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?

Comments

Overkill

[koh]

90% of current programmers probably do not use those drugs, since they're overkill for Visual Basic coding...

Re:Overkill

[tomhudson]

90% of current programmers probably do not use those drugs, since they're overkill for Visual Basic coding...

shouldn't that read ...

90% of current programmers probably do use drugs, since you've gotta be on drugs to be coding in Visual Basic ...

All kidding aside, if you count caffeine, I think you'll hit 99.99999 ... ah wtf, say 100%. Both programmers and school kids. Ditto for sugar.

Re:Overkill

[devnull17]

90% of current programmers probably do not use those drugs, since they're overkill for Visual Basic coding...

I wrote Visual Basic code for years, and I took Adderall twice a day. I (or rather my employment status) probably couldn't have survived without it.

There's a common misunderstanding about stimulants like Adderall and Ritalin. They don't make you smarter or faster. They make you able to focus, and they make typically miserable tasks interesting. (Wiring database fields to GUI forms all day is boring, soul-crushing work, but well-paying, challenging jobs don't grow on trees.) They make you feel productive while performing the most menial tasks.

The reason that students take Adderall to cram for exams isn't because it makes you smarter, but because it increases your attention span and allows you to focus on really dry subject matter, so you can study for longer. It also keeps you awake at times when even coffee could not--that, from what I've seen, is the only place where abuse of the drug occurs.

This is anecdotal, but I know a lot of people who took unprescribed Adderall in college. Most of them have never touched any other illicit drugs, but they find the substance useful, and it doesn't seem to cause any harm. I really don't see the rationale for making it illegal for adults without ADD.

Re:Overkill

[KanSer]

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?

Re:Overkill

[damiena]

caffe-ine
coca-ine

Big diff, right?

calam-ine
chlor-ine
cos-ine
coastl-ine
cuis-ine
can-ine
clothesl-ine
crystall-ine

Just Say No To The Drugs...

[__aaclcg7560]

Maybe we need to get Nancy Reagan out of the 80's closet just tell everyone to say NO to the drugs. It's bad enough in California that you have to show ID to buy cough medicine and be limited to two packages, while I can walk into a cloud of pot smoke at my apartment complex even when the police are nearby.

Re:Just Say No To The Drugs...

[xlyz]

while I can walk into a cloud of pot smoke at my apartment complex even when the police are nearby

is this a bug or a feature?

Re:Just Say No To The Drugs...

[tsm_sf]

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?

Re:Just Say No To The Drugs...

[kfg]

The short answer is that a corporation doesn't make a profit on pot. Corporations do make a profit in opposing pot.

Of course it's a bit more complicated than that, but not much.

Here's how our mental "health" structure works these days:

Go to the psych ward at a city hospital and tell them you use pot. The shrink will put you on a program to teach you that drugs are not the way to deal with your emotional problems.

But go a few hours later though and tell them you have emotional problems and the same damned shrink will give you psychoactive drugs to deal with it.

It's totally schizo, but they get paid for both ya see.

Is it any wonder that our legislators are utterly psycho about the drug issue? They grew up being taught to accept this kind of cognitive dissonance without experiencing any cognative dissonance. They'll make cough syrup a crime, but mandate Ritalin.

The world has gone totally, fucking nuts. Does anyone know where I can find a nice, quiet, dry cave to hole up in?

Ummmmmmmmmmmm; with broadband.

KFG

Re:Just Say No To The Drugs...

[Poppler]

the problem lies in the double standard. you know how it works, laws are passed to prevent bad stuff(tm), most people will go on and do bad stuff(tm) and the police won't care, while they will bug to no end the only good guys(tm)

I agree with your statement only if taken out of context. In this case, the double standard is in favor of pharmacuticals. Ephedrine is not only more dangerous than Marijuana, but it is also used to create methamphetamine. I'm not saying I agree with the ID laws, just that you should reconsider which one is really the "bad stuff".

Re:Just Say No To The Drugs...

