The price you pay for an 'A'

It was 8 p.m. on a Tuesday in early December. Andrew had a final exam in his math class the following day and he was already beginning to feel his eyelids become heavy after countless hours of studying. As he contemplated the importance of studying all night, Andrew reached into his desk drawer and pulled out an orange capsule with small black lettering that read Adderall® and popped it into his mouth.

Final exams are often the single most important event in a college class and students will sometimes go to any length to ensure a passing grade.

While this may seem like a normal part of college, the pressure to succeed is beginning to create a new trend among college students who are using prescription stimulants like Adderall® and Ritalin non-medically.

Andrew, a former SCC student who has asked to remain anonymous, has experienced the stress of final exams many times. Like many other college students, the stress and pressure to do well on these exams led him to take Adderall® and Ritalin.

“The first time I used Adderall®, I was studying for a math final. I had heard that taking it would help me study all night,” said Andrew. “I was amazed at how well it worked; I ended up studying for about 10 straight hours and got an A on my final.”

Adderall® and Ritalin are prescription drugs in a family of drugs called psychostimulants that are usually prescribed to those with attention deficit disorders like ADD and ADHD.

These drugs increase alertness, concentration and also decrease fatigue, which is why they are so often abused to help students study or write papers all night, but there is a downside to using them as well.

“While using these drugs may give student’s an edge from the onset, increasing their ability to focus and stay up, the problem is there is a downside to this when the drugs ware off,” said Anthony Campbell, medical officer of Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Agency.

The burst of energy and alertness while the drugs are in your system inevitably wear off once the drugs have passed through your system, often resulting in what is often referred to by users as a “crash.”

The drugs can also have adverse effects on the body that can range anywhere from unpleasant to dangerous and sometimes even deadly.

The side effects of these drugs can include dry mouth, depression, sleep disorders, anxiety and even high blood pressure, stroke and heart attack, according to Campbell.

Adderall® and Ritalin are never prescribed to those with high blood pressure or any other heart conditions. However, when students receive these drugs from friends, they are not tested for these conditions and often do not know of the dangers. 

“Sometimes when I ended up taking a lot of Adderall®, I would definitely notice that my heart would start to beat really fast, it was actually scary sometimes,” said Andrew.

The growing trend

According to the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, college students are more than twice as likely to use Adderall® and similar drugs non-medically than those not in college.

This can be attributed to the fact that the drug is not necessarily used recreationally, but as a performance enhancer for students.

After a semester of procrastination, the days leading up to final exams can be an extremely hectic time involving reading hundreds of pages and studying for days without sleep.
In the past, students looked to large amounts of caffeine to keep them going but today many students rely on Adderall® and Ritalin to keep them awake during their marathon study sessions.

“(Adderall®) is not something that I rarely ever took for fun, I never really even thought about it unless I had a big test or project due in class the next day,” said Andrew.

Regardless of the fact that these drugs are usually not used recreationally to get high, they still carry a high risk of dependency, abuse and addiction.

Another large reason for the growing use of these drugs among students is because they do not view them as dangerous and illegal like other controlled substances.

Many students assume that because Adderall® and Ritalin are drugs that are often prescribed by doctors they are relatively harmless. This is only true when they are taken in very small and regulated doses.

“Most of my friends used Adderall® to study for big tests too, even the ones who refused to do drugs normally,” said Andrew. “I just never really thought of (Adderall®) as something illegal. It was just like taking medicine to me.”

Now that this problem has been noticed by agencies like the Drug Enforcement Agency and SAMHSA, attempts are being made to educate students about the dangers of abusing these drugs.

“We are trying to educate those people who are actually being prescribed the drugs about appropriate use,” said Campbell. “Diverting your medication is not a good thing to do; in fact it is against the law.”

Over-prescribed, underestimated

Starting in the early 1990s the diagnosis of ADD and ADHD began to rise at unheard of levels, which inevitably led to more prescriptions for drugs like Adderall® and Ritalin.

According to a study done by the DEA, production of Methylphenidate (Ritalin) rose from 1,768 Kg in 1990 to 14,957 Kg in 2000 and the production levels of Amphetamine

(Adderall®) rose from 417 Kg in 1990 to 9,007 Kg in 2000.

The growth in production numbers has slowed down in the past few years, but they are still hovering at extremely high levels.

The boom in ADD/ADHD diagnoses in the 1990s results in the high number of college students who have been taking the drug for over a decade.

Elementary and middle school children are the most common age for being diagnosed with ADD or ADHD.

Now that the children growing up in the 1990s are beginning to go to college, more of the psychostimulant drugs that were prescribed to them are coming with them.

Doctors are now more careful about diagnosing ADD or ADHD, but there are still plenty of previously diagnosed people with access to the drugs.

The way that college students get these drugs is the reason why this problem has surprised the public as well as government agencies.

Adderall® and Ritalin are not distributed like most controlled substances. Instead of gettingthe drug from a traditional drug dealer, the students receive them from their friends or peers who have been diagnosed with ADD or ADHD and then prescribed Adderall® or Ritalin. 

“I would get my pills from a guy in my dorm who had ADD but didn’t take his pills, so he would have 30 of them to sell off every month,” said Andrew.

This creates a problem because it is much harder to stop the distribution of these drugs since they are initially being legally obtained from a pharmacist and then passed out among friends and classmates on college campuses.

A gateway drug

One of the more recent discoveries that has come from studying the abuse of Adderall® and drugs like it is that people who use Adderall® without a prescription are much more likely to abuse other illegal drugs as well.

According to NSDUH, full-time college students who use Adderall® non-medically are almost 10 times more likely to use cocaine and methamphetamine.

Those same students are also three times more likely to be heavy alcohol users, as well as three times more likely to use marijuana and five times more likely to use pain killers.

One of the reasons for this is that stimulants, like Adderall®, increase a person’s alertness, heart rate and ability to stay awake. However, once the student is done studying, he often has a hard time relaxing and falling asleep. Therefore the student will take other drugs, such as alcohol, marijuana or painkillers in order to calm himself down and sleep.

“Sometimes I would take an Adderall® to help me study but I would finish early and want to get some sleep before my test. The problem was the Adderall® kept me awake and I couldn’t go to sleep so I had to drink (alcohol) or smoke (marijuana) to relax me,” said Andrew.

This can be extremely dangerous because mixing drugs together multiplies the chance of a serious complication.

Using a stimulant like Adderall® with a sedative like Oxycontin is extremely bad for your body, especially the heart; one drug is trying to get your heart to work at an increased rate while the other is trying to calm your heart down.

“We are not only concerned with Adderall®, we are looking at the other drugs as well because there are some real dangers with mixing other drugs with Adderall®, which is something that students do not really anticipate,” said Campbell.

Another reason that non-medical use of Adderall® and Ritalin may lead to use of other illegal substances is the connections that they make with drug users, as well as simply becoming used to the idea of taking drugs.

“Usually whenever I wanted to buy other drugs like marijuana or Oxycontin, the guy who I bought my Adderall® from would either have some or know how to get some rather easily,” said Andrew.