Are almost all journalists on Adderall?

Somewhere in the depths of this lengthy Joe Rogan podcast, Joe asserts that all the journalists are on Adderall. Let me see if I can find it and start you at the right point (which is near then end, after a lot of talk about the use of mind-altering substances). Okay, here:



Rogan says he watched a lot of YouTube videos of Adderall users, "who thought the whole world was against them, that they were super-competent, capable of anything. They had unstoppable confidence. They wouldn't shut the fuck up. But everyone was against them."

Then, Rogan says: "A lot of people are on it.... It's a spooky drug... First of all, journalists. I have a buddy of mine who's a writer who said almost all journalists are on it." One of the other guys says, "You get stuff done." And Rogan muses, "But it changes who you are as a person. It fucks with your head."

I like to know when someone I'm listening to is on drugs. If I don't know, and they are, they are stealing from me. That's how I see it. I'm not talking about people with a genuine mental disorder who take a prescribed drug that's supposed to get them to the medical profession's idea of normal. I respect their privacy. But somebody taking drugs to get a lot of writing done? I want a warning before I spend some of my life's precious time absorbing their addled — Adderalled — verbiage.

Searching my blog archive, I see I wrote about this subject last April, when Mike Cernovich tweeted "Yes adderall is passed around D.C. like candy, and many of your favorite journalists also do meth." Let me reread what I said back then:

I have no idea whether this is true, but I will just say that I would not watch a newsperson or commentator on TV if I knew they were on such drugs.

Ha ha. Exactly what I said today.

And I do have an aversion to the TV news and news commentary shows. Perhaps those 2 things fit together. I would read an article even if I knew the person used meth or adderall. You're not staring at a human face. You're not hearing the human voice. You're looking at words, and it's a subtler thing, the way drugs get into the words.

Hmm. That didn't occur to me this morning. I guess I was trying to understand my willingness to read my mainstream news sources and my avoidance of TV news. I hate to see their faces and hear their voices.

Anyway, I wonder how much of the intensity and anxiety in the TV newspeople can be understood as symptomatic of drug use. When I do watch some news TV (almost always because I'm with someone else), I study and comment upon the faces, some of which have an insane and weird expression. From a summary of symptoms of chronic abuse of Adderall:

Chronic abuse is marked by severe rash, insomnia, irritability and personality changes. The most severe symptom of abuse is psychosis, which is often clinically indistinguishable from schizophrenia, according to the FDA. Toxic symptoms from taking an overdose of Adderall can come at low doses. Initial signs of an overdose include restlessness, tremor, confusion, hallucinations and panic, the FDA says. After this central stimulation, the patient will undergo fatigue, depression, and often cardiovascular and gastrointestinal symptoms....

Irritability, restlessness, hallucinations, panic.... Where do you see that on TV news commentary? Whether these people are jacking themselves up with drugs or not, it's a bad idea to fill your evening staring into these anxious faces and hearing their intense chatter. I was watching one of those shows yesterday — I won't say which one — and they were talking about the possibility that Attorney General Barr misrepresented what is in the Barr report. There was loud, fast talking; darting, over-wide eyes; and hand gestures so big that I paused the show and exclaimed that it looked like a wild late-night party. It's screwy to be sitting, relaxed and passive in your lounge chair, and letting these weird humans have their way with your mind.

I'd like to see more journalism about the problems of journalists. I searched the NYT archive for the newest articles about Adderall. I got (in reverse chronological order):

1. "Virginia Woman Admits to Fatally Stabbing College Roommate" ("Commonwealth's Attorney Chris Rehak says Cutting told police she was on an array of drugs the night she killed Cannon including, cocaine, mushrooms, Xanax and Adderall").

2. "Dallas Shooting Victim Was a ‘Big Personality, Nice Person’" ("[The victim's sister] told jurors her brother used marijuana after not liking how he felt on Adderall, which he was prescribed for attention hyperactivity disorder").

3. "The Shark-Infested Waters of Trump’s Tweet-Filled Weekend" ((a Jimmy Kimmel joke about Trump) "He’s losing what little was left of his mind. He even retweeted a comedy Twitter account called ‘Trump but About Sharks.’ This is an account that takes his tweets and makes them about sharks. So he retweeted it. He’s so rattled, for lunch today aides say he ate a bucket of Adderall and snorted his fried chicken").

4. "Can We Slow Down Time in the Age of TikTok?" ("My students are growing up in a culture that is even more intensely individualized and fiercely competitive than it used to be, a punishing, Adderall-fueled version of my teenage years").

I scrolled through many more. Mostly about students. Nothing about journalists and politicians. Nothing about the elite. Maybe the elite are elite because they work harder, and they work harder because they've got a drug that makes them want to work, work, work.

Of course, there is a willingness to talk about Trump on Adderall. A Google search turned up way more than 2 million hits. This seems to be the original source of the chatter: "TOM ARNOLD CLAIMS DONALD TRUMP SNORTED ADDERALL ON 'THE APPRENTICE' SET" (Newsweek),