What I'd Tell My High School Self

Well, first of all, high school me, girls are interested in you. You’re just too socially inept to see it. You’ll learn in college that if you go up to a girl and ask her out, she’ll probably say yes.

But whether or not you date in high school doesn’t really matter. In fact, there’s a lot to be said for waiting until you’re an adult to date. Once you lose your virginity and get rid of stigma associated with it, people don’t really care how experienced you are with relationships - though maybe they should. But you know who does care how experienced you are? Employers.

I don’t like the victim mentality that the current recession has cultivated in my generation. But at the same time, I have a hard time arguing with it. While unemployment has been dropping since its peak in 2009, more than half the jobs that were lost in the recession still haven’t been recovered. And there’s no question that my generation has been paying the price for it. With so many people out of work, employers have no reason to take a chance on a recent graduate when they could hire the out of work 40-year-old with the same degree and 20 years more experience who’s applying for the same entry-level position. Only 51% of people who graduated college since 2006 have a full-time job, and while unemployment is at 7.6% overall, it’s twice that for the 20-24 age bracket. Those who are working are working for less, and in jobs outside their chosen field that may not even require a degree. And all this at a time when college costs are higher than ever and steadily rising, with student loan debt climbing to meet it.

In one of the animated Peanuts specials, Lucy asks Charlie Brown: if their team loses, is it the fault of the coach, or the fault of the players? Over at Cracked, John Cheese seems to think it’s the coach’s fault, blaming his own generation for the way mine turned out. He makes a lot of good points, but I’d like to focus on #4.

If I could go back in time to high school, the first thing I’d do is ask my crush out. The second thing I’d do is get a job. I’m all about education, but grades - especially high school grades - are less important than we’re led to believe. So instead of focusing on my studies - not that I did that the first time around, either, I cruised through high school, content with the A’s and B’s I got from the modicum of effort I put in - I’d take all the free time I had and invest it in a job. And a girlfriend.

I was taught, implicitly, at least, that there was a natural order to growing up. If you did well in high school, you would get into a good college. And if you did well in college, you’d get a job in your chosen field after you graduated. So come my junior year, after much procrastination, I applied to a few colleges. It occurred to me only once that there were things to do other than go to college, but I didn’t really know what those things were. After I chose from the even smaller number of colleges that accepted me - two of the schools on my list were Yale and Harvard, because they were schools I’d heard of - my dad and stepmom sat me down and told me that college was an investment, and asked me if I was sure this was what I wanted. What the hell was I supposed to say? Going to college was what you did after high school. The fancy, posh K-12 private school my parents had paid over $10,000 a year for me to attend from the time I was six specifically advertised itself as “college prep”. My whole life had been geared towards college. So after a modicum of thought, I said that yes, this was what I wanted.

I was 17 at the time. As The Last Psychiatrist puts it, I was at an age where I could have killed someone and not been held criminally responsible. I selected my expensive private university because I had Googled “good schools for physics”, “good schools for biology”, and “good schools for computer science” and it had been on all three of the lists I got from ask.com and Yahoo! Answers. Plus, it was in Florida and they had a jungle on campus, which was cool. I eventually decided to major in biology, not because I thought a biology degree was a good investment, or even because I was particularly enthusiastic about becoming a biologist, but because AP Biology had been the class I’d enjoyed the most in high school.

What was my dad thinking, trusting a 17-year-old to decide how to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars? The only thing I knew about being a biologist was what I’d seen in movies - tromping through the wilderness, collecting samples and having adventures. Why do kids want to be firefighters and astronauts when they grow up? Because those are the jobs they see in the movies. And a lot of us never grow out of that. When I took an EMT-B certification course after deciding to switch from biology to pre-med (turns out that after you go on your wilderness expedition you have to come back and crunch the numbers on the data you gathered, then write an exhaustively detailed report on them with dozens of citations), one of the kids who was failing the class told me he was going to switch to fire school because he’d “rather just pump water”. We have no idea what any job really entails. How could we? Sure, we could have shadowed someone in the profession or gotten an internship back in high school, but no one encouraged us to do these things. Instead, it was all about sports, volunteering, and other extracurriculars - we were constantly pressured about making an effort to ensure that we got into a good college, and absolutely no one took the time to talk to us about what came after that.

