Is Adderall the new speed for the smart set?

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Every student feels some anxiety before taking a big chemistry final.

Jon eased the pressure by turning to some chemistry of his own: He popped two blue pills at lunch, one hour before the test.

Then a senior at Dreyfoos School of the Arts, Jon (who did not want his full name used) took Adderall, a prescription drug for treating attention deficit disorder.

Like Ritalin and other stimulants, Adderall helps students with ADD concentrate on their schoolwork. But teenagers without ADD are discovering that the little blue or orange pill does something for them, too -- it gives them a thunderbolt of focused, productive energy.

Jon got the pills from a friend who has an Adderall prescription from his psychologist. Using the drug without a prescription is illegal, but that doesn't stop students from selling their pills to other students for $2 to $10 a dose (the price jumps during exams and FCAT testing periods).

Jon says he "didn't really feel anything until I had something to focus on." But when he sat down to take the exam, he shifted into overdrive.

"It kind of freaked me out. I was just flying through it," he said. "Usually, I abbreviate stuff. But I wrote everything out. And when I finished, I checked my answers -- like they tell you to do. I never do that."

Jon said he was so fixated on the exam that he didn't even hear the bell ring. "I was in my own little world," he said.

Other students who take Adderall before

a tough exam or a long night of studying report similar experiences, often saying the drug allows them to focus more acutely than they thought possible.

Jon got an A on his test. When he is a freshman in college this fall, he said, he might take Adderall again if he finds himself in a jam.

"Hell, yeah, I would take it again," he said.

If he uses Adderall in college, Jon will be joining the scores of students at the nation's colleges and universities who use prescription drugs to help them study.

Of course, using chemicals as study aids is nothing new. Coffee and No-Doz have long been considered requisite supplies for an all-nighter.

Even marijuana, regarded as the most popular drug among youths, may increase a person's ability to focus. With pot, of course, this focus is generally directed on something like a tree stump. And then on nachos.

Students say taking Adderall, however, can yield productive results -- such as good test grades and enough pep to survive even the most soporific school day. Caffeine, they say, can't even compete.

Jonathan, a rising senior at Jupiter High School, explains his rationale for using Adderall: "Let's say you've got a test tomorrow, and you haven't studied at all. You take about 30 milligrams, and you'll study all night. And it lasts all night. When the test comes, you kind of remember everything. Sometimes, you can just take it before the test, and it kind of clears your mind. I took it before my math final. It just brings up your common sense."

Jonathan can count at least 11 of his friends at Jupiter who use Adderall this way.

"Big surprise," said James O'Callaghan, a toxicologist with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention who studies amphetamines such as Adderall. "Kids are not stupid. They figure out what's in this stuff."

O'Callaghan said the risks for students taking Adderall are mild, compared with other drugs in the amphetamine family such as speed or Ecstasy. The drug can cause heart palpitations, loss of appetite, inability to sleep and, in extreme doses, psychotic behavior.

According to O'Callaghan, Adderall's addictive qualities represent the most substantial risk. After his first experience, Jon admitted, "I wanted that feeling again."

Dreyfoos Assistant Principal Leo Barret, who said he hadn't heard of the drug before a recent interview, said that if students are taking Adderall illegally, the administration and faculty are largely unaware of it.

Tracking Adderall's abuse on the county level is tricky business. The school board's police force doesn't record the types of prescription drugs students are caught with, so compiling data about how many arrests may have been made specifically for possession or the sale of Adderall -- or whether these arrests are growing in number -- is practically impossible.

School district police chief Jim Kelly did not return repeated phone calls.

In the 2002-03 school year, 22,907 doses of Adderall were administered to students in Palm Beach County, making it the second most popular drug to be given to local students in school, behind Ritalin. According to the health department, which tracks the medications dispensed by school nurses in an annual report, figures for this year are not yet available.

In any case, it is unlikely that any of the thousands of Adderall pills given out by the school nurse to students with ADD fall into the wrong hands. According to Barret, the state mandates that all medications -- even over-the-counter drugs such as Tylenol -- must be kept under lock and key in the nurse's office.

How, then, are students getting Adderall?

"Like everything else, there is a huge black market for this stuff," said Myles Cooley, a clinical psychologist in Palm Beach Gardens who treats adolescents with ADD.

Cooley said students are able to abuse Adderall because more and more parents bypass the school nurse, trusting their kids to take the medication themselves.

