Transcription
Earlier this year, I was diagnosed with ADHD, and I already knew that there was a drug shortage problem and that it would be a little bit challenging. But what I experienced in seeking treatment was and is objectively up. Like, if I were just telling you what I'm about to tell you in this video without showing you the evidence, you would probably think that I was a drug addict or a crazy person off of his meds.
If you live outside of the United States, just about everything happening in this video is going to seem like a dystopian science fiction film. But worse yet, a lot of my viewers in the United States will feel validated by this video because this is a dumpster fire that is all too familiar to them. Today, we're going to go down a deep rabbit hole about what ADHD is, why so many people are being diagnosed with it, the incredibly stupid reasons why it's so difficult to obtain your prescribed medications. We're going to put on our investor pants and listen to a drug company CEO brag about how great their year has been as a result of the drug shortage. And I'm going to take you on a little shopping trip so we could see how hundreds of thousands of people are now buying ADHD drugs on the black market as a result. Let's go.
If you were to just observe my professional output as a musician, a researcher, a content creator, a business co-founder, you would not think that I had a problem with concentrating or completing tasks, which is what most people imagine when they think about ADHD. And that's why I resisted participating in a test or diagnosis for over a decade, despite multiple therapists and doctors insisting that I do. But if you called me today, just to ask me how I was doing or say hi, or if you looked at my work desktop, or if you rescheduled dinner with me to an hour later, you'd notice by my behavior that things weren't quite ideal. To a lot of people, I would seem pretty intense, high-strung, and maybe even unreasonable. But in reality, I'm just busy, and I'm mentally unable to improvise with sudden changes. And I just didn't realize how debilitating that actually was until I received effective treatment. I took a prescription stimulant and felt calmer. When I normally needed to withdraw from everything and everyone to stay focused, I now felt like I just flowed and coexisted with others.
This is why ADHD is so much easier to identify in children than it is in adults. Kids are pretty simple. They don't have the learned neuronal connections or baggage that we have as adults. And even as an adult, a solid clinical ADHD diagnosis takes into account your behavior and grades from when you were a child. In most cases, those ADHD symptoms should have been prevalent very early on, as it is believed that as many as 90% of people with ADHD inherited the disorder from their parents. What is the deal with so many children having ADHD and autism these days? There's actually not thought to have been an increase in ADHD symptoms in the population. It's just that in the last 30 years, we started understanding a whole lot more about the frontal lobe of the brain and things like the neurological roles of executive function. In fact, I just found a couple different studies that strongly suggest a lower prevalence of both ADHD and autism diagnosis in lower-income areas, which kind of reinforces the link between prevalence and healthcare quality.
There are still a lot of people out there that think that ADHD is not a real disorder. And if you believe that, let me put that belief to rest right now. It is proven to be predominantly hereditary. It can be observed and even predicted with MRI imaging of the brain. And ultimately, it's a disorder that is caused by a shortage of dopamine in the brain, which makes a person more hungry for dopamine, or their reward center more powerful. Adderall simply increases levels of dopamine, serotonin, and norepinephrine in your brain, and it makes your brain hold on to the dopamine a little bit longer. And if a person without ADHD were to take my prescription, they might feel overstimulated or possibly even euphoric. Meanwhile, I just feel normal, calm, and collected. And that's what really surprised me and ultimately sold me on my diagnosis. I expected Adderall to make me feel cracked out, but it made me realize that I feel cracked out by default when I'm not taking it. And I'm not alone here. Over 8.2 million people in America have ADHD, or about 5% of the population. And many of them, most of them, are having trouble receiving treatment right now. And we're about to dive into that. But first, we need to understand how incredibly dangerous not being treated is.
