Hello all,
Me and lots of my friends have been struggling badly lately. One of my friends, call him Larry, recently broke up with his partner, and has been struggling to function at work. Larry has a long history of not applying himself to his work and studies. He's a very disdainful person, and there always seems to be some reason why things are not worthy of his efforts.
Currently Larry is working as a teacher, and completing a teaching degree. The other day Larry called me and said that he had not done the prep he needed to do for his upcoming class. This has been a common reason lately for him to call me. He then said that one of our mutual freinds, call her Erica, had given him some of her ADHD meds, which he said helped him focus. I found this very distressing. While it's entirely possible Larry would benefit from an ADHD diagnoses/medication, my understanding is that having patients self-diagnose and share their medication with each other is generally a very bad idea.
I called Erica to express my concerns. I stayed very calm but was very direct in my language, saying I didn't think it was right to share her prescription meds with Larry. I said this was a red-line for me, in that I didn't want to be friends with people who share out their prescription meds in this way. Erica said this was a "weird" and "threatening" thing to say, but later said she retracted the "threatening" bit.
Erica then said she had discussed her decision with her doctor and psychiatrist, which I interpreted as her suggesting this was normal and accepted behaviour, even as viewed by the medical profession. This surprised me a lot. Are GPs/psychiatrists generally tolerant/encouraging of patients sharing pycho-active meds with each other? It seems very reckless to me. I am thus very skeptical of what Erica told me.
The context for me is that I have seen multiple family members lives destroyed by slipping from innapropriate use of prescription drugs (stimulants, painkillers, depressants) leading on to hard drug abuse, so the idea of Larry casually taking someone else's ADHD meds was "triggering" for me.