"Who is monitoring the pill bottle?" Cooley asks.

With Ritalin, which was for many years the only medication available to treat ADD, the effect lasted only about three hours, so more doses were required, most of which had to be given in school.

With Adderall, and other, newer ADD medications such as Concerta, the effect lasts longer, up to 12 hours. The result, according to Cooley, is less oversight.

Jonathan said he buys Adderall in school from friends with ADD.

"They see it like helping your friends out," he said. "They give (Adderall) to me or sell it. It goes for about $2 to $4, but they're not really making a big profit. If kids are going to be making money selling drugs, it's not going to be with Adderall."

Students also report the drug is used for recreation. Jonathan said he once took 90 milligrams of Adderall to get high.

"If you take enough, it will make your body tingle. There was one point where I just couldn't move my hand -- it was just tingling so much," he said. "You're more social and talkative (on Adderall), and you're not scared of interacting with other people."

Still, he said, its most popular use is as a study aid.

Cooley said many high-achieving students come to his office, seeking to be diagnosed with ADD after reaping benefits from a friend's dose of Adderall.

"I've had kids come in -- usually college-age but sometimes a high school student -- and say, 'I had a friend who told me to try one of his pills and see if it did anything (to help me study). Gosh, maybe I do have a problem, because that medicine made a huge difference.' "

Barry M. Gregory, the director of substance abuse prevention at Florida Atlantic University, said drug counselors nationwide are just now getting wise to heavy prescription drug abuse among high school and college students.

"It's not that we're in denial," said Gregory, who calls prescription drug abuse among students "an epidemic." "I guess we should just be asking different questions."

He's not surprised that Adderall has become an "academic steroid."

"For students, there's a huge amount of pressure to succeed academically. Why does a person like Barry Bonds allegedly use steroids? Because they give him what he's looking for -- an edge."

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Is Adderall the new speed for the smart set?
By Stephen Heyman, Palm Beach Post Staff Writer
Monday, June 28, 2004

Link
 
Even marijuana, regarded as the most popular drug among youths, may increase a person's ability to focus. With pot, of course, this focus is generally directed on something like a tree stump. And then on nachos.


Great quote, well written piece.
 
I don't like how the author automatically starts to toss around the word "abuse" in regards to students who take adderall in moderation only around exam time for the sole purpose of getting better grades. How is that abuse?
 
^^Because they take it for a reason other than the perscribed one, and they aren't perscribed it in the first place.

But all I can say to this article is...

DUH

That shit has been going on since I was in eighth grade. It was even bigger back then, I think.

Its so funny how drug companies are like "This is extended release, so people wont abuse it. And by the way, we put six times as much in there. People won't want to abuse it though, they dont like to be high for a really long time. What? Yes I'm serious!"
 
This isn't a new thing. My friends and I have been taking adderall for years, mostly for help on exams and with studying, but in larger doses it can definitely be fun.
 
Adderall is great around exam time. But it's also great to use just for fun. I don't eat the pills, though. I crush them up and snort them. I took 40mgs one night and I went to the bar. I just sat at the bar, writing and writing and writing. When I was finished writing, I typed it all up - 9 pages. It wasn't for any kind of school project or anything, it was just writing about some of my lofty theories... Adderall definitely enhances productivity. I recommend it to everyone. I mean that.
 
i so hope there isn't a trend in cutting back the amount of prescribed stimulants caused by this "news flash"
 
I hope not either geez Don't even focus on adderall please we need more adderall out there and MORE kids selling it because geez I use up every one's prescription a prescription bottle lasts me about a week gr and make 100mg Capsules PLEASE then I wouldn't have to buy so many pills thanks cool can't wait bye
 
Great article, and very true at that. I just love how everyone tends to just ignore the period (30's-60's) when amphetamine pills were the drug of choice, acting like this is some kind of a new fad. On another note, I wonder why they didn't mention Dexedrine...that's the real study drug of choice for those who can get it. I guess because it's so much harder to get...
 
