College Kids of America: The Government Wants Your Adderall

If you’re a college student who uses a little pharmaceutical kick to get through finals or long nights of studying, I might have some bad news. Senator Chuck Schumer is coming for your Adderall.

According to Schumer, up to 35% of students admit that they use stimulants such as Adderall and Ritalin as a study tool.

“That’s sort of academic doping,” Schumer said. “There are better ways to pull an all-nighter and stay up. There’s coffee, there’s things like NoDoz.”

The senior senator from New York has called upon college campuses to better regulate who gets prescriptions to stimulants, urging on-campus health centers to do full workups and gather histories on the students they’re prescribing to.

Schumer said in a press conference:

“For somebody to call up and say ‘well, my doctor prescribed it at home, send me pills, here’s the prescription number…’ that’s not good enough. If a student gets 100 or 200 Adderall pills, even if they are legitimately entitled, they may lend a bunch to their friends.”

Look, Chuck — if kids want to get Adderall, then kids will get Adderall. They’ll get it from their little brothers or dorm mates or off-campus physicians because where there’s a frantic college brain will, there’s a frantic college brain way. Telling students that they should rely on caffeine and other over the counter stimulants hardly seems like the answer.

Maybe — just maybe — instead of focussing on how students pull all-nighters, we should focus on why they’re pulling all-nighters in the first place. While taking Adderall as a study aid isn’t good for you, existing in a system (like the U.S. college system, for example) that limits your access to proper rest is just as bad if not worse. Let the kids sleep and maybe they’ll go back to using stimulants for their intended purpose. Or they’ll just use them to be dumb and party, but that’s a-whole-nother story.