The adventures of an Adderall enthusiast

A journal called n + 1 recently featured a great first-person account of a college student's experiences using Adderall as a tool to assist with learning. Her tale is nuanced and well-reported, a nice "slice of life" tale that illuminates how this drug has escaped into the wild and is having a variety of unintended effects - many of them arguably beneficial, most of them clearly variable per person who decides to take the plunge.

The feeling begins about twenty minutes after you take the pill: a mental tightening, as though someone had refined your scope of vision into a narrow and penetrating line. All peripheral distractions disappear (you would make a very poor hunter or soccer player). There is a slight fluttering of the heart, and gentle, persistent waves of warmth that are not distracting unless it is hot outside. This is how I experienced Adderall; some people have panic attacks and others feel nothing at all.

Any actual amount of time spent under the influence is hard to describe, because time passes very quickly. It's a euphoric drug, but also an alienating one. If I took a pill with my morning coffee, it would wear off by early evening. All of my work for the coming week would be finished, and I could take an aspirin, shower, and go to bed. Having missed the transition from day to night as well as all three meals, my dreams would be hysterical, but I always woke the next day feeling chipper and accomplished.

By the end of her account, the student has progressed into a senior year relying on nothing more elaborate than caffeine and a vague sense that this is a superior plateau for studying. Of course, one could assume that by the time her senior year had rolled around, the rigors of academic pursuit had become familiar in ways that allowed her to achieve equal results without using the drugs; couldn't you call that a clearly successful use of the drugs as a tool in the first place? Additionally, many of the people I know who regularly use drugs of many varieties for many kinds of reasons often choose periods of abstinence as a counterbalance. It just seems to make sense.

The upshot, though, is that we continue to see articulate, intelligently reasoned accounts of this variety, whether for Adderall and Ritalin, or more recently Provigil, that help contribute clarity to what still amounts to a "wild west" situation when it comes to so-called "cognitive enhancers." The genie is clearly out of the bottle with these drugs, and the reasons people are taking them; it has become much harder to castigate a generation of Ivy League graduates and academics of stalwart repute into believing that they are somehow the enemies in our ramshackle war on drugs. The times, they are a-changin' - the next act of this story has hardly even begun.