Thanks for posting this so articulately and honestly.
I have been working on a book about ADD and the infuriatingly stupid "War on Drugs." The hypocrisy and doublethink necessary to maintain those two things---a campaign to prescribe highly addictive drugs on the one hand, and a campaign to stop people from using anything from plants on the other---is just too bizarre for me to manage. I've also finished a book of short stories, "Drugs, Guns, and Living in America" for which I am seeking a publisher, to little avail thus far, but who knows? And I've completed a screenplay, shot in flashback, the contemporary "bookends" of which are about a young boy diagnosed with ADD and a mother and sister struggling to determine what to do about the situation. It's a pretty intense story, based on a true incident that happened to a friend of my ex-wive's, in which she almost received a lobotomy, circa 1960 for what today we would call ADD. Ritalin is comparable for most of its recipients to a highly focused chemical lobotomy.
As to the rationale behind Ritalin, in addition to profit, what seems clearest to me are failures of human relations or any other approach to management to deal with the real diversity of the human condition and the inevitable longing that many of us feel for breaks and changes from the one-track-mind that current business practice wants for its workers, while extolling creativity disingenuously as the missing quality in the American workplace at the same time that SOP, starting in elementary school with Ritalin, is conform or die.
