Jun 06 2008
I Don’t Do Drugs Anymore…Or Do I?
Published by I had a teen experience that embraced a lot of things. Let’s just say I did not behave responsibly. Maybe I was self-medicating, maybe not. I am self aware enough to not blame everything on my ADD and maybe I just made bad choices with my health and safety because I didn’t have any sense. I don’t regret it, but I sure do fear the thought of my kids (whom I happen to love more than myself), trying the same kinds of things.
Eventually I stopped doing all that. Not because I decided it was wrong, dangerous, or a waste of money. Mostly it was because I just didn’t have the time, and I stopped being around other people who were still doing it. I guess I grew up. And had the good fortune to be able to walk away from things that others had more trouble with.
So now, I find myself an adult on several medications (not currently on Ritalin; I have to get my blood pressure down first) that have ostensibly the same purpose those illicit drugs did in my youth: to make life somehow easier to live.
I struggle with medication for myself and for my kids. On the one hand, I am not anti-drug in the sense that I feel like our country’s response to controlled substances is misguided at best, and a racist suppression of disadvantaged populations at worst. I also happen to think that drugs are fun, and I was lucky enough never to learn differently.
But I can’t just walk away from these drugs. I had a couple of allergic reactions a while back trying to zero in on the right meds and had to “clean up” twice. The experience sucked. A lot. I don’t want to do that again, and it reminded me that these are really drugs. In the full-on, all caps D-R-U-G-S kind of way. It’s easy to think of drugs prescribed by a doctor as somehow different than those other “bad” drugs. But I’ll be damned if they aren’t all from the same steaming cauldron of crazy.
So, are ADHD treatmends “gateway drugs?” If only there was some sort of study out there that pertained to this question. What’s that you say, dear jamama? There is? Will wonders never cease?
Researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital and the Harvard Medical School, both in Boston, compared the incidence of substance abuse and dependence in 56 boys with ADHD who were being treated with either stimulants or TCAs at the beginning of the study, 19 boys with ADHD who were not receiving any medications, and 137 boys without ADHD.
While 75 percent of the unmedicated ADHD boys had started abusing these substances in the previous 4 years, this was true of only 25 percent of the medicated ADHD boys and 18 percent of the boys without ADHD. The researchers calculated that treating ADHD with medications reduced the risk of substance abuse or dependence by 84 percent.
Yeah, but that’s only one study.
The article “Childhood predictors of adolescent substance use in a longitudinal study of children with ADHD” appears in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology, August 2003, Volume 112, Number 3 and finds that “The presence of ADHD during childhood appears to be as strong a risk factor for substance use and abuse as having a positive family history of substance use disorder. It is not specific to only one substance but cuts across alcohol, marijuana, and other drugs…”
Ok, two studies then. But surely there are many more that say just the opposite. No?
A study (results appeared in Pediatrics January 2002) by researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital (Harvard University) indicates that stimulant medication treatment decreases the risk of substance abuse in individuals with ADHD.
One argument against the use of stimulant medication is that by providing a controlled substance to children to treat behavior issues is opening the door to later drug and substance abuse. But it is also known that those who do not receive treatment of any kind for ADHD can have many problems later in life, including substance abuse and low self-esteem.
According to the research, there was a reduction of substance abuse in those individuals treated with stimulant medication. In those studies which followed up to adolescence, there children were 5.8 times less likely to be involved in substance abuse. For the studies that followed individuals through adulthood, this number decreased to 1.5 times less likely to abuse drugs or alcohol.
Is that all?
Drugs that alter moods and that are taken on a regular basis worry me, regardless of their affect on future drug abuse. I love that my kids are (as a friend once said) “expansively creative.” I love that they can turn anything into something else and that there seem to be no rules around playtime and what toys are for what. I secretly love that Non tries to surreptitiously dye her dolls hair with calligraphy ink or draws faces on her mirror with lipstick. And I love that Row is in constant motion, that he is as quick to hug as he is to fly at you, head down, for the tenth headbutt to the groin of the day. I love their madness and don’t want them to lose it.
But school is hard on kids like that; hard on kids who need time to mentally travel through Faerie on their way to the answer in a long division problem. Kids who listen best when they are in doing something else - something that may be distracting to other kids in their class. I hate that my kids are smart enough to be in classes where they are asked to do math a year or more ahead of their grade, but then not given the attention and time to finish their work.
See what I’m getting at? I’m asking because I’m not entirely sure myself. Let’s just say it’s this:
I like my kids just the way they are. I know that any problems we face are because the world we live in is not friendly to people like them (us). I know that there are things that they are asked to do every day that medication makes easier for them to do but I think it sucks that they have to do those things things in exactly that way. So we give them medicine. Not to make it easier on us, or their teachers. We give them medicine to make things easier for them.
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