[Vision2020] Risky Rise of the Good-Grade Pill
Dave
tiedye at turbonet.com
Sun Jun 10 20:56:19 PDT 2012
What you may have took back then was "cross-tops", not actually an
amphetamine. I know I took a lot of them in the late seventies.
It was actually strychnine, i.e. rat poison. The speedy effect is your
adrenalin helping your body fight the stuff.
I hear that Adderall is a pretty fun (and clean) speed high. I haven't
tried it though, (a Dr. wanted to prescribe it for me once, but I
actually prefer being ADD).
What worries me is how many kids are strung out on the shit due to their
Dr.'s orders.
Dave
On 6/10/2012 12:52 PM, Sue Hovey wrote:
> We used amphetamines in college way back in the 50s for exactly the
> same thing..late night studying or finishing assignments before
> deadlines because we'd put everything off till the last minute. I
> sure wasn't unique in my habits, and this was Baylor University where
> we didn't drink, smoke, or even dance (in public,) but we did use
> those little pills. I don't think much has changed here. Everybody
> used them, either to keep awake or lose weight, or both.
> Sue H.
> *From:* Art Deco <mailto:art.deco.studios at gmail.com>
> *Sent:* Sunday, June 10, 2012 6:23 AM
> *To:* vision2020 at moscow.com <mailto:vision2020 at moscow.com>
> *Subject:* [Vision2020] Risky Rise of the Good-Grade Pill
> The New York Times <http://www.nytimes.com/>
>
> <http://www.nytimes.com/adx/bin/adx_click.html?type=goto&opzn&page=www.nytimes.com/printer-friendly&pos=Position1&sn2=336c557e/4f3dd5d2&sn1=917bb2bd/6da1b9d&camp=FSL2012_ArticleTools_120x60_1787507c_nyt5&ad=LolaVersus_120x60_NoText_June8&goto=http%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Efoxsearchlight%2Ecom%2Flolaversus>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> June 9, 2012
>
>
> Risky Rise of the Good-Grade Pill
>
>
> By ALAN SCHWARZ
> <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/s/alan_schwarz/index.html>
>
> He steered into the high school parking lot, clicked off the ignition
> and scanned the scraps of his recent weeks. Crinkled chip bags on the
> dashboard. Soda cups at his feet. And on the passenger seat, a rumpled
> SAT practice book whose owner had been told since fourth grade he was
> headed to the Ivy League. Pencils up in 20 minutes.
>
> The boy exhaled. Before opening the car door, he recalled recently, he
> twisted open a capsule of orange powder and arranged it in a neat line
> on the armrest. He leaned over, closed one nostril and snorted it.
>
> Throughout the parking lot, he said, eight of his friends did the same
> thing.
>
> The drug was not cocaine or heroin, but Adderall, an amphetamine
> <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/health/diseasesconditionsandhealthtopics/amphetamines/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier>
> prescribed for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder
> <http://health.nytimes.com/health/guides/disease/attention-deficit-hyperactivity-disorder-adhd/overview.html?inline=nyt-classifier>
> that the boy said he and his friends routinely shared to study late
> into the night, focus during tests and ultimately get the grades
> worthy of their prestigious high school in an affluent suburb of New
> York City. The drug did more than just jolt them awake for the 8 a.m.
> SAT; it gave them a tunnel focus tailor-made for the marathon of tests
> long known to make or break college applications.
>
> "Everyone in school either has a prescription or has a friend who
> does," the boy said.
>
> At high schools across the United States, pressure over grades and
> competition for college admissions are encouraging students to abuse
> prescription stimulants, according to interviews with students,
> parents and doctors. Pills that have been a staple in some college and
> graduate school circles are going from rare to routine in many
> academically competitive high schools, where teenagers say they get
> them from friends, buy them from student dealers or fake symptoms to
> their parents and doctors to get prescriptions
> <http://health.nytimes.com/health/guides/specialtopic/getting-a-prescription-filled/overview.html?inline=nyt-classifier>.
>
>
> Of the more than 200 students, school officials, parents and others
> contacted for this article, about 40 agreed to share their
> experiences. Most students spoke on the condition that they be
> identified by only a first or middle name, or not at all, out of
> concern for their college prospects or their school systems'
> reputations --- and their own.
>
> "It's throughout all the private schools here," said DeAnsin Parker, a
> New York psychologist who treats many adolescents from affluent
> neighborhoods like the Upper East Side. "It's not as if there is one
> school where this is the culture. This is the culture."