Let's start with the most direct and horrifying statistic that you're going to hear in this video. In a study published earlier this year, it was found that people receiving treatment for ADHD in the form of medication had a 19% lower risk of death than those who are not being treated. And this is a really legit study tracking hundreds of thousands of people in each group over a period of two years. Here's some more, not at all fun facts: Adults with ADHD who are not treated as children suffer from anxiety, depression, and physical ailments 30% more than adults without ADHD. Adolescents with ADHD who are left untreated are twice as likely to abuse alcohol, marijuana, cocaine, and unprescribed drugs such as stimulants than adolescents who are adequately treated and prescribed those stimulants. Young adults with ADHD who are not receiving medication as treatment are nine times more likely to have or cause an unwanted pregnancy. Young drivers with untreated ADHD have three times more motor vehicle crashes than average and are statistically at a higher risk of destroying their vehicle than an adult who is legally drunk. Then, when you mix in a dozen or so studies strongly suggesting higher suicide and homicide risk, it gets pretty easy to say that having untreated ADHD is incredibly dangerous. And that's on top of studies showing that untreated ADHD results in poor job performance, poor school performance, higher divorce rates, and so on.
So why the hell is it so hard to get treatment right now? So, as mentioned earlier, ADHD diagnoses have been rising steadily in the last few decades, and this is the case in Europe as well as North America. And interestingly enough, this rise is mostly in adults. In contrast, the relative amount of children taking stimulants has actually not changed all that much in the last 20 years. But in 2022, the DEA, as in the same group that collaborates with and empowers Mexican drug cartels, decided that there was a massive amount of ADHD stimulant abuse that originated during the pandemic when they had allowed controlled substances to be prescribed via telehealth. And there's actually no evidence to support this, like at all. When it came to sketchy online doctors prescribing stimulants without a proper diagnosis, that never accounted for more than 1% of stimulant prescriptions. Now, of course, college students taking Adderall recreationally to help them stay awake and study is still a problem. But it doesn't take a genius to come to the conclusion that maybe making some changes to reduce the need to abuse stimulants will be more effective than taking the treatment away from a completely unrelated group of people. The DEA, being chronically allergic to facts, decided to limit the amount of amphetamines that drug companies in America can buy to make their medication or drugs. Now, it should be pointed out that in America, Americans cannot and never could legally buy controlled stimulants like Adderall that were manufactured outside of the USA. So while Canada and other countries have had some supply chain related shortages, we are in our own shitty walled garden here in the States. Now, if you want to buy your drugs illegally on the black market, the production, importation, and prominence of prescription stimulants is way, way up right now, and we'll get into that in a little bit.
All right, so everything that I told you in this video so far is not new information. Everybody was getting treatment, then the DEA started being, and now drug companies can't supply pharmacies, and now patients are not getting treatment, and that leads to an increased risk of death. That's pretty messed up, but there's more to this that I've sussed out. I need to be completely transparent and point out that due to the stuff I'm about to talk about being difficult to prove substantially by nature or by design, I'm not going to be formally throwing around accusations of corruption or extortion, even though that is precisely what I personally think is happening. Come on.
In November of 2023, the DEA administrator released a statement saying, and I quote, "Our data showed that in 2022, manufacturers did not produce the full amount that these limits permitted them to make, resulting in a shortfall of 1 billion doses that could have been produced that were not made or shipped." And the data in 2023 has shown a similar trend. Drug companies are required to let the FDA know if they are experiencing a supply shortage, but they're not required to give a reason as to why they're experiencing the shortage. As far as I could find, none of the 17 stimulant manufacturers experiencing a shortage have provided those details. It has just been assumed that the shortages were due to the DEA quotas. But why wouldn't they be? Why would a drug company want to have a shortage of such a desperately needed medication that they were selling?
Okay, so like a lot of people with ADHD, I was prescribed Adderall XR, which stands for extended release. And wow, it really helped me. A 30-day supply was $31 without insurance. Not too bad. Uh-oh. Now, like, every time I get this prescription filled, there's a delay for a few days. But this one won't be ready for over a month. So I'd better try some more pharmacies. I was just wondering if you had any... I need to speak to a pharmacist. Okay, the pharmacy, which would you like? Say, refill a prescription, speak to pharmacist. Sorry. So what happens is I call and I stay on hold with this music with nobody answering, and then they just pick up the phone and drop it down because they're tired of hearing it ring, I guess. This is the drug that my doctor chose to prescribe me, and it works great. Unfortunately, no pharmacy that I talk to will have any generic supply of that drug for over a month. And if I want any, I'm going to have to get the name brand, which costs 15 times more.
