ABC News is hot and bothered that young people are taking the drug Adderall off-label to help them study. Let the hysterically inappropriate analogies begin!

Still, high school students are increasingly turning to the drug to help with SATs, according to Lisa Jacobson, chief executive officer of the tutoring company Inspirica.

“The reason it has come to my attention is that the parents ask me should they get it for their kid, and my answer is absolutely not. The answer is no,” she said. “It is cheating with a capital ‘C.’ “

Heiligenstein says Adderall is an academic steroid.

“It’s a very interesting parallel to what happens in athletics,” he said. “In other words, [it's] why athletes on the starting line of a race will look around and say, ‘Who’s using and who’s not. Do they have an unfair advantage?’”

Let’s see…

(A) Common, cliched, contemporary worries about kids (they’re studying too hard, they’re overworked, they’re being robbed of their childhood, they’re all on drugs).

(B) Drug war fanaticism.

(C) Fear of the unknown.

Yep. All the ingrediants for full-blown media-generated hype.

From what I can tell, the side effects of Adderall are negligible, and certainly now worse than three or four cups of coffee or a gas station packet of No-Doz — which hyper-ambitious students would likely be downing in its place.

If your kid’s grinding Adderall into powder and snorting it, well, then perhaps you have a problem. But I have a hard time getting too excited about studious high school and college students using pharmacology to help get through an all-nighter, or to get prepped for the LSAT.

As promised, I got my hands on some Provigil about six weeks ago. I took about ten tablets over the course of a month, and can report that I’d like to get my hands on some more. Increased productivity, increased concentration, less need for sleep.

I took one a day over a one or two day period when I wanted to plow through a nagging project, and it worked really well. No shakes, no cold chills, no bugs crawling on my skin since I’ve stopped, though it did get me into cocaine.

Kidding.

And the only side effect I’ve noticed is a mild decrease in appetite, which for your humble Agitator might be more of a feature than a bug these days.

But maybe I oughtta’ give this Adderall a shot.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 17th, 2004 at 4:58 pm by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.