Slashdot Mirror
Psychopharm Going 'Mainstream' In Schools?
PizzaFace writes "Back in the day, college was a place where a lot of kids tried recreational drugs. Now the world's more competitive, psychopharmaceuticals are better targeted, and millions of students are routinely using drugs to work better and longer. Stimulants developed for attention deficit and narcolepsy are giving mentally healthy students an edge like athletes get from steroids or human growth hormone. These psychotropics seem fairly safe, but should they be banned in the interest of fairness, perhaps with enforcement by urine tests before exams? Or do we tell our kids that, if they want to compete in this brave new world, they better find some Adderall and jack their brains up like their classmates'." If college students are doing it, how many programmers are? What say you?
Drugs are no substitute for reading a lot, tinkering, listening to others and keeping classifying things with respect to what you already know. Learning is a very long-term process, certainly little understood, and no drug can kick you on that time scale. What drugs can certainly do is to make you think you are smarter and temporarily relieve the pain of learning. The problem is that anything that makes you different, smarter or otherwise, is painful in some way.
Well, one is a mildly psychoactive drug that's fairly harmless in moderate quantities. The other is used in the manufacture of an extremely physically and socially destructive substance. Sounds like the cops and politicians in your area are on the ball... have you seen what meth does to people?
Literalism isn't a form of humor, it's you being irritating.
These are amphetamines we are talking about. They're a lot less healthy than the recreational marijuana use favored by other students. Just because they have a brand name, doesn't mean they're safe.
What's the ugliest part of your body? Some say your nose, some say your toes, but I think it's your mind. -Zappa
You can't buy curiosity.
Someone who is curious continues to mull over material long after the test has been passed. Someone who only cares about the grade will forget about it after the test.
Smart employers can tell the two apart.
I do it. I have ADHD, but the Adderall does a heck of a lot more than keep my ADHD in line. It has been extremely beneficial to me at work and in my personal projects with programming and coming up with ideas. It is like caffeine x 10 without the jitters and with the ability to focus that amazing energy at whatever you want. Then again, since I have ADHD, maybe that is just normal to everyone else but something new to me? I think it has given me an edge over the average person. However, that is a side effect of the drug. I don't think I should be discriminated against for that. I am not abusing it, and it is working as the doctor hoped at keeping my ADHD in line. Before I found Adderall, nothing I had tried worked in terms of meds. I would not want to get out of bed and I had no energy, focus, or drive. I don't like the thought of people without actual medical need taking it to get ahead. I look at that as the same thing as teens smoking pot. Cancer patients smoking pot to alleviate pain and keep their food down is a hell of a lot different than Harold and Kumar getting stoned so the sliders at White Castle taste wicked and so they can "feel" the music.
theres lots of new players out there too. i'm bipolar+etc. and part of how I discovered this was that I started to go wacko when I was taking speed to be able to work 100+ hour weeks. unfortunately I just about nuked my brain in the process, but thats another story completely. now I need to very carefully control my dopamine levels with several different medications, but thats life as I know it.
But I did this at one time, taking amphetamine and methamphetamine as well as ritalin, modafinil, adderal and any number of other substances at work in order to be able to work longer and care less about doing other people's bidding. Don't forget the flipside, the taking B-vitamins to deal with the burnout, tyrosine to fix the receptor loss, benzodiazepines to deal with fact that you can't really sleep properly anymore. counselling to deal with the psychosis and the weird mental states you get into from the fact that your brain can't cope with being up for many days straight.
The slant of this post was that there is something inherently UNFAIR about this, that "we" need to test against people doing this. There isn't a big worry because the people doing this all end up at one time or another like me, running on borrowed time means massive burnout. I aged biochemically about 10-15 years in the space of 3 years. Mileage may vary, but its not a smooth move. Ironically taking amphetamines to study isn't even a great strategy. Just going to class and paying attention is a better plan. Being on amphetamines reduces memory retention so much that its not worth the effort.
The big issue here, to me - is that people feel the need to self improve just so they can put out like whores for other people. Learn to live cheap and work less. Why do people feel the need to work harder and longer? I'm not sure why I did it, most of the money I was making was just going into the very drugs I was taking just to make more money for more drugs. Now I live on almost nothing and what unhappiness I have is mostly from the things lacking from my life from when that lifestyle caught up to me. Living on borrowed time catches up to a person. And when your employer finds out you're not just an eccentric hard working savant and really you're tricked out on speed you find out just how little they really care about you.
--- ask me about nihilism, I will have nothing to tell you.
It isn't about what is more appealing, it is about what is sustainable. Stimulant abuse beyond caffeine really isn't very sustainable. Maybe it'll work for a college student for a couple of years, but a career programmer simply couldn't sustain it. They'd either burn out or get a nasty addiction on their hands. Stimulant addictions will mess you up pretty bad. Moderate recreational drug use like pot, on the other hand, is quite managable.
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
Based on my own volunteer work in school programs, I would say that class sizes should rarely be above 15-20 in total, and should have 1 teacher/assistant competent in the subject for every 5-7 students. I also think kids should be streamed per subject, with some flexibility for when certain groups of kids happen to work well together. (No, that does not mean cribbing the notes.)
The problem with the existing system is that it is geared around people learning as and when the teacher gets round to it, rather than pushing people as far and as fast as they are able. It is no wonder that kids use drugs, but my guess is that its more to zone out the inadequacies of the educational system as it is to improve learning. You can't accelerate much beyond the speed the material is taught.
Based on research that has been caried out, I think that I'd extend this basic concept by throwing in a second or even a third language, as it appears that the complexity of language is such that learning new languages young boosts the growth of neural connections and seems to improve the capacity to learn. Languages, therefore, may provide a safe alternative to these drugs in that they'll boost intelligence and have no risk of later side-effects.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
but not the fact of usage.