[x2A]

No, the problem with "just say no" isn't addiction, because to be addicted, you must have already not said no at least once already. The problem with "just say no", and in fact so much of the anti-drugs FUD out there, is the term: drugs. Drugs are meant to be bad... right? So what about all the drugs that you get from the doc/chemist? Okay, so drugs are bad if they're illegal, but drugs from the doc/chemist are good, because they're legal... so it's actually breaking the law that's bad, and the laws MUST be right... right?

Wrong. "Just say no!" teaches ignorance, it says don't question, don't learn, just repeat after me. But the truth is that illegal drugs aren't all the same, and the legal status of a drugs makes absolutely no difference to whether it's "good" or "bad" for you. The difference comes when whether you've learnt how to use the drugs responsibly.

The only drug I've ever become addicted to was one I was prescribed from a doctor, because I trusted/just accepted what I was told. All other drugs I've 'experimented' (recreational only, I stear well clear of the big addictive one's such as smack/crack) with, I've researched beforehand, and not hand anything like the same kind of problems with. I've even managed to boost my work productivity (programming) with some, which has saved my ass at least a couple of times.

Whenever I've seen people having problems with these drugs, is because they don't respect them, think that taking more == makes you cooler, they get competative ("I can handle more than you"), or often believe that the drug will solve something that it can't. But guess what... you get the same problems with legal as you do with illegal drugs. Just because it's legal, doesn't mean you won't become addicted, or that it won't screw your liver or whatever, and just because something illegal, doesn't mean it will.

I've become far more successful in my life, both work wise and socially, since I discovering what levels of different chemicals have different effects on me, what I can achieve in different states, and importantly: my limits. I can use amphetamines (the family ritalin is in, as is speed) to slam out code for 24hours straight, but the brain needs to rest, so if I keep doing it, I just end up being awake, and can't be productive. I've learnt this, I use it wisely, I use it responsibly, I monitor my health (physically and mentally) very closely. There's no reason why I should stop (except legal status).

Take responsibility for your own life, for MORE of your own life, and you'll find you can be safer from most things, and see that some things are only "dangerous" if used irresponsibly (like powertools) but can be useful if used wisely (like powertools).

New? Try old.

[akarnid]

Nothing new here, at least for Uni students. Back in the fifties and earlier, when amphetamines were over-the-counter andcould even be baought in vending machines in some places in Europe, Uni students cramming for an exam used to pop quite a lot of those. These new drugs may not come with the unpleasant side effects now, but we'll see what effects long-term use will have in a few years when use becomes widespread.

OMG I'm So Stoned Right Now

[Doomedsnowball]

Like, I'm sooo stoned right now. It's totally, like, helping me write a Google Homepage plugin for checking your MySpace notifications. That way I can keep in contact with the people who do my homework for me! I tried a few drugs to help me as a programmer, but pot is the best. I tried coke for motivation and to focus, but like, I totally ended up foaming at the mouth playing WoW online. I tried LSD, then tried to program my cat to feed itself. I tried snorting my Mom's Zoloft, but I felt so good about my programming, I totally like, stopped tweaking it and it's still full of bugs. But when I smoke pot, I lay around playing XBox until the last minute when I drink an entire pot of coffee and my panic driven code is the best I could ever hope to write sober. Like pharmies are so pill-popping '80's. Sounds like something babyboomers would worry about, like, for reals.

Drugs are no help

[mlefranc]

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.

Re:Drugs are no help

[Durandal64]

I bought a pill of adderol once from a friend of mine in my sophomore year at college. I had linear algebra and EM physics finals the next morning. I've never concentrated that hard in my life. I was going from about 11:00pm to 7:00am straight (with regular smoke breaks) at the library, and my linear final was at 7:50. I nailed it too. When I was done studying, my hand was cramped up from all the writing, and my paper felt more like papyrus from all the hand-sweat that was on it.

