By Dustin Barks, Staff Writer

While media and convention are inevitably dulling all of our creative edges, my beef is with the pills and ADD pills in particular. Everyone knows you can get addicted to muscle relaxers or pain meds, but what about the pill we feed our nation’s children? Adderall could be one of the most detrimental pills on the market today for the welfare of society. It’s like convention is an obstacle and the kids with ADHD have the best chance to overcome this convention of anyone else in the world, but we treat them like they’re sick and feed them pills instead of honing in on their skills for their own good.

ADHD is the inability to be satisfied with normal sit-still-and-listen type circumstances. The brain craves extra stimulation. For example, someone telling them about an uninteresting topic or reading a book in a quiet room may not be enough stimulation to hold their attention, so they tap their foot or sway side to side. Now there are behavioral treatments that could be used that would help level out ADD like reading in a public mall or doing homework with really loud uninteresting music for background noise. But instead the most common result is to prescribe any child showing ADD symptoms with a modified version of meth called Adderall. Adderall is a highly addictive pill that causes loss of appetite, unhealthy weight loss, nervousness and personality changes. The Adderall users, like meth users, don’t even notice or care because the pills make you feel good.

The reason it makes kids do better in school is the same reason people on amphetamines might clean their house 15 times in a weekend. There is so much sensation going on that they just want to do things. Even people without ADHD that get prescribed with Adderall usually do better in school just because of the extra push that the drug gives them. Severe depression often occurs when Adderall is prescribed after the age of fourteen because ADHD can help you be a social person but when Adderall is introduced it’s like going from a spotlight to a laser pointer and things just stop being fun.

The system doesn’t know what to do with outliers: the smart, the dumb, the ADHD kids, so they do what they can with pills to make the outliers more like the normal kids. In other countries there is tracking, where a test determines your future schooling and career. Which is kind of creepy, but there has to be a middle ground. Instead of finding a solution we just try conforming everyone. The world has always tried to conform the many to be controlled by the few whether through slavery, mass illiteracy, false history, or even just the people on TV looking down on the innovative or different.

ADD can be very useful in the world as far as outside of school. School is the only time you have to sit and listen of which your life reflects on it. Adderall is a school age drug making it even more destructive. After school, a person with ADHD might go on to be a paramedic or a construction worker or a fireman and be equally if not more functional than a person without ADHD. Shortsighted parents and doctors put the kids on pills instead of someone else fixing the system

Parents feed their children Adderall to raise their grades, make them docile in school, and make them do what their told and it works. The kids turn into robots, just cogs in the machine. All the while, their parents are patting themselves on the back for stopping and blocking what could have been a great mind. Their child could have been unique and social with pills just because a doctor says it could raise the amount of work they could do in school without doing behavioral work. It’s the doomed breeding another generation of the doomed to funnel into the machine.