Thanks to policies by the Drug Enforcement Administration, prescription medications for attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) like Adderall and Vyvanse are in a years-long artificial shortage.
Luckily, one expert has a few tricks up his sleeve to help those suffering without their meds get access to them.
In an interview with Futurism, veteran psychiatrist and ADHD specialist William Dodson revealed that prescribers in the know will often sync up their patients’ prescriptions to be filled on the seventh day of every month.
The reasoning behind this, as Dodson explains, is labyrinthine.
Since 2022, the DEA has capped the amount of pills that ADHD drug manufacturers — like Adderall maker Teva Pharmaceuticals, Vyvanse maker Takeda, and Ritalin maker Novartis — are allowed to produce. The agency's reasoning, as Dodson wrote in a 2024 op-ed for ADDitude Magazine, is the claim that people are abusing prescription stimulants — despite there being "virtually no evidence to support this belief."
So strict are America’s drug czars in controlling stimulants that they set the number of pills manufacturers can send to pharmacies monthly a year ahead of time.
"The drug company is so told [by the DEA] 'you can release one million Vyvanse 40s and 800,000 Vyvanse 60s,'" the Colorado-based psychiatrist said, citing Vyvanse, an "abuse-deterrant" stimulant, as an example. "They're told exactly how many of which strength they can they can produce, and then can release to the warehouses and the wholesalers on the first of each month in the next calendar year."
On the first of every month, Dodson detailed, wholesalers get the drugs, and after that pharmacies request it. Around the sixth of each month, the stuff makes it to pharmacies — and on the seventh day, they release it to customers.
"People who know that," he said, "synchronize all of their patients' prescriptions for the seventh."
As Dodson told us, individuals can either request that their doctors submit the prescription at the very first of the month or ask pharmacies to hold onto them until the seventh.
"Both docs and pharmacists are happy to not have to spend hours and hours searching for medications toward the [latter] part of the month," he said.
As helpful as this sort of advice may be, however, it’s no substitute for common-sense drug policy — especially if enough patients find out about this one weird trick.
"That's sort of the vagaries of distribution," Dodson said. "The DEA plan is cumbersome, stupid. It doesn't work well, and they are completely resistant to any modification."
Of all people, Dodson knows. As he told Futurism, the "only reason" he’s able to criticize the DEA as strongly as he does is because he’s retired from practice — and as such, is less concerned about getting blowback from what calls the "thuggish" agency.
At some point over the next month, he said the DEA is expected to sit down with drug manufacturers in what’s "supposed to be a negotiation" and tell them point-blank how much of each stimulant they’re allowed to produce over the next nine months.
"In some cases," he continued, "they're trying to guess what the needs are going to be 20 months in advance. It's the whole next calendar year, and they're doing it in March and April."
In sum, Dodson likens the DEA to the cartels it's nominally fighting against. (When we reached out to the DEA, a spokesperson had no comment on Dodson's advice, but responded with links to the agency's own press releases about slightly upping quotas year over year.)
Ahead of its upcoming non-negotiations, the DEA has, as we’ve learned from an agency update the psychiatrist shared with us, slightly raised its production quota on methylphenidate, or generic Ritalin. Last fall, it did the same for generic Vyvanse.
While that update is certainly welcome to those who've had to go without their meds, it's hard to say now whether the DEA's policies will shift significantly under the new Trump administration. As Dodson assured us, the known Adderall-hating Robert F Kennedy Jr, who now sits in charge of our country's healthcare, has no authority over the DEA.
More on drug shortages: Hims Is Begging Customers to Lobby the FDA to Keep Its Ozempic Knockoffs Legal
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