Neuroenhancers are very preva­lent, both legally and ille­gally, on the Ferris campus.

It’s finals week and there are chem­istry and cal­cu­lus exams loom­ing the fol­low­ing morn­ing. To help study, will you turn to cof­fee, soda…or pre­scrip­tion drugs?

Students on col­lege cam­puses across the nation are look­ing to Adderall and sim­i­lar pills com­monly pre­scribed for Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) to help them con­cen­trate on their school work. This issue is present at Ferris just as it is on most other campuses.

Matt McCoy, a Ferris junior in the con­struc­tion man­age­ment pro­gram, recently shared his thoughts about Adderall, which has been pre­scribed to him since he was in junior high.

“I took it today and was in the library for about six hours study­ing,” said McCoy.

Adderall is a form of amphet­a­mine that keeps the mind awake and alert. McCoy com­pared it to drink­ing a cup of cof­fee in the morn­ing, only tak­ing a pill that lasts for ten to twelve hours. He said he will usu­ally take his pre­scrip­tion in the morn­ing so that it does not keep him up at night.

Adderall has a pres­ence on many col­lege cam­puses for these effects that stu­dents see as a way to help cope with a work­load. McCoy said that he even saw Adderall being sold in one of his classes between two stu­dents who did oth­er­wise not know each other.

“The kid just walked across the class­room and asked the other one, ‘do you know where I can get any Adderall?’” said McCoy. “It went down right there, he made the phone call and everything…the teacher walked by and had no idea what was going on.”

Adderall is used as both a way to con­cen­trate and as a recre­ational drug. It can be taken in pill form as well as snorted, the lat­ter being the way stu­dents use it in a recre­ational sense.

While McCoy uses his pre­scrip­tion spar­ingly so that he does not become depen­dant on it, other stu­dents buy pills ille­gally when they do not have a prescription.

A stu­dent speak­ing under the con­di­tion of anonymity who uses Adderall peri­od­i­cally and with­out a pre­scrip­tion said, “I have used it for about two years, but only when I need it. You can def­i­nitely get addicted…and when you come down from it you feel very slug­gish, it is phys­i­cally exhaust­ing on your body.”

The stu­dent said that Adderall can sell for between one and four dol­lars a pill on the “black mar­ket,” depend­ing on the strength and type of pre­scrip­tion. Different mil­ligrams are avail­able as well as extended release and rapid release forms.

Both McCoy and the unnamed stu­dent attested to the fact that when com­ing down from the pill, feel­ings of edgi­ness and anx­ious­ness are com­mon. Despite these side effects, the drug remains as pop­u­lar as ever.

“It def­i­nitely helps if you need to study or crack out a paper,” said the anony­mous student.

McCoy said that there are many dif­fer­ent forms of med­ica­tion for ADD. Others include Concerta and Focalin, both serv­ing a sim­i­lar pur­pose to adderall.

“I have been on seven dif­fer­ent prescriptions…I was like a test rat for my ADD doc­tor,” said McCoy.

The Guardian Weekly, an inter­na­tional news­pa­per pub­lished in Britain, ran an arti­cle in September titled, “Can pop­ping pills make you smarter?” A Harvard stu­dent named Alex was inter­viewed about his use of Adderall to help keep him moti­vated for his intense workload.

“The expe­ri­ence that neu­roen­hance­ment offers is…about squeez­ing out an extra few hours to get a B instead of a B– on the final exam in a lec­ture class where you spent half your time tex­ting,” said the article.

The Guardian also cited a University of Michigan study which found that 4.1 per­cent of American under­grad­u­ate stu­dents had used pre­scrip­tion stim­u­lants for off-label use.

While many have taken a crit­i­cal eye toward the abuse of this drug, stu­dents seem to still turn to it to help con­cen­trate and get work done. As both Ferris stu­dents men­tioned, there are obvi­ous pos­i­tive effects, but many down­sides exist as well.

More infor­ma­tion on Adderall can be found on web sites such as pubmed​.gov and other med­i­cine related sources.