This seems to be your solution to everything, having read the other thread. Unfortunately, it shows an equal lack of understanding of brain function as most of the other opinionated morons on this thread. If you know anything at all on the subject, you will know that alcohol is a depressent and Ritalin is a stimulant so the effect is opposite.
The second thing everyone here needs to understand is that ADD/ADHD is not an either/or situation but rather a bell curve that we are ALL on. The re-uptake of seratonin in the nerve synapsis is a function we all have and it is extremely effective in some and miserable in others. Those on the miserable end are considered to have a disorder.
Third, this disorder has no possible definitive boundries or markers because it is a scale that includes everyone. We could pick 2 or 3 standard deviations from the norm except we don't know what the norm is and currently have no way of directly measuring the uptake efficacy. As a result, we are stuck with a system where we find children being medicated based on the tolerance level of the parents and teachers for ADHD children. On the previous thread, there was also a mention of financial gain for having children medicated. That is only true for temporary foster parents in some states that can get the wards of the state put into special day care type programs. ADHD doesn't qualify for that by itself.
Fourth, chemically, Ritalin has the same active structure as cocaine. The only difference between the two is the speed of action of the drugs and the fact that Ritalin is not habit forming. The net effect of giving Ritalin to a misbehaving child is to reward him for his behavior. This is also the same effect that health freaks get from a very hard workout because the endorphines that give the "runners high" act on the same sites as Ritalin and cocaine and are actually more addictive tha Ritalin, making runners depressed (withdrawal) if they miss a workout. The important issue to understand here is that the problem is with the seratonin re-uptake in the neural synapse and Ritalin does not address that problem in any way. Wellbutrin, Effexor or several other medications work directly on the neural synapse and have the desired effect without the Ritalin side-effects. If you drug your children into zombies, they should be taken away from you.
Finally, people have a misconseptin that ADHD children have "more energy" than other children. That just is not so, their infraction is an inability to channel it into socially acceptable activities. The reason they are unable to do this is not that they haven't been taught what is right or they just want attention or any of a thousand other excuses/reasons. The reason they do all these socially unacceptable things is because administrative control section of their brain is too slow due to the seratonin re-uptake problem. The control function of your brain is the part that you train to recognize what is acceptable and what is not. An ADHD child can tell you what is unacceptable and after they do it anyway, when you ask them why they did it, they will say, "I don't know". The fact is that they don't know because it was an unconscious impulse that everybody has but their control functions aren't fast enough to over-ride the impulse and stop the unacceptable behavior. The fix isn't to slow them down but to speed up the synapsis in their brain so they can control the impulse to hit their neighbor or get up and leave their desk, so they can control their attention and stay focused on their homework instead of wandering around the universe during a math page.