Almost anybody, ADHD diagnosis or not, will feel and perform better on low dose amphetamine like Adderall. It's not surprising there's a demand for it — and actors who know how to profit from it.
man to man, no, but arguably they lost it tactically because their troops/pilots kept taking the pills, without rest and getting worse and worse, until they were wiped out, which lost them almost all of their experienced troops/pilots, whereas the western allies rotated their troops/pilots out of combat.
> but arguably they lost it tactically because their troops/pilots kept taking the pills,
I don't think you'll find a single mainstream historian who would agree with that take.
Germany lost the war because they lacked the logistics to sustain a multi-front war against the combined military and industrial power of the USSR, the United States, and Great Britain. No amount of pervitin added or subtracted from this equation would have changed that outcome.
strategically yes, but i think historians of the luftwaffe would agree that it was fataly dammaged because its pilots never got a rest. didn't help that the rest of german high command, up to hitler himself, were all on pills/injections. you can't imagine eisenhower getting into such a state.
Again, the pills are not the decisive thing here. The Luftwaffe had to counter constant allied bombing of cities and industry both day and night, while also supporting advancing troops on the front. All the while, the allies are running a successful campaign to eliminate Germany's sources of petroleum which eventually all but neuters the operational capacity of the Luftwaffe.
Frankly, it sounds to me like you've let Norman Ohler's pop history book, Blitzed, disproportionately color your perception of the second world war.
But the pilots were taking pills and never getting rest because the army had to cover two war fronts while lacking the resources to do so..
using pills and not resting enough was a symptom of the problem of having to fight a war in two fronts, not resting and taking pills was not the problem itself..
stories of amped up pilots in the US military are common as well. i don't think it was just the germans, so trying to say that was the thing that didn't work well for the germans is just falling flat.
No one said it was just the Germans. But it is well-documented that the Germans distributed amphetamines on a mass scale which had harmful effects. The US did not distribute on a mass scale.
Almost is a huge caveat for your comment. Maybe it's lack of practice, but whenever I've attempted to work while "medicated" in logic intensive workflows like coding or other things like maths or other sciency stuff, my output is much less coherent. Being "medicated" doing more creative type work is the only time I actually enjoy working in that state.
I see it claimed a lot, but if so I'm surprised there isn't more open discussion in places like HN with people saying "I did the research and boosted my productivity by taking drug X".
Even if it only makes you feel better, there were people talking about micro dosing LSD for a while when that was fashionable.
And no surprise how people in this thread rush to defend amphetamine usage.
As someone who was diagnosed several times with “adhd” - there is zero science to it. No medical tests to prove its existence. You’ll just get a drug after the first or second visit and who doesn’t want to defend their addiction online?
If you want focus, don’t take drugs. Exercise, eat healthy, self-discipline yourself
This is objectively false. There are medical tests to prove its existence, there have also been numerous studies highlighting the differences in ADHD brains and those without it, one of them being far slower development of the pre-frontal cortex. Not just a couple of weeks or months, we're talking years of delay. The FDA has also approved testing to assess for brain wave ratios, specifically theta and beta, in which ADHD brains have much higher count.
For most people with ADHD, staying on the drug is the hard part. On top of all of this, there are ADHD drugs that aren't stimulants if one reacts negatively to it. It's not the 70s anymore. Pushing stereotypes is a horrible thing to do, please refrain from it in the future.
There's a misunderstanding here, you're asking about medical tests from the perspective of a doctor diagnosing their patient in the office. I am talking about doctors/researchers assessing the existence of ADHD through medical test studies, brain scans, and so on. Hopefully in the future as this continues we're able to make this more widely available.
> And no surprise how people in this thread rush to defend amphetamine usage.
The same thing happens on opiate threads. The people who have been on opiates for a decade explain that their pain is the real kind that can only be helped by opiates. Take anyone with no pain at all, put them on opiates for ten years, and they'll say the same thing.
Because it's true. If you take away the opiates, they will be in all kinds of agony. They may have created deficiencies in their reward system that will never recover. That's not the same as saying that opiates are helping people (in the long term), or that pain is a deficiency of opiates.
edit: and there's no way out of this other than stopping big pharma from funding patients' rights groups, either directly or indirectly, and/or lobbying through them. Patients' rights groups from the 80s on were the Patient Zero of non-profits acting as political front groups for large financial interests.
Many of the people who have been on opiates for a decade explain what they tried before opiates and the difference in their quality of life. The issue would be simpler if we could dismiss them as junkies and useful idiots however.
the germans tried this with their troops in ww2 - hint: it didn't go so well for them.