Re:Drugs are no help

[The_Wilschon]

Good heavens. ADD is not "being wild and unfocused". I have ADD. I was never wild. I was not hyperactive. Nobody looked at me on the playground and said "Oh that kid is soooo ADD" (Which phrase I positively detest). However, my performance in school did not at all match my intelligence. I was given some kind of IQ test (I don't remember anything about it, nor do I know what I scored on it.) The psych just went on and on about how intelligent I was. My grades (esp. the work habits section that was on our elementary school report cards) sucked. I was not just unfocused, I was unable to focus. In third grade, my parents finally found a doctor who didn't just say "Oh he seems to be emotionally healthy, and plenty smart, I don't know why he's sucking so much at school", and he said that I had ADD. I was given Ritalin, and suddenly, when I sat down to do my homework, I was actually capable of doing more than one problem at once without drifting off and thinking about who knows what for half an hour in between. Oh and by the way, my parents did make me sit down and work. I could spend three hours sitting at the kitchen table doing nothing but homework, and still only finish a single one page worksheet. And this was with my mom in the kitchen checking on me to make sure I was still working every few minutes. Oh yes, my parents made me sit down and work. On the other hand I never have had time advantages on tests or anything. I could at my college, but I don't because I don't need to, and if I didn't take my medicine, the time advantages wouldn't be anywhere near long enough.

Yes, ADD is horribly overdiagnosed, and the typical "That kid is so ADD" reaction to undisciplined children doesn't help at all. However, in spite of this, it is a real problem, and it does affect numerous people, many of whom you would never suspect. It is worth noting that I am no longer taking narcotics like Ritalin, but am now on Strattera. Strattera is not a stimulant. In fact, there are large segments of the population on whom strattera doesn't work at all. This seems to correlate well with people who actually have ADD versus those who were just "wild and unfocused children". My doctor says that he'll put people on strattera, and they'll complain and want to go back to ritalin, because "It doesn't give me the same rush". Well, Ritalin never gave me a rush at all. In fact, that is sometimes used as a diagnostic test for ADD: a small dose of ritalin will make someone without ADD slightly high, but someone with ADD will not get high at all.

You say that kids with ADD are getting time and focus advantages. I can assure you that in cases where those kids actually have ADD that taking ritalin or whatever is not an advantage over kids without ADD. In fact, unless the dosage is pretty much perfect, it probably still leaves them at a slight disadvantage.

Now, all this is not to say that I think drugs like ritalin should be given out willy-nilly. In fact I am completely opposed to it. It would also be nice if all extant diagnoses of ADD could be required to go back and see an actual competent doctor this time and get rediagnosed (or, in perhaps most cases, not). Then, if those people could be convinced not to stupidly give out their pills, and to keep them locked up (my ritalin was stolen from the school nurse's cabinet several times when I was little), perhaps these drugs would not be a problem, ADD would be recognized as a real problem instead of being scorned as a cop out for bad parenting, and you wouldn't have to whine about kids getting advantages on tests anymore. Unfortunately, it's not going to happen.

Re:Drugs are no help

[slamb]

I bought a pill of adderol once from a friend of mine in my sophomore year at college. I had linear algebra and EM physics finals the next morning. I've never concentrated that hard in my life. I was going from about 11:00pm to 7:00am straight (with regular smoke breaks) at the library, and my linear final was at 7:50. I nailed it too.

As long as we're trading anecdotes, I skipped class for six weeks before my linear algebra final, then nailed it. [*] No drugs, no studying. For whatever reason (my natural talent in mathematics? low standards? the professor letting us use TI-89s to check our work?), I found the class and test really easy.

On the other hand, E&M was the real deal. Challenging material, demanding (but great) professor. I went to class, I studied, and I was proud when I got As on those tests.

My point is that anecdotal evidence is worthless. You felt more focused while studying. But was your studying actually more effective? Or were your finals simply as easy for you as my linear one was for me? What grade would you have gotten if you hadn't taken any drug? What grade would you have gotten if you'd taken a placebo? It's impossible to know.

Has anyone actually done any real scientific studies of the effects of these pills on healthy people? Our brains are complicated. While it seems reasonable at first to say you felt more focused, therefore you were more focused, therefore you were more effective, that's actually quite a leap. There are many drugs out there that will make you feel more effective, then discover afterward that your work was crap. Does a pill that turns an ADD patient into a "normal" person turn a normal person into a superperson? If even more of some chemical in our brains makes us even more focused and intelligent, why didn't natural selection increase the dosage? What's the catch?

