there are freakout posts every hour or so on r/adhd. desperate plans to amass a huge petition of signatures, or challenge it legally with a class act. lawsuit, but mostly a lot of despair and disbelief. also some blaming of the so-called undeserved adderall users that are allegedly the official reason for the shortage…and something about tiktok users.
it’s bad and capitalism is certainly the reason why. i’d like to understand the nuance of it more though if anyone had some good leftist takes on it.
What I heard from my pharmacist:
Only a handful of companies are allowed to produce adderall because of the war on drugs. the main factory for one of these companies was temporarily shut down last year. This was apparently because of black mold contaminating a different production line (not adderall).
The working conditions there were also horrible, so the discovery of black mold set off a worker’s strike which has since been resolved.
Only so much adderall can be legally manufactured at a time. The US government is very slow to increase these limits so it can maintain control / limit amount of unused Adderall. It uses historical numbers to adjust, working off the RX number from previous years.
This typically benefits the pharma corps because it creates artificial scarcity + drives up cost, equalling higher profits. However those same companies are now behind the demand curve to such an extent there is a shortage. They are now losing money.
This has been combined with an uptick in people who were finally able to get diagnosed with adhd because telehealth became more accessible and the cost of being assessed went down.
The pharma companies cut corners to maximize profits, ate shit, and now the control mechanisms set in place by the war on drugs is making it so they can’t catch up.
TL;DR: it’s the US government and incompetent pharma corps, not individual people trying to get medication.