The Meth We Gave Our Kids

Every generation has blind spots that later seem absurd. In the 1950s, doctors recommended cigarettes. In the 1970s, nutritionists told us margarine was healthier than butter. Today, I suspect we’ll look back in disbelief at something else: the mass diagnosis of ADHD, and the fact that millions of American children were prescribed what is essentially a form of methamphetamine.

The rise of ADHD coincided with two forces: classrooms getting more rigid, and pharmaceutical companies needing new markets. A fidgety kid wasn’t unusual in 1960. By 2000, he was a patient. What changed wasn’t the children. It was our willingness to turn restlessness into a medical condition — one conveniently treated with a daily pill.

The most popular ADHD drugs — Adderall, Ritalin — are stimulants. Chemically, they’re close cousins of methamphetamine. Imagine explaining to future generations: Yes, we gave eight-year-olds meth before sending them to math class. That sentence alone should stop us in our tracks.

But it didn’t. Instead, we normalized it. Parents shared dosing tips. Teachers quietly encouraged medication as a classroom management strategy. Pharma companies made billions.

The real tragedy isn’t just the pills. It’s that we diagnosed an entire generation of kids as broken, when maybe the system was what needed fixing. Schools weren’t designed for variety in attention spans or learning styles. Instead of adapting classrooms, we adapted children’s brains with chemicals.

It’s easier to prescribe a pill than to redesign education. Easier, but wrong.

Fifty years from now, I think we’ll look back at the ADHD boom with the same mix of horror and dark humor we reserve for old cigarette ads. “Doctors recommend Camels” will sit next to “My kid’s on Adderall” in the museum of bad ideas.

Generations of kids learned to measure their attention in milligrams. And the adults who gave them those pills thought they were doing the right thing.

That’s the scariest part: how normal it all felt at the time.