Going to work that Saturday evening several years ago I had no conscious intention to stay awake for two days straight or disassemble and reassemble everything I owned containing screws, but it happened anyway. After it was all over, I slept for an equally large amount of time, and--upon waking--wondered what exactly had possessed me. Answering that question, of course, was easy: drugs.
But the pharmacology of my experience was far from typical, since the drug was both legal and common, being used with great regularity by 4 million American children under the age of 18. So when my friend (who had met me at work to collaborate on a project) offered one of the orange pills, sensing my fatigue and the associated ineptitude, I accepted, allowing my ill-advised natural curiosity and recent reading of "The Doors of Perception" to triumph, yet again, over the perennially boring "right decision."
By taking Adderall, I entered the ranks of the estimated 20 percent of college students who have experimented, without a prescription, with drugs designed to combat attention deficit disorders by delivering a potent dose of stimulant to the patient. Indeed, the drug stimulated. Within 45 minutes, I began to feel a peculiar yet thoroughly indescribable lustiness, coupled with an odd compulsion to do work, and an equally bizarre yearning to take things apart and put them back together again (the aforementioned assembly and disassembly).
Shortly thereafter, I savored total dissolution of self, losing all capacity for negative feedback whatsoever from my body: no anxiety, no cold and no hunger. It was the closest I had ever been to reality, and the farthest I had ever been away from myself, except for those wonderful moments as a lad when lingerie catalogs would arrive in the mail. Feelings of omnipotence cycled through me, as did plans for solving all problems in the cosmos--elegantly--invariably involving Twinkies and other sacred totems. Then, over the span of the next few hours, I did more homework than I have in the past month, all without looking up.
Only two days later and 10 pounds lighter did the drawbacks make themselves apparent as I sank into an uncharacteristic melancholia and had little idea about why I felt depressed and uneasy. Nothing seemed particularly interesting, my body looked alien and I only wanted to do trite, antisocial things--be alone, sleep, read Baudelaire and contemplate the vanity of existence. While these symptoms dissipated within a few days, I nevertheless came to understand the mechanism that might lead others to continue taking more and more of the drug to combat the progressively more severe depressive episodes associated with its "crash."
While my experimentation was the result of a mixture of boredom, curiosity and a borderline I.Q., in a competitive environment like that at Duke, it is easy to see how students might be tempted to resort to drugs in hopes of gaining a competitive "edge" over their peers in a sort of steroidfest for the academically-inclined. And as more drugs of this sort are produced and prescribed, the more illicit and unmonitored abuse there will be. Disconcertingly, the magazine Men's Health reports that medicinal amphetamine production climbed 2,060 percent between 1990 and 2000, giving evidence to support this trend.
Currently, it is hard to tell how many Duke students use prescription amphetamines to help them study; what is not uncertain is that the problem exists and that it is almost surely increasing in severity. Most of these students probably get the drug as I got it--through friends and acquaintances, and will continue to do so with greater and greater ease as more and more of their friends receive "legitimate" prescriptions.
Considering the fact that drugs like Adderall and Ritalin are essentially intellectual performance-enhancers, one has to wonder about how they relate to academic integrity and the Community Standard. Are students lacking prescriptions for these medications who take exams under their influence committing an honor infraction? Does pharmaceutical cheating exist? Are papers written in the throes of a Ritalin binge inadmissible in class? Should students be subject to the same random drug tests that athletes are? Points to ponder, undoubtedly.
Although my romance with Adderall ended acrimoniously, I remain impressed by its might. Taking mind-altering drugs of this sort is becoming more and more common in our society, but it is hard for me to understand how anything like this could possibly be marketed as a "medicine" --no matter how efficacious it is at making children sit still in class--when it produces such a severe psychological reaction in a more or less normal subject. The reality remains that it has horrific side effects, most of which I was lucky enough to avoid--though the most ghastly of all--erectile dysfunction--struck like the Blitzkrieg. It is on that memory of flaccidity that I make my final point. The problems of humankind cannot be solved with a pill; the craft of the scientist and pharmacist will always yield imperfect products. Ultimately, reality is best met dead on, even if you're too hyperactive to give a damn.
Matthew Gillum is a Trinity Junior. His column appears every third Friday.
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