Ritalin, at least if you swallow it, is no stronger than caffeine, but is more effective for a lot of people, myself included. Ritalin also lacks the physical addiction feature of caffeine. While the severity of caffeine withdrawal varies widely, virtually everyone experiences at least a headache, and quite a few people, myself included, experience more severe symptoms. If I’ve been consuming just two cups of tea a day as my only caffeine intake, and then miss the second cup one day, I end up with severe and debilitating headaches that on a few occasions have led to vomiting. If I take 40 mg of Ritalin every day for months, and then forget or just don’t take it because I don’t need to do anything that requires concentrating on information, I have no physical symptoms whatsoever, and just feel a bit spacier.
To me, physical withdrawal symptoms are a sign of something I shouldn’t be ingesting. Just because the government has chosen not to label caffeine as a “drug”, doesn’t make it safer than things the government has chosen to label as “drugs”. Plenty of people are ending up in emergency rooms from caffeine overdoses, that can produce serious heart rhythm abnormalities. The lobbyists for the coffee and caffeinated soda industries would go berserk if the FDA proposed making Ritalin a freely available non-prescription drug, like aspirin, and it wouldn’t be because they’re concerned about consumers’ safety.
Dude, you sound like a NORML ad.