Just this week, I found myself so out of touch with the common college student that The New Yorker showed me up. Margaret Talbot published an excellent report on what she calls the ‘defining drug’ of our era: so-called neuroenhancers, specifically Adderall and Ritalin.

As we all should know, these drugs are hard stimulants prescribed to psychiatric patients diagnosed with one of the forms of Attention Deficit Disorder. In the interest of truth and giving everyone the benefit of my experience, I was diagnosed with a form of this disorder (it seems to run in my family) at age 17 and prescribed extended-release Focalin, 10 milligrams every day in the morning as needed.

The New Yorker article brought me up to date on modern attitudes toward the use of this stuff my doctor prescribes me by saying that large numbers of American undergraduate college students take these hard stimulants ‘off-label’ (meaning without a prescription and very, very illegally) to enhance their capacity to do academic work in the wee hours of the night.

Apparently the people taking these things don’t do so due to a disorder or disability that keeps them from working at normal level, but simply because they can’t fit everything into their life that they want to fit.

Hell, as The New Yorker put it, ‘a 2002 study at a small college found that more than 35 percent of the students had used prescription stimulants non-medically in the previous year.’

I wish to explain to everyone the difference between my use of hard stimulants and theirs. I use a hard stimulant in a limited dosage, only once in a 24-hour cycle, in an extended-release form, with a diagnosis and regular care by a doctor ‘- the kind with a medical doctorate.

I maintain a regular sleep schedule, refrain from using any other drugs with my Focalin (even caffeine), eat healthily and exercise often. I don’t even like the stuff, and try to avoid taking it when I can.

‘You,’ so to speak, take the stuff in whatever dosage you can get, as you feel you need to study, most likely to complement an unhealthy lifestyle of alternating partying with frantic studying. Or maybe you don’t.

Honestly, I don’t want to have a debate over whether you have some right to put these evil little pills in your body. At this school we all know the drug user wins in the court of public opinion for having the ‘right’ to put any substance he can obtain or synthesize into his body.

Instead, I just want to convince everyone that while using this stuff without a diagnosis may help your grades (though The New Yorker claims that a study found most students who use Adderall off-label have a GPA of 3.0 or less) and let you party more with less of that nasty, interfering sleep stuff, as a university community and as a society ‘- we ought to refrain from it.

The side effects give us our biggest reasons for refraining from large-scale use. They include sleep deprivation, dehydration, discomfort with eating and drinking, inability to socialize properly, the possibility of addiction and mild psychosis.

Not only have doctors verified these, I’ve experienced them all at one time or other. If lots of people really take stimulants to study, we’ll have to sit in classrooms or exam rooms full of irritated, semi-psychotic jerks who haven’t slept due to cramming material they should have studied months ago at the last minute.

Quite frankly, most people don’t need it anyway. If the average UMass student exercises, eats right and sleeps enough, they can keep their mental focus up to levels quite suitable for studying for finals without pills. If they haven’t studied things because they spent too much time partying, that’s what I call ‘their problem’.

I take Focalin to bring my own focusing abilities up to normal, but even I don’t need it most of the time if I keep up those good habits. It especially helps that each of these things feeds into the others, adjusting the human physiology to make overall health easier to achieve.

Thus, I can honestly say that the best thing for students, for the UMass community and for society as a whole is to treat stimulants as a specific treatment for a specific problem, and to remember that a healthy lifestyle and hard work put into academics leave you with better grades and more friends than popping pills to study would. If you really need to dope yourself to stay up, try one of those energy drinks the C-stores sell.

Eli Gottlieb is a Collegian columnist. He can be reached at [email protected].