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Grade
A fix?
Students
who use Adderrall to study taking risk
Illegal
use of Adderall and Ritalin should be among main concerns
for universities.
Editor’s
note: Some of the names in this story have been changed
at the request of those interviewed. Names that have
been changed are indicated.
By
Amy Bowman
Staff Reporter
Tired, stressed, can’t study? There’s always
Ritalin or Adderall.
Don’t have a prescription? Your friends do.
Problem solved, right?
Wrong.
“Candy,” a senior interior design student,
says she takes Adderall, a medication commonly prescribed
to people diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity
Disorder, during finals and serious projects.
One 10 mg pill is all it takes for Candy to “stay
awake and become more productive.”
“Hell yeah, you can feel a difference,” she
said.
Angela Taylor, director of alcohol and drug education,
said students may begin to depend on Adderall for academic
purposes, supposedly to help them focus. However, it
doesn’t build confidence because students then
rely on it to achieve a good academic performance, she
said.
“Mark,” a junior finance and entrepreneurial
management major, said his GPA has gone up since he
began using Adderall to study for tests his sophomore
year.
“Most of my friends have taken Adderall to study,”
Candy said. Instead of drinking cup after cup of coffee,
some students would rather pop a pill to get the quick
fix to stay awake and study, she said.
“When I took Ritalin, I was actually excited to
study and stayed focused the entire time,” said
“Joan,” a junior marketing major.
Several articles have listed alcohol, smoking and Ecstasy
among main concerns for many universities, but the articles
suggest the illegal use of Ritalin or Adderall is often
overlooked and not found in many studies.
Taylor said the use of Adderall was not one of the drugs
covered on the last survey TCU administered.
Because of the rise in use, Adderall could be added
to the next survey, she said.
Mike Katovich, a sociology professor, conducted a survey
and found drugs students perceived to be easily available
on campus.
For the survey, students were asked to rank how quickly
they could obtain Ritalin and other legal and illegal
substances on the TCU campus. A zero meant students
had no idea how long it would take; and a four meant
immediate access or a wait of one hour to get the drug.
Katovich
found that between heroin, Ecstasy, LSD, cocaine, morphine
and Ritalin, students perceive Ritalin as the most accessible.
Ritalin was ranked a 2.6 on the scale, which means respondents
said they could get Ritalin without a prescription in
as little as three hours.
The Drug Enforcement Agency has grouped Ritalin and
cocaine in the same category because of the addictive
nature of the stimulants.
Child
psychiatrist Les Linet wrote in an article for healthology.com
that Adderall and Ritalin are chemical cousins of cocaine
and affect the nervous system.
Katovich said that speed and Ritalin are both powerful
stimulants that can enable increased concentration and
stamina over a short period of time.
“I’m not saying that speed (amphetamines)
are safe in these regards, but its impact as a stimulant
on the central nervous system is less than the impact
of Ritalin,” he said.
“Ritalin’s specific effects differ considerably
from speed which makes it an effective drug to treat
Attention Deficit Disorder, but a dangerous drug to
keep awake or to cram,” Katovich said.
Though she gets her pills for free from a friend, Candy
said Adderall on campus runs about $3 for a 10 mg pill
and the price goes up for the increased dosage, all
the way up to 30 mg.
Taylor said Adderall is easy to get because so many
students have prescriptions for it. It is estimated
that 4 to 6 percent of the U.S. population suffers from
ADHD.
“Getting Adderall is as easy as buying bottled
water,” Mark said.
Burton
Schwartz of the TCU Health Center says these medications
are not easily prescribed at TCU, despite popular media
coverage.
The Health Center warns students about illegally sharing
medications with others, who may use the medicines as
“club drugs” or to stay awake at mid-terms
and finals, Schwartz said.
“We encourage on-campus students with these medications
to store them in a lock box of some sort,” Schwartz
said.
Ritalin, which surfaced in the 1950s to initially minimize
the side effects of appetite suppression and insomnia,
has now become a dominant prescription for kids and
adults suffering from ADD or ADHD.
Ritalin is available in both a short acting form, which
begins to work in about 30 minutes, and a long acting
form, which peaks at two hours and is gone in about
four hours.
Though some researchers feel that the use of stimulants
such as Ritalin or Adderall may be gateway drugs, Katovich
does not agree.
He said that “gateway” is a term used to describe
an assumed progressive sequence from a legal substance
to an illegal scheduled substance. He said in his opinion,
the term has taken on a more mythical meaning than factual.
“If Ritalin was a gateway drug, then every 21-year-old
who began using Ritalin as a teen, would be using other
(illegal) drugs,” Katovich said.
From a sociological standpoint, Katovich said that students
who illegally use prescription drugs may do so because
they associate legal with “good” and illegal
with “bad”. He said TCU students have a conventional/conformist
orientation to substances.
Joan said the one time she took Adderall, it made her
shaky, but she plans on taking Ritalin to study at the
end of this semester for finals.
She said she has never thought about the side effects
of taking Ritalin without a prescription.
“I’m not worried about the side effects of
Ritalin as much as I am about failing a final,”
she said.
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