85 Million Amphetamine Pills Seized

It’s common knowledge these days that most of the drugs prescribed for so-called Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder are composed of amphetamines. Examples of such drugs are Adderall, Vyvanse, and Dexedrine. Other ADHD drugs in the same drug category are composed of the chemical methylphenidate and are sold under such trade names as Ritalin or Concerta.

ADHD drug common side effects

All these drugs have common side effects, such as difficulty falling asleep and staying asleep, loss of appetite, stunted body growth in youth taking them, headaches, stomach discomfort, increased heart rate and blood pressure, and occasionally heart attacks. These are side effects at normal prescribed doses. Furthermore, brain scans of methamphetamine addicts have shown significant loss of brain tissue.

ADHD drug addiction

Another side effect they all have is that they are addictive; highly addictive if taken at doses above those prescribed. Unfortunately, high school and college students often take the drugs at high doses for staying up late cramming for exams or for recreational purposes. In addition to causing themselves bodily harm when they do this, they also often become addicted.

For an article, Angela Hennessey for VICE Canada recorded interviews with people who had become addicted to Adderall.  A quote from one student reads as follows (the student used the expression “wet bar” apparently referring to a bar of soap):

“It got to the point where I would be popping five at once and would be awake for three days. There would be times when I would be in a final exam, not having slept for three days and it would take me five minutes to write a single sentence. My brain literally couldn’t function. Things slept from my mental grip like a wet bar – I was paranoid. I would only eat a banana a day, and I was always sleep deprived.”

(the full article can be googled by typing: “I would only eat a banana a day”)

ADHD drugs’ failure to improve academic performance

When a student first starts taking a stimulant drug they seem to improve in their academic performance initially for a few weeks. They may experience an increase in energy and a greater ability to stay awake when they would usually be sleeping and have a greater ability to concentrate, even on very mundane things or written materials they don’t understand. They might feel more confident and even sort of invincible for a few weeks.

However, in the 1970’s and 80’s dozens of studies were done to see if stimulant drugs such as Ritalin would improve academic performance. One after another they failed to show long-term improvement in students’ scholastic abilities and comprehension. Some of the study findings concluded that the drugs could even have negative effects on academic performance.

In 1987, Gerald Coles stated in his book The Learning Mystique, A Critical Look at Learning Disabilities:

“Worst of all for drug advocates, whether the studies were short or long term, whether they met basic scientific criteria or not, all conclusions converged: ‘stimulant drugs have little, if any impact on…long term academic outcome.’”

In Norman Ohler’s best-selling book Blitzed, Drugs in the Third Reich, he exposed the results of a study that was conducted on a drug known as Pervitin, which was a form of methamphetamine. In 1938, Professor Otto Ranke became the Director of Germany’s Research Institute of Defense Physiology. He had hundreds of medical students split into four groups. They were given an exam that they would take through the night and up till 4 pm the next day. It was a blind study with some students given the methamphetamine Pervitin, others given caffeine, others given Benzedrine, and some given placebos. He noticed that the students taking the methamphetamine pill Pervitin finished soonest and were energetic at the end of the exam, but they did not do so well on their answers. As the book states, “Pervitin kept people from sleeping, but it didn’t make them any cleverer.”

Drugging soldiers with amphetamines to kill and be killed

However, what Ranke was looking for was a drug to keep soldiers awake and energetic, and Pervitin methamphetamine was it. Toward the beginning of World War 2, when Germany invaded France the German soldiers were almost all taking methamphetamine as thousands of Pervitin pills were consumed by the troops and they took over France in a sudden and overwhelming invasion that led to the French surrendering in 11 days from the start of the attack. Armored vehicles and soldiers rolled into France going day and night without stopping except to refuel and they overwhelmed and surprised the larger and more well-armed French forces. It was noted that during that invasion some soldiers spent 17 days without sleep before they collapsed.

The methamphetamine Pervitin pills continued to be used by German soldiers till the last days of the war when teenage boys were sent out on near-suicidal assignments to defend Berlin against Russian and American troops closing in from both east and west.

The Japanese used methamphetamine injections on young Kamikaze pilots being sent on suicide missions, many of whom were in the 17-24 age bracket.

Today, we find that many soldiers in the Middle East also use an amphetamine known as Captagon.  At one time it was an ADHD drug, but a primary use for it in recent years has been to make it possible for soldiers in Middle East wars to go for days without sleep and feel over-confident, invincible, and less afraid to die in battle circumstances.

On Monday, December 21, 2020, the BBC released a news story about a shipment of 85 million pills of the amphetamine Captagon being incinerated. According to the article the shipment had come from the Syrian government, through the hands of Hezbollah in Lebanon, and was destined for Libya until the Italian Financial Crimes Police seized the shipment. The estimated current potential worth of the 85 million pills was about a billion dollars.

The use of drugs in warfare has a long history in that part of the world. Even the derivation of the word “assassin” comes from the Arabic words for “hash users,” as this form of marijuana was used for the preparation of a person to be an assassin who would become willing to die in his effort to assassinate a specific human target. Similarly today, suicide bombers on drugs in Afghanistan and other countries are sent to murder and certainly die themselves as part of their missions. Often, the bombers’ states of mind permit them to kill innocent children and civilians in the process.

The drugs used to make soldiers more willing to kill others and possibly die in the act themselves are often the same types of drugs that children in America are forced to take for the made-up mental disorder known as ADHD, a “disorder” which has never been found in the bodies of patients and is only diagnosed by opinion, not by medical, scientific testing.

U.S. government program rewards drugging kids with amphetamines

Ironically, one of the driving forces to get millions of children from poor families in America being put on amphetamines and amphetamine-type drugs are the large monthly payments from Supplemental Security Income (commonly referred to as SSI) that can be easily obtained by poor families simply by having a child or multiple children in a family being diagnosed with ADHD and then being prescribed these drugs.

Between the psychiatrists in the U.S. and the psychiatric drug companies “influencing” our nation’s politicians, America’s children have been sitting ducks.

Drugging Kids: Psychiatry’s Wholesale Drugging of Schoolchildren for ADHD is available on Amazon.com, both as a paperback and as a Kindle book.