Four years.
College students have four years to get a degree, four years to get an internship, four years to win a championship, and four years to party hard before the real world hits. Four years: that’s all we have.
College has managed to become one of the most stressful times in an individual’s life, and stress has now turned into pressure.
Consequently, students feel that, to handle this pressure, they must turn to worse, more dangerous means of handling it.
The most frequent, yet unsafe, strategy in today’s nation is the use, or abuse, of Adderall -a prescribed medication for students with ADHD, which works to help with attention, energy and awareness.
Students believe that if it can help a student with ADHD focus, it most certainly can help them.
This pressure boils down to college’s structure being similar to a competition, a game of how much students can handle. It becomes a race to gain the most accomplishments and the finish line is the end of the four years we are granted.
Within these four years, pressure can fester from a variety of sources, such as academics, sports and social life. That being said, if college is now a competition, illegally using a drug to ‘win’ should be considered cheating.
What happened to college students making a date with their laptop and a large cup of a coffee? What happened to college students drinking a big Gatorade in the locker room before game time? What happened to college students drinking a Five-Hour Energy drink before going out at night?
Today’s college system enforces immense pressure on students, so much so that kids are now certain they must go to extensive measures in order to be successful. Expectations are endless. For example, student athletes may be subjected to passing three tests, giving a superb performance in their rivalry game and going to a friend’s birthday party all in the same day, not to mention the pressures on commuters and working students. Students feel the only way to not only complete all obligations, but to be content doing so, they must turn to Adderall. Why drink a large coffee, Gatorade, or Five-Hour Energy drink when one drug can solve all three pressures, and better?
While Adderall use started as a means of merely assisting students’ academics and sports lives, it has evolved into being a party or social drug because of the euphoric “high” it produces, as well as a diet drug, by killing students’ appetites and helping them lose weight.
Students not only found the drug that makes them sincerely happy to study all night and practice all day, but they found the drug that even allows them to avoid the freshman 15. They found the answer to winning college’s battle that students have been searching for, for far too long.
Half of winning any battle in life is finding the motivation to put in the time, effort and commitment. Kids with ADHD often times lack the skills it takes to strive in these areas because of a factual chronic condition; kids without ADHD don’t. Therefore, students without ADHD utilizing this drug only enhance their motivation to a much stronger, intense and, most importantly, unethical level.
Picture college as a series of actual ongoing competitions. Although I can relay many examples, relate competition in terms of exams: picture two students taking the same test. One who is genuinely invested in the subject, and one who regularly skips class for invalid reasons. Now say grades come back, and the less invested student got 100 percent, the highest score, and the more invested, a 95 percent. Now, say the less invested took Adderall the night before, cramming in the weeks of curriculum they missed skipping class by being excessively, unusually attentive, energetic and aware to study for 15 hours straight. Now say the best grade gets an internship.
Adderall in itself may not always have the ability to become a cheating strategy if the student were to not be so successful or “win,” but putting other potential outcomes of using Adderall in certain circumstances such as this, and you can’t help but feel like college students are being cheated.
Not to mention the fact that students are also cheating themselves. Addressing the statistics of how many students become addicted to Adderall, it’s clear kids are losing the instilled desire to attain personal academic, athletic or social ambitions on their own. That is, they may, in fact, achieve personal goals, but not without Adderall.
More importantly, students are depending on those crammed hours before the test to learn all the material, leaving professors’ entire terms as a waste of time, not only because students will forget as soon as the exam is over, but because the student fails to retain any knowledge from the teacher within all those weeks prior.
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