This is like saying the teen anti-drinking-and-driving campaigns have lost all meaning because adults sometimes drink at bars.
People with ADHD have a completely different reaction to stimulants than people without it do and the difference in dose between what an addict would take recreationally and what a child takes therapeutically is several orders of magnitude. Giving a therapeutic dose of stimulants to minors with ADHD has a positive effect on health outcomes throughout the rest of their lives, including extending their lives on average and lowering suicide rates.
Tl;Dr stimulants paper over sleep deprivation (common) and stimulate reward centers the same way they do in other brains. The reason it “fixes” ADHD behavior is because those reward centers weren’t functioning properly.
In other words, if you needed 10 units of tasty brain chemicals, and the stimulant makes your body produce five more units than normal, that creates hyperactivity in normies who make the 10 by default and now have 15 and “normal” functioning in the ADHD brain that was only making 5 by itself.
This is important to understand in the context of drug abuse, including the very typical caffeine abuse.
Caffeine does not make ADHD people feel sleepy because they have ADHD. They feel sleepy because they’re hard addicted to caffeine and chemical dependency does weird, seemingly paradoxical things like needing the comfort of the stimulants to sleep, and then ruins their sleep quality, which requires more caffeine to fix in the morning, and the cycle grows ever more vicious and the user more and more dependent.
Once they started dosing little kids with stimulants all that messaging lost its meaning anyway
This is like saying the teen anti-drinking-and-driving campaigns have lost all meaning because adults sometimes drink at bars.
People with ADHD have a completely different reaction to stimulants than people without it do and the difference in dose between what an addict would take recreationally and what a child takes therapeutically is several orders of magnitude. Giving a therapeutic dose of stimulants to minors with ADHD has a positive effect on health outcomes throughout the rest of their lives, including extending their lives on average and lowering suicide rates.
The premise that stimulants affect ADHD brains differently is incorrect, or at least a misleading phrasing that creates incorrect beliefs.
https://neuroscienceresearch.wustl.edu/stimulant-adhd-medications-work-differently-than-thought/
Tl;Dr stimulants paper over sleep deprivation (common) and stimulate reward centers the same way they do in other brains. The reason it “fixes” ADHD behavior is because those reward centers weren’t functioning properly.
In other words, if you needed 10 units of tasty brain chemicals, and the stimulant makes your body produce five more units than normal, that creates hyperactivity in normies who make the 10 by default and now have 15 and “normal” functioning in the ADHD brain that was only making 5 by itself.
This is important to understand in the context of drug abuse, including the very typical caffeine abuse.
Caffeine does not make ADHD people feel sleepy because they have ADHD. They feel sleepy because they’re hard addicted to caffeine and chemical dependency does weird, seemingly paradoxical things like needing the comfort of the stimulants to sleep, and then ruins their sleep quality, which requires more caffeine to fix in the morning, and the cycle grows ever more vicious and the user more and more dependent.