And what comes after… hoo. We were told to chase our dreams, but besides being left alone for the entertainment industry to tell us what to dream about, no one dared tell us if we had no real hope of realizing those dreams. There was a kid at my high school who was in every fall play and every spring musical. He wanted to major in theater in college and become an actor. There was just one small problem: he couldn’t act his way out of a paper bag. Did anyone ever tell him that? I doubt it. It wouldn’t have been polite. Did anyone let him know that even if he was talented, he could join a small-time improv group and take lessons on the side and, after four years, be tens of thousands of dollars richer and just as likely to get a role? Probably not; who would ever encourage a high schooler not to go to college? Getting a degree in your chosen field is what you do after high school. And did anyone ever point out to him that more people graduate with theater degrees every two years than there are jobs in the field? Almost certainly not. We told him to chase his dream, and whenever there was a chance he might realize that he was wasting tens of thousands of dollars and years of his life, we encouraged him to keep going with stories about how the Beatles were told they had no future in show business, or how Harrison Ford was so unsuccessful that he quit acting to install cabinets until he was discovered by George Lucas. (The story about Einstein from that link isn’t even true.)

But everyone (except the hundreds of thousands of people studying to be actors, apparently) knows that it’s almost impossible to get into the entertainment industry. And it should come as no surprise that anyone looking to get into the humanities is screwed too. Even scientists are having a tough time of it - all of academia is hosed, especially the psych majors, who have the only degree even more worthless than fine arts. Think you can avoid all that by deciding to become something prestigious, like a lawyer? Think again. Even people going into engineering or medicine, held up as degrees that are virtually guaranteed to get you a job, face a highly uncertain future. I could go on, or you could just look for yourself.

So am I saying that I’d tell my high school self not to go to college? Not at all, you need a bachelor’s degree to be a McDonald’s cashier these days. But the degree he’ll spend tens of thousands of dollars of his parents’ money getting is nothing more than a piece of paper proving to a potential employer that he’s (probably) not an idiot - it’s not the golden ticket to a job of his choice that we’re all taught that it is. More people have degrees now than ever, and a lot of them are looking for work. That’s why I’d tell myself to get a job - because employers don’t care about your GPA or what clubs you were in nearly as much as they care about whether you’ve shown the initiative to get a job and done that job well. Your college, on the other hand, doesn’t care if you have a job, but high GPAs and a variety of student-run clubs help them attract more students who are willing to give them money. That’s why they have programs to help bring your grades up and the University 101 class all freshmen are required to take probably requires you to join a club. But work experience is the only thing that can really set you apart from the 1.5 million people who graduate with bachelor’s degrees and start looking for work every year. (Nota bene: 1.5 million is many times greater than the corresponding number of yearly retirements.)

Further, I’d tell high school me to cough up the money for the National Association of Colleges and Employers’ Job Outlook report - he’s about to hand over a small fortune of his parents’ money, $50 to make sure it’s a good investment is perfectly reasonable - and to look at how many people are employed in the relevant fields, whether that number is going up or down and by how much, and how many people are graduating with the degree every year. Then look up the numbers for the specific job he wants (free here) and to think hard about whether he has any real chance of getting his dream job - see above - with this degree. 

I realize that these statistics were just as available when I was 17 as they are now. Maybe someone even politely suggested I look at them. But for the love of God, why is this information not handed out to every high school student? Why was it not written in tiny letters on a sledgehammer and beaten into our skulls? Why, in the entirety of the College 101 course all juniors at my prestigious college prep school took, did they never impress on us the importance of why we were going to college instead of treating it as an end in itself? Why, when I thought I wanted to go to a hippie school that only offered degrees in Human Ecology (whatever that is) did my parents not reveal their concern until after I told them I had already changed my mind? Why is it so fucking easy for colleges to dupe students into paying for worthless degrees?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all about education, about learning and striving to better yourself. But even if forking over a small fortune to a university is the best way to do that (Besides libraries, did you know that a lot of Ivy League schools offer their lectures and course materials for free online? Check out Coursera and edX.), the world doesn’t care what you know, or who you are. It only cares about what you can do for it, or rather, what you do do for it, and many degrees don’t enable you to do much that the world finds valuable. I’m a rather intelligent individual (quite modest, too), and my entire life I’ve been led to believe that because I was smart, my success was guaranteed. One individual who I had never met before sat down at a table with me and casually mentioned that I looked “really smart” and was obviously going places in life. What was I doing while he was telling me this? Taking a hit off of a bong. (Note to any potential employers that may be reading this: I no longer do drugs.) We’ve been taught for so long that it’s what’s on the inside that counts, that everyone has a unique talent (not a skill acquired by training and practice, an innate talent) to contribute, that we have taken it to heart and learned to judge people by everything but their actions. 

