Once you’ve found heroin, you don’t really need anything else. But isn’t that true of any addiction? Every addict has their jam. Just because I was injecting heroin doesn’t mean I was more of an addict than somebody who needs a five-martini lunch to make it through a work day or a graduate student popping handfuls of pills in order to finish his thesis.
Generation Adderall
In Casey Schwartz’s recent article in The New York Times Magazine, she recounts her decade-long love affair with the prescription amphetamine Adderall. She talks about how she started taking Adderall in college to help her study and eventually became so dependent on it that she lied to a doctor to get her own prescription. Schwartz considers herself part of “Generation Adderall” (also the name of the article). This is a catchy label for people who went to college after the use of Adderall exploded, both with and without a prescription.
Adderall hit the market in 1996 as a more effective, longer-lasting alternative to Ritalin, the usual treatment for Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). By 2015, a NIDA survey revealed Adderall to be the most commonly abused prescription drug among 12th graders. Although Schwartz’s drug use started innocently enough (doesn’t it always?) she eventually reached a point where she couldn’t function without it, and continued to use despite the negative impact on her life. What her story reminded me is that addiction really is the same no matter what the drug.
Speeding Downhill Fast
Despite not being really into uppers, I still did them. Some of them were even prescribed—just not to me. As a human garbage disposal between the ages of 14 and 24 for all things chemical, I did plenty of speed, everything from a handful of NoDoz from the grocery store to crystal meth with a blowtorch. My first semester away at college, I met a guy named Max who had a prescription for Adderall. He was always around and happy to trade his pills for weed, which I usually had. I remember breaking open the orange capsules and crushing the tiny balls into a fine powder to snort. It wasn’t the most intense high, but definitely did the trick if there was a paper to write or a keg of beer to consume—or both.
Schwartz describes her early days with Adderall in college almost lovingly. She talks about her time on the drug during those first two years as the “most precious hours” of her life. She could study all night and still have time for exercise and reading the The New Yorker. But, like any addiction, the honeymoon was over soon enough. She started snapping at friends, raging on her roommates over stupid stuff and, eventually, ended up in the ER with an amphetamine-induced anxiety attack that derailed the first semester of her senior year. Although she swore off the drugs after that incident, Schwartz soon resumed her pill-popping routine (sound familiar?) and graduated that spring. A year after graduation, while applying to graduate school to be a psychologist, she had an idea. She would cut out the middle-man and get her own prescription for Adderall.
On the Up and Up
Because of her field, she knew exactly what type of doctor to seek out and just what to say in order to convince an MD she had ADHD and get a prescription for Adderall with no strings attached. Schwartz brings an interesting perspective (to what is essentially a mini addiction memoir) because she is a writer with a Master’s Degree in psychodynamic neuroscience. If you’re like me, wondering WTF that means, the bottom line is that this lady understands a whole lot about how the brain works and how different neurological processes influence feelings and behavior. So, basically if she can get hooked on drugs, anybody can.
Once Schwartz had her legit scrip for Adderall, it was on. She cranked through grad school, traveled, studied and stayed strung out the entire time. With her existing prescription, she didn’t have trouble getting new doctors to renew it without requiring follow-ups. She was just one of millions of Americans using of Adderall and other prescription stimulants, including Ritalin and Concerta, unsupervised. Like any good addict, the lengths she would go to for her drugs became more extreme. She shipped herself the drugs from LA while she lived in London and once skipped an entire day of work to drive six hours round-trip to get Adderall from a clinic where her prescription was on file.
Breaking the Cycle
Schwartz reached a point in her life where she was caught up in the cycle of trying to quit, but using again over and over because she didn’t have the proper support system in place. Her recollection of tossing out all her pills (even the secret “emergency” stash) gave me the chills, because it was so familiar. The difference between her story and mine is that I was climbing into a dumpster outside my apartment to retrieve drugs while she sat in the doctor’s office. The sense of failure and desperation is identical.
After a decade of using Adderall—both illegally and with a prescription—Schwartz finally got off it. With the help of a psychiatrist, she fought through the awful withdrawal symptoms, including debilitating lethargy and depression. She began to rebuild her life without drugs and reconnect with the world. Anybody who has gotten sober can relate with that shaky feeling of emerging from a chemical haze and facing the real world. While her journey may have been different than most addicts, the final destination is the same. As they say, it takes people from Yale and people from jail (not to mention many in between).