"adderall? im selling. second floor at a back table"
"a doctor or street pharmacist"
"i'm on the second floor what you wearing?"
"where the hell are you? i will suck you right now for 60 mg of adderall"
-Anonymous conversation, boredatvanpelt.com
For Paul*, an otherwise average Penn student, an Adderall deal almost always started with a text message.
He'd get a text - from a friend of a friend, say, a quick missive asking for the stuff, anything he or she could get her hands on - and he'd move quickly, arrange to meet the person within hours at an agreed upon location. Maybe they'd meet near an unoccupied table at Van Pelt Library, or maybe the fellow student would come knocking at the door of his cozy apartment on a quiet, tree-lined West Philadelphia street: regardless, caution was key. Many times, Paul didn't know the names of the people who would show up at his door.
Paul, a Penn student with a shy smile and a Type B personality rare to overachieving Quakerland, is an ex-dealer of Adderall, which students use to focus on homework: a study drug. Unlike the archetypal dealer, Paul didn't go outside the campus limits for study drugs - his stash came from fellow Penn students.
Adderall, a prescription amphetamine used to treat ADD or ADHD, helps those without either disorder focus for hours, rendering the study drug irresistible to your average cram-happy college student. (Stimulants like Ritalin and Effexor are used similarly, although Paul dealt Adderall exclusively.) According to Martha Farah, a Penn Psychology professor who is currently researching study drug ethics, stimulants like Adderall work by increasing the dopamine activity in the brain, particularly in the pre-frontal cortex, the part of the brain most involved in focusing the mind and dealing with distraction. While Farah says it's not "super dangerous," Adderall has "abuse potential" - dopamine strongly affects our brain's pleasure centers, making it tempting to use again and again.
Yet despite our medical knowledge of Adderall, questions about the extent and scope of study drug use on campus remain. How do Penn students get study drugs? Who's buying? Where?
Enter Paul.
"I'm really more in-the-know about the whole Adderall experience overall," Paul says, eschewing the dealer label, although he supplemented his income selling for an entire semester last spring. He agreed, on the condition of anonymity, to sit down with 34th Street and answer our questions about Penn's study drug market. We wanted to know everything.
"ne1 wanna sell some adderall?"
"yes. $15 a pill. strong stuff"
-Anonymous conversation, boredatvanpelt.com
Drug use is nothing new on American college campuses, but the scope of college drug use has changed. CASA, Columbia University's alcohol and substance abuse research center, released a study in March titled Wasting the Best and the Brightest: Substance Abuse at America's Colleges and Universities. According to the study, prescription stimulant use jumped 93% from 1993 to 2005. While alcohol is still the inebriant of choice for college students, taking medication without a prescription now surpasses the use of every other illicit drug (including cocaine, Ecstasy, LSD, inhalants and heroin) except for marijuana. And this trend is specific to the college population - CASA and the National Institute on Drug Abuse both report that college kids are the most likely out of any group to abuse prescription stimulants.
In 2004, the NIDA released a study claiming that "students attending colleges in the Northeast ... schools with more competitive admissions standards" have the highest rates of stimulant abuse. In other words - demographically, at least - Penn fits the bill for an Adderall hotbed.
Even a cursory look at student social networking sites reveals the extent of study drug use at Penn. Although Paul claims he didn't use the Internet to make deals - he's particularly cautious about leaving paper trails - a search through the records of anonymous, online social networking site BoredatVanPelt.com reveals a plethora of deals going down in myriad dark corners of Van Pelt Library. The site, which completely veils its posters' identities with anonymity, is only accessible by Penn students, and if its archives are to be believed, is used mostly for solicited sex and study drug deals. (Its sister sites across the Ivy League reveal similar extracurricular pursuits.)
In any case, the proof is in the stressed out, transcript-obsessed pudding: Paul knew there was a market out there. When asked how many students he estimates use study drugs, he's quick to answer: "Oh, I think about this a lot," he says, with a small chuckle. "If I had to guess, I would say in any given like, let's say any given lecture, probably 40 to 50 percent are on it."
So how did Paul deal? "I considered myself a middleman," he says in a slow drawl, flipping channels on his DVR (which, by the way, is filled with pre-recorded episodes of drug-dealing dark comedy Weeds) and taking a long drag on a cigarette. "I connected people. I saw people who wanted to sell and I saw people who wanted to buy. That's it."
Adderall pills come in milligram counts - 5, 10, 12.5 15, 20, 25, 30 - and the going rate at Penn, according to Paul, is $5 to $20 per pill, depending on the milligram count. (For a cost comparison, name-brand Adderall XR costs roughly $200 for a month's supply.) His business principle is simple: buy low from those looking to dump their Adderall stash, sell high. During finals season, however, all bets are off: "During finals, the cheapest doses go at the rate of the most expensive." Do people have specific dosage requests? "Nah. People generally just take whatever they can get."
While he says he made OK money, Paul did not get rich dealing. He estimates his weekly profits were "one hundred and ten bucks a week," and he maintained a work-study job to help pay the rent. When asked if anyone could deal Adderall full-time, he laughs, saying that would be ridiculous - people get into this for a few extra bucks, he says, not a career.
Paul says it was easy for his suppliers to get Adderall. While ADD is considered a lifelong problem by medical professionals, he insists that childhood immaturity is often misdiagnosed as ADD, and kids retain prescriptions long after they need them. There's an advantage to keeping your prescription: students can either pop a pill to study for midterms, or sell to Paul for quick pocket money. This is common: according to a 2005 study in medical journal Addiction, over half of the randomly sampled college students who held legitimate Adderall prescriptions were approached to sell.
