Since this node seems to be lacking in use (or rather, overuse) experiences, I'll add my two cents. I will personally cause grievous harm to anyone who claims this to be a getting to know you node, whether it really is or not.
At age ten I was diagnosed with the dreaded scourge of
suburbia,
Attention Deficit Disorder. I was put on Ritalin and
Clonidine (a depressant), both of which have the magical ability to suppress any
psychological abnormality evident in a
pre-teen. By age 12, I was only on Ritalin, and by age 14 I was still prescribed it, but had stopped taking it, as any sane individual would.
After a while I began to realize just how much Ritalin I was stockpiling. Though I knew there were kids who sold theirs for a good sum of
money, I was still weird and
zitty, and didn't exactly hang with drug dealers. I was never very inhibited, so by fifteen or so I was blowing away my spare time on 40 or 50mg doses. I think I tried
snorting once, but it hurt like hell, and didn't seem to work any better than popping the pills. As is said above, it just seemed pretty damned stupid to me, considering just how much you'd have to actually snort to get 50mg of Ritalin into you.
50mg (5 pills, for me): The first thing you notice on this dosage is a mild
euphoria, but a pretty calm one. Your palms get a little
sweaty, usually, and you tend to be thirsty. You urinate frequently. Food seems very unappealing to you. This is the case with pretty much any
stimulant. After about twenty minutes it's really started to kick in. The greatest thing you notice is the calm--you are depressive, perhaps, but very happy about it. There's a big docile fuzzy feeling in your heart, and you're finding all sorts of new and interesting things to do. You are very
focused upon them, to the point that you might get a massive amount of
schoolwork,
artwork, or completely pointless
nonsense done. This
dosage was the ideal one, in my opinion, as it gave me a wonderful feeling, and allowed me to get a good deal of schoolwork done (which was nice, since I would've been
failing otherwise anyway).
Effects at this dosage seemed to last between four and five hours, sometimes a bit longer.
Recommended listening:
*
Placebo -
Without You I'm Nothing
Deeply depressing, but beautiful. I fell in
love with this album while high on Ritalin.
*
The Smiths -
The Queen Is Dead
* Anything by
Belle and Sebastian
As time went on, I worked the doses up higher and higher, taking more pills at a time. I never noticed a significant
resistance to the drug, but I am sure, as an
amphetamine, that it must eventually produce resistance in users. I can only assume that it is rather mild.
90mg:
Don't do this. I am possibly not the most experienced
druggie, but I went absolutely insane at this level. I wrote fifteen pages of absolute nonsense about why
god exists and why I am
god and why there is no
god... I kid you not, fifteen pages, and it was probably done in about twenty minutes. I've still got it lying around somewhere, but it's impossible to follow.
* Fifteen minutes in - The familiar
buzz is starting to kick in, and it's even better than before. You're absolutely
in love.
* Half an hour - You start to get a little
confused, but you don't mind. It's decisive confusion, if that makes sense. You are mentally all over the place, and you aren't going anywhere in particular, but you understand and
adore just about everything there is.
* 1-4 hours - You are a fucking
maniac. You do everything, you do it quickly, and you do it well. And you
love it. You
love everything, though, but you especially
love whatever it is you're doing. And it's all pure
genius. After a while passes, the urge towards
productivity fades, and you sit
basking in your glory and the glory of everything around you, everywhere. Outrageous and then-profound
philosophical notions jump in and out of your head, seeming perfectly reasonable. The thing I cannot stress enough is that you are absolutely in
love--that's the only word for it. You don't need a focus for this
love, it's just an outward expression. It's glorious. The
happiest hour of my
life was likely somewhere in here.
* 5 hours - Did you take enough? Is it dying off? What's going on? You are
sweating like a
hog, and you
smell a hell of a lot worse. It seems like all you're doing is
shaking,
drinking, and
urinating. Attempts at
masturbation (or
sex, if you're not me), feel wonderful, and get you nowhere at all (another
stimulant thing). You still feel
love for everything, but
reality is starting to fall apart, and you're starting to wear a little
thin. The effects are not unlike that of
sleep deprivation.
* 6 hours - At this point, you try to
sleep, because it was is pretty freaking late now, and you can hardly walk or focus your
eyes upon things without feeling very strained and very
confused. Your
heart is
racing, as it's been doing for hours, and you are drinking insane amounts of
water just to
piss them back out ten minutes later. You might try to
read, and you are pretty interested in anything you pick up, but it's hard to keep going on it for long without feeling like there are
needles jabbing your eyes. You can't sleep when you try. You sweat through the
sheets pretty quickly, and whenever you close your eyes you have formless
visual and
aural hallucinations, often very annoying ones. I, for one, kept hearing a sound not unlike the
Macintosh eep, very loud, over and over.
* 7-10 hours - If you're stupid enough to be trying to sleep, still, your head seems to be changing shape and size. You seem to be able to control this, if only slightly, and you spend most of the time doing precisely that. Your eyes
ache no matter what you do, and your head feels like it's about to
pop. You can lie still with your eyes closed for hours, if you'd like, but you're not going to fall asleep. Since you don't feel much better when you get up, this is what you do, until
dawn comes, and you eventually pass out from
exhaustion.
I had
varied experiences with the 50mg, some very good, some very bad, but only did the 90mg once, for reasons you can probably understand after having read that. Ritalin brought me a lot of
pleasure, and a lot of
excruciating pain. Both had a tendency towards sometimes-dangerous
extremes--during some of the depressive (and oddly, some of the euphoric) moments, I introduced myself to
cutting, which went on for several years. I would probably still be doing Ritalin anyway, had I not exhausted my stash by the time I was
sixteen and pulled off the crap (which was, for the most part, the result of my own decision anyhow).
As I said, however, I did not notice any significant
addictiveness to the drug, nor any real amount of
tolerance that was built up over time. From what I've heard, tests support that there is some degree of a resemblance to
amphetamine use where both are concerned, but I was able to pull off the drug after relatively prolonged use with no more than what seemed a
psychological attraction to it.
As a
side note, the claim I’ve heard so many times that those with
ADD cannot feel the effects of the drug the same way that those without it can is
utter bullshit, meant to alleviate the concern of
soccer moms that they’re putting their children on
amphetamines. That’s precisely what they’re doing. You can
cherry flavor the crap and shape it like characters from the
Flintstones, if you’d like. It certainly won’t make it any better or worse for them to shove down the throats of third graders.