© 2011 N.C. State Student Media
You’ve checked Facebook 18 times and both your personal and school e-mail three times each. You’ve watched about 16 YouTube videos of cats dressed in cute outfits. You’ve spent 20 minutes getting organized to start studying. However, three hours later, you still can’t seem to focus on next week’s final.
So, what do you do? That boy in your engineering class said he’s willing to sell his Adderall to you for a relatively low price. Another friend of yours isn’t taking her prescription so she’ll just give it to you. Or, you could tell your doctor that you’re having trouble focusing. It’s not like you’re cheating, right? Maybe not, but that certainly doesn’t make it right or safe.
I’m not advocating that people with prescription Adderall stop using it for studying and testing. If you have a prescription, then it’s justifiably necessary. However, selling or giving your Adderall to other students is certainly not okay. It’s just as illegal to sell your prescription drugs as it is for someone else to possess them.
In an article published in Technician toward the end of the fall 2010 semester, the campus police informed our writer about the punishment for possession. The article stated, “Students caught with less than 100 pills can be charged with a Class-I misdemeanor punishable by up to 45 days in jail. Students caught with more than one hundred pills will be charged with a Class-I felony and can result in four to five months in prison.”
Even with this punishment in place, one in five college students without Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder admits to using the amphetamine, Adderall, to focus, be more motivated and pull all-nighters. College students are twice as likely to abuse Adderall as any other age group. Students may feel too pressured to succeed and feel the only way to pass a class is by using Adderall. Some students even reported an improvement in GPA once they began to use Adderall for studying.
Besides being illegal, using Adderall to focus is a bad habit to start. National Public Radio reported Martha J. Farah, the director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Pennsylvania, said Adderall is “habit-forming.” Becoming addicted to Adderall for studying is dangerous and can lead to problems later in life. It has been said, people addicted to Adderall could move on to worse drugs, such as speed or ecstasy, once the effects of Adderall have worn off.
Once you start using Adderall to study on a regular basis, you lose the ability to study without it. No matter how helpful Adderall may be in improving your ability to study or test, it creates dependency like any other drug. When you get out of college and into the work force, you will need to be able to focus at work. The distractions will not be eliminated just because you leave the collegiate atmosphere. Clearly, if you have to keep taking Adderall at your job, you’ve lost the ability to function without it. You will begin to need it for more than just working.
Adderall may seem like a relatively harmless drug, but it is a drug. Like all drugs, it’s illegal to sell and possess without a prescription. It’s habit-forming and addictive. It may seem okay while you’re taking it, but it’s just as dangerous to mess with Adderall as with other drugs. So, students, when you need to study for that big final, try this instead: log off Facebook, turn off the Internet, drink a cup of coffee and force yourself to study. You’ll be better for it in the long run.