[*] Okay, 98/100...forgot to normalize an eigenvector...though MathWorld says now that they don't have to be normalized, so I want my two points back.

Re:Drugs are no help

[radtea]

Drugs are no substitue for real learning, but they can provide an unfair advantage in an artificial situation intended to measure learning, such as a college exam.

This is the problem. College exams are terrible measures of learning. As an old prof of mine once said talking to some first-years in a physics lab: "If I tell you to measure this table, and you lay a tape-measure down on it like so and write down the number and hand it in, I WILL FAIL YOU. You never measure anything just once!"

As a prof I was even more uncomfortable giving exams than I was as a student taking them, because I came to realized that we were making a measurement in a way that we would never condone as scientists. We were making a single measurement on our students and saying it was a good measure of their capacities, which is nonsense.

If marks were objective they'd have error bars.

The "final exam" culture that exists in many modern universities is a product of mass-produced education, and I don't have any particularly good answer to it. We need some relatively simple way of evaluating students and reporting that evaluation to the world, but we take marks way too seriously given the shoddy, unscientific process that produces them.

But so long as we give such unrealistic and unreasonable weight to a few point-measurements of student performance, students will be tempted to use every means available to increase their performance to an unrealistic maximum at those few points.

Stimulants don't do much for me.

[Visaris]

I've tried many "performance enhancing" drugs over the years. From caffeine to adderall, riddlin, cocaine, and methamphetamines. All these things have been reported to allow one to think and work faster and longer.

My experience? I perform much worse on these substances. Sometimes I'm jittery and cannot focus. At times I think and work so fast that I make many carless errors that end up taking me more time to fix than if I had done the work slower and did it right the first time. The drugs that kept me up and allowed me to work longer just took more of me the next day.

I can tell you all, from personal experience, that taking stimulants to try and help you through the day is a waste of money, is a health risk, and may actually decrease your overall monthly or yearly performance. Not to mention the fact that our over-reaching government would be more than happy to put you in jail for a very very long time for posessing many of these substances.

Re:Stimulants don't do much for me.

[uniqueCondition]

I would recommend dexadrine. A great drug, this thing is prescribed to kids w/ ADD and special forces pilots often take it as well.

The drug is perfect for studying late:
1) keeps you awake (why special forces likes it)
2) you're not hungry (use to be a diet drug)
3) keeps you focused (why ADD kids get it)

Those three factors are perfect from cramming

Side affects:
1) sometimes you'll end up talking too much
2) can grind your teeth a bit
3) i'm sure there are some health side effects..

Safe?

[Poppler]

These psychotropics seem fairly safe

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.

Curiosity

[Sir Holo]

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

[luckynoone]

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.

NoQuestionIt'sHelped

[Anonymous Coward]

EversinceI'vebeenusingAdderallI'vegottenmuchmorewo rkdone.Moreworkthanever.Ithinkeveryoneshouldtryit. Imeaneveryone.Regularol'coffeejustwon'tcutitintoda y'soutsourcedworld!Yougottatakewhateveredgeyoucanf indnowadays.Gottago.Morecodetobewritten!

modafinil, etc.

[Rage Maxis]

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.

A deficient diet?

[Colin Smith]

First thing to do is make sure you're eating a diet which provides everything your body and brain needs. The western diet is... abysmal... mostly; mediterranean isn't bad.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/4511759.stm

The body and brain are chemical machines, they need certain quantities of certain substances to run at their maximum potential and if you're not consuming the right substances, they'll be artificially limited to a lower performance. So you're wasting your time if you eat crap then try to boost your performance with drugs.

Re:this is nothing new

[Martin Blank]

Now they're moving on to modafinil (aka Provigil). In tests, they can stay up for several days at a time without fatigue, jitters, headaches, nausea, or loss of alertness or attention span. At the end of the test, 10-12 hours of shut-eye seems to reset their sleep clocks, and they move on, largely without any apparent side effects.

