Why'd I take speed for twenty years? - Part 1 (classic)

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PJ Vogt

Society & Culture, Business, Technology

4.8 • 4.1K Ratings

🗓️ 4 July 2025

⏱️ 57 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

One of the millions of millennials given prescription stimulants to treat ADHD decides to quit. And afterwards wonders -- how did these drugs becomes so popular, so fast? This week, the story of amphetamine's birth, life, death, and rebirth in America. (Methylphenidates, too.) Have We Been Thinking About A.D.H.D. All Wrong? by Paul Tough Comment on the episode Support the show! To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, Search Engine listeners. It's July, and we have a lot of new listeners. And so we're rebroadcasting some of our absolute favorite episodes from earlier in our run when a lot of you knew folks were not yet here. The episode that we want to play for you this week is called Why Did I Take Speed for 20 Years? Part one. It's one of my absolute favorite stories we've worked on. It's very personal for me about a topic that is complicated and which a lot of people puzzle through for themselves or for their kids. The decision to take or not take stimulant medications. We worked on this for over a year. We were really trying to strike a balance in the story's two parts so that people across the spectrum on this topic might be able to listen and hear their own experiences represented.
0:42.5	But also, we worked very hard just to answer this question that I had never asked myself in my many years taking these compounds.
0:49.2	What was the story of their rise?
0:50.7	Like, how did they get here?
0:52.5	How did they get to be so popular?
0:55.7	We also, in this story, get into the surprising studies about the actual effects of these drugs, which are not
1:00.2	what I expected. There have been more good studies since we first published. There's a great
1:04.8	Paul Tuff article you can read about them. We'll link to it in our show notes. But the emerging
1:09.3	story fits the story that we captured here,
1:11.8	so you can follow along with this rebroadcast
1:14.1	without any anxiety that you might be missing out.
1:16.7	Okay.
1:18.1	After these ads, part one.
1:50.0	Okay. The first time anyone convinced me to take drugs, I think I was 14. At the time, the adults in my life were annoyed because my grades were pretty bad.
1:55.0	They'd started using the word potential very ominously,
1:58.0	uttering it like a curse word that meant I'd been saddled with a lot of debt
2:01.4	I couldn't quite pay. My parents had me go see a doctor. The doctor told me I had ADHD. I already knew
2:07.8	I had ADHD. Everyone knew I had ADHD. I lost my backpack pretty much every three days.
2:13.9	My brain heard everything my math teacher said in the adults from Charlie Brown trumpet voice.
2:19.5	Pretty much the only thing I could reliably focus on was golden eye for Nintendo 64.
2:24.5	I was amazing at it.
2:26.3	Still, when the doctor told me the solution to all this might be a drug called dexedrine,
	...

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