I talked to my doctor, who switched me to a slightly different type of stimulant called Azstarys. Azstarys isn't exactly cloaking their opportunism when it comes to marketing to people who can't get Adderall. When you go to their website, a pop-up literally shoves a dosage comparison chart in your face. It is more expensive, but at least the manufacturer has this coupon that works with everyone, literally everyone, even if you don't have insurance. If you have commercial insurance, you'll pay a co-pay of $50, or as low as $0 for your Azstarys medications, even if your insurance doesn't cover the medication. Trying to get it at Kaiser? No. Okay, because this is what it's saying. You should use in this case. It's not doing it, which means it could be an issue on their end. I don't know how... how urgent it is that you get this. Turns out that my insurance will not cover it if I buy it at Kroger. And it turns out that Kroger won't accept the coupon. So I call my doctor and I get it moved to CVS. So my insurance will cover it, and CVS needs a few days to order it. We're waiting for you. And also wouldn't pay for... Wait, I'm sorry, what? The insurance wouldn't pay for it. Turns out my insurance won't work for this particular drug at CVS and requires me to get it transferred to a pharmacy inside a hospital owned and run by my insurance, which doesn't carry the drug at all or have any available prescribers for mental health. So we have to waste even more of my doctor's time and get it transferred to the manufacturer's recommended pharmacy, which is a tiny building in a small town about 45 minutes away that, um, yeah, what do you know, the CVS pharmacy doesn't have its Azstarys in stock. And the person I spoke to wasn't aware of this discount program or any affiliation with the manufacturer. Do you accept, uh, the RX Connect coupon? We don't. We haven't heard of that. You put in our system. It usually gives you like the numbers that we can load into the system. Yeah, I mean, I'm not the manufacturer. I'm sorry. Our medications work, won't break the bank, and aren't a hassle to get. Yeah. In fact, every single pharmacy that I visited told me to contact the manufacturer, Ubi Pharma. And can you believe it? The drug manufacturer doesn't answer their phone. But I did notice that they had a big Q&A live stream coming up. Unfortunately, it appeared to only be for investors. So I called my financial advisor, and we managed to scrape up some capital to buy myself some equity in the company. And it was the best $249 I have ever spent. And I am so excited to meet the CEO as a new part owner of this business venture we have together.
Ultimately, we made the critical decision starting a couple years ago that we are going to wind down any operation that we don't believe can drive near-term shareholder value. And ultimately, what that has netted us is an opportunity to become exquisitely focused over the last 12, 12 months, specifically looking at the prescription business, most notably Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, ADHD. We've had tremendous revenue growth, and specifically looking at the RX segment. Now, it would be hyperbolic and maybe a little bit of a stretch for me to say that Ubi Pharmaceuticals is intentionally taking advantage of the drug shortage, and we're taking advantage, still to this day, of the fact that Adderall, Concerta, Ritalin, these products have been intermittently in and out of supply for various reasons. Okay, but it's not like they're somehow connected to a generic Adderall manufacturer other than the private settlement agreement that they entered into with the world's largest generic Adderall manufacturer. Every single path that I navigate down in this maze always leads me to having to pay a bill like this at the pharmacy counter. And this is not Adderall, by the way. It may not even work for me. Then I could try this one or this one. It's not exactly difficult to understand why drug manufacturers might not be tripping over themselves to make generics widely available again. It is a business, after all. And just because patients are 19% more likely to die as a result of our little drug shortage doesn't mean that y'all have the right to take it out on us shareholders. You smell that? It's opportunity.