So now I wonder about it, even though I shy away from taking most pills aside from the occasional Advil or Rolaids. I have my day job, which is getting a little tougher because aside from training on a sudden influx of new technologies, I also have to help make up for the quarter of our team that went elsewhere. I have some side work that I do for extra money. I'd like to get back to learning C/C++, and pick up Perl as well. I also want to go for Cisco and Linux certifications, and come this fall I'd like to go back to school and get back on the path to my degree. Being able to slice out even half of the nights that I currently use for sleeping would be a tremendous assistance.

But is it fair? If I'm able to use this time to ramp up like that, will it force others to do so as well? Is it fair to my colleagues if I'm able to do half of their jobs (time permitting)? If I'm awake 24 hours at a stretch, and don't mind putting in an extra four hours since I have eight more than usual, am I putting their jobs at risk? And what happens to me when the next person comes along who is not only taking modafinil, but also a memory booster?

Adderall and ritalin ARE basically amphetamines

[morgan_greywolf]

And I can tell you all, from personal experience, that they are a complete godsend. The short story is I had serious learning problems at school, I had serious hobby problems at home, I had serious problems all up. I was interested in EVERYTHING and my mind wouldn't let me settle down and truly enjoy & work at any one thing in a productive way. Doctor wanted to put me on ritalin at age 9, my parents jacked up at that and called him crazy, then spent the next 7 years trying all kinds of alternative bullshit to help me.

Then I scored a constant supply of ritalin, and the world was a different place. I could actually DO things. I made more improvements to my schoolwork in the year after starting it than I had in a decade before. It changed my life. My parents still don't like it, they think ritalin = amphetamines = crack cocaine = me dead by age 30, but I don't live with them any more and that's their problem.

For those of you thinking about trying this stuff without the supervision of a doctor after reading this: don't. While they can be a godsend for those with ADHD, those who don't have the problem can have some serious trouble.

In non-ADHD subjects, Ritalin and Adderall are similar to methamphetamine in function. In normal individuals, they cause rapid increase in dopamine, just like amphetamines do. Really. If you don't believe me, this article on Ritalin from the National Institute of Health. The upshot of all of this is that in non-ADHD patients, addiction rates are very high due the increased dopamine levels.

Disclosure: my wife is a substance abuse counselor and deals with people addicted to this stuff all the time.

Re:Surely more recreational?

[misleb]

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

drugs in college

[Anonymous Coward]

Posting AC because of drug talk.
I go to a college well-known for its drug culture (Ithaca). The most prevalent drug on campus is, by far, marijuana. But the second most prevalent is adderal/generic knockoff (adderal has 4 amphetamine salts, most generics are just amphetamine sulfate). Kids will rail addies to stay up to study, to stay up and be able to drink more, or before finals. (Other drugs make appearances too... psychadelics and opiates mostly, to my knowledge there isn't a very large coke/coca market at all.)

I'll preface this by saying that yes, I've done speed to do work, and even to party. I've found it to be an incredibly useful tool, if used well, though I very much dislike the effects of the drug. Speeding isn't very pleasant -- you're totally unable to relax or chill out, but rather you have enough energy to do whatever it is that needs to be done. 20-page term papers become 4-hour fodder... or 10,000 lines of code, or a semester's worth of reading for a class.

What could be better? Literally -- you eat a pill and have 6 hours of pure work-ethic, plus your brain is on overdrive so you're working faster anyway. I know kids who don't do work for about 2 weeks straight, and then rail some addies, and do whatever is owed in one night. I know kids who say "drugs are bad" but will eat 30mg before studying for finals. I also know kids who are addicted to amphetamines.

I can't say whether any drug is bad or not -- I firmly believe that a drug is what you make of it and how you use it. But the people who should be taken to task for the prevalence of these drugs on college campuses are the pharmaceutical industry, for its aggressive campaigns claiming far more people have ADD/ADHD than actually do, and the doctors who take the rhetoric and perscribe the pills the companies tell them to. Anecdotal evidence is a buddy of mine who is convinced he doesn't have ADD/ADHD, and yet has an 80mg/day perscription for adderal (he sells the pills he doesn't keep for his own scholastic use).

