The headline is so odd! Adderall is not sold in Mexico and the article mentions this several times. It's of course unfortunate someone would buy the wrong drug. The bigger headline is buried which is that people mistakenly bought fentanyl instead of other painkillers (which are actually legally prescribed). This is a much more deadly mistake.
I just came back from Puerto Vallarta, and it's shocking how pharmacies advertise their drugs to tourists. I'm talking massive signs with every prescription med under the sun-- Adderall, Xanax, Retinol, you name it. All next to the HGH and testosterone posters featuring unreasonably muscular bodybuilders.
My roommates in college were amateur body builders and used to go down to Mexico in the early aughts to get testosterone and bring it back since they were starting to clamp down on the abuse of it here.
They stopped doing it when two things happened.
A) One of their buddies who they lifted with got a counterfeit batch of T and got really sick and spent two weeks in the hospital.
B) Some of the guys at the gym were bragging they were getting T from Mexico too, but would buy it with counterfeit $100 super bills they got somewhere in Vegas (still have no idea how they got them) and then would bring their T back and sell it for a huge profits to other bodybuilders who didn't want to risk getting caught at the border. They eventually did got caught and did several years in a Mexican jail.
Now you just have to go to your doctor and tell him your sex drive is down or you have ED and they'll put on you on TRT pretty quickly without all the fuss. Its pretty standard now for older men to be on a TRT regiment.
It's true! In many parts of Mexico, including Mexico City, this is not the case at all. Even in Guadalajara, which is in the same state as PV, you can't buy this stuff without a prescription. But I was in PV and my partner had a headache so we wandered into a pharmacy in an upscale neighborhood to buy some ibuprofen and to our surprise the pharmacist was a hell of a saleswoman! We walked out with a variety of benzos and boner pills.
> it's shocking how pharmacies advertise their drugs to tourists
I’ve been there and a number of other tourist traps in Mexico, none of it is even close to legit. I would trust a drug dealer on the street over a Mexican pharmacy.
The shock you felt is a bit like the shock many foreigners feel when visiting the US, and seeing a consistent flow of television commercials with “Ask your doctor about X.” (Direct marketing of prescription drugs is banned in most of the developed world.)
I also just don't understand how it's profitable to run those ads in the US, given how niche some of the conditions are...like I'm pretty sure that if you have cancer, you're going to be asking your doctor about a lot of things anyway. What's the point of advertising cancer / lupus / drugs that extremely specific conditions that <0.1% of the US population have?
The worst discussions we have on Hacker News are around healthcare and medicine.
For some reason the community refuses to apply a high of research and rigor to this topic, as if it's lesser than the non-sense we call computer science.
This entire debate is comical, the medical community's approach has been, by it's own admission, to throw various stimulants at ADHD. Methylphenidate, L-Amphetamine, D-Amphetamine, Lisdexamfetamine, etc.
By in large, everyone on this thread is pretending like there is a treasure trove of research demonstrating the superiority of Adderall (a racemic mixture of L & D amphetamine) to Methylamphetamine.
And that's just not true at all, there is a paucity of research on the subject. Meth = Bad because of the Germans and street drug users (who smoke an uncontrolled amount).
I get tired of people that don’t have to deal with ADHD trying to apply some sort of morality to stimulants to treat the condition.
If something else actually worked people would gladly try it. Stimulants have so many downsides and side effects that most would never take it unless it was necessary for them to function. These people are not junkies looking to get high.
Not too surprised to see people say here stuff like “isn’t adderall just meth” dose and delivery methods are completely different.
What would it take to make consumer systems to characterize molecules to see if they conform to a particular spec? The FDA et al are great and all if you live in the nice places of the world. They aren't so great for the rest of the world.
I'm decently sure that there is a dosage for methamphetamine for which the effects are (nearly) indistinguishable from "regular" d-amphetamine, assuming that the route of administration is the same.
Readit News
At this moment I realized how far we went in wealthy countries, in my case Europe countries, in the regulation of drugs.
They stopped doing it when two things happened.
A) One of their buddies who they lifted with got a counterfeit batch of T and got really sick and spent two weeks in the hospital.
B) Some of the guys at the gym were bragging they were getting T from Mexico too, but would buy it with counterfeit $100 super bills they got somewhere in Vegas (still have no idea how they got them) and then would bring their T back and sell it for a huge profits to other bodybuilders who didn't want to risk getting caught at the border. They eventually did got caught and did several years in a Mexican jail.
Now you just have to go to your doctor and tell him your sex drive is down or you have ED and they'll put on you on TRT pretty quickly without all the fuss. Its pretty standard now for older men to be on a TRT regiment.
I’ve been there and a number of other tourist traps in Mexico, none of it is even close to legit. I would trust a drug dealer on the street over a Mexican pharmacy.
For some reason the community refuses to apply a high of research and rigor to this topic, as if it's lesser than the non-sense we call computer science.
This entire debate is comical, the medical community's approach has been, by it's own admission, to throw various stimulants at ADHD. Methylphenidate, L-Amphetamine, D-Amphetamine, Lisdexamfetamine, etc.
By in large, everyone on this thread is pretending like there is a treasure trove of research demonstrating the superiority of Adderall (a racemic mixture of L & D amphetamine) to Methylamphetamine.
And that's just not true at all, there is a paucity of research on the subject. Meth = Bad because of the Germans and street drug users (who smoke an uncontrolled amount).
I get tired of people that don’t have to deal with ADHD trying to apply some sort of morality to stimulants to treat the condition.
If something else actually worked people would gladly try it. Stimulants have so many downsides and side effects that most would never take it unless it was necessary for them to function. These people are not junkies looking to get high.
Not too surprised to see people say here stuff like “isn’t adderall just meth” dose and delivery methods are completely different.
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