An endless onset of assignment deadlines and exams, compounded with extracurricular obligations - a part-time job, looking after family, an internship - may leave college students overworked and distraught. Moreover, as stress begins to occupy more and more of their emotional bandwidth, students might find themselves deprived of motivation to go on. As a result, they turn to study drugs for their perceived mind-enhancing effects, heartened by their lack of stigma, but unwitting of their peril. After all, these medications are prescribed by doctors. 

The side effects of prescription drug abuse are very well documented. Still, students often think that study drugs are safe because they’re prescribed; a physician must assess your physiological conditions before dispensing the medication, which validates one’s use of it. The operative word here is “validate"- the capacity for need easily leads to oversight of a drug’s application, and for students, this kind of validation encourages them to take this application into their own judgement. Research finds that one in five college students report abusing prescription medication, as opposed to the one in seven drug abuse rate in non-students. It shows that synthetic stimulants are being pursued in lieu of natural stimulants like coffee and tea, which were originally meant to treat mental health disorders like ADHD, ADD, and narcolepsy. However, with more children diagnosed with conditions like ADHD being on the rise, the number of prescriptions has seen a corollary increase. With these stimulants being more widely used, they’ve become progressively more available to students who don’t need them but still find other uses for them. Students cramming for tests, for instance, can now resort to popping study pills to enhance their focus to get in a more productive study session.

The long-term effects of extensive study pill usage are less understood than their general drug abuse counterparts, but there exists sufficient literature on the matter that we should nevertheless heed. Stimulant abuse of drugs like Adderall and Ritalin include “permanent damage to blood vessels of heart and brain, high blood pressure leading to heart attacks, malnutrition, psychosis, and depression." Still, many students overlook running the risk of experiencing these consequences because pill consumption for them is contingent on often short-term activities like studying or exercising. It’s easy to think that you’re only going on the pill for the duration of one assignment, and that you can simply stop afterward. But even if it’s only in trace amounts that you won’t even detect, you’ve likely sustained the side-effects of the medication, which cumulatively does not bode well. The bottom line is that prescription drugs, which are often strong medications, can have significant impacts on their users the same way non-clinical drugs can. 

The good news is that there are - and have always been - hosts of resources for college students who could enlist help with their college careers. Going through the period of time in your life where you’re supposed to integrate yourself into the labor force whilst trying to squeeze the life out of the remaining time you have as a jobless and carefree youth is tough. But there are people who understand. Your school’s counseling and mental health center, for instance, helps deal with stress, anxiety, and other mental or personal health issues. College campus learning centers offer tutoring and personal life management advice, and there’s always a Center for Students in Recovery at your school that helps with students seeking recovery from an addiction. There are also self-service alternatives like meditation to alleviate stress, exercising to balance hormone levels, and ingesting natural stimulants like caffeinated or high-sugar foods in moderation that can help get you through your work. People generally agree that running the risk of sustaining any of the conditions listed above isn’t worth it just to accomplish fleeting tasks, and there’s a rare kind of virtue in that type of popular thinking - it’s right. It would be profoundly regrettable to witness drug overuse and addiction rise by any more of a margin, and it’s up to us as college students - as the future - to uphold the distinction between healthy and dangerous drug use.

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