– English Lyrics

Lyrics & Translation

[English]

Amphetamines can drive you through brutal work  shifts, push you through boring study sessions

or keep you dancing til dawn. They  fuel ambitions and sharpen minds.

We’ve given  them to soldiers to fight  harder and to children to help them focus.

Today, millions of brains are running  faster than evolution had ever planned.

In the last 15 years amphetamines have become one  of the fastest-growing drug markets in the world,

second only to cannabis.

Like any drug, amphetamines  can be used to escape reality.

But unlike any other, they promise  to help us master our modern world.

What makes them so appealing and what  happens to your body once you take them?

Supercharging Your Brain

Almost everything humans do  relies on focus and motivation.

Whether you are working, playing, studying, creating, working out, partying or fighting,

you need to push through exhaustion, silence distractions and stay in sync.

Amphetamines are stimulants and  do just this extremely well.

They come in three main types: plain  amphetamine, methamphetamine, and MDMA.

Meth is an extremely potent and addictive version,

and MDMA, or ecstasy,  has some quite unique effects

but today we’ll focus on plain amphetamine

– sold on the street  as speed or as prescription drugs like Adderall or Vyvanse.

The main effect of amphetamines is to trick your brain to

massively increase the levels of dopamine and noradrenaline.

Dopamine is the chemical of motivation and  excitement – like the rush when you're about

to beat that impossible boss in a Souls Game.

Noradrenaline makes your mind awake, focused, alert and sharp

– able to precisely and quickly move your fingers to perform the combo that destroys the boss.

Dopamine says “yes, this matters!” 

and noradrenaline gives you  the tools to make it happen.

On amphetamines you aren’t simply excited,  but plugged into a hidden power source.

You can quickly absorb and  react to everything around you,

your attention is locked in the moment, in the  best case you enter a state of flow easily.

Your mood is lifted and boring tasks seem more engaging.

Distractions become less distracting in the face of your goals.

Your heart pounds faster, your breath  quickens and sweat beads on your skin,

hunger fades and fatigue dissolves.

Other stimulants like  cocaine peak or fade quickly,

maybe crashing you and leaving  you more tired than before,

but amphetamines lift you up and  hold you there for 4 to 14 hours.

Back in the day amphetamines used to  be prescribed for all kinds of problems

– to lose weight, fix your depression  or against nasal congestion.

Nowadays they are mainly prescribed for ADHD – a mental disorder that makes it hard to

concentrate on things you find  boring and to control your impulses.

ADHD brains are basically looking for a reward that never comes

– amphetamines solve this  by providing this reward.

Turning a super easily distracted  scatter brain into a focused one.

In the last decades ADHD diagnoses in kids and adults in the US have skyrocketed

leading to an unprecedented amount  of prescription amphetamines.

But amphetamines aren’t  just drugs - they are tools.

Performance enhancing tools, perfectly  aligned with our most mainstream ambitions.

And if they manage to keep you awake and  focused better than coffee or energy drinks,

why not get your daily performance  boost with a dose of amphetamines?

They’re made in labs, prescribed by doctors,  and safely taken by millions after all!

So their legal and illegal use  has surged in many workplaces,

particularly in very stressful  or highly competitive industries

that require long hours and intense focus.

From tech to finance bros, from cooks  or truck drivers to surgeons or nurses.

In the US alone more than 4 million people  illegally use prescription stimulants.

Especially college students have started to  rely on them more and more – not to party,

but to push for better grades.

Concentrating and studying are hard  enough on their own, but even more so

in times where short form videos and endless  scrolling have nuked our attention spans.

Some believe they have undiagnosed ADHD,

that their struggle to concentrate is a flaw that needs chemical fixing,

or they simply want an easy edge to achieve more.

Imagine you’re cramming for finals. Someone  offers you a pill and the fog in your brain lifts.

8 hours vanish in a hyper-focused blur.  Should you take another one tomorrow?

This is starting to sound like a commercial.

But the frank reality is that amphetamines promise

an easy fix to things that many of us struggle with.

But of course, nothing good  in life comes for free.

Speed Crash

The dark side of amphetamines  comes in two flavors:

Unpleasant side effects and serious health risks.

The least negative bad experience may be that  amphetamines work, just not for the right thing.

Instead of finally writing the paper that is due  tomorrow you hyperfocus on grinding your game.

And then the day is over. Congrats on the  new item, but you will still fail your class.

More serious is that noradrenaline puts  your body into fight or flight mode,

which can make you feel  nervous, tense, and on edge.

Your heart beats faster and  your breaths are shorter.

Which is exactly how your body feels  when you experience anxiety or panic.

Suddenly you feel extremely  worried or can’t stop ruminating.

If you are already pretty stressed or anxious  

this can worsen your anxiety or even  lead to a full blown panic attack.

On the other hand your motivation can overshoot.

Your patience shrinks to almost zero and you  can feel wired and very annoyed at people

because they speak and think too slowly.

