His ridiculous self-prescribed dosage and willingness to abuse the drug alone is indicative of the careless risk-taking required to decide to do something like insider trading and think he could get away with it. The arrogance required, especially from someone intelligent and capable enough to do a job like his, is palpable.
80mg is four times the average dosage. Anyone who has taken this drug therapeutically for its intended purpose at sane dosages will tell you that it can have some nasty side effects if you’re not careful. In brief, it makes it more difficult for your body to tell you when its had enough and needs food or rest. Things like sleep and eating are simply more difficult. You’ll find that out quickly enough without a doctor informing you of such, but it’s manageable then. We could just as easily be discussing someone who increasingly decided to sleep and food deprive themselves for months or years.
> He says he came up with the scheme while he was abusing Adderall, which he started taking to deal with his long hours at Wells Fargo.
Very loose connection there...
> it changed the person that I was while I was on it. This is a no-joke drug. It’s medical-grade meth.”
Okay, that I agree with.
> “It’s medical-grade meth.”
No, that exists and is called Desoxyn. For many people who have ADHD in the US, this myth makes getting their medication more difficult and adds unnecessary stigma to its use. Don’t perpetuate it.
Stimulant therapy for ADHD is one of the (if not the) most well studied and effective treatments in all of psychiatry. Yet, the DEA has done a fantastic job making this one of the most difficult drugs to get a prescription for. It is ironic that patients who would struggle to keep a routine must remember to call their doctor to get a script every month because of the drug’s schedule.
This guy is just talking up the drug he was taking to make it seem worse than it was. An adderall addiction is no joke, sure, but it is a far cry from meth.
At the dosages he was taking, it's quite similar to a recreational meth dose (assuming said meth was not smoked). The difference between the two chemicals isnt that big, but the culture and dosing surrounding how therapeutic amphetamine is taken is what makes it generally safer than meth, not the difference in chemical structure.
Going the other way, you can safely take desoxyn orally at a therapeutic dose and mostly it is like adderall, and you will avoid for the most part the bad effects that occur at recreational doses of smoked street meth. That's why desoxyn isn't schedule 1.
So I dont think it's particularly misleading to say that this guy was basically taking meth and experiencing a lot of the side effects that would be experienced had he been taking street meth. The two chemicals have similar enough effects, and when taken at recreational dosages they can both have the bad effects we would typically associate with meth abuse. It's good to make this clear to people getting treatment for ADHD (or college students popping pills illegally for a cram session) so that they don't get the erroneous impression that because it isn't meth, they don't have to treat dosage and dependence as seriously as they would have to if it were actually scary street meth with all the scary imagery that comes along with it. It's good that we draw parallels and are clear with people that it's a very serious drug with potentially meth-level side effects if abused.
I sympathize with you in the sense that I don't want to make it harder for people to get their prescriptions, but on the other hand I think it's just false to say they are totally different due to the addition of the methyl group.
TLDR: it is absolutely possible to abuse oral pharmaceutical grade (not meth)amphetamine to the extent that you have stereotypical meth head type side effects. And it is absolutely possible to take pharmaceutical grade methamphetamine at a therapeutic dose and have it be a lot like typical therapeutic (non meth) amphetamine use. There isn't that big of a difference.
How tall was the guy? 80mg a day? Far beyond a reasonable amount.