Pill-powered brains?

With midterms in full swing and deadlines for papers and projects fast approaching, some students may turn toward drugs to work harder, for longer.

About 30 percent of college students had used a prescription stimulant illegally at least once by their senior year, usually to help them focus while studying or working, according to a College Life Study at the Center for Substance Abuse Research. Last night, Kimberly Caldeira, the project director for the college, joined two students and one other faculty member to discuss the use of so-called "performance-enhancing" prescription stimulants, such as Adderall and Ritalin.

Recently, Caldeira said, news articles in Nature magazine and the New Yorker have given an almost tacit approval to their use, calling them "brain power."

The opinions of panelists and audience members on the safety and morality of unprescribed stimulant use ran the gamut: Some feared for public health, others for the state of society and still others believed personal choice and freedom should trump all.

Caldeira and junior computer science and mathematics major Kevin McGehee, a student panelist, focused on the public health risk posed by the unprescribed use of medications.

McGehee, who was prescribed Adderall and Provigil after experiencing chronic fatigue, argued that illegal users often ignore safety risks, and also pointed out the lack of long-term studies on the stimulants' effect on the brain.

"I had an [electrocardiogram] done because apparently if you have a specific heart defect, Adderall and Provigil can stop your heart," McGehee said. "In the end I stopped using the drugs because I didn't like the effect they had on me."

The conversation grew to encompass the moral and societal implications of using these medications illegally. Some in attendance found fault with the drugs, while others thought their impact could be positive.

"We've banned performance-enhancing drugs for athletes and they're not tolerated," McGehee said. "Yet in academia, it's not looked upon like that."

Moderator and senior lecturer Sibbie O'Sullivan even drew a comparison between cocaine users and their competitive-at-all-costs attitude that she said contributed to the economic crisis.

"Cocaine is the white stockbroker's drug," O'Sullivan said. "It was what fueled a lot of this 24/7 Wall Street go-go-go in the 1980s, and look what happened because of these people."

Biochemistry major Stanislav Datskovskiy countered the comparison, saying whether drug use is moral is often determined by the actions taken under the influence of the drugs.

He explained that Paul Erdos, who he called one of the most prolific mathematicians of our time, took small doses of amphetamine nearly all his life. He went on to paraphrase a section of Erdos' biography, "The Man Who Loved Only Numbers: The Story of Paul Erdos and the Search for Mathematical Truth" in which Erdos' friend challenged the mathematician to quit amphetamine use for a month.

"‘You've showed me I'm not an addict,' Erdos said to his friend after quitting. ‘But I didn't get any work done. ... You've set mathematics back a month,'" Datskovskiy said. "If it's for the public interest, like antibiotics and birth control are, is it immoral?"

However, despite the perception that students who use stimulants are high achievers, Caldeira said students using prescription stimulants illegally tend to perform on a lower level than their non-using peers. She said users often turn to drugs to compensate for skipping class and drinking frequently.

Junior American studies major Josef Parker said he had a problem with prescription stimulants' tendency to reinforce the existing "rat race" structure of society. Judging a student's or worker's output in ways based solely on productivity is unfair, he said.

"What's interesting about this crisis in particular is that people aren't using the drug to think differently or expand their mind," Parker said.  "They use it to operate better within this existing institution. They are doing them to write longer papers or stay out longer if they're partying."

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