People who use cocaine regularly may have a harder time breaking the habit if they used Ritalin or the club drug Ecstasy in their youth, a University of Miami study suggests. The number of U.S. children and adolescents who were prescribed Ritalin and other stimulants surged dramatically in the 1990s. The study, conducted on laboratory mice, found that rodents given Ritalin and Ecstasy, then later cocaine, showed higher sensitivity to cocaine than those that hadn't been exposed to the first two stimulants. See an abstract of the actual study here.
In the 1990s, the number of U.S. prescriptions for Ritalin and similar drugs rose fivefold to nearly 20 million by 2000, according to IMS Health, a national prescription auditing firm. About 80 percent of the prescriptions are written for children diagnosed with ADHD.
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