But there’s clearly some cognitive dissonance at work here, because we don’t act on these judgements. And again, actions are all that matters. People will tell you that you’re a great person - perhaps they’ll even mean it - but you don’t get invited to parties or asked on dates because people like you, you receive these invitations if and only if the qualities they like are reflected in actions that make them like being around you. And people are even more stingy with their money than with invitations. No employer is going to give me a job just for being smart, or you a job just for having a degree, just like nobody is going to pay a mechanic just for having tools - the mechanic only gets paid if he has the right tools to fix somebody’s car, and knows how to use them. I have an amazing set of tools in my head, but nobody ever taught me how to use them in a way that benefits anyone. My parents paid a private school hundreds of thousands of dollars to stuff my head full of facts. They probably saw the statistics the school advertises on their website. Right now, the stats describe the class of 2010. 100% of them got into college. 13% of them were named Illinois State Scholars. 47% were inducted into the National Honor Society, and 16% into “the prestigious Cum Laude Society”. There is nothing on there about what percentage of the class of 2008 has successfully graduated college and found a job in their chosen field.

So here I am, class of 2009, watching my friends from college discuss their job interviews with prestigious companies on Facebook. I had the arrogance to consider some of these people less intelligent than myself, but while they are preparing to graduate, I am lounging about about my mother’s house, unemployable (or so I tell myself, I haven’t applied for a job in months) and struggling to convince myself that I am accomplishing something of note and acquiring a valuable skill by reading and writing articles and books, as if the world needs another wannabe philosopher. And before you mention it, yes, I recognize the hypocrisy in criticizing the boy from my high school for chasing his dream of becoming an actor while I pretend that I have what it takes to be a writer.

I fully accept the blame for my own hubris, but I have to ask: why was it not drilled into my head from the time I stepped into preschool that there was more to becoming successful than simply being intelligent? Why do we praise kids for being smart (what they are) instead of for working hard (what they do), when studies have shown that kids who are praised for being smart are less likely to apply themselves? If anyone ever told me that I was squandering my potential by spending my high school afternoons playing Puzzle Pirates and World of Warcraft, their voice was drowned out in the sea of compliments and praise I received from my classmates, teachers, and parents. The only advice I remember getting was the occasional mention in my student evaluations that I could stand to apply myself more in class. Despite acing every test and assignment in the course and showing tremendous enthusiasm for the subject, my high school computer science teacher never told me that I clearly had potential and that I should make use of it by taking up programming as a hobby - in fact, he specifically discouraged me from taking the Computer Science AP Test, since it contained material that hadn’t been covered in the course (and, he didn’t say, it would make the school look bad if I failed it). The world told me that I already had everything I needed to get ahead. I am only now realizing that it lied.

I said at the very beginning of this article that I dislike the victim mentality that the recession has fostered in my generation. You’ve probably forgotten this, since I then spent the rest of the article painting myself as a victim. But while I can’t go back in time and set my high school self straight, I can do something about the consequences of his mistakes. I’m going back to college (again, you need a bachelor’s degree to work at McDonald’s now), but instead of forking over a small fortune to a private university, I’m going to my local community college, and I’ve actually put some effort into deciding on a major: computer science, which is what I would have done in the first place if I had had any clue what being a biologist actually entailed. 

