Life & Wisdom Quote by Elizabeth Wurtzel

Wurtzel’s line lands less like a clinical observation than a flare shot over a culture that medicalizes ambition and then acts surprised when people start gaming the prescription pad. Coming from the writer who turned her own psyche into a public document, it carries an implied confession-by-proxy: this isn’t an abstract “public health concern,” it’s the texture of everyday American striving, especially in classrooms, campuses, and white-collar pipelines where performance is treated as character.

The intent is blunt and strategically unsentimental. “Big issue” is almost comically plain, as if she’s refusing the euphemisms that usually cushion conversations about stimulants (focus, productivity, “just getting through”). That plainness is the point: it frames Ritalin not as a rare vice but as a normalized workaround in a system that rewards output and punishes deviation. The subtext isn’t only that people abuse Ritalin; it’s that the country quietly depends on it to keep the machine humming.

Context matters. Wurtzel wrote in an era when ADHD diagnoses surged, pharmaceutical marketing went mainstream, and elite institutions developed an unspoken economy of “study drugs.” Her work consistently interrogated the blurry border between illness and identity, treatment and self-fashioning. Here she’s signaling a familiar American contradiction: we stigmatize addiction while fetishizing the results it can buy. The sentence is short because the indictment is large. It doesn’t plead for sympathy; it calls out complicity.