American universities are fuelled by amphetamines – so I tried them

 New York

A biography of Freud to my left, a black leather lounger to my right. We were 30 minutes in. ‘Well,’ said the psychiatrist, sitting up in his chair, ‘what you’re describing sounds like ADHD.’ Oh? ‘And what we normally prescribe for that is Adderall.’ There they were. Ten blue, oblong capsules, in an orange cylinder with a white top. 20mg, extended release. To be taken once a day. They’d help me focus, sit still and finish my work. It’s odd that I didn’t come across them last year, while a student at New York University. They say Adderall, the brand name for a mix of amphetamine salts, is the most popular among the ‘study drugs’ now ubiquitous on American campuses. Around 30 per cent of American students have taken stimulants at least once, and the higher-ranking the university, the more common it is. Undergraduates find multiple uses for ‘Addy’ — hunkering down with it, cramming with it, crushing it into powder then snorting it at parties. Done thus, I’m told it’s much like cocaine, though apparently ‘tastes worse’ and ‘turns phlegm bright blue’. But the overdiagnosis and overmedication of ADHD — attention deficit hyperactivity disorder — is no joke. Rather, it is a ‘national disaster of dangerous proportions’. Those are the words of eminent American psychologist Dr Keith Conners, who speaks to us from the grave (no, really: prior to his death in 2017, in order to ‘provide one last word of warning’, he co-wrote his own obituary in the BMJ). Fifty years ago, Dr Conners practically invented ADHD, when he noted impulsivity and hyperactivity in small children as being worthy of clinical attention. From his own work, and from serious review of the literature, he established that the population of affected children is 2 to 3 per cent. But in the 1990s, the combined effect of loosening the diagnostic criteria (so that exuberance, eccentricity and the ordinary struggles of day-to-day life were all potentially pathological) and allowing American drug companies to have another go at marketing amphetamines (which had been curtailed by regulation in the 1970s) created a perfect storm of supply and demand.