Everyone is aware that if you were up at 3am writing this paper it isn't going to be as good as it could have been. He explained, "At Harvard, at the most basic level, they aim to do better than they would have otherwise. In fact, he said, "it's often people" - mainly guys - "who are looking in some way to compensate for activities that are detrimental to their performance". When you conceive of what you have to do for school, it's not in terms of nine to five but in terms of what you can physically do in a week while still achieving a variety of goals - social, romantic, extracurricular, CV-building, academic."Īlex was eager to dispel the notion that students who took Adderall were "academic automatons who are using it in order to be first in their class". Alex was happy enough to talk about his frequent use of Adderall at Harvard, but he didn't want to see his name in print he's involved with an internet start-up and worried that potential investors might disapprove of his habit.Īfter we had ordered beers he said: "One of the most impressive features of being a student is how aware you are of a 24-hour work cycle. He was ingratiating and articulate, and smoked cigarettes with an ironic air of defiance. Skinny and bearded, and wearing faded hipster jeans, he looked like the lead singer in an indie band. I met Alex one evening last summer, at an appealingly scruffy bar in the New England city where he lives. He fell asleep until noon, waking "in time to polish my first paper and hand it in". At eight the next morning he attended a meeting of his student organisation he felt like "a zombie" and went back to his room. Alex then "took an extended-release Adderall" and worked productively on the paper all night. At eight he attended a two-hour meeting "with a group focused on student mental health issues". The drug, along with a steady stream of caffeine, helped him to concentrate during classes and meetings, but he noticed some odd effects at a morning tutorial, he explained to me in an email, "I alternated between speaking too quickly and thoroughly on some subjects and feeling awkwardly quiet during other points of the discussion." Lunch was a blur: "It's always hard to eat much when on Adderall." That afternoon he went to the library, where he spent "too much time researching a paper rather than actually writing it - a problem that is common to all intellectually curious students on stimulants". Minutes after waking on Monday, around 7.30am, he swallowed some "immediate-release" Adderall. In his second year, he persuaded the doctor to add a 30mg "extended-release" capsule to his daily regime.Īlex recalled one week during his junior year when he had four term papers due. During his college years, Alex took 15mg of Adderall most evenings, usually after dinner, guaranteeing that he would maintain intense focus while losing "any ability to sleep for approximately eight to 10 hours". His brother had received a diagnosis of ADHD, and in his first year as an undergraduate Alex obtained an Adderall prescription for himself by describing to a doctor symptoms that he knew were typical of the disorder. (Such use is "off label", meaning that it does not have the approval of either the drug's manufacturer or the FDA, America's Food and Drug Administration.) College campuses have become laboratories for experimentation with neuroenhancement, and Alex was an ingenious experimenter. But in recent years Adderall and Ritalin, another stimulant, have been adopted as cognitive enhancers: drugs that high-functioning, overcommitted people take to become higher-functioning and more overcommitted. Since, in essence, this life was impossible, Alex began taking Adderall to make it possible.Īdderall, a stimulant composed of mixed amphetamine salts, is commonly prescribed for children and adults who have been given a diagnosis of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). "Trite as it sounds," he told me, it seemed important to "maybe appreciate my own youth". Weeknights were devoted to all the schoolwork he couldn't finish during the day, and weekend nights were spent drinking with friends and going to parties. He also ran a student organisation, for which he often worked more than 40 hours a week when he wasn't working, he had classes. As a history major, Alex wrote about a dozen papers a term. A young man I'll call Alex recently graduated from Harvard.
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