InoMedFinder is an ethical startup with the mission of giving everyone access to the medication that they need, unless they can't afford to pay $50 to hire somebody to call a bunch of pharmacies every single time that they have a prescription that needs filling. Then they could go themselves. And even newer one is Needle. You can pay just $1 per pharmacy called, or you could buy 50 pharmacy call credits for a $35 monthly subscription. As in, subscribe to an online service that only exists to find medication that your tax dollars pay to make scarce. I hope everybody burns to death in a fire. I found out about Needle because they market themselves by responding to people complaining about their struggle in finding ADHD meds on X and Reddit and TikTok. Oh, and if you're on TikTok, you can definitely expect to find a bunch of people telling you that whatever supplement their multi-level marketing scheme sells works as a replacement to your ADHD medication. Bad news, guys. The Adderall shortage, there's no end in sight. This is exactly why I switched to something else. I decided to take a step into 2050 and go with something new, and it works. The cognitive function off the charts is Alpha GPC. Actually, an Adderall alternative. Let's get into it. God, this works amazing. And I'm not going to gatekeep because I know that there's millions of you guys out there who also cannot get their prescription. The name of the product is Four Sigmatic, guys. An orange shopping cart at the bottom left of this. You need to hurry and get it. They're going to sell out. And if that menagerie of excellent solutions is not enough for you, you could just mention your medication problems on X, which will summon an army of Twitter bots recommending you to send crypto to some Nigerian guy on Telegram. I don't need to tell you that these are obviously scams, do I? None of these people are going to actually send you any form of effective ADHD medication. You will have to go to the dark web for that. Now, this isn't as easy as it sounds. You can't just log onto the dark web and find an Adderall. Jesus. So Dread is like the Reddit of the dark web. It has, I'm pretty certain, over a million users. And the first post on the homepage of Dread is a promoted post from the Adderall sub. Turns out that this is quite the vibrant marketplace with established dealers, reviews, payment gateways. I can even pick up some 5-MeO-DMT on the same shopping trip. That saves me an errand. Now, I did not actually illegally buy my exact prescribed medication for less money than what the alternative is costing me, and it didn't actually arrive quicker to my mailbox than it takes the pharmacy to stock it. Now, if these pills were real and not a 3D animated asset that I put in post-production, I would not be taking them for a very obvious reason. It could be laced with something. It could be entirely made up of methamphetamine. It could be fentanyl and literally kill me. This danger is not something that the DEA made up or a paranoid delusion in my head. I know that this is a serious risk because tragically, it is happening to real young people who are resorting to buying their ADHD medication on the black market. And the reaction and response to these tragic deaths is Congressman Dave Joyce's Stop the Pills That Kill Act, which finally takes a hard look at the glaring problem of counterfeit medication being easier to obtain than actual prescribed medication. And the solution to this problem, to make sure that it never happens again, proposed by our competent, esteemed lawmakers in Congress, was obviously to give law enforcement more power and money to catch and punish the people who are selling these pills outside of where our law enforcement has any jurisdiction. Yeah, brilliant. That'll work. Great job.
I wish that I had a solution that I could share with you. I do not. And from what I can gather, the DEA analyzes their quotas very seldomly, and it appears that they won't even consider increasing amphetamine allotments for manufacturers until December of 2025. It's safe to say that there's no end in sight. And the official stance of the government and a lot of drug companies is, uh, go fuck yourself. Listen up. I'm going to be very real with you. This goes without saying, but it's really dangerous and stupid to pay for or take pills that you're not obtaining legally. There's tons of incentive for them to contain different, cheaper drugs, and there's virtually no incentive for an anonymous underground pill mill in another country to double and triple check what they're sending to whom. And like, 2 milligrams of fentanyl is a lethal dose for somebody without a high opioid tolerance. The reason we went to drug markets on the dark web in this video was to illustrate a very important point. When the government makes prescribed medications more difficult to obtain, they inadvertently make illegal drugs easier to obtain. They punish innocent civilians trying to obtain legitimate treatment and reward drug cartels with increased demand. This is nothing new. This is the function of the DEA.
It's not all bad. Non-stimulant drugs like bupropion and Strattera seem to be pretty effective for some people, and sometimes even at a higher rate than stimulants. But the challenge is that they're not immediately effective like stimulants are. So you have to give it a few months to wait for things to start balancing out before you know if it's working or not. Neurofeedback therapy, something that I've made multiple videos on, is proven to be extremely effective treatment for ADHD. It just takes some determination and patience, which is something that ADHD sufferers tend not to have an excess supply of. This video is not in focus. All right, this video is sponsored by viewers like you. And if you enjoyed this video, or if you learned anything, and if you want to help make content like this possible in the future, my Patreon has a super positive community. It has monthly songwriting challenges, unreleased music, released music, audio and music production assets, and a whole lot more. And it's as little as $1. Thanks for watching. Keep creating. Bye.