Essay-enhancing drugs
More and more students are taking ‘smart pills’ to help boost their results in exams — but are they safe, asks Tariq Tahir in ‘The Times Online’.
Gemma is a recent Oxford University graduate. As a student of experimental psychology, she wrote three essays a week, in addition to spending 40 hours in lectures and labs. At night she worked for the student newspaper. In her final year things began to pile up but the 22-year-old was reluctant to drop any of her activities. She started taking Modafinil to make possible a life that was fast becoming impossible.
Modafinil is a stimulant most commonly prescribed as a prescription drug to treat sleeping disorders, particularly narcolepsy. But increasingly this drug, and two other stimulants, Ritalin and Adderall, are being bought illegally over the internet by high-achieving, overstretched students in British universities to sharpen their focus, concentration and memory.
Like many other high-flyers who use so-called “study” or “smart” drugs, Gemma felt a desire to be on top of her game all the time. Modafinil helped her to stay awake long enough to complete her assignments.
“I had a few American friends who regularly used Ritalin and sang its praises but I was suspicious of it,” she says. “But my friend bought some Modafinil online, said it was fantastic and could keep you awake for ever so I bought some from him.
“Taking Modafinil meant that I could just keep working. It didn’t make me any more gifted but it meant that my day lasted anything up to 36 hours.”
The other popular stimulants, Ritalin and Adderall, are legally prescribed for children who have been given a diagnosis of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). But since it has been demonstrated in scientific trials that these drugs can boost cognitive performance, their unofficial use has rocketed.
Yet, even as students pop the pills and brag about their advantages in chat rooms, some experts are asking how much damage they are doing to their bodies. Others are speculating that, if the risks are found to be slight, the use of such drugs could become the norm for the brightest, most competitive young people in our society.
Like many users Gemma soon discovered the downsides. She describes feeling shaky, although “this might just have been me not going to sleep. I didn’t feel tired and I didn’t feel hungry. It stopped my body clock. I lost all track of time and whether I was meant to be eating or not. I would have long bursts of concentration”.
More worryingly, she also experienced bouts of obsession. “One night I made 10 Facebook photo albums for no good reason other than the fact that I was set on doing it,” she says.
Tackling the problem is difficult. Figures that reveal who is taking what are not readily available. Last year the scientific journal Nature published the results of an online survey of 1,400 adults. It showed that 20% of readers had taken “smart drugs”, but no definitive figures exist on the extent of their use in British universities. Research at the University of Michigan in the United States reveals that 8% of American undergraduates have used such drugs at one time or another to improve alertness. Other studies suggest the figure could be as high as one in six.
Emmanuel Akpan-Inwang, a student union welfare officer at the London School of Economics, says that as students approach their exams at the end of the year many are experimenting with “anything that will enhance their performance. “Adderall is the most popular drug at the moment,” he reveals.
Such people include Claire, a 22-year-old final-year Cambridge University philosophy student. She opted to try Adderall, a drug that is composed of mixed amphetamine salts, in the run-up to her second-year exams last year. She had no difficulty getting hold of it.
“I was sitting around in our college rooms with friends and someone mentioned that the engineering students had this drug that they used to help them study,” she says. “A friend who was in the year above had a lot of it, which he had bought on the internet, and so he gave me some.”
She took a capsule the next day before going to the library and was delighted to sail through a highly productive session of study. “I really found my concentration levels went up,” she says. “I thought, oh wow, I’ve been sitting in the library for five hours and haven’t been distracted by people walking around like I usually am. It was very helpful.”
With her finals coming up in a few weeks, she is planning to use Adderall again to keep her concentration at peak levels. Nor are the prices prohibitive: Ritalin costs £290 for 150 10mg pills, Adderall £230 for 120 30mg capsules and Modafinil £75 for 100 200mg doses.
Information on the risks of such drugs is highly anecdotal. Users report side effects such as headaches and depression, but no definitive research has been done on the long-term effects of their use on healthy people. This in itself is worrying many, including Barbara Sahakian, professor of neuropsychology at Cambridge University. Sahakian first became interested in the drugs when, arriving jet lagged at a conference in the United States, she was offered Modafinil. After speaking to her colleagues she discovered the extent to which it, and other similar drugs, were in circulation, both among her academic peers and their students.
In a paper entitled Professor’s Little Helper, she spelt out her concerns. “The trouble is that people in the UK are getting these drugs off the internet,” she says. “That’s worrying, because you are not really sure what you are getting. And even if the drug is pure, you may have another medical condition that means you shouldn’t take it. A person having a bad reaction to one of these drugs is, I think, a horrible accident waiting to happen.”
For other academics, such as John Harris, professor of bioethics at Manchester University, it is only a matter of time before smart pills are available, without prescription, on the high street. “If these drugs are shown to be safe, I can see a time when bright, competitive people will be able to access them as easily as you can get the morning-after pill now,” he says.
Some names have been changed
http://www.timesonline.co.uk