I would definately say that this adderall fad is quite old allready. I've been taking adderall for exams for a couple years as well. The downside of things is that if there is 3 days of exams, and your harder exam is on day 1, you may do good on that exam, but then do very shitty on the others because you couldn't sleep worth a shit the nights before cause you ate the adderall the first day. So IDK is it really worth to do good and do shitty on the others, because you are all sleep deprived?
 
yes most definitely old news. at my high school adderal is rediculously widespread, I'd say just about everyone at one time or another either has a prescrip to it, or buys pills from their friends. I tried to get a prescription to Adderal about a year ago, and then realized that a prescription isn't really what I wanted- I didn't want it to be normality for me. Adderall helped me do great on tests, and finish all my school work for the next week in an hours time, and stay up all night meddling-- it also made me alot more social, but it also made me easily irritated and impatient.
 
if taking adderall to do better on a test is abuse, then so is our fighter pilots taking dexedrine (both amphetamines, in fact adderall has the same one in it along with some other salts) to stay awake and alert on long flights/missions.
 
Sometimes I think the role of the media is to state the obvious for those who just dont get it.

Of course then the writer inevitably fucks it up and only states PART of the obvious, so that everybody who reads it and depends on it has an opinion SLANTED in 1 direction.


On another note, I always thought it was funny the way that amphetamines always (in my friends and myself) make it SEEM like one is studying harder and smarter, and like one is ACING that test they are taking, when instead it is just making the subject overconfident of their abilities inevitably leading to mediocre performance. (Yes, I acknolwedge that people have received both A's AND F's under the influence... but it is my honest opinion after 10 bottles of ritalin, 6 bottles of adderall, 8 bottles of dexedrine, 3 bottles of provigil and 1 bottle of focalin, that amphetamines DO NOT improve peak performance to any degree, they can however make up for lost sleep... for a little while [much shorter than most people beleive], unfortunately the flaw of the amphetamines, and all stimulants is that the perceived improvement NEVER matches reality, thus with a skewed perspective of risk vs reward and cost vs benefit the user ends up making regrettable decisions. This is not to say that performance cannot be improved using stimulants, it just almost never works out that way. And you'll never know whether you are that lucky 1 in 100 or not until it [abuse] has already happened.)
 
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who mE?, excellent points.

Please post more in DITM forum, I always enjoy your informative posts.

:)
 
who mE? - i agree with the majority of your post, but maybe not the entirety.

when you mention stimulants not improving peak performance and only making up for lost sleep, i have found that only partially true. when a doctor overprescribes a stimulant, and a person takes their full daily dose of that stimulant, sleep can become negative cyclical problem requiring more stimulants daily to maintain a level or normalcy.

on the other hand, when used as an aid to write a paper or study for an exam, light doses of stimulants have helped many friends and i benefit from increased concentration on the task at hand. thanks to managing my dose correctly, i have made the deans list for the past 2 semesters

out of a bottle of "a lot" of non time release dexedrine, i personally use 1 a day at morning, any more is too much for me. i have been prescribed everything else up to desoxyn for a minimum of three months, i have a network of friends who also have been prescribed various stimulants. one trend i have noticed among friends is that many doctors prescribe too many pills for most people, causing them to lose sleep as you said and eventually under perform if they take them as prescribed.

responsible and educated use of stimulants can benefit anyone, before anyone proceeds to take a schedule 2 substance they should understand its potential effects and always begin at the lowest dose possible

in my experience, it has been a lucky 4 out of 10 that can avoid addiction, and out of those unlucky 6 most learn how to manage their prescription personally after a few months ;)
 
kalt_kalt said:
if taking adderall to do better on a test is abuse, then so is our fighter pilots taking dexedrine (both amphetamines, in fact adderall has the same one in it along with some other salts) to stay awake and alert on long flights/missions.

word
 
Adderall is a pretty impressive drug, as they have said it increases productivity drastically. I remember popping a few of them in highschool then going to my Computer-TA class and instead of doing the normal 1-2 pages of data entry required I went through about 9-10 pages!! Quadrupled my usual workload. Notes are detailed, in small text, and well organized. The more I read over this thread the more I realize that I should have an adderall prescription of my own, pharmepseudical (sp?) amphetamines are the shit.
 
O'Callaghan said the risks for students taking Adderall are mild, compared with other drugs in the amphetamine family such as speed or Ecstasy.

It's funny how they say that adderall is different from "speed," which most drug users utilize as a blanket term covering all non-psychedelic psychostimulants in the amphetamine family, and sometimes even 4-MAR. When they say the risks are mild, they must not be talking about addiction, for which the risk is DEFINITELY greater for amphetamine than ecstasy. In fact, I would say that Adderall at recreational doses is generally riskier than MDMA.

Oh, and props to who mE? for a good post
 
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