Vermont’s problem with heroin and opiate abuse has been making headlines lately. At Middlebury College, the campus newspaper has been focusing on a different drug problem: Adderall use among students.
Kyle Finck, the editor in chief of the Middlebury Campus, has spent the past year reporting on the uses – and abuses – of Adderall for studying and partying at the liberal arts school. Finck's stories, Living in the Adderall Generation, Part 1 and Part 2, were published this month.
Finck drew on a student-led study that found that 16 percent of Middlebury students who participated use the drug illegally, while only 4 percent reported have prescriptions. Nationally, an estimated 5 to 12 percent of students use Adderall illegally.
"A good amount of students here don't have prescriptions, which creates a distinction here between prescribed and un-prescribed students, with a lot of students here saying this is just the cost of doing business at a top liberal arts school," Finck says. "That creates the dilemma of, is this kind of going to be the status quo going forward?"
Finck says that the high pressures on Middlebury students to perform academically, athletically, socially and eventually professionally drive use of the psychostimulant, which is typically prescribed to treat attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) but can easily be obtained by anyone who wants to study or party hard.
"When you look at what Middlebury and other top liberal arts school ask you to do, which is, you know, have a fit body, have a fit mind, work 20 out of the 24 hours a day, get four hours of sleep, and get up and do it again … [There's a feeling that] Adderall and psychostimulants really help."
"When you look at what Middlebury and other top liberal arts school ask you to do, which is, you know, have a fit body, have a fit mind, work 20 out of the 24 hours a day, get four hours of sleep, and get up and do it again, [there's a feeling that] Adderall and psychostimulants really help." - Kyle Finck, Middlebury "Campus" editor in chief
In some circles, Finck says, Adderall use is a socially acceptable way to cope with the pressure.
"There's tons of different … groups on campus, and some talk about it openly," he says. "I had sources who told me that they wouldn't mind, within their social group, if everybody knew [they used Adderall], because they didn't think it would be stigmatized at all. And then you start to make the transition between taking it just for studying and taking it to go out at night … You, you know, break it up and snort it and it becomes pretty much similar to cocaine. So there are similar ideas of starting at one point and evolving to different types of use."
Even though Adderall can be obtained at a pharmacy, its escalation of use can close mirror that of illegal opiates.
"There's almost a scary distinction between something people described as not dangerous because it's sold to them or given to them by someone at Kinney Drugs or Walgreen's, and it's a big pharmaceutical company that makes it, that somehow it's a lot less stigmatized, and it's perceived as not really dangerous, which to me seems problematic and a lot of administrators and experts that we talked to think it's really, really problematic."
Finck spoke to Rebecca Tiger, a sociology professor at Middlebury, about the cultural perceptions that distinguish legal drugs from illegal ones.
"Her idea is that drugs never exist outside the cultural construct that we put them in," Finck says. "And so, when you look at the difference between something like crystal meth or cocaine and Adderall, they're all relatives in terms of their makeup, chemically. But when you look at the difference between walking around campus with 10 grams of cocaine or 10 grams of crystal meth and 10 pills of Adderall, there's a huge, huge difference in terms of what people would consider is a drug dealer and what's considered being just another student at this college."
"When you look at the difference between something like crystal meth or cocaine and Adderall, they're all relatives in terms of their makeup, chemically. But when you look at the difference between walking around campus with 10 grams of cocaine ... and 10 pills of Adderall, there's a huge, huge difference in terms of what people would consider is a drug dealer and what's considered being just another student at this college."
While administrators at Middlebury have dedicated themselves to curbing the consumption of hard alcohol, Finck says he hopes they'll follow the lead of other peer institutions that have begun formally addressing the use of study drugs on campus.
"Traditionally, hard alcohol has been at the top of the list in terms of concern, and rightly so, and I think that's continued," Finck says. "But I think it's starting to get on the radar as something that at the very least is worth a conversation. You know, some peer institutions like Wesleyan have put taking prescription drugs that give you improper assistance on their student code of conduct. So we could consider putting on the [academic] Honor Code, or something like that, in terms of, "Is this really cheating?
"I think that it's something that is going to be, in the next 10 years, something that increasingly competes with hard alcohol as one of the major concerns facing elite, and probably more general institutions of higher learning," Finck says.
Finck says that because Adderall abuse has less extreme physical repercussions, it gets less attention than binge drinking.
"It's really hard for it to compete with something like hard alcohol, because you have kids going to the hospital and getting their stomachs pumped, and there isn't really that overt representation … There hasn't been that huge Black Swan type of event that's really bought it into the mainstream discourse."
The good news, Finck says, is that when students graduate and the pressures to perform become less acute, some leave their Adderall habits behind.
"Middlebury creates a very intense situation, but it's only one intense situation that you'll be in over the course of your life. And I think that one silver lining of my reporting is that when I followed students who left the college and went into all different kids of fields ... a lot of them stopped taking it. Because when they took the macro lens of their life, and they said, 'This is four years, a really intense four year period, albeit.' When they actually left college, they found that it's not worth it. So the risks just weren't worth the rewards. So not sleeping very much, or not eating, or being really moody, just wasn't worth it in the long-term calculations of, 'Is it worth taking these drugs every day?"
