With graduation quickly approaching, three major assignments and a 10-page research paper due by the end of the week, Emma is under tremendous pressure. She’s willing to do something drastic to get it all done.
Late one night, she gets her hands on a drug called Vyvanse, commonly used to treat attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD. She snorts lines of it in an empty classroom.
Snorting an amphetamine-based drug is completely out of character for Emma. She smokes marijuana regularly and occasionally drinks alcohol, but stimulants have never been her idea of a fun time. But friends told her about successfully using these drugs to get their assignments done, and Emma’s convinced it’ll help her stay focused and awake long enough to get through her work.
“It didn’t make my work better, it didn’t make it worse,” Emma remembers. “It’s not like a genius pill that’s going to automatically make you a scholar. It just makes you get your work done a bit faster, allows you to concentrate more.”
Since she first used stimulants to study last fall, Emma has used Vyvanse and Adderall on three separate occasions to finish her school work.
She isn’t alone. In a 2013 study of Canadian post-secondary students by the American College Health Association, nearly 4 per cent of students were willing to say they had used prescription stimulants that were not prescribed to them.
Exam time is the high-octane season. A study done by the U.S. National Survey on Drug Use and Health in 2015 found students were most likely to try prescription stimulants for the first time during exam months.
Students who misuse ADHD medication are also typically low achievers. A report from the Society for the Study of Addiction says “students who earned a B or lower grade-point average were almost two times more likely to report non-medical use compared to students who earned a B+ or higher.”
Students may believe the perks of using study drugs are worthwhile, but there are definite consequences. Loss of appetite, insomnia, dehydration and a nasty “come-down” when the drugs wear off are some of the known downsides, but the long-term effects of many of these drugs are unknown.
Michelle Arnot, a senior lecturer in the department of pharmacology and toxicology at the University of Toronto, says people who use drugs non-medically won’t actually gain the same benefits as someone who needs them for a disorder such as ADHD.
“There’s not a lot of data that suggests there is any cognitive enhancement. You hear the words ‘smart drugs,’ ‘nootropics’ and ‘cognitive enhancers,’ but we’re not really seeing this, in a healthy population at least, from the stimulants,” says Arnot.
And what about the potential for addiction?
“I don’t know anyone who has used to a point where it was out of control in terms of addiction,” says Emma. “I don’t want to fail – I want to graduate.”
Some people have enough self-control to not abuse these drugs, but others struggle. Bridgette says she began taking Adderall, Biphentin and Modafinil in high school and can’t go a day without using. She doesn’t have ADHD.
She was 16 the first time she took Adderall to study for exams in subjects related to a field her family pressured her to go into.
“My dad is an engineer, my mom’s a doctor, and my sister graduated from the same program, so I had to take [science courses] even though it was never my strength. It was a lot of pressure to make sure I passed the class,” she says.
Brigitte fully admits she has an addictive personality but doesn’t see a problem with using study drugs. Despite knowing the negative effects of abusing ADHD medications and the lack of research supporting their study-enhancing properties, she believes they improve her work.
“My work’s better, for sure ,because you have more time to edit your stuff. With writing, you get things done more quickly. When you don’t have that time, it’s a struggle to write every sentence. It’s a struggle to flow. [With the drugs] I tend to read faster and don’t have to reread a sentence to understand what the writer is trying to say. There’s less distraction in my head,” she says.
Brigitte insists that if she were to stop using study drugs, she wouldn’t be able to graduate. She has a difficult time paying attention in class and often becomes distracted by her phone, classmates and general surroundings. In her mind, Adderall and other study drugs have saved her academic career.
“I still haven’t found a better way to focus than Adderall. I think it’s the rush from it. You can’t stop until you do [your work]. Everything that’s thrown at you, you’ve just got to do it. Once you finish something, you want to do something else. You want to have something to focus on and to think about,” she says.
These drugs may be able to increase focus and wakefulness, but Arnot is quick to point out that students are highly unlikely to retain the information they’re trying to learn while on them.
“We’ve seen that at any time when you walk out of a lecture, you retain only a small percentage of what was actually taught and have to go back and reinforce that material. So if you’re not doing the long-term work to retain the information, plus you’re not sleeping or reducing your sleep, you’re going to have significant deficits with respect to memory,” says Arnot.
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