Making you jittery and  pretty unpleasant to others.

Amphetamines also make you numb  towards the needs of your body.

So it is easy to forget that you  need to drink, eat and sleep.

You may suddenly realize that you are  totally dehydrated, tired and shaky,

after neglecting your body's  needs for hours and hours.

And while amphetamines lengthen the time  you can stay awake and be productive,

if you took them too late in the day or too much,

it may just be impossible to get to  sleep as your mind can’t stop racing.

Making you exhausted the next day – tempting  you to solve the problem with another dose.

If you take too much all the  enhancing effects can reverse,

leaving you nervous, restless, obsessively overthinking

or outright unable to focus on anything.

Some prescription amphetamines like Vyvanse  stay active in your system for up to 14 hours.

So if you have a bad trip  you may have to wait it out.

And the come down can also be pretty harsh

– after hours of being bathed in dopamine  and noradrenaline their levels drop suddenly.

You may feel extreme fatigue, your mood can crash,  leaving you feeling low energy and depressed.

You may experience a fresh boost of anxiety  as your brain tries to rebalance itself.

And of course, there is addiction.

But first of all, constant artificial dopamine highs  can totally disrupt your emotional baseline.

Swinging from euphoric and super focused and  driven to stressed and tired is pretty unpleasant.

If you take amphetamines  regularly you build a tolerance,  

needing higher doses to achieve the same effects.

Which raises the risk for  all the negative effects.

Maybe at the beginning amphetamines were  the solution to finally do your homework,

but after a while you just feel completely unable to study or work at all

without the boost they give you.

It can be hard to get back to  your normal baseline afterwards.

Ok, not ideal – but can  amphetamines destroy your life?

Well, maybe. Definitely your brain and heart.

The flood of chemicals that boosts  your brain can overwhelm it,

mixing noise and signal and turning  clarity into chaos, leading to psychosis

– you can no longer tell for sure  what is real and what is not.

Typical symptoms are bizarre  thoughts, hallucinations and paranoia.

In most cases they fade once the drug wears off.

But sometimes they stay for months, and for a minority of people

they can evolve into full-fledged  schizophrenia, changing your life forever.

Amphetamines speed up your heart and over time

even mild increases in blood  pressure can damage vessel walls,

causing them to thicken,  narrow, and lose elasticity,

which forces your heart to work harder.

If you use them long term this can lead to  

serious complications like cardiac  arrest or an irregular heartbeat.

And in high enough doses, especially  mixed with other stimulants like cocaine,

amphetamines can trigger heart  attacks, tear open major arteries

or burst blood vessels in your brain,  leading to strokes – even in young people.

How likely is this to happen?

Today it seems that low-dose prescription use over  the short term for ADHD is relatively low risk

while chronic and especially heavy use  in healthy people is probably harmful.

If you want our opinion after our research:  Amphetamines are a huge grey zone.

A part of society runs on speed because it wants  to work more, be more focused, faster and longer.

For some people they are an effective  way to treat a real underlying condition,

for some they are a great health risk.

Without medical guidance and proper  care, amphetamines can turn you into

a terribly on edge, anxious and  unpleasant version of yourself.

They are an easy but also a short term fix

– and probably not a sustainable long term solution

if you do not have an underlying condition.

You can brute force your mind and body  to do what you want them to right now

– but amphetamines are not helping  you to acquire better habits

or to grow and become a better version of yourself.

But we are not the health police. You do you

– but hopefully you do so as  informed and responsibly as possible.

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Key Vocabulary

Vocabulary	Meanings
drive /draɪv/ A2	verb - to operate a vehicle verb - to force something forward
push /pʊʃ/ A2	verb - to apply force to move something away
fuel /ˈfjʊəl/ B1	verb - to provide energy or power noun - a substance used to provide energy
sharpen /ˈʃɑːrpən/ B1	verb - to make something sharper or improve
fight /faɪt/ A2	verb - to struggle against something
focus /ˈfoʊkəs/ B1	verb - to concentrate attention noun - the center of attention
motivation /ˌmoʊtɪˈveɪʃən/ B2	noun - the reason for acting
trick /trɪk/ A2	verb - to deceive or cheat
increase /ɪnˈkriːs/ A2	verb - to make something larger
awake /əˈweɪk/ A2	adjective - not asleep
alert /əˈlɜːrt/ B1	adjective - vigilant and aware
sharp /ʃɑːrp/ A2	adjective - having a fine edge or point
absorb /əbˈzɔːrb/ B1	verb - to take in or soak up
react /riˈækt/ B1	verb - to respond to something
nervous /ˈnɜːrvəs/ B1	adjective - easily agitated or anxious
tense /tens/ B1	adjective - stretched tight or stressed
addiction /əˈdɪkʃən/ B2	noun - the state of being unable to stop using something
psychosis /saɪˈkoʊsɪs/ C1	noun - a severe mental state involving loss of contact with reality