But more importantly, I’m not going to treat college like it’s the same thing as an education. Even if it were true that if I did everything they expected of me there would be a guaranteed job waiting for me at the end, I am more than my (future) job, and so are you, high school me. You pay the college money, and they give you a piece of paper certifying that you’re not too stupid or lazy to pass their courses. Unless you love the shit out of your job, what you do in the classroom or at the office doesn’t matter. It should matter, but it doesn’t. What matters is what you do because you want to become a better person, not what you do because it’s expected of you. I’m not going to stop writing, but I am going to set aside a few hours of my 24/7 free time to re-learn Python and Java, and take a CompSci 101 course on Coursera or EDX. 

There’s a path laid out for us, but if you follow that path, picking fruits, flowers and vegetables as you go, at the end of the journey you’ll have nothing more to offer than everyone else who followed that path, who did what was expected of them and nothing more. The people who recognized that there were rare plants to be found just off the beaten path are the ones who will succeed. And everyone I’ve ever met has been convinced that I’m going to succeed. I’d say that it would be a shame to let them down, but that would be missing the point of everything I’ve written. Going back to college, and studying independently, isn’t about meeting the expectations of my friends and family, or even my teachers or future employers. I went to college the first time because it was what I was expected to do, and look where that got me. The changes I’m making now are about me, about becoming the sort of person that people will respect not for who I am, but for what I do. Because that’s all that matters. People will give you respect for who you are, but that’s all they’ll give you. Love, friendship, gainful employment - these things only come from giving people something they can’t get from other people. 

That, high school me, is why you should get a job. I’ve been focusing a lot on the economic rewards, but it’s more than that. You want girls to be interested in you? Again, they already are, but they’ll be even more interested in you if you can ace every test without studying and hold down a job - and not just because it means you can take them out on expensive dates. You could be a very responsible person - you’re not, but you could be - but that doesn’t count for anything if you have nothing to be responsible for. Nobody talks to you because you don’t talk to them. They like you, but they don’t invite you to parties because you never do anything to make them enjoy being around you. So stop basking in the praise of having everyone around you tell you you’re smart. If you keep relying on who you are and not what you do, one day a cute girl from your organic chemistry class is going to ask you to help her study, and after half an hour of bullshitting explanations (because your ego won’t let you admit that you don’t know what you’re talking about) she’s going to say “Geez, I thought you were smart.” and leave. Stop listening to the people who praise you because you’re going places in life, and instead do everything you can to make them start praising you because you’re already there.

Evolution and the Veil of Ignorance

I’d like to begin by explaining three concepts. The first concept is reciprocal altruism. It is often summed up as “I’ll scratch your back, you scratch mine”, but this is an oversimplification. There is no conscious expectation of reciprocation involved. Unconscious bacteria exhibit reciprocal altruism by producing substances, collectively referred to as biofilms, that protect not only themselves but also the bacteria around them, with the “expectation” that in return for this expenditure of energy, the other bacteria in the biofilm will also expend energy producing these substances. Similarly, the one conscious species whose thought processes we can reliably analyze - humans - do not generally keep tally sheets of how much they have done for someone and how much they expect in return. While we will forsake a friend who abuses our generosity, the vast majority of the favors we do are not done with any conscious expectation of reward. Nor is our altruism limited to friends who are capable of helping us in return; we also give money to beggars we will never see again, and even donate to organizations that help faceless, nameless people on other continents who will never know that we helped them, let alone be able to repay us.

The second concept I’d like to discuss is natural selection. You probably already have a working knowledge of this, so I would simply like to address a common misconception: natural selection operates at the level of genes, not individuals or species. It is often said, even by scientists who should know better, that an organism performs a particular behavior “for the good of the species”. This is not the case. Species are not selected for, genes are. A possible rebuttal to this “for the good of the species” talk is that individuals only act for the good of the species when doing so benefits themselves, as in reciprocal altruism. But again, this is not quite true. Individuals are not selected for either, genes are. This is the reason for the second form of altruism, kin selection, in which an individual makes sacrifices for the benefit of its close relatives, or rather, for the benefit of the genes they share with these close relatives. The most extreme example of this is eusocial insects. The vast majority of ants, bees, and termites are infertile; they will never be able to pass on their genes. Instead, their lives are devoted to helping pass on the genes they share with their fertile relatives, particularly the queen(s) but also for the males who inseminate her.

