childhood disease wrote:
ADHD is a childhood disease that people get over before they are adults unless they make absolutely zero effort to manage their own condition. There's really no reason for anyone in college or later to need to medicate their lack of attention.
As someone diagnosed with attention deficit (and diagnosed rigorously), this comment displays a lot of ignorance about how the condition works. While it is true that as children with ADHD become adults with ADHD they must learn coping mechanisms which take maturity and experience to learn, the effects of ADHD on your ability to perform certain tasks are very real and very different from non-ADHD adults. Compared to my peers, it takes me vastly more time and effort to do certain tasks like writing and making complex plans, and the weaknesses are obvious when working with people of my same intelligence and skill. It REALLY sucks being dependent on a medication to do the things I am passionate about, but there is no way I'd be able to finish these kinds of tasks in a reasonable time frame otherwise. But even though meds help, they are not a fix-all; I have to work extraordinarily hard to stay organized and disciplined - no medication can teach you those things.
That aside, I think the WADA's decision to ban lisdexamfetamine is absolutely correct. I'm surprised it wasn't already on the banned substances list, but someone taking Vyvanse would already test positive for amphetamines anyway since lisdexamfetamine is simply dextroamphetamine with a lysine group attached. It is is directly converted to dextroamphetamine (same as Adderall) in the blood stream.
From my own experience, amphetamines do have small but significant effects on distance running performance. When I compare my own performances on vs off the meds, I do think they make one "feel" stronger/more energetic much more than they actually make you become, but that small psychological difference could make all the difference in a race. Subjectively speaking, I would say the performance effect is on par with and not greater than that of caffeine. In sprinting and skill-based sports (including gymnastics), however, I suspect the performance enhancement effect would be greater.
For elite athletes I think the fairest thing to do would be to allow legitimate prescribed use of these kinds of stimulants outside of competition with TUE's, but prohibit use by anyone in competition. Personally, if I were able to ever get my knee working again and trained to the point where I was a contender to win races, I would not feel comfortable taking my prescription on race day out of concern for fairness.