Great article from Sports Illustrated on the pervasiveness of Adderall in college sports, diving into a sad story at the University of Georgia. A good example of the pitfalls of our cultural desire for quick fixes to problems and the potential for further negative knock on effects that can cause. Fortunately in this case, there does not seem to be an inevitable path to other drugs that cause more societal and health problems.
Adderall in college athletics: University of Georgia tennis | SI.com: "The rise in Adderall use coincided with a rise in diagnoses of ADHD. Doctors and researchers debate which came first.....according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in the 1990s between 3% and 5% of school-age children in America were believed to have ADHD; the most recent statistics put the diagnosis rate at nearly 11% among children 5--17. By 2006, more than six million annual prescriptions of Adderall were being written. By 2012, annual sales exceeded $2 billion.
Adderall increases attentiveness and decreases distraction. And when it works as intended, the effects are remarkable.....The drug has become especially popular on college campuses, where millions of students carry a prescription....
In most cases though, college students take Adderall with no prescription at all. A 2015 study by the National Institute on Drug Abuse reported that 7.5% of 12th-graders had taken Adderall without a prescription.....
While it's a federal crime to possess Adderall without a prescription, that threat has not had much of a chilling effect on its use on campus. As Roger Cohen wrote in The New York Times, "Adderall has become to college what steroids are to baseball: an illicit performance enhancer for a fiercely competitive environment.""
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