Dr. Josh Kane Head Researcher at A Better Today Recovery Services and Lecturer and ASU continues this series from Big Pharma Opioid Epidemic, Part 7 – ADHD & Amphetamine Prescriptions.
Amphetamines and Housewives
In the 1950s and 60s pharmaceutical companies started pushing Amphetamines to housewives for a lot of different reasons, one of the main ones being to lose weight.
“This created millions of Meth zombies out of housewives. They were so addicted to Amphetamines that they couldn’t manage their lives and they certainly couldn’t manage their children’s lives.”
Explained head researcher at A Better Today Recovery Services and lecturer as Arizona State University, Dr. Josh Kane.
“With abuse rampant in homes across America the drug spread.”
Amphetamines were no longer just being used by housewives, it was now in the hands of gangs, and distributed all over the United States.
Because of this, in the 1970s prescribing Amphetamines became illegal.
The Backdoor: ADHD
“How did prescription of Amphetamines come back? … It came in through a backdoor, and that backdoor became known as ADHD. The man who ushered ADHD through that backdoor was one Roger Griggs, not a doctor but a pharmaceutical executive and marketing genius.”
Griggs came up with the name Adderall to market ADHD medication, he bought a company that had the weight loss pill Obetrol.
Obetrol it made with Amphetamine Salts.
“Griggs knew the FDA would never approve Amphetamine salts for weight loss, they had been there, they have done that. Griggs had heard of a relatively new condition; at the time, it was estimated that 1 to 1.5 percent of children in American exhibited symptoms of ADHD.”
After finding this out Griggs decided to start trials to see what affect Amphetamine Salts had on children who showed these symptoms.
Not surprisingly, when the children were given Amphetamines they felt better.
“[However] 1.5 percent of all children wasn’t enough for Griggs, he thought big. He sought to cast the widest net as possible for the marketing of his new FDA approved Amphetamine based drug.”
Kane explains that Griggs came up with the name because he felt that all children have ADD, ADD for all; Adderall.
Griggs then sold his pharmaceutical company, and the patent for Adderall, to Shire Pharmaceuticals for $186 million.
And an epidemic was born.
“Today Roger Griggs is horrified by what he sees. He no longer has an interest in the selling of Adderall, he no longer profits from [it] and today he calls Adderall a nuclear bomb that is being exploded in children’s minds.”
…continue on to Big Pharma Opioid Epidemic, Part 9 – Marketing ADHD Medications.
