The New Yorker recently ran an expos on the illicit use of "neuroenhancement" drugs, both on and off college campuses. According to the article, the most frequent collegiate users of Adderall are undergraduates at highly competitive schools in the Northeast, and users are likely to be in a fraternity or sorority. Ring any bells? That's Dartmouth in a nutshell. If The New Yorker is right, then Dartmouth could well be the Adderall capital of the world. Unfortunately, the issue still remains very much an underground one on campus. There is apparently a huge disconnect between the reality of student use and the level of awareness among administrators and Health Services. Because of this disparity, it's difficult for students to find information about how to make smart decisions with respect to study drugs. Health Services, undergraduate advisors and Drug and Alcohol Peer Advisors should educate students about study drugs, with information on the different types, dosages, methods of consumption and side effects.
I decided to ask a few fellow students about their personal experiences with Adderall. The most common sentiment expressed was not that Adderall is fair or unfair to use, not that it's healthy or unhealthy, but simply that "it works." For the most part, students didn't seem at all concerned with anything except the drug's effectiveness, despite the fact that several of these students reported negative experiences with the drug, such as restlessness and nausea. Still, the consensus was, "Adderall is the best. It helps so much."
So I decided to do a little more research into Adderall's presence on campus. I went into The Dartmouth's archives and searched for any article that contained the word "Adderall." Most of the recent entries containing the word "Adderall" were from the Overheards section of The Mirror. This confirmed for me that study drugs are a topic on the minds of students, frequently joked about alongside self-calls and booting and rallying. But when I tried to find official statistics on study drug use, I found the results shocking. There was an article written on this issue based on a 2003 survey, with the conclusion that "Dartmouth has mostly escaped the study drug craze."
In this survey, only 1.6 percent of students surveyed admitted to using psychiatric drugs without a prescription (this includes Ritalin and Adderall). If my math (and the survey) is right, that means that only 66 students on this campus had used study drugs illicitly. If you're a student reading this, your reaction should be the same as mine was: pure and utter disbelief. Assuming that the survey was accurate in 2003 (a stretch), there is absolutely no way that it's accurate now. When I shared this statistic with a friend of mine, she laughed and said, "I'm pretty sure I could name 66 people off the top of my head that use Adderall here."
What this campus needs is a reality check. Many, many students here use study drugs, at least occasionally. Students will continue to use them as long as the drugs allow them to squeeze in more work when it's crunch time. But despite the potential for problems, the only discussion of study drugs I hear around campus is, "where can I get them?" According to a 2007 article in The Dartmouth ("Adderall: a miracle drug?" Feb. 2, 2007), a couple of students per week are evaluated for ADD at Dick's House. If you do the math, that means over 1 in 20 of us will try to get a prescription for study drugs by the time we graduate.
Except for hearsay, students really don't know about the effects and implications of their study drug use. I was trained as a DAPA last spring, and the topic of study drugs was barely touched on, despite their prevalence on campus. The problem is that, unlike drinking too much or getting the flu, a student's abuse of study drugs is probably not going to send him to Dick's House, thereby keeping the issue off of the radar.
In the same 2007 article, then-Class Dean for the Class of 2007 Lisa Thum said, "I think I've heard of students using [Adderall] at Dartmouth, but I've had only one student admit to doing it."
While this is certainly not the most pressing health issue on campus, there needs to be some alignment between the realities on campus and the resources made available to us by Health Services, UGAs and DAPAs. Students using study drugs should be made well aware of the actual effects of these drugs, aside from the fact that "they work."