The final concept is the veil of ignorance, a philosophical technique for determining the morality of a practice or policy. Pretend, for a moment, that you know absolutely nothing about yourself. You do not know your race, your gender, your religion, how wealthy or influential your parents were, your strengths and weaknesses, your opinions, anything. Knowing absolutely nothing about yourself, and therefore nothing about what your life will be like, would you support, for instance, slavery? Would you find this institution desirable, not knowing whether you yourself would be a slave or a master? Would you support a theocratic government, not knowing whether or not you would believe in the official religion? Would you support disability payments, not knowing whether you would be receiving them or paying them?

Now to tie it all together: natural selection operates from behind the veil of ignorance. It has no “knowledge” of the future. When a group of genes have been selected to be passed on, natural selection knows nothing about the creature they will create, whether it will be strong or weak, smart or stupid, fast or slow. In the case of humans, it has no knowledge of whether it will be rich or poor. All that natural selection can do is select for genes that program the host for a general series of behaviors that will result in those genes being passed on. And in humans, genes for altruism have been selected for. Obviously natural selection is not a conscious entity; I have referred to it as if it were such as a simplification. But nevertheless, it has come to a conclusion: a gene pool that contains genes for altruistic behavior is superior, in terms of how likely those genes are to be passed on, to a genome whose genes encourage selfish behavior.

It is often said that science does not make moral judgements. This is true, but as a utilitarian, I believe that it is only through the scientific study of a particular action’s consequences that we can arrive at an objective judgement about the morality of that action. As such, that we have been programmed by natural selection to help others has very real moral implications: genes that produce altruistic behavior are more likely to be passed on than genes for selfishness, and since organisms are nothing more than the sum of their genes, what is good for the survival of our genes is, with a fair number of exceptions, good for us. And since a group is nothing more than a collection of individuals, what is good for an individual is, again with exceptions, good for the group. Natural selection has decided, from behind the veil of ignorance, that a species that gives help to those who need it is better off than an identical species whose individuals look out only for themselves. We would do well to heed its lesson.

Study Drugs

I am writing this under the influence of Adderall. I have a prescription for 20 milligrams a day, a relatively small dose.

I do not have ADHD. Instead, I suffer from depression. Adderall is not approved to treat depression; it was prescribed to me “off-label”, that is, for uses other than those which the FDA has approved it for. Depression decreases motivation and concentration - two symptoms that it has in common with ADHD. After struggling for months to so much as fill out a volunteer application, I asked my psychiatrist for something to help me concentrate. “Like Adderall,” I suggested. I had never tried the drug before, but its reputation for increasing productivity is well known.

I left that day not with a prescription for Adderall, but for an antidepressant that was known to aid in concentration. I filled the prescription and added it to my daily regimen of psychiatric medications. 

My concentration increased, but I concentrated on the wrong things. Instead of becoming more productive, I found myself more likely to brood on the very things that caused my depression: past wrongs and my personal failings. I found myself becoming angry with very little provocation. My mood and self-esteem dropped. When I returned to my psychiatrist and told him why I had stopped taking the medication, he thought for a moment. “Okay, we can try the Adderall.”

At first, I noticed no effects. I still found it hard to motivate myself. My behavior did not change until one day, I decided to pick up a book. I used to be an avid reader, but lately I had found it difficult to read anything more than a few pages before feeling the urge to do something more immediately gratifying.

But on that day, I read for hours, captivated by the narrative. Finding myself able to enjoy reading again, I began trying other things I used to enjoy as well. I found all of them to be engaging and rewarding. I began to find joy in my writing again. Instead of looking at pictures of cute dogs on Reddit, I played with my own. My interests changed; no longer was the internet used to deliver an endless stream of funny pictures, instead, I began to devour articles about a variety of topics, including several about the use of “study drugs” like Adderall, motivating me to write this article about my own experience.

Adderall was not a miracle cure. In fact, a recent study on people without ADHD found that those who took Adderall scored no differently than those who took a placebo on tests that measured concentration, intelligence, or memory. The only significant difference between the two groups was in their response to a question they were asked at the end regarding how much they felt the drug had helped them in the tests. Those who had taken the real deal rated the drug’s impact on their performance as much higher than those who were given a placebo. This mirrors my experience perfectly. Adderall does not make you better at what you are doing, it simply makes you more engaged in the task.

