> Why do you expect pseudoephedrine to be less nasty on the cardiovascular system than caffeine?

I'm not advocating for substituting pseudoephedrine for caffeine, but rather using pseudoephedrine as a one time proxy for amphetamine to see how well it works for you.

> Recommending going from caffeine to amphetamine comes across as rather weird to me.

With respect for the potential for abuse and addiction, that's a good point. My suggestion comes from a firsthand account of an adult with undiagnosed ADHD who self medicated with grossly excessive coffee drinking. Their doctor suggested getting assessed for ADHD and making the substitution out of fear for their cardiovascular health.

I assumed the parent commenter was overusing caffeine to self medicate for attention issues, but didn't think of the possibility that it was pure addictive behavior.

Pseudoephedrine is very different from amphetamine. If you must push caffeine users towards something else, go for nicotine. It is quite well tolerated, techniques for cessation are abundant, and like caffeine it is a cholinergic and would not be moreish unlike amphetamine.

For treatment of ADHD amphetamine is pretty much never the first reasonable option. It's reasonably among the last, way over there with meth, on the other side of reuptake inhibitors with a much nicer toxicological profile.

Amphetamine is no stronger or more treacherous than caffeine, when dosed properly. As someone with EXTENSIVE experience with both, I would say caffeine is probably substantially more treacherous.

I'll necro this even though I've been away for quite some time because this is such a motorheaded jaw clenched dum-dum of a position to take.

"When dosed properly" is basically a circular premise. When things are good, things are good. Great. Brilliant. This is the kind of solid ground we need for making judgements about psychoactives and health.

The thing is this, this ideal world does not exist. If you raise the dose or take an extra dose of caffeine, what happens? You'll probably feel sick and correct. What happens with amphetamine? In the best case you inch towards euphoria. At worst, if you really hit it on, you'll get a rush like little else and then euphoria.

Caffeine is very not sneaky, it clears the fog and you trivially find your equilibrium where you take roughly the same amount of a hundred millis per day. It carries very little risk for changes in personality and perception. Amphetamine is quite different. It affects confidence, behaviour and changes your perception so that the amphetamine starts to look like a solution to more and more problems. It does this in nefarious ways that usually aren't obvious to the newcomer. It's also way more potent than caffeine, therapeutic doses being in the few milligrams rather than hundreds a day.

Perhaps you've eaten more pills than I have, but I'm sure you didn't pay as much attention as I have. I like amphetamine as a very sporadic recreational drug, but that's on a hiatus because I have kids that depend on me. I'd never take it on a casual basis because I'm not disabled in a way that makes up for the risks. And there are risks, for one it's neurotoxic due to excitotoxicity. How much can't easily be predicted but chronic exposure is unlikely to be safe in the sense caffeine is. As far as I can tell this is more pronounced with dopaminergic than noradrenergic effects, i.e. if this is the case then dextroamphetamine is likely worse than the levo enantiomer.

Then there's the issue of mixing drugs. In many users amphetamine will not lessen or stop the consumption of caffeine.