Released: 9th March 2018

Seen: 12th April 2018

Take Your Pills is a documentary on Netflix about the problem regarding prescription drugs, particularly the stimulants like Ritalin and Adderall. This movie lasts for 87 minutes and 43 seconds. Within the time that I spent sitting at my computer to watch this movie here is a list of just the random things I ended up doing while I tried to sit in a seat for an hour and a half.

Went to make myself several drinks

Stopped the movie to check my emails

Stopped the movie to check my facebook

Stopped the movie to check my twitter

Changed my shirt that was getting a little warm

Shaved not only my face but also the hairs on my right hand

Went to find the youtube trailer for this movie to get the pictures used in this

Opened the spreadsheet I keep my University Assessment marks on

Considered taking a nap

I am not someone who really has a problem with focus. Truly, I am able to just set my mind to something and do it, I do not have ADD or ADHD or anything else and yet there sits a list of random stupid things I caught myself doing while watching this movie. Not because this movie isn’t interesting, it’s actually pretty damn fascinating, but because that’s the culture we’ve developed. We live in a “Let me check my facebook feed” time, we’ve become as someone in the documentary called it “a One-minute society” where we just have this urge to do everything, no attention spans whatsoever. You probably started reading that list, looked somewhere else, then came back (Thanks for that) and this documentary is about how some people who have that relatively universal lack of attention span decide that a little pill meant for an actual medical condition should be something they take in order to get them through the work that they need to do.

Some things about this documentary do, admittedly, annoy me. The weird animations they overlay with the film footage to make you feel like you’re in the head of someone with ADHD just get’s irritating by the end of the opening credits. There are some moments where it was a little harder to keep up, possibly they could’ve added another 15 minutes (During which I’d of probably gone to make a sandwich, clipped my toenails, watched the latest Randy Rainbow video, they all would’ve been on the list) just so they weren’t rushing through the interesting information about how Adderall became what it’s become today. For the majority of the time, it’s a fascinating documentary about a very real problem and it does offer a fair amount of balance. They explicitly state several times that there are people who legitimately need this drug for legitimate medical reasons, one of them actually pointedly states how offensive it is to actual sufferers of the illness when people say that everyone has ADHD.

The talking heads style of documentary is usually reliant on getting interviews with people who are able to be informative and interesting at the same time, it’s a hard thing to create because if you have a dud interview then people will zone out even more than they already do naturally. They got a great bunch of people who either genuinely need the medication, admit to just using it as a performance enhancer, wrote about the negative effects of it or are medical professionals. One of the people is even the guy who brought it to America in the first place, or was at least involved in the process. So rest assured that they got a good batch of people. They don’t leave out much, they describe the history of the medication, it’s derivative forms, it’s positives and negatives. This is not some big awful anti-Adderall movie, it’s just about abuse of that drug and what it can do.

This movie is not trying to scare you into running to the cabinet and grabbing the bottle of pills to flush them down the toilet. It just want’s to try and give you a nudge, to show you what the drug itself is doing to people who take it without needing it. If you have the actual medical condition that this drug is created to help with, this documentary is not here to change your mind. It’s just here for those who take it so they can pass a test, it’s not going to change the world but it’s not a detriment to it either.

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