Senior Gisele Tremblay discusses the harmful effects of Adderall when misused by students to increase focus while studying. | wikimedia.org/CREATIVE COMMONS
As work and college get harder and more time consuming, it gets more difficult for college students to manage their time and keep up their grades. It is rare for a student to get through college without pulling at least one all-night study session, and caffeine is often a necessity. But more students than ever are using other methods, such as drugs, to help them cope with the immense amount of work.
INCREASED ADDERALL USE
In 2009, the National Survey on Drug Use and Health discovered that more than 6 percent of full-time college students will have used Adderall — a drug used for treating ADHD — for non-medical purposes in the past year.
However, in 2013 a different study from the University of Maryland showed the percentage jumped to nearly 11 percent. According to an article on NPR.org, the going rate per pill of Adderall is $5, although when supply and demand is highest around finals week, the price can get as high as $25 a pill.
LACK OF AWARENESS
When I asked a few Biola students about their thoughts on the topic, I was shocked by the lack of knowledge within our community. Those who did know about it’s usage had personal experience, whether using it themselves or knowing someone else who had used it. One student I talked to about reasons her friend had sold it said “I think the main issue here at least is that since the cost of tuition and rent is so high that a lot more people try to sell their prescriptions and even try to get more refills and stuff like that. It is becoming an alternate revenue in some circles.” Another student talked about his experience with someone he knew selling it, “Biola isn't like stanford where anything you can get will give you a edge. It's more like if you do the work you will be fine. Someone I knew had Adderall prescribed for legitimate reasons but would give a few here and there away to people who were really stressed out and/or wanting to try it out to see if it would make a difference or alter their mood.”
Adderall is highly addictive and has been known to cause loss of appetite, heart problems, insomnia, anxiety and depression. Use of these drugs is likely to affect exam scores and GPAs as the amount of people taking these drugs continues to rise. This will cause the median scores to go up, making it harder to excel without using the drugs.
Three of the people I interviewed compared these drugs to taking steroids in sports, with one person saying “at the point that everyone is taking drugs in order to succeed, our achievements will become less about what we have done and more about what drugs we took to get there. Steroids give our bodies an advantage and ADHD drugs give our minds an advantage. I’m scared what it will do to us in the future.” As more people continue to use the drugs, less people will succeed on their own merits. Just as steroids are the easy way out of working hard for success in the athletic words, drugs like Adderall make the self control needed to study efficiently or excel on tests less important. Grades aren’t everything, so make sure you aren’t compromising your health and your ethical beliefs in your race to end school.