It still takes effort to tear myself away from the computer to do research, or finally fill out that volunteer application I alluded to. But the stimulant’s effects have freed me from my dependence on immediate gratification. Aware of this, it came as no surprise when I learned that one of Adderall’s effects is an increase in the brain’s access to dopamine, a neurotransmitter that causes feelings of pleasure - and also greatly responsible for addiction.

There is a tendency, even among psychologists and psychiatrists, to shy away from classifying gambling problems and excessive use of pornography as addictions, terming them “compulsive behaviors” and reserving the word addiction for drug abuse. But there is at least one common thread tying these behaviors together: they all cause the release of dopamine. My addiction, or compulsive behavior, was the internet. An endless supply of funny videos and pictures, providing entertainment without requiring any sort of thought or mental exertion, and available at the click of of a mouse. But with Adderall providing me with the dopamine fix I normally got online, the barriers to engaging in productive work were significantly lowered. 

Knowing this, could Adderall be used to treat addiction, by freeing dopamine junkies who get their fix from drugs, sex, or gambling from their dependence on these substances and behaviors? I don’t know. A search of the scientific literature for any variation on “Adderall treatment addiction” returned only results about addiction to Adderall itself. Changing “Adderall” to “stimulant” and adding the word “gambling” did yield one study showing that the stimulant modafinil, another dopamine releasing agent, reduces the desire to gamble in high-impulsivity pathological gamblers - while increasing the same desire in pathological gamblers with low impulsivity.

It was rather predictable that a search for “Adderall” and “addiction” would yield mostly articles related to Adderall addiction. Concerns about stimulants and their use as “study drugs” are being raised from all corners. In February, the New York Times ran a front-page article about Richard Fee, who developed an addiction to the drug after first being exposed to it in college. After returning home, he obtained a diagnosis of ADHD - a ten-minute process of filling out an easily-falsified questionnaire. Armed with a diagnosis from a reputable physician, he found no shortage of psychiatrists willing to prescribe him increasingly large amounts of Adderall to feed his habit, even after warnings from his parents and clear evidence of psychiatric breakdown - which ultimately led him to commit suicide.

What happened to Richard Fee is tragic, and calls into question whether psychiatrists can be relied on to prescribe potentially dangerous drugs responsibly. But I fear that the story will turn popular opinion against the use of a drug that has great potential and, as the article notes, is non-addictive and not harmful when used properly. Richard would take “four or five” 50 milligram pills at a time, and purchased additional Adderall from a friend when his prescription ran out. 

I believe there are two lessons to be learned from Richard’s story. The first is obvious and uncontroversial. Psychiatrists - all doctors, actually - need to take a more active role in monitoring their patients for signs that they are abusing their prescriptions, and emphasize therapy over medication. Since I expect that I will receive no disagreement on this point, I will not belabor it.

My second lesson will be more controversial. While others may call for a crackdown on the prescription of stimulants, I would actually prefer to see these drugs be more freely available. Richard’s first exposure to the drug was in an environment where its abuse was seen as normal, where amounts of Adderall well above the normal dosage were taken both for recreation and to increase productivity. Perhaps if he had first acquired the drug from a competent physician who had educated him on the risks associated with it, his story might have ended differently?

Not likely, you say, pointing to the incompetence of the physicians who prescribed him the drug in his final months. And I agree: as I touched on above, the system needs to be overhauled, with doctors given far more education and training on the abuse of prescription drugs, to better provide these drugs responsibly. But the demand for Adderall is here, and it’s not going away. Seventy years of proscription, trillions of wasted dollars, and millions of people thrown in prison, yet marijuana, as well as more dangerous substances, are still available to anyone with $10 who knows what sort of person to look for while strolling through the poorer areas of town. More and more people at every level of society are recognizing that the War on Drugs has failed, in the same way and for the same reasons that Prohibition failed. The referenda that legalized marijuana in Washington and Colorado last November are only the beginning, and it is the duty of the medical establishment to embrace the role it has to play in promoting and ensuring responsible drug use. If an informed, consenting adult wishes to obtain a prescription for Adderall to increase their productivity, I say let them. Better that they are prescribed it by a doctor who can explain the risks and monitor their usage than buy unregulated, adulterated product from someone who stands to profit from seeing them become addicted.