Yet it wasn't just students who wanted in on the Adderall action: parents can encourage study drug use, too. Paul believes that some Penn parents urge their children to feign ADD for Adderall. According to Paul, a minority of parents want their children to take Adderall for better grades. When he's questioned bout the veracity of this claim, he insists that it happens. "I've heard a bunch of stories about kids' parents who are doctors who prescribe them or get someone to prescribe them for the purposes of study ... Look, I'm not saying I'm condoning it. I am not the spokesperson for Adderall. But if people mention they're trying to get rid of extra pills, and their parents are paying for it ... I mean, why not give your kids every opportunity?"
"Penn has made me a drug addict.I need one pill to study, one to not jump out of a window, one to get to sleep at night, and another to dull the headaches. Fuck."
"I think there should be random drug testing at every exam; if you're on Adderall and you don't have a prescription, you fail."
"I kind of hate you people who use adderall for an advantage... but I kind of love that you're wasting so much time trying to buy it on here that you'll end up studying about as much as the rest of us anyway."
-Anonymous postings, boredatvanpelt.com
While Paul analyzed Adderall use for fun and profit, there's a strange sort of ambivalence about Adderall elsewhere. The joke Facebook group, "Adderall should be issued at the beginning of the semester!!!" extols the drug as perfect for studying after a hangover-inducing weekend - and there are many others, indicating a weird, self-conscious humor about its use.
While Penn's Office of Health Education has some information on study drug use on their website, the student-led Drug and Alcohol Research Team is mostly mum about the issue. (When contacted, DART members declined to be interviewed for this article.) However, that doesn't mean study drug use is not illegal: as stated in the Pharmacy Act of 1961, which Penn's Code of Student Conduct specifically vows to uphold, it is a misdemeanor to "procure or attempt to procure drugs by fraud, deceit, misrepresentation or subterfuge or by forgery or alteration of a prescription."
It is often surmised that the forbidden nature of drugs adds to their cachet. Unlike the insinuations of a bad D.A.R.E. ad, Paul doesn't feel Adderall is inherently "cool," and he doesn't think Penn students feel glamorous taking it. Still, he admits Penn's "work hard/play hard" ethic gives it a certain prestige: "People take pride," he says, "in saying, 'I don't work very hard, but I still get good grades.'"
But does Paul think it's ethical to use study drugs to get ahead? After all, we punish athletes' steroid use - look at the case of Marion Jones. Why would study drug use be any different? For Paul, it seems, Adderall use falls into the broader spectrum of class and privilege at Penn.
"Look," says Paul, blowing perfect, circular smoke rings by now, "there's so many inherent advantages that people have in school. What's the fundamental difference between using Adderall and having someone tutor you? I mean, we're at a school that is, you know, based on having a financial advantage to start. Not to say that there aren't people on financial aid but even if they
are ... they've had some sort of education that - living in a good area, maybe not being rich but having at least a demographic background that's conducive to doing well at school ... I have a lot of friends who aren't rich, but who went to a rich school, maybe they have rich friends, or maybe because they have a family member who was rich and then when they got to college they got financial aid and scholarships."
He thinks about it some more and laughs. "After all," he says, "Isn't it like coffee? Coffee costs money too." (For the record, Farah says coffee and amphetamines aren't exactly alike: while amphetamines like Adderall work directly on neurotransmitter dopamine, caffeine indirectly affects neurons that then affect dopamine.)
Farah, a pioneer in the emerging field of neuroethics - the study of ethics and neurological technology - thinks similarly along class lines. Says Farah, "How fair is it that well-to-do students use these meds to score higher on their SATs and so forth, while those from the wrong side of the tracks must do without?" For both the former dealer and the researcher, it seems, study drug use is part of a larger debate about whether or not Penn and places like it are true meritocracies. Even The New York Times concurs: the September 30th edition of Randy Cohen's Ethicist column writes of Adderall use,"If there were a safe, legal and effective pill that let you learn French in a day, you'd be mad (folle!) to shun it." While it's probably "unwise, unsafe and illegal," Cohen advises, "it is not unethical."
So with all this talk of ethics and advantage, did Paul, a pre-law candidate, ever use Adderall recreationally? He dislikes the word "recreational" because of its implication that Adderall use is fun, but he says he used it to study. He claims he only tried it once, and it helped him focus - made him crave a cigarette. But he claims he's not doing it anymore - he's content with his own study habits. According to Paul, stopping wasn't a huge decision, and he doesn't believe Adderall is inherently addictive.
This laissez-faire attitude mirrors the way Paul's exploits in Adderall peddling came to an end. To him, stopping wasn't a sudden decision, the conclusion of some cheesy after-school special: he fell out of the business when his friends stopped filling their prescriptions. Simple. "I didn't need the money," he says. "It was just something that ... the time and the place made it easy. And then my friends ran out." Just like that.
"Look," Paul says, still on the ethics, "most students probably aren't thinking about the ethical implications of study drug use." He says its perfectly normal, part of the day-to-day fabric of Penn student life. "The most common story in the world."
But perhaps this normalcy - the fact that most people don't question their own study drug use - serves to underline its pervasiveness, its place in Penn's social fabric. While Paul is through, he knows of many others who still deal, many more who will buy. Study drugs are here to stay.
"Perhaps we'll come to see [study drugs] as just one more unfair thing in that same category of advantages," Farah says. She tells Perspectives, "When I was a kid, most people you met weren't taking medication every day. It's becoming more and more sort of a normal thing to be popping pills, and I think that has also sort of set us up to find it, you know, quite normal and quite reasonable."
And after all, "If people think there's no intrinsic harm in the drug, and they know it's going to help them study," Paul says, "what's going to stop them"
