Just Say No to Ritalin

Look, let's face it -- ADD people are suckers for a drug problem.

Basically, drugs are often a shortcut to achieving a state of mind that we want to get to (or feel that we need to get to), but that is currently out of our reach, usually due to the circumstances in which we find ourselves at a given moment.

Our society makes people -- almost everyone -- feel dysfunctional. We're bombarded with messages that we do not have enough x, y and z to be okay, and that the reason we don't have x, y and z is because we are inadequate. And when people feel inadequate, there's usually a drug dealer or drug company ready with a solution via a convenient powder or prescription that will solve the whole problem and make the whole damn world look like a Sudafed commercial.

I myself am struggling with coffee addiction. If I don't drink coffee, I feel like I'm moving like a slug and I start to have fleeting thoughts that maybe burning my house down would be easier than cleaning it up. Lucky for me, my wonderful husband makes me an organic espresso almost every day, so I try to gratefully limit myself to that one shot.

Others, however, are not so lucky. Excessively close to my house is a big shiny Starbucks, where all the middle-class malihini of Kane'ohe line up for their daily dose of competence before fighting nasty traffic into Honolulu, where they all work competitive jobs, pretending to like all the people they're trying to boot off the success ladder. Half of them are late to work, and there's violence in their eyes. The fact that they are all paying ridiculous rents or mortgages so they can live on the "mellow" side of the island makes them feel ripped off, and while they wait in line you can see them meditatively honing their rage into a competitive edge to be used in the daily battle they call work, complete with friendly smiles for all the others in line, whom you know they wish would just go away so they could just get their fucking cappuccino and go.

About half a mile away from Starbucks is an old road where people dump trash and smoke batu (crystal methamphetamines). I take my dog there a lot, and no, the iceheads don't scare me. I mean, they sometimes rev their engines angrily and throw trash just to make like they own the place, but then again, so does the Starbucks crowd -- just in a different way. In fact, the only real difference between the batu smokers and the Starbucks sluggers is CLASS (and, um, the fact that the batu addicts are mostly native to the area and now renting from the Starbucks crowd). The tweakers started smoking when they felt ripped off, incompetent, and angry; batu made them feel like they could handle the world just a little bit better. Of course, the drugs made them even more genuinely ripped off, incompetent, and angry -- hence addiction. Same with the Starbucks ass-kickers (and other coffee addicts, like me).

My point is that feelings of incompetence lead very easily to drug abuse, which ultimately tends to make things worse, not better.

Our society makes almost everyone feel incompetent, and it makes ADD people feel very, very, VERY incompetent! Just achieving the level of self-improvement that would be required to function "normally" feels almost impossible (and the fact that it's so hard makes us feel like shit, too). Changing the society around us into something we could actually function in seems like as much of a fantasy as riding into town on the Loch Ness Monster. So the logical, simple, easy answer is...of course...voila...drugs!

I'm 40 years old now. When I was 10, 11, 12 years old, I drove my teachers NUTS. I happened to go to an extremely wealthy private school for Hawaiian children, so they spent lots and lots of money sending me to expert after expert, trying to "fix" me. I actually sent one psychologist packing back to the Continental U.S. after I squarely hit him with a plastic baseball bat (trust me, he earned it. My peacebuilding skills were not exactly refined in those days, okay?). Finally, a psychiatrist told the school and my mother that I should take these drugs (Ritalin) that would make me chill out and focus. And of course, the adults' answer was..."hallelujah!"

Well, I myself often wished that I could focus a little better, so I tried them. Bo-ring! As far as I was concerned, they just made life duller than it was before. And dull was just not my thing. But hey, maybe I just wasn't taking enough. So one day, I decided to do a controlled experiment, just for fun. My mom was an extremely busy, long-working single parent, so I didn't have to worry about her butting in. The control was, if I wigged out or died, then I would stop. Until then, I would take one pill at a time at intervals determined by the fluctuation of my curiosity level at the moment, until something interesting happened.

Well kids, let me tell you, don't try it, it's not much fun at all. Several hours later I was vomiting with a racing heartbeat and I had definitely had enough, but the euphoria I had hoped for didn't even twinkle in the sky. Not even numb, just sick and shitty.

Now, I'm not a believer in "gateway drugs" -- I think that the concept was just invented to justify the "drug war" that opened the floodgates to batu, which has been a real bad thing for all of us who have lost real people to that substance. I think that some people are just more susceptible to getting sucked into drug abuse, period, due to a whole bunch of factors usually stemming from an intrinsic mismatch of some kind between them and their surroundings. However, I have to say that the fact that the materials used in my Ritalin escapade, the first incidence of drug abuse in my young life (followed by many many others in my 'opio years...), actually came from the system itself somehow made the whole fix-the-problem-with-chemicals thing seem kinda legit, know what I mean?

Now think about all the kids who are right now at this moment forced to swallow a Ritalin tablet for the sake of the contrived ability to follow the tracings of a piece of white chalk on a blackboard, and to stop trippin' out on the harmonics made by the echo of its screech against the various objects at the back of the room. And then think about the names of the kids any teacher would put on a list of most-likely-to-become-a-future-drug-addict, if asked. Would the kid swallowing that pill be on the list? I think it's a little more than likely, don't you?

I should mention that in 1981-82 the "in-school" recreational price for Ritalin was $1 to $2 per pill (I tried to warn them that it sucked, okay?). I can only assume the price has gone up, although I could be wrong, due to severe market flooding between then and now...

My point is this: pushing drugs on kids at a young age is a really bad idea. Especially for ADD kids, who are headed for a life-long struggle with societal interface, unless either the society or the interface (or both) changes a lot, and I believe that it is very important to teach them at a young age that yep, they got a big problem on their hands, nope, the problem is not them per se, and nope, that problem is not gonna be solved with any quick fix, especially chemicals.

(However, I just saw a very interesting youtube video on medical marijuana for ADHD in children here. I'm not advocating, but it's less scary than chemical stimulants!)

Now, that being said, I'm not a blanket all-drugs-are-bad person. Peter Tosh, Santa Claus, and the countless indigenous shamans of the world are examples of great human beings, and certainly not abusers, as far as I am concerned. However, drugs are a subject that (ironically) must be looked at with much sobriety, much truth.

Is all Ritalin use bad? Truthfully, I don't know. I believe that there are adults who probably do make good use of the stuff in their ability to get through life, without relying on it for everyday use. Shoot, there are probably a few people out there who can do this with crack, too -- I don't know. Never met them, but I wouldn't rule it out, and I wouldn't be surprised at all to find out that their cars are a helluva lot cleaner than mine. I mean, the ice addicts who park at the old road have cars a lot cleaner than mine is -- some of them look like they were scrubbed for hours on end with a toothbrush, in fact -- so who am I to judge?

One of the best things about ADD is that we're all different. One of the hardest things is that we're all struggling to cope in a world that is really hard on us. Everyone needs to figure out hir own answer, day by day, and if a drug works for someone at a given moment without becoming a long-term problem, more power to them.

What's really important is the power to choose, and the personal freedom -- starting really young -- that will facilitate good choices. And people should not be pressured or afraid to JUST SAY NO to ADD medication if they want to!! Myself, I choose to live with a certain amount of dysfunction, which I consider a small price for staying relatively chemical-free while I work out solutions for dealing with all this crap.

When I figure it out, I'll let you know!