I'll never use speed to party again (with the exception of ecstasy, which is an amphetamine [methylenedioxymethamphetamine]), but for school I find it a very useful tool. I'm just very careful that I use it sparingly and have a safe place to come down [if you've got more tests to take when you're coming down, the only solution is to do more amphetamines].

As to its fairness... I think it is inherently unfair that one human differs from another -- we're not all on an even playing field physically or mentally. That's just the way it is, fortunately or unfortunately.

Just for reference, Adderal is so prevalent that either I'm handed pills for free, or pay around $2 a pill. During finals week, the price was up to $5, and I heard of people paying upwards of $10.

Re:this is ironic

[jd]

Sadly, you are correct. Many kids who are a "problem" are bored. Some because they're smart enough to plough through the material, others because they run into a problem, get stuck, and have to wait 10-15 minutes before the teacher can help. Assuming the teacher ever does, of course.

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 not DXM that's restricted

[Sycraft-fu]

It's pseudoephedrine. That is, apparantly, one of the primary ingrediants in meth. So they decided that any OTC medication containing pseudoephedrine will no long be something you can simply walk in and buy. You still need no perscription, but you have to go to the pharmacist, fill out a form, have your ID checked, and then you may buy one box only.

Fuck that, too much effort. Next allergy season my doctor has said she'll just write me a 4 month perscription of Allegra.

At any rate, that's the only OTC component I know of that has any regulation. Though people can trip on dextromethorphan, I guess it's rare enough that there's not a serious concern about it. I mean hell, people can get high on whip cream propellant if they want. Pseudoephedrine is just a concer because meth is a rather problematic drug. If it honestly can push meth in to the category of too hard to make, I'm ok with the restriction, but I've a feeling it does nothing but inconcenicence most of us and does not deter the meth heads.

I wouldn't bother

[kimvette]

I once tried caffiene tablets to keep going at the office (working 12-16 hours a day for months at a stretch because an employer is too fucking cheap and shortsighted to let a QA director hire ample qualified staff takes its toll) but it didn't help. I felt better for an hour or two then I'd crash harder. I can only imagine that it would be a harder, more painful crash with stronger (and illegal) stimulants.

What does work is exercise and getting more sleep. I've been trying to burn both ends of the candle at my own business, but lately I've been eating fruits for breakfast and bicycling to and from work, so now when I do work long days I still feel tired, but not to the point where I feel totally exhausted. Soon I'll be bringing in more help and knocking back to 5 days a week. I still make sure I get at absolute minimum 6-1/2 hours or so of sleep per night, and I try really hard to get between 7 and eight (any more than that and I end up either groggy or get a migraine).

Do yourself a favor if you need to work long hours: MAKE a way to get exercise into your routine, and lay off refined foods. You'll find yourself able to work longer before you feel tired, and you'll feel better overall, and will probably lose any extra weight you're carrying at the same time.

Drugs (legal or otherwise) might give you a temporary lift, but there is no subtitute for sleep, eating right, and actually getting working your muscles from time to time. If there were a magic bullet, America wouldn't be full of fatties. I'm glad to say I'm no longer a fatty, and while I still have some more weight to lose, the first 25 pounds has made a huge difference and I only have a few more to go. :)

Need a lift? Eat a banana or drink some herbal tea, or just drink plenty of water.

deregulate almost all drugs

[m874t232]

I think we should deregulate almost all drugs. If you want to mess up your body or your mind with steroids or "smart drugs", that's your business. If you want to feel good through chemistry, that should be your decision. If you die 30 years before your time because of various kinds of drug abuse, that's nobody's business but yours--just don't expect exceptional measures from doctors to try to reverse the effects.

The only drugs that should be far more tightly regulated than they are are antibiotics and antivirals, because incorrect use by one person harms other people.

Re:deregulate almost all drugs

[loqi]

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.

Re:deregulate almost all drugs

[m874t232]

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.

New levels of usage maybe...

[Cognitive Dissident]

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.

Drugs are good!

[FhnuZoag]

Most of the commentators have latched on to the drugs are bad conclusion, so maybe it's time for some devil's advocating... Suppose a drug is invented that has almost no adverse side effect - would it be ok to take it?

