degree to which Adderall actually is needed by the population or they're accessing it illegally in one way or another, it just opens up like interesting questions. But then again, I mean, the person next to you can drink 10 cups of coffee and that's allowed, right? Like you're allowed to do that.

Joe Weisenthal (2:33)

Yeah, I mean, this is not the Olympics.

We're trying to all maximize our performance here in the corporate world. So I first heard about Adderall when I was in high school. I graduated in 98 and I wasn't like a great student. I got bored a lot in class. I've just been scattered. I couldn't focus and suck. And I feel like I was probably in a slightly different environment. Maybe if I had been born a couple of years younger, I might've been prescribed it. I think maybe not because my parents were hippies and so they didn't really believe probably in prescribing drugs for that sort of thing.

But then, you know, sort of this cultural thing, it's like, oh, they're giving all these boys, particularly, it seems like most of the-

Tracy Alloway (3:11)

Yeah, predominantly boys. I think this is a big issue that a lot of women weren't diagnosed when they were young. And there are a lot of people right now in their 30s and 40s who are getting late diagnoses because all the symptoms that people were looking out for were, you know, hyperactive boys, basically.

Joe Weisenthal (3:26)

Totally. And so it went from a hyperactive boys in high school thing.

And then I sort of forgot about it for a while. Then I went to college and I found that to be a little easier. And then like, I forgot all about Adderall. And then over the last several years, what we've seen is prescriptions for Adderall absolutely explode.

Much more adult use, as you say, people finding out later in life that they're diagnosed with ADHD, which of course has also led to shortages which have a variety of reasons, some relating to the DEA and manufacturing, some just related to the absolute booming in demand. And so Adderall is just sort of an omnipresent topic of conversation and an angst in its own right.