With finals and papers looming, it seems like the right time to make the decision, will you or won’t you allow chemicals to alter your brain make-up so that you can do better on a paper or final. 

Research on Adderall quickly reveals it is considered a highly addictive medication. Typically Adderall is given for attention deficit hyperactive disorder, ADHD. However, the same chemicals in Adderall are also in a medication for narcolepsy. These chemicals, dextroamphetamine and amphetamine, work by changing the amounts of certain chemicals in the brain to produce a different result.

For people who do not have ADHD, Adderall acts like a stimulant. Although stimulants increase attentiveness, they also increase heart rates, sometimes at a rate too high to be safe. Other side effects of Adderall abuse are: development of sleeping and eating disorders, dry mouth, mood swings and higher blood pressure.

Although there are no real statistics to show how prevalent the use of Adderall and similar medications are on college campuses, the National Survey on Drug Use and Health in 2009 revealed, full-time college students between the ages of 18 and 22 are twice as likely as their counterparts who are not full-time college students to have used Adderall non-medically in the past year.

Any medication, legal or illegal, altering the chemicals in your brain should be considered heavily before being taken.

This semester Duke University updated their Community Standard to include unauthorized use of prescription medicine in the definition of cheating. Although UNC – Chapel Hill doesn’t include unauthorized use of prescription medicine, according to an article published in the Daily Tar Heel, the student attorney general for UNC’s honor system said it might be included before long.

With other local universities taking the step towards lowering, if not doing away with, the use of Adderall as a study aid, it’s time for N.C . State to do the same.

Although our Student Code of Conduct includes various methods of cheating that are, unfortunately,  utilized by students, Adderall should be included.

If a student uses Adderall and ends up with a 96 on a test, it’s very obvious they wouldn’t have gotten the same score had they not used Adderall . The Adderall made it possible to significantly increase the amount of time spent studying as well as the attentiveness to the material.

When said like this, it sounds highly beneficial, but the fact still stands–it alters the chemicals in a person’s brain.

I, for one, am not a fan of the fact that a medication can change the chemicals in my brain. Even if I don’t graduate from college with a  4.0, the fact that I’ll have made it through college without taking Adderall or a stimulant to make myself study more, will mean more than a 4.0 with Adderall would mean.

Although I’ve never taken Adderall , it would seem to me that although the material could be retained for the test or final, the material wouldn’t be retained after that. What we learn in college is supposed to help us for the rest of our lives. If we learn the material just for the test, it’s not going to help us ever again.

I hope the University will at least consider including Adderall use in the Student Code of Conduct. Using mind-altering substances is not something that shows we are an institution of higher learning, as the administrators like to remind us that we are.