There's an assumption in most people's responses that drugs must inherently have a bad sideeffect. That the badness of the side effect is in general proportion to the benefits obtained. Hence, it cannot be good to take X, because X must have a hidden side effect that cancels out any advantages it may provide. Such reasoning may be true when we were kids and were having the 'Drugs -just say NO' message drummed into us, but they aren't going to be true forever. And it's not as though the 'healthy' alternatives are really perfect, either. Exercise to improve fitness is fraught with physical risks. Increased study to boost academics hurts social lives, and may well have a greater cumulative harm than impotence 30 years down the line. (At least, if you've been taking drugs, you've actually slept with someone in that time) How many teenage suicides would have been averted if the victim was taking recreational drugs, and kept taking them? (So no withdrawal symptoms...)

If we look at things in a certain way, there is no special evil associated with using chemicals to achieve some effect over carrying out some other activity. As technology improves, the lines are bound to blur even further.

I'm a college student AND work in a pharmacy

[shaneFalco]

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.

Re:I'm a college student AND work in a pharmacy

[loqi]

You seem to place your own individual judgment over that of the government

Yes I do. How could anyone think so little of their judgment that they need to look to a noncorporeal entity such as a government for it? Multiplying people together doesn't make them more ethical.

However, Rouseau, writing in The Social Contract recognized that our individual will must become subordinate to a more embracing general will which expresses the views of society en masse.

Well, Rouseau can "recognize" all he'd like to, but I disagree with him. Since we're invoking arbitrary dead people to back up our arguments, I guess I'll toss this out (Thomas Jefferson):

No man has a natural right to commit aggression on the equal rights of another, and this is all from which the laws ought to restrain him.

appear quite willing to violate the law in order to make a statement

And indeed I am, although this has nothing to do with my earlier statements. If a law is unjust, people should not abide by that law. That's essentially the beginning of how many unjust laws get removed, believe it or not. The simple truth is that bullshit laws stick around on the books all the time (e.g., sodomy laws in the South).

Your posts suggest alienation and indifference to the political process.

No, I think that political processes are not relevant to the reality of what is right and what is wrong. They are a vehicle to ensure fair treatment of citizens in a civilization, and any time their treatment becomes unfair (e.g., indefinite copyright extension), I am by definition alienated.

This can of course be cured by becoming proactive in the political process by writing the FDA, Congress, etc.

Now this is just condescending. You know nothing about me or my involvement. You may be surprised to learn that many politically active people disagree with the law from time to time.

If you were to wake up tomorrow and decide pants were optional could you justify not wearing them? What if you woke up and decided you wanted to kill your neighbor's dog?

Then I'd do those things. If I woke up tomorrow insane, I'd do insane stuff. If you woke up tomorrow, robbed of your judgment, you'd make poor decisions too.

If it is change you seek- do it within the system.

Does this mean, "abide by the law"? Because from the looks of change in the past, that's piss-poor advice.

You my friend are merely being a fatalistic troll.

No, I simply disagree with you. I suppose I'm fatalistic because I don't have a rosy, comfortable view of the individual's relationship with government? I'll see your fatalism and raise you one accusation of complacent naivety. But thanks for calling me a troll, that says something about one of us.

This comment is so out of place here, but...

[Jugalator]

This sounds a bit corny, and is so out of place on Slashdot that it isn't even funny, but I've found being physically active (like at least 30 mins exercise a day) and maintaining a healthy lifestyle does good things to your concentration and studying abilities. You'll be less tired because your lung capacity improves and more, and there's of course other good side effects beyond the realms of studies, like better looks and health. Many feel they're too tired to exercise, but that's a bit of a vicious cycle in that the reason is often because you haven't.

So this would be a natural way to hopefully improve the studying situation a bit if you're into that sort of thing.

OK, so I've done it. Posted a health/lifestyle post on Slashdot. Feel free to mod me into oblivion! :-)

Re:This comment is so out of place here, but...

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

This sounds a bit corny, and is so out of place on Slashdot that it isn't even funny, but I've found being physically active (like at least 30 mins exercise a day) and maintaining a healthy lifestyle does good things to your concentration and studying abilities. You'll be less tired because your lung capacity improves and more, and there's of course other good side effects beyond the realms of studies, like better looks and health.

