Print“It was freshman year and I had a paper due the next day,” describes Mark, a senior in CC whose name has been changed to protect anonymity. Olympic curling was playing on mute on his flat screen as we talked in his dorm. Cans of various brands of beer sat in front of the TV and littered the floor. “And somebody—I think a friend from home—had given me, I don’t know, just a pill, in case I wanted to try it. And I figured it was the appropriate time. And it worked very well.”
“Study drugs”—prescription drugs such as Adderall and Ritalin, used off-label by students to enhance performance—are often referred to as academic steroids, as they allow students to work for sustained periods of time with greatly increased focus and tirelessness. There are, of course, physical side effects of these drugs, but in an academic setting, moral implications come into play as well. Study drugs force students to question the meaning of academic integrity, and the actual presence of the “self”—while students are on the drug, it is really them doing the work?
Counseling and Psychological Services declined to comment on the number of known study drug users at Columbia, but any student who has pulled an all-nighter at Butler during midterms or finals will attest to the fact that study drugs are a very real part of campus culture. A 2005 study by University of Michigan found that non-medical use of prescription stimulants (Ritalin, Dexedrine, and Adderall) was more prevalent among students who were male, white, members of frats or sororities, or had lower GPAs. Among the colleges sampled, between zero and 25 percent of students at each institution had used prescription stimulants off-label in the previous year. Rates were higher at northeastern colleges and those that were highly selective. Students who used prescription stimulants non-medically were also more likely to fall under the influence of alcohol, cigarettes, marijuana, ecstasy, or cocaine, and to engage in other risky behaviors.
Unlike Mark, Kevin, a 26-year-old recent transfer to Columbia’s School of General Studies whose name has been changed to protect anonymity, was initially, strongly opposed to the use of Adderall as a study drug. A year and a half ago, before he came to Columbia, Kevin was dating a girl who had a 20-page paper to write in a weekend. When he asked her how she was going to get it done, she said, “I got all weekend to do it. I’m just going to take a couple Addies.”
“I didn’t say anything right then and there to her,” Kevin says. “I went to my office, I look online, I look it up, and I’m like, man, everybody’s doing this stuff! And I realized there’s like a culture: It’s an integral part of academia, of upper academia.”
The next time Kevin saw his girlfriend, he told her that what she was doing was cheating, and compared her use of Adderall to an athlete’s use of anabolic steroids. “I made her feel so bad about it that she never took it again,” he says.
When Kevin transferred to Columbia, though, his opinion changed. A classmate with a valid prescription for Adderall offered Kevin the drug. Pressured by the overwhelming expectations of his new school, Kevin tried it. “I was completely blown away,” he says, “because I felt like my eyes were sinking into the paper that I was reading and what I was writing, and there was nothing—I mean, World War III could be happening around me, and I was not going to be distracted.”
Later, under increasing pressure, Kevin spoke to his father, a practicing doctor. He expressed to him the demands of his work and the difficulty of getting everything done. “He wanted to help me,” Kevin said, “and so he wrote me a prescription for it and then told me, ‘You have to do this, you can’t do that, and you can’t tell anybody.’”
The topic was to be kept under wraps for legal and ethical reasons related to Kevin’s father’s medical license. In addition, distributing the drug to students who do not possess a “valid” prescription could have serious consequences: The Columbia Bulletin states that students would be subject to discipline by the University for “possessing, distributing, manufacturing, or using illegal drugs,” which would include prescription stimulants without prescription.
The federal government has listed Adderall as a Schedule II drug, which, according to U.S. legal code, means the drug has “a high potential for abuse,” “a currently accepted medical use in treatment in the United States,” and that abuse “may lead to severe psychological or physical dependence.” This is the same category that includes Ritalin, opium, morphine, OxyContin, PCP, Percocet, cocaine, and methamphetamines.
Legal issues aside, study drugs get to the heart of what “cheating” means. Columbia does not have a strong and prevalent honor code, and the use of study drugs is not listed explicitly in Columbia’s statement on academic integrity. What does this exclusion mean for the ethical implications of using such drugs? What consequences are at risk?
