Diary of a Legal Meth Addict

Does this sound familiar? You or a loved one or just someone you know has a chronic illness. Treatment for this illness includes taking medication daily. You go to your doctor’s office and you’re prescribed that medication. With today’s technology you don’t get a paper script anymore. You just tell them your pharmacy, not the just company, the local one near your home and zap! Bing! They send it right to your pharmacist where it’s waiting for you when you arrive. Normally that medication will have a number of refills. When it’s time for a refill you can call your pharmacist or even just access them via an app and zap again, your refill is ready. No more refills? That’s all right. If your doctor’s office doesn’t need to see you they just send another prescription and all’s good. Now put a figurative pin in that.

Recently I have been diagnosed with ADD (or ADHD). That diagnosis was entirely based on my doctors’ observation. Observation of course meaning that I described my situation or problems and they (because there were two separate doctors, one in family care and one a psychiatrist) felt or related that to ADD.

Someone in my family has had epilepsy since childhood. Her illness is tracked with bloodwork and EKGs.

But, see, there is no one test for ADD. You don’t have something in your blood panel that a doctor looks at and goes, “Oh wait. Your can’t-get-shit-done count is low. And wow, your inability-to-concentrate-to-finish-a-task levels are horrible right now.” When a doctor believes that you have ADD he or she can’t just say, “We might be looking at ADD or ADHD here. We’re going to have to run test X to make sure.”

Here’s what the National Institute of Mental Health (and I’m writing out the whole name so we don’t confuse this with the organization that created the rats that helped out Mrs. Frisby) says,

“No single test can diagnose a child as having ADHD.”

And that’s with children. It gets more fun with adults.

“Like children, adults who suspect they have ADHD should be evaluated by a licensed mental health professional. But the professional may need to consider a wider range of symptoms when assessing adults for ADHD because their symptoms tend to be more varied and possibly not as clear-cut as symptoms seen in children.”

So diagnosis is completely based on observation. Your doctor has to make a diagnosis based on evaluating your situation along with a series of other factors to assess that you may have ADD. How can they test that diagnosis? With treatment.

And while there are other areas that can help treatment, psychotherapy or training for example, the only medical treatment is medication. You’re prescribed medication and monitored.

(On a personal side-note someone close to me actually expressed the view that I had convinced the doctors that I had ADD. Awesome.)

The medication in this case is stimulants. For me that’s Adderall. What is adderall? It’s amphetamines. That led to my having fun for a long time calling my meds “my speed.” Later I watched an interview with Dr. Carl Hart who said that Adderall had the same composition as meth. And he’s a tenured Colombia professor who’s studied this for over two decades. Meth it is!

But that pharmacological fact actually plays a larger role in my life now besides my getting to joke about taking meth. Let’s go back to that pin. With your medication:

• The doctor’s office sends the prescription right to the pharmacist.
• That prescription usually, almost always, comes with refills.
• The refill process is simple and automatic.
• Often when you’re out of refills but don’t need to have another doctor visit your doctor’s office can just re-send another prescription.

Ha! Not you Mr. need-something-that-is-chemically-the-exact-same-as-an-evil-narcotic! Here are your rules:

• You get a good old-fashioned paper prescription.
• You have to go to your doctor’s office to pick it up.
• You have to take the script your damned self to the pharmacist.
• You lose the script? Well, that’s 30 days you have to wait until you can get another one.
• There are no refills. When you run out of your meds you get to start this process all over again.

I have more than once seen my mother and other people traveling just have their script or refill sent or done at whatever office they are closest to should they run out of their meds.

That’s not the case with me and my meth. If I’m not anywhere near my doctor’s office, I can’t just have an easy fix (pun intended). I have to take extra steps (or jump through hoops, you can qualify it however you feel) to get my medication. If I’m going to be away or out of town for an extended period of time I have to set up a completely different health care system to ensure I get the medication I need to better function.

And that’s the point. In the time since diagnosis I have noticed two truths about me and my meth. The first is that meth alone and not taking care of other factors limits the help the medication can give me. The second is that when I’m taking those steps alone I’m still not able to function as well or as long as I am when I’ve been taking meth.

I think that more time must be spent before I can really state that second observation as 100% fact. Remember, my doctors and I can only base the success of meth on pure observation, there is no one test to make sure. But in the time I’ve been on meth I’m able to perform and function much better than I am when I’m not on it. I’m able to complete more tasks, complete them faster and better, have more follow-through and be more organized in certain areas and thoughts (this last one gets combined with sticking to behaviors and systems to support this for an even higher level of success).

But honestly, I’ve now noticed other little things that the meth has helped. I notice I don’t forget as many things in the moment. That the extra step to make sure that I’ve put the plate correctly on the table or looked both ways before crossing the street comes more naturally or automatically.

So far meth has helped me function. But since I have been away from my primary care professionals I have had to do extra steps to get that medication. More than once that step was the wrong one and since this whole process has to be under a pharmacological microscope I have had to go without my medication for certain times.

Hell, I’ve had written prescriptions denied tacity (because I doubt that any medication takes 10-15 days to arrive) and expressly by pharmacists. And I’m talking about taking my written prescription from a doctor to a national chain in which I am clearly in the database as having taken this drug several times before while I’m carrying both my driver’s license and passport.

Do I need to make sure that I set up a system so that when I’m away that doesn’t happen at all? Sure. Should I have learned that the first time I had problems? Yes. But do you have to do that with the medication that helps you with your chronic problem?

It’s time we rethink a few things. I’ll let you decide what those are. But let’s start with how we can make mental health care a more humane process. We’ve come far. But we’re not there yet. Not at all.