I tried that, it didn't work. In fact it failed miserably. I was more tired, had less energy, put on weight and my grades suffered. Reason, I hated exercise. It was boring, uncomfortable, embarrassing, unrealistic, tiring and unproductive.

Instead of cycling, running, or horror of horrors, going to the gym, I just took up walking down a few quiet country lanes. No people. Nice and quiet. Time to think. Walking normally, not "briskly" or whatever the hell those people waddling along in the wrong gait are up to.

Like any lawyer will tell you: IT DEPENDS

[Zaphod2016]

I am shocked that no one has mentioned the simple fact that IT DEPENDS on the person taking the drug.

I'll use food for my analogy.

I have a buddy who weighs about 120lbs (skinny), eats like a pig. I'm 205lbs (fatty) and I also have a terrible diet. Yet another friend is pushing 250lbs (fatty+), and he's a lifelong vegetarian. We're all about 6' tall.

I have no interest in splitting hairs between "food" or "drug"; both cause chemical reactions in the body, and these reactions are entirely dependant on any number of factors (diet, lifestyle, age, race, location, gender...I could go on and on and on...).

I for one think it is disgusting that we live in a country (USA) which advertises perscription meds to children every night during prime time, and then locks these same kids up a few years later for smoking dope. This isn't hypocritical; it's fucking asinine.

Call it "free markets", call it "the people", the verdict is in: WE LOVE DRUGS and WE LOVE FOOD. Both will affect each and every one of us in different ways, and legal or not, each must be used in MODERATION and with ALL DUE CAUTION.

Classic Formula

[illuminatedwax]

I use a simple shot of cocaine, seven per-cent solution, to keep my brain stimulated.

Re:New? Try old.

[Ungrounded Lightning]

You've covered the amphetamines.

But the whole POINT of the "psychedelic" drugs (which turned out mainly to be hallucinogens) was an attempt to increase mental ability - intelligence, creativity, empathy, intuitive pattern-matching, and perhaps obtain access to paranormal abilities (this being before Rhine was debunked).

The very WORD "psychedelic" was coined to reflect this. Means "mind-expanding".

The adolescents of the '60s and '70s were trying very hard to obtain exactly the sort of mind amplification that these new drugs actually produce.

Unfortunately, they only had what was available at the time.

LSD, for instance, apparently reduces the threshold of patten matching - whether it's a real pattern or a false one - but simultaneously reduces the threshold of the "eureka" signal. So the user has a lot of odd thoughts, and every time he has a new one a his mind says: "That's RIGHT!". (You can imagine how this warped the minds of even well-educated and intelligent users, such as the emminent psychology professor Timothy Leary.)

Or amphetamines - which mimic various neurotransmitters, primarily in the fight/flight mechanism. You could achieve more focus and alertness (with some of them - at the cost of deep thought). But you paid for it later, as non-emergency systems (such as cell growth and even immune response) were put on hold to conserve resources for the "emergency".

Some use was also self-medicative. Psychology at the time (before the widespread use of Crack Cocaine led to the recognition of Freud's theories as typical cocaine addict ravings) was largely in a religious and black-art stage, and while there were a number of psychoactive drugs available that were pallative, but often mis-prescribed. People with mental problems often attempted to cadge prescriptions for, or buy on the black market, drugs that they perceived (often correctly) as improving their condition. And the Vietnam adventure resulted in a lot of people with injuries producing chronic pain, which could be alleviated only by narcotics.

And of course once a generation was "distracted" from government-approved "channels" into "self-actualization", the government started an ever-escalating drug war - which meant that the pure, pharmacutical-quality, drugs were supplanted by black-market concoctions of dubious ingredients, strength, and purity. This also warped medical practice, leading to under-medication for pain (which is still with us).

By the '80s the use of drugs in an attempt to increase intelligence had pretty much died out, and the remaining use of the remaining garbage-quality street drugs was mainly hedonistic, self-medicative, and the feeding of addictions.