High Point University

Misuse of ADHD medication grows increasingly more prevalent

By Alexis Ancel // Editor-in-Chief

From the time I was six years old, every progress report and report card sent home repeated some variation of the same thing: “She’s so smart, but she doesn’t try.” In hindsight, it certainly must have looked that way. The schoolwork itself was never hard for me and I understood the material just fine, but I can only assume that staring out the window and drawing on the back of my hand lead my teachers to believe otherwise. Homework assignments that should have taken 15 minutes took me over an hour, and almost everything I turned in was incomplete.

I imagine this was quite frustrating for my mom and my teachers, but what never occurred to any of them was that my inability to pay attention wasn’t actually my fault.

When I was in 7th grade, my advisor was the first to recognize the signs of Attention Deficit Disorder and suggested that my mom and I have a conversation with my pediatrician. I was then prescribed with Concerta, and within a single week of taking it, I became alert in class and the quality of my work drastically improved. My grades shot up, and I was eventually placed in higher-level classes. It seemed like the cure-all for every academic problem I ever had. At first, anyway.

After the initial confidence boost, I began a long and rocky relationship with this medication that prevails to this day. I quickly realized that it negatively affected my mood and made me far less social at school. I skipped lunch every day because finishing my homework was somehow more appealing than spending time with my friends, and I spent most of my middle and high school years severely underweight as a result. I played with different doses and eventually switched to Vyvanse, but it didn’t matter. The medicine was the medicine, and as miserable as I was when I took it, I didn’t have the option to stop taking it. My parents, teachers, doctors and I all agreed that this was something I had to do in order to get through school whether I liked it or not.

My relationship with Vyvanse has been about the same through the years. I have been taking this medication since I was 12 years old, and no one thought much of it throughout middle and high school. Before I left for college, however, my pediatrician gave me one very specific rule: tell absolutely no one that I take this medication. Hide it, lock it up and make sure no one knows it exists.

I did as I was told, but it didn’t make sense. Why would anyone take this medication if they didn’t have to? What could they possibly want out of it? The loss of appetite? The daily headaches? The anxiety? The insomnia?

Unbeknownst to naive little freshman me, my doctor was right. ADHD medication has become widely overprescribed and consequently misused, particularly on college campuses. I’ve seen firsthand how common it has become for students to buy prescription medication for a learning disability they don’t have, but the problem is by no means specific to this school, or even to schools in general. It’s hard to know exactly how many people are taking this medication illegally or how often those people take it, but you’d be hard pressed to find a student on a college campus who doesn’t at least know someone who is prescribed it, has sold it or has bought it. This is due in part to the over-prescription of these drugs since they were first introduced. In fact, according to the CDC, the number of children prescribed with ADHD medication in the U.S. has increased by 2.9 million in the past three decades.

With the mounting pressures of classes, work and finals, it can be easy to believe that a couple pills can solve all of your problems, but it’s not that simple. We live in a fast-paced society that keeps almost anyone’s mind bouncing from one thing to the next, but that’s not the same as having a medically recognized disorder like ADD or ADHD. Not everyone has a brain that works this way. Medications like Vyvanse, Adderall, Concerta and Focalin don’t have the same effect on someone who does not need it to get through the day the way I do. Especially considering how widely misused this drug has become, it’s almost too easy to forget that taking prescription medication without consulting a doctor is both dangerous and illegal. There is no way to determine how each person’s body will react to these medications, especially someone who has no medical reason to take them.

But even if we disregard the fact that selling medication to someone without a prescription is against the law, the reason I have not and will never sell my medication extends past my paralyzing and arguably irrational fear of going to jail. I won’t sell my medication because it’s not fair. It’s not fair that I have to manage the side effects every day, but someone without ADD or ADHD can take one pill before an exam and still get a better grade than I would. It’s not fair that the overuse of this medication has created a stigma that makes me hesitant to even tell people I take it. It’s not fair that for me, this medication is necessary in order to keep up, but for everyone else, it’s a way to get ahead.

For most people who have a valid ADD or ADHD diagnosis, medication is not an unfair advantage. It levels the playing field. For me, Vyvanse is something I need in order to function at a normal capacity, not a shortcut, and it’s frustrating to see how often it is abused and taken for the wrong reasons. Do the responsible thing and drink a cup of coffee instead. Believe me, I would if I could.