ADHD may be the defining diagnosis of our time. According to the latest data, more than 10% of American children (that’s 7.1 million kids) have been diagnosed with ADHD. And the number of stimulant prescriptions for adults in their 30s has shot up nearly threefold since 2012, hitting 15.3 million in 2021. It’s increasingly common to hear people who haven’t been diagnosed at all say they’re “so ADHD,” as if it’s more of a personality trait—or a zodiac sign—than a medical condition. In recent years, this explosion in demand has combined with other factors—including federally mandated limits on production—to create a widespread stimulant shortage in the U.S.

In the second installment of Backfired, co-hosts Leon Neyfakh and Arielle Pardes look at the unintended consequences of the ADHD industry, and trace the surprising path that brought us here.

Backfired: Attention Deficit is the latest podcast from Prologue Projects, the award-winning team behind Slow Burn, Fiasco, and Think Twice: Michael Jackson, and the second season of the Backfired franchise, a show about what happens when solving one problem inadvertently leads to a host of new ones. Backfired: Attention Deficit follows the acclaimed first season Backfired: The Vaping Wars.

Backfired: Attention Deficit was hosted and produced by Leon Neyfakh and Arielle Pardes. The senior producer and story editor of Backfired: Attention Deficit was Madeline Kaplan. The executive producer was Andrew Parsons. Producers were Dustin Desoto and Danielle Hewitt. Fact-checking by Maggie Duffy. Research by Frank Zhou. Archival research by Francis Carr. Theme song and score composed by Emma Munger. Audio mix by Aman Sahota. Backfired was co-created for Prologue Projects by Kim Gittleson.