My Personal Adderall Shortage Is Over . . . Or at Least Paused

DEA policy harms the public it is supposed to protect.

On February 10, I wrote about the Adderall shortage in the US and how going without the drug affected me as a person with both Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos syndrome (hEDS). At that point, I had been out of generic Adderall for about a month and was really starting to feel the withdrawal symptoms. The irritability was making working in an office setting taxing, to say the least. Daily nausea, cramping, and the occasional feeling that I was about to vomit lasted until early March.

In addition to those symptoms, I had to deal with the reemergence of all the symptoms that Adderall was helping to suppress. I lost the ability to focus on anything uninteresting for more than a few minutes at a time. My loss of impulse control had me eating pizza multiple times a week or buying random foods at the grocery store, resulting in me regaining 12 of the 15 pounds I had recently lost. Without the analgesic effects of a central nervous stimulant, I was in constant pain.

All of that came to an abrupt halt Thursday, May 4, when I was finally able to get my prescription filled. The changes were immediate and drastic. At least, they seemed drastic after four months of…