Many people object to this use of Adderall and other stimulants by those who do not have the disorders they are used to treat, seeing it as analogous to the use of steroids in sports. But this is not a fair comparison. Firstly and most importantly, Adderall and other stimulants prescribed for ADHD do not have the same long-term health effects as steroids. Secondly, sports are contests of skill, and XKCD aside, it is entirely reasonable to view the use of steroids in a contest designed to measure natural ability as cheating. But while students and workers can certainly be competitive, the work they do in classrooms and offices is not a contest. If I use Adderall as it is prescribed to me, and while under its influence I write a paper that receives an A, I have not cheated. I have done the work and learned the material. My degree certifying that I have the skills and knowledge necessary to enter my chosen field does not become fraudulent because I learned those skills while under the influence of Adderall. 

One can argue that one of the skills college is intended to teach is how to be productive without the use of these drugs. But if the use of these drugs by people without ADHD is cheating, then how can it not also be cheating when they are used by people who do have ADHD? Shouldn’t they also learn how to be productive without the aid of drugs? I take four antidepressants and mood stabilizers in addition to Adderall, have I cheated at life by using drugs to become happy instead of learning to be happy without them? Perhaps. There is much to be said for seeking therapy instead of using drugs as a quick fix, and many of those raising the alarm about Adderall abuse have called for a greater emphasis on therapeutic treatments and less reliance on medication. But I posit that there is no logical distinction between someone with ADHD using Adderall to become more productive, and someone without ADHD using Adderall to become more productive. If one is cheating, both are cheating; if one is acceptable, then both are acceptable. 

It is said that there is a difference because the person with ADHD “needs” the medication, but then where do we draw the line between those who need it and those who don’t? Everything is a continuum when it comes to the brain; mental disorders like ADHD and depression are caused by a chemical imbalance in the way neurotransmitters are produced and processed - an imbalance which varies in magnitude. The discrete categories of mental illness found in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, psychiatry’s Bible, are a convenient legal fiction. In reality, there exist grey areas between what is considered normal and what is diagnosable as a mental illness. 

Imagine a world in which what we consider to be moderate ADHD was the norm. By current standards of who is and isn’t allowed prescription stimulants, in this world only the people who have what we would consider to be severe ADHD would receive medication, while those who would, in our world, be given treatment are instead expected to cope on their own - after all, their inattention, hyperactivity, and/or impulsiveness is “normal”. But since “normal” is merely an accident of statistics, why do we only consider it acceptable to use these drugs to bring people up to “normal”, instead of using them to help anyone who wants them to realize their full potential? Paul Erdős, one of the most famous and respected mathematicians to ever live, used amphetamines to aid in his work. After quitting for a month to win a bet with a concerned friend, he immediately resumed use of the drugs, saying “Before, when I looked at a blank piece of paper my mind was filled with ideas. Now all I see a blank piece of paper.” We can draw an arbitrary line to decide who receives stimulants and who does not, ignoring the potential these drugs hold, or we can realize the truth: that there is no line.

But what of the concern that the normalization of study drugs will lead to a scenario in which those who would otherwise avoid them will feel pressure to take them just to keep up? Against this, I can offer no real argument. I believe in the freedom of individuals to use drugs, but I have an equally strong belief in the right of individuals to be free from pressure to use drugs they do not want. The only point I can raise is that there is already one study drug whose use is completely legal and widely accepted: caffeine. Caffeine is even more potently addictive than Adderall - many who joke about being addicted generally do not realize that it really is an addiction - yet we have no qualms about letting people use caffeine to wake themselves up in the mornings, or even to continue using it heavily throughout the day to keep themselves alert and focused. We don’t even place an age limit on who can purchase or be given the drug. The effects of Adderall addiction are far more severe than those of caffeine addiction, true, but I am in no way advocating that Adderall become as freely available as caffeine; only that informed, consenting adults who wish to use Adderall be able to acquire it from doctors who can then monitor their usage.