"The United States uses 80 percent of the world's Ritalin.

Now, it used to be 90 percent, and so it is changing in other countries. Canada uses almost as much as we do per capita. Australia is catching up. The U.K. -- it is Western Europe where it is very different, of course. The under-developed countries don't have or don't use any stimulants at all.

But even though Western Europe is maybe catching up, physicians in the U.K. are still using one-tenth rates of Ritalin use than we are. In France and in Italy, it is practically not used at all. And in Germany, it is somewhere in between."

(Source: Lawrence H. Diller, "Prescription Stimulant Use in American Children: Ethical Issues," Testimony before The President's Council on Bioethics, December 12, 2002; http://www.bioethics.gov/transcripts/dec02/session3.html .)

"'It's so great, I can find it anywhere,' she says. 'Through sorority sisters, people in class, wherever. It's worth paying for, to stay awake for 30 hours and know I'll get a good grade.'

[These students] are part of a growing trend among college students, an estimated one in five who pop Adderall without a prescription, according to a 2002 Johns Hopkins study. Many students don't consider their use of Adderall to be abusive because it helps them perform well in school.

...But Adderall, an amphetamine approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 1996 to treat attention disorders, can have serious side effects, including heart failure, seizures and strokes -- especially when mixed with alcohol or other drugs. After all, it's speed."

(Source: Alyssa Abkowitz, "The new caffeine," Creative Loafing Atlanta, September 16, 2004; http://atlanta.creativeloafing.com/2004-09-16/news_feature.html )

Adolescents and young adults who grow up in an intact family are much more likely to avoid using marijuana than are peers reared in broken homes. Strong evidence for the protective effects of growing up in an intact family appears in the pages of Health Psychology as part of a study of marijuana recently completed by researchers at the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, California. 

Scrutinizing survey data collected from a racially and economically diverse sample of 5,833 respondents tracked from seventh grade through age 29, the RAND analysts established a clear relationship between family structure and marijuana avoidance. Although their research did show that a significant number of young people from intact families were "steady increasers" (who used marijuana early and then steadily increased their usage), the RAND scholars clearly established that "abstainers ... were significantly more likely to come from two-parent families" than from other family structures. Indeed, fully 68% of the 2,648 abstainers in this study came from intact families, compared to just 31% of the 147 "early high users" and 34% of the 555 "stable light users."

The researchers see "youth from disrupted families" statistically "over-represented in the two early-starter groups."

Living in an intact family not only reduced the chances of adolescent or young-adult marijuana use, but avoidance of marijuana also-in turn-dramatically increased the likelihood of "favorable outcomes" in their young-adult lives. "Abstainers," the RAND researchers report, "had a higher level of educational attainment, better overall health, greater life satisfaction, and lower rate of hard drug use at age 29 than all other [marijuana-use] trajectory classes. Abstainers also had higher earnings than all other groups except for occasional light users, whose earnings did not differ from those of abstainers."