Schaff: Media too high on Adderall

Designer drugs can plague people’s bodies. They also can plague our collective attention — cue Adderall. Designer drugs can plague people’s bodies. They also can plague our collective attention — cue Adderall.

Surely, psychostimulants like Adderall and Ritalin don’t technically fall under the designer drug category, but there’s no question that in the media, keeping the public abreast of Adderall’s supposed systematic rape of college students’ academic integrity is all the hype these days. Not a week seems to go by without national news shedding light on the issue, and even The Pitt News editorial board chimed in last week, wagging a cautionary finger at our student body as it launches into finals-cramming mode.

In short, media personnel far and wide are high on Adderall. But let’s kill the glamour: It’s time to detoxify.

College students are increasingly getting their hands and brains on psychostimulants, often for class performance purposes — there’s no arguing with that. What’s also hard to dispute is that self-administering psychoactive drugs without a physician’s prescription or guidance confers heightened health risks to drug users. But considering the host of other maladies that threaten student life, close scrutiny of the nonmedical use of Adderall and Ritalin on campus has hogged our time and effort, which society could most surely use more productively. As well, we shouldn’t encourage University administrators to spend too many tuition dollars on toothless education campaigns.

People commonly think of Adderall as a performance enhancer, akin to anabolic steroids for bodybuilders or nitrous oxide for street racers. Many commentators, like Duke University officials and The Pitt News, go further; they consider using the drug without a prescription a form of cheating, of providing an unfair advantage to student abusers over student abstainers. They all talk along these lines, confidently, but no one addresses the room-filling elephant: There is absolutely zero evidence that psychostimulants improve grades for people without ADHD.

As far as scientists understand it, Adderall works by increasing levels of dopamine (a modulatory neurochemical) nonspecifically throughout the brain, one effect of which is to prolong attentiveness. This effect in particular has proven highly therapeutic for people suffering from attention deficit disorders. Searching for paths of least resistance, some students unburdened by attention problems have looked at this observation and proceeded to extrapolate. That is, a brave few progenitor abusers, and now college culture in its entirety, have silently reinforced the troubled conclusion that Adderall boosts GPAs. Just like thousands of 17th-century Dutch investors thought buying tulip bulbs would end their financial worries — look it up on Wikipedia — thousands of modern-day college students think popping attention pills will end their grade worries. Both manias are fueled by hopes, not facts.

But if anything, at least according to the few studies sponsored by the National Institues of Health that address the correlation between academic performance and nonmedical use of prescription stimulants, nonmedical Adderall use either does nothing to academic performance or hurts it. That’s because college students who use Adderall without prescriptions are already low-performers, and, convinced they can rely on Adderall as a crutch, they either start slacking off academically or become complacent with their slacking. In this sense, a veritable risk of rampant Adderall use is the further development of a “last-minute” study culture, but there’s no evidence to believe abusers are warping the playing field by “enhancing” their test performance.

To diffuse the hype over psychostimulants, realizing that their prevalence doesn’t put academic fairness in jeopardy is helpful — but it’s not enough. What’s even more important to understand is the fact that, as a health risk that doesn’t fail to harm college students, Adderall and Ritalin are dwarfed hands-down by another substance you might have heard of: alcohol. While the psychostimulants carry little addictive potential or history of serious health consequences, alcohol abuse is everywhere and regularly exacts enormous costs on college students, their families and surrounding collegiate communities. It causes thousands of deaths and is involved in hundreds of thousands of assaults and injuries each year among people aged 18 to 24, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. So if there’s ever a drug toward which the media should direct its spotlight and administrators should focus their mitigatory efforts, it’s not Adderall. It’s beer.

After all, it’s surprising no one points at alcohol for warping the academic playing field — talk about something that actually affects student potential.

Write Matt Schaff at matthew.schaff@gmail.com.