Photo by Stephanie Scott
Last December during finals week, Helen went on a “study bender.”
Like she does often when it comes down to crunch time, Helen, then a junior interior design major, took Adderall to help her make it through a mountain of stress-inducing projects.
“When you take Adderall, it makes it so you’re really focused on what you’re doing,” she says. Coffee doesn’t help – it doesn’t make her concentrate, only stay awake. “If I’ve taken Adderall, I can turn on my iPod and get in the zone.”
But the bender turned into a marathon.
After four days and no sleep, Helen started to feel the side effects. When her jaw locked up, she chewed gum. An occasional cigarette break dampened her shakes for a little, but they never disappeared. Eventually, she can’t remember when, she passed a threshold.
“At that point, I was hallucinating and not there. That’s really unhealthy and I wouldn’t recommend it,” she says. “If I were a normal person, I would be concerned.”
A few months later during mid-terms, Helen went on another bender, taking at least one time-release pill – which can keep her awake for up to 11 hours at a time – every day for three weeks. She recently transferred from Colorado State University to Front Range Community College in Fort Collins, but chose to remain anonymous because she uses Adderall without a prescription.
“I wouldn’t say I’m addicted to Adderall because I don’t take it on a daily basis,” she says, mentioning that she only buys and keeps 2 to 3 pills at a time. “I just take one when I need to study. It’s like steroids.”
And Helen is not alone.
Adderall, a stimulant used to treat Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder, is breaking the stereotype that drug abuse is always recreational. A 2008 study by the National Institute of Drug Abuse looked at over 35 years of drug trends and found college students are twice as likely to abuse prescription stimulants as their peers outside of college.
“I believe prescription drugs can be very dangerous and there’s a reason they are controlled,” says Mari Strombom, the acting director of residence life at CSU. “It concerns me when people are using prescription drugs to self-medicate. I believe there is the potential for future harm.”
Not only is Adderall abuse seen as acceptable, but the pills are also more readily available than ever. The FDA estimates around 30 million Adderall prescriptions were written in the U.S. between 1999 and 2003, more than any other country.
Research suggests that Adderall abuse is a cultural phenomenon. A 2005 report in the journal “Addiction” found connections between a high-stress college environment and Adderall abuse. At institutions with strict admissions standards, such as Ivy League schools, the usage rate was as high as 25 percent – a number that continues to grow.
Beyond Adderall and the Study Hall
Adderall is just one aspect of the legal drug culture. Prescription drug abuse is a growing trend across college campuses and the United States as a whole. According to the 2009 National Collegiate Health Assessment, an annual survey of over 80,000 college students, nearly 13 percent of students reported that they abused prescription drugs, the third most commonly used substances behind alcohol and marijuana.
“We’ve definitely seen an increase [in prescription drug abuse] in the past 10 years,” says Jim Weber, director of the DAY Program, a substance abuse counseling program at CSU. “It’s much more acceptable to this current generation.”
From 1999 to 2004, the number of young adults aged 15 to 24 who died from unintentional overdose nearly doubled, according to a 2007 report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Of the drugs used, most were prescription painkillers like OxyContin – heroin’s legal equivalent – which Weber claims can be the most addictive.
“Its perceived safety is equal to risk,” Weber says. “Culturally, there’s this divide. We don’t see pills as bad. This contributes to this false sense of safety and security that says ‘It’s safe because a doctor gave it to me.’”
Along with depressants like Xanax, stimulants and painkillers make up a trifecta of the most highly abused prescriptions. Adderall and OxyContin are both classified as schedule II narcotics by the Drug Enforcement Administration, sharing a place alongside cocaine and methamphetamine.
Despite the numbers, education and research efforts targeting college students have been few and far between. The NCHA only recently included specific questions about prescriptions – much as they have done with alcohol and marijuana since the survey began in 2000 – making it difficult to draw any broad, long-term conclusions about student abuse.
After participating since 2003, CSU stopped giving the NCHA survey to everyone but student athletes in the spring of 2008 – the same semester prescription drug questions were introduced.
“We just wanted behavioral data about our students,” says Debra Morris, a health educator with the CSU Health Network who helped administer the survey. “Why are prescription drugs not included? I just don’t know. So many students come to university with prescription drugs, and other people will want to use them to stay awake longer. So yes, I think it’s a concern.”
The Other Side of Prescription Addiction
Eric Lintz, a detective with the CSU Police Department and Northern Colorado Drug Task Force, claims that even at the law enforcement level, prescription drugs are not a hot topic.
“It’s not fancy, it’s not glamorous,” Lintz says. “Someone in the office says, “I’m going to get a guy with three grams of coke,’ compared to ‘I’m going to buy three grams of pills.’ It’s not the same. It’s not sexy.”
In the past twelve months, Lintz claims that around a dozen college-aged students were arrested for selling heroin to undercover officers in Northern Colorado. Heroin is a cheap alternative to the more expensive prescription opioids.
“These kids at one time were majoring in school,” Lintz says. “But as they drop out they still have to eat and still have to live, so they go to the only thing they know. And that’s selling drugs.”
The 2005 “Addiction” study adds weight to Lintz’s experience. It found that students who abused prescription stimulants were 20 times more likely to use cocaine and 10 times more likely to use marijuana.
“If you’re doing something that doesn’t require brain power but just focus, my friends and I will smoke weed,” Helen admits, saying that marijuana is better than cigarettes for counteracting the side effects of Adderall. In addition, she has taken Xanax, ecstasy, Ambien and acid.
Despite its perceived prevalence on a college campus, prescription drug abuse at CSU is hardly documented. David McKelfresh, the executive director of assessment and research for the division of student affairs, and Pam McCracken, the communications director for the CSU Health Network, both say the university is not collecting data on prescription drug abuse by CSU students.
“When it comes to feeding the mind or feeding the addiction, the addiction wins,” Lintz believes.
For now, Weber is the main point of contact for students who have struggled with abuse. A point he stresses to students is that taking drugs without a prescription is a felony, no matter how they are taken or sold.
“They’re safe if used in accordance with how they’re prescribed,” Lintz says. Like several officials, he relates prescription drug education efforts to alcohol in the wake of Sam Spady’s death in 2004 – as reactionary. “I think the problem is bigger than even law enforcement recognizes. I hope it doesn’t take someone OD’ing for the community to wake up to the problem.”
When asked if she could make it through finals without the help of Adderall, Helen hesitates.
“None of it’s safe, obviously, but when I take it I know I’m not going to die,” she says. “Everything other than Adderall I take recreationally. And I don’t do that often. I could do finals week [without it], but why would I want to? It would be counter-productive.”
Tags: adderall, college students, Colorado State University, heroin, oxycontin, prescription drug abuse, Volume 5 issue 3