Though possession, use, and distribution of prescription stimulants is certainly not promoted by the University, there is little public discussion on the subject—even in the form of warning. Go Ask Alice! (Columbia’s health Q&A website) lists possible physical side effects of abusing Adderall and Provigil, and suggests instead looking into stress and time management techniques or considering lightening one’s workload, but any discussion of ethics is noticeably missing, and the illegality of using prescription drugs off-label as study aids is not mentioned. Is a blind eye being turned? And while caffeine can hardly be compared to amphetamines, it is difficult for students to know where to draw their personal line: There are, after all, locations on campus (most notably Butler library) that sell various energy drinks such as Red Bull, Full Throttle, and NOS, which help students remain awake and alert while studying.
According to Kevin, the use of study drugs is fair because students are “still doing the work. It just makes you get through something you otherwise would’ve had to get through anyway,” he says. “It’s just an accelerator or a booster. Is it cheating? Do I feel bad after I do it? No, I feel relieved that my work is done.”
But the idea of the “self,” and the question of who’s really doing the work, brings with it a feeling of “outsourcing,” or hiring the drug to help you do something more quickly and easily than you could have otherwise done yourself. Both Kevin and Mark say they could accomplish their work without Adderall—according to Mark, it’s mostly a question of willpower. “I don’t like studying or doing work,” he says, “but … when I do take this, my level of optimism toward the work that I have to do is greater.”
But Kevin concedes, “It makes you question yourself. If you know you can do it otherwise, then why take it?” The answer, really, is quite simple: Just as in outsourcing, the producer (of, in this case, a paper, a problem set, a reading, etc.) is left with more time in his or her schedule and is subsequently able to accomplish more than initially thought possible.
Mark justifies his use of Adderall through the idea of normalization. “I don’t feel bad when I take it just because enough people, I guess I know, do take it,” he says. “That eases my conscience … and I feel I have a pretty guilty conscience as it is. I feel like there’s more evil going on in the world today than people taking Adderall.”
What exactly is the “evil” involved in using study drugs? One argument is that in using them, students miss out on learning how to effectively manage their time—perhaps one of the most important lessons to learn while at school. Also, in using them, students gain an edge over those who don’t, giving incentive and reason for students to sacrifice their health. Another is that, according to Kevin, you get through the work, but “it’s not like you have a better understanding of what it is you were studying. It’s not like it makes you retain more information.”
And then, of course, there are the physical side effects. “You crash so hard,” Kevin says. “There was one weekend when I looked like hell. I looked like I just went on a three-month heroin binge, from three days of just studying and writing out three term papers. It took me over a week to recover from that, and I still wasn’t fully recovered. By the end of that week, I actually jumped back on it, but only for a day or two, to finish.”
Vera, a senior in CC whose name has been changed to protect anonymity, tells me she used to use Adderall, which she bought from a friend who had “a lot of extra pills” from his prescription. It “just made me hyper, unable to focus, unable to sleep, like a fucked-up automaton, essentially,” she says. Since stopping, she adds, “Red Bull is honestly all I’ve really needed to do work, and it doesn’t leave me feeling like some type of robot the way Adderall did—not to mention it’s a lot cheaper.”
The feeling of “crashing” is a common but comparatively minor side effect of Adderall. Others may include loss of appetite, insomnia, seizures, and increased blood pressure, which in rare cases can lead to heart attack, stroke, or even sudden death.
But the benefit, according to Kevin, is a higher GPA—something that can translate into better career options and a higher salary. “When you know that you’re up to bat and you have three strikes to get the last home run, and you know that you’re going to be in that situation, you’re going to do anything that you can to help that, and I think that’s how people look at it,” he says.
Kevin believes that he can control his use of Adderall, but he is aware of the possibility of dependence or other side effects. “Bottom line, it’s an assistant, and in one aspect you can call it a shortcut,” he says. “If that becomes habitual in your life, it could be more detrimental than you not taking it and getting a D, versus a B. You have to look at it from that perspective. I might have some false perceptions about how I’m handling the drug. That’s what’s dangerous about it.”