Onpoint 09/2002: College Students and Psychoactive Medication
Never mind the old equation of college and recreational drugs, the parents' old tiptoe through pot and peyote. A new generation is arriving at university heavily armed with prescriptions for Zoloft, Dexedrine, Paxil and Prozac. Xanax, Adderall, Cylert and Ritalin. And it's not about weekend benders. It's about ADD, anxiety, OCD and depression.
Officials say that today that about 40 percent of American college students are on psychoactive drugs. Everybody knows the number is huge. But what exactly does it mean? Up next On Point: the Medicated Generation goes to college.
---
And maybe the reason for the increasing levels of usage is that they are learning this from their days in grade school?
Better Living through Chemistry? (Dr. Leonard Sax)
This year some six million children in the U.S.--one in eight-- will take Ritalin. With 5 percent of the world's population, the U.S. consumes 85 percent of this drug. Have we considered the consequences?
and...
Despite their stubborn refusal to medicate their children with Ritalin, these other countries do not lag behind the United States in academic performance. On the contrary: according to the most recent studies, France, Germany, and Japan continue to maintain their traditional lead over the United States in tests of math and reading ability.
---
This article dates to 2000, but it's about the very same crisis that we've been hearing about more and more the last few years. Children are being medicated in order to get them to sit still in school (where 'unproductive' things like things like recess are being cut in favor of more cramming). Maybe a whole generation has been raised to think of 'learning' as something you need drugs to accomplish. And now we are beginning to see the consequences.
I work in a pharmacy and my expierence with the ADHD medications shows how insanely stupid these college kids are being. We had a pharmacist lose his licence for slipping some of the ADHD pills on the sly; there is a reason the FDA classifies them as controlled substances, they are highly addictive. Some of them (Ritalin for sure, maybe Allderal as well) are narcotics which are the most addictive and most highly controlled category of legal drugs. In the state I live in (I'm not going to reveal that because the pill popping pharmacist is still under investigation by the state) controlled drugs are required to be locked in a cabinet that only the pharmacist can access.
Now, for further insight- I am a college student, a soon to be senior political science and history major, I pull 4.0's with nothing more than Earl Gray tea doused in honey to help me write those term papers on Progressive politics until 3:00 am. I equate taking controlled substances illegally in order to gain an "edge" to writing notes on the palm of your hand before stepping into the exam room. I got my high GPA the honest way, I'm going to take my GRE the honest way, and I'm going to persue my PhD the honest way.
Before popping the controls in order to push up those scores realize they are controls because they are highly addictive. If they were safe for use without a prescription then I doubt they would be locked under the counter and subject to an insane amount of paperwork and redundant checks before dispensing. Besides, taking an illegal drug to get your edge reflects badly on you and cheapens the meaning of everything you gained.
There are idiots or ignorant people who take drugs without realising the consequences.
There are lots of stupid people that do lots of stupid things without realising the consequences. It's not a justification for prohibition.
They might become addicted and start stealing etc to support their habit.
This is why stealing is already against the law. Nevermind that far more people are in prison for simple drug offences than theft. We're paying for 1 million peoples' annual room and board right now on account of prohibition. You'd better be able to show that that cost plus the cost of the drug war is less than the cost of letting people decide what to put in their own bodies, or all your financial arguments are out the window.
they might take too much and overdose, costing society a lot
This rationale could be used to outlaw everything dangerous, from McDonald's food on up.
they might become psychotic with nasty effects to others like family, friends
Good point. Let's add joining the Church of Scientology to the list of things that should be illegal along with drugs.
If other reasons we do lack, we swear no one will die when we attack
There are idiots or ignorant people who take drugs without realising the consequences.
While there are many valid functions for government, protecting people from their own stupidity or ignorance shouldn't be one of them. Furthermore, with the amount of money that currently goes into policing, we could create informational campaigns that ensure that everybody knows the dangers.
They might become addicted and start stealing etc to support their habit, they might take too much and overdose, costing society a lot, they might become psychotic with nasty effects to others like family, friends, etc.
Given a choice, the drugs people tend to take are drugs that make them happy and make them feel good; legalizing drugs would probably reduce use of drugs that cause people to harm others.
I'm not even getting into direct damage to others : would you like your father/your mum to turn to a life of drug and abandon you and your siblings while still at a young age ?
Drug addiction doesn't generally cause parents to abandon their children; except for unusually severe cases, most people with drug addiction can function reasonably well and seem to overcome addiction after some time if support is available. It is the fact that drugs are illegal that results in children growing up without their parents, either because their parents got killed or because they got incarcerated.
I believe most people would not be able to cope with themselves in a society with very few laws (an anarchy), yet most people are under the delusion that they could.
I'm not a libertarian or anarchist; I just think that proponents of drug laws have failed to demonstrate that they work. Oh, people like you use lots of "mights" and "mays" and "think of the children", but, in the end, the reasonable conclusion based on all available data is that drug laws make the consequences of drug addiction worse, both in human and in finanical terms.
The class of drug Adderal and Ritalin belong to has another name.
SPEED. They are fucking hard drugs. You want to talk about a gateway drug? Jesus Christ.
America seriously needs to wake the fuck up from its asinine hypocrisy. We have fucking hard liquor advertizing on FUCKING RACE CARS. Every body and their mother is addicted to Caffeine. We are such a drug culture that it's such an absolute joke how much money we spend on the 'war on drugs'.
caffe-ine
coca-ine
Big diff, right?
Now the meat of the argument is that I think it should all be legal for adults. My huge problem is the generation of children we have gotten started on speed. We have 10 million teen-age addicts. 10 million kids intimately familiar with the street value of their little bottle of pills.
10 million kids with the taste of speed in their mouths. Does that not scare anyone else?