Performance-enhancing drugs taint every aspect of professional sports. Athletes such as Barry Bonds will always have an unofficial asterisk next to each record they set, and some — like Lance Armstrong — have already had many of their achievements revoked. Many students are incredulous that athletes would be willing to poison their bodies and most likely decrease their eventual lifespans by taking steroids in order to improve their careers. Yet are students really that different? Just as some athletes ignore the consequences of steroids, some students similarly use Adderall without a medical need to improve their academic careers.
Adderall is an amphetamine commonly used to treat attention deficit hyperactive disorder. ADHD patients have difficulty paying attention, which is believed to be caused by a lack of the neurotransmitter dopamine in the brain’s frontal cortex. Through prohibiting reuptake of dopamine, Adderall increases the amount of the neurotransmitter present, thereby increasing the frontal cortex activation. Increased activation bolsters cognitive processes such as focus and problem solving, making Adderall the academic performance enhancer that some students have come to rely on. While the effects of Adderall could have short-term benefits in the classroom, the negative medical effects of the drug should keep it far out of the reach of anyone without a valid prescription.
To people suffering from ADHD, this prescription drug is extremely beneficial. But what happens to students who use Adderall without having the disorder? According to a National Institutes of Health study, close to two-thirds of college students are offered Adderall by their senior year, and between 7 and 36 percent of college students have used a prescription stimulant without a medical reason at least once during their lifetime. While Adderall normalizes the amount of dopamine in ADHD patients, it causes an excessive amount in those without the disorder.
One of the biggest dangers with Adderall is its high level of addictiveness. Consistent intake causes an overall increase in dopamine levels, which causes a person to adapt to that unnaturally high level. This creates a brain dependency on Adderall to maintain the high dopamine level at all times. The raised dopamine levels decrease the effectiveness of Adderall, necessitating a higher Adderall dosage to get the same effect. Adderall usage can also lead to depression, anxiety and difficulty sleeping, all of which prompt further medication. Depending on the symptoms of Adderall abuse, the need to alleviate those symptoms with medication both is expensive and can lead to additional drug dependencies to mitigate the side effects.
Make no mistake about it — besides being dangerous, taking Adderall is cheating. It gives students who take the medication without a medical reason an unfair advantage over students who rightfully restrict themselves to natural studying techniques. In sports, performance-enhancing drugs are illegal for similar reasons. Besides making sports unfair, using PEDs takes away from the game. Professional athletics showcase who can play sports the best humanly way possible, not who can take the most steroids. Anyone can take enough steroids to gain the strength to hit a baseball out of a ballpark, but not everyone can do so just from natural talent and practice.
Students will often argue that there is no difference between Adderall and coffee and other sources of caffeine. But people who make that argument should stick with using caffeine in the first place. Without getting into the chemical differences between the two, caffeine is something found naturally while Adderall is synthetically made — I have yet to accidentally ingest Adderall while eating chocolate.
Even if Adderall weren’t a dangerous substance, students still should not resort to the drug. One of the purposes of college is to learn how to handle stress and deadlines. It’s a time where people learn how to handle obstacles with improved time management, seeking outside help or working with peers. Depending on medication throughout college to face every obstacle makes an individual unprepared to handle real-world challenges.
Unfortunately, there is no way to prevent students from getting access to these prescription medications. When not getting the prescription drug from friends or family, students find it relatively easy to get Adderall prescribed from a health care provider. ADHD, like most psychological disorders, is extremely difficult to diagnose because physicians’ diagnoses rely on self-reported symptoms and lack a test to prove that a patient actually has the disorder. All a patient has to do to get an Adderall prescription is complain to a physician about feeling hyperactive and unable to focus.
In sports, athletes are tested for Adderall because it is considered a performance-enhancing drug. Increased attention and focus can give athletes an unfair advantage, especially in sports like baseball and football. One baseball player, Carlos Ruiz of the Philadelphia Phillies, was actually suspended for 25 games last year due to Adderall usage, though he has since been given an exemption due to an ADHD diagnosis. But in sports, athletes are tested for a myriad of performance enhancers, not just Adderall. It is not as if the average student could be consistently tested for any drug usage, let alone for Adderall. It would not be practical to require urine testing when handing in every term paper and exam.
Ultimately, students are the only ones who can protect themselves from the health implications of Adderall. Colleges cannot oversee Adderall usage without invasive measures such as drug testing, so making an example of a few students caught with the drug would seem excessive and unreasonable. The only beneficial intervention would be a large-scale reform of medical treatment of psychological disorders, which is a topic large enough for several columns by itself.
Those who use Adderall without a medical reason do so at great medical risk. Taking drugs to benefit inside the classroom is truly an unfair performance enhancement — just not the kind America has become accustomed to hearing about on the news. Whether due to the moral argument that Adderall provides an unfair advantage or due to the physical argument that it causes detrimental brain plasticity, Adderall needs to be regarded as a dangerous substance.
Andrew Feldman ’15 is working on compiling an academic Hall of Fame in which known non-medical Adderall users will receive asterisks next to their names and can be reached with comments or suggestions at andrew_feldman@brown.edu.
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