>
> Observed Gary Boggs, a special agent for the Drug Enforcement
> Administration
> <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/d/drug_enforcement_administration/index.html?inline=nyt-org>,
> "We're seeing it all across the United States."
>
> The D.E.A. lists prescription stimulants like Adderall
> <http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmedhealth/PMH0000166/> and Vyvanse
> <http://www.vyvanse.com/> (amphetamines) and Ritalin
> <http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmedhealth/PMH0000606/> and Focalin
> <http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmedhealth/PMH0000223/>
> (methylphenidates) as Class 2 controlled substances
> <http://www.deadiversion.usdoj.gov/schedules/index.html> --- the same
> as cocaine and morphine --- because they rank among the most addictive
> substances that have a medical use. (By comparison, the long-abused
> anti-anxiety drug Valium is in the lower Class 4.) So they carry high
> legal risks, too, as few teenagers appreciate that merely giving a
> friend an Adderall or Vyvanse pill is the same as selling it and can
> be prosecuted as a felony.
>
> While these medicines tend to calm people with A.D.H.D., those without
> the disorder find that just one pill can jolt them with the energy and
> focus to push through all-night homework binges and stay awake during
> exams afterward. "It's like it does your work for you," said William
> <http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/06/10/education/stimulants-student-voices.html#/submit#3>,
> a recent graduate of the Birch Wathen Lenox School
> <http://www.bwl.org/RelId/33637/ISvars/default/Home.htm> on the Upper
> East Side of Manhattan.
>
> But abuse of prescription stimulants can lead to depression and mood
> swings (from sleep deprivation), heart irregularities and acute
> exhaustion or psychosis
> <http://health.nytimes.com/health/guides/disease/psychosis/overview.html?inline=nyt-classifier>
> during withdrawal, doctors say. Little is known about the long-term
> effects of abuse of stimulants among the young. Drug counselors say
> that for some teenagers, the pills eventually become an entry to the
> abuse of painkillers and sleep aids.
>
> "Once you break the seal on using pills, or any of that stuff, it's
> not scary anymore --- especially when you're getting A's," said the
> boy who snorted Adderall in the parking lot. He spoke from the couch
> of his drug counselor, detailing how he later became addicted to the
> painkiller Percocet and eventually heroin.
>
> Paul L. Hokemeyer, a family therapist at Caron Treatment Centers
> <http://www.caron.org/> in Manhattan, said: "Children have prefrontal
> cortexes that are not fully developed, and we're changing the
> chemistry of the brain. That's what these drugs do. It's one thing if
> you have a real deficiency --- the medicine is really important to
> those people --- but not if your deficiency is not getting into Brown."
>
> The number of prescriptions for A.D.H.D. medications dispensed for
> young people ages 10 to 19 has risen 26 percent since 2007, to almost
> 21 million yearly, according to IMS Health, a health care information
> company --- a number that experts estimate corresponds to more than
> two million individuals. But there is no reliable research on how many
> high school students take stimulants as a study aid. Doctors and
> teenagers from more than 15 schools across the nation with high
> academic standards estimated that the portion of students who do so
> ranges from 15 percent to 40 percent.
>
> "They're the A students, sometimes the B students, who are trying to
> get good grades," said one senior at Lower Merion High School in
> Ardmore, a Philadelphia suburb, who said he makes hundreds of dollars
> a week selling prescription drugs, usually priced at $5 to $20 per
> pill, to classmates as young as freshmen. "They're the quote-unquote
> good kids, basically."
>
> The trend was driven home last month to Nan Radulovic, a
> psychotherapist in Santa Monica, Calif. Within a few days, she said,
> an 11th grader, a ninth grader and an eighth grader asked for
> prescriptions for Adderall solely for better grades. From one girl,
> she recalled, it was not quite a request.
>
> "If you don't give me the prescription," Dr. Radulovic said the girl
> told her, "I'll just get it from kids at school."
>
> *Keeping Everyone Happy*
>
> Madeleine surveyed her schedule of five Advanced Placement classes
> <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/a/advanced_placement_program/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier>,
> field hockey and several other extracurricular activities and knew she
> could not handle it all. The first physics test of the year ---
> inclines, friction, drag --- loomed ominously over her college
> prospects. A star senior at her Roman Catholic school in Bethesda,
> Md., Madeleine knew a friend whose grades had gone from B's to A's
> after being prescribed Ritalin, so she asked her for a pill.
>
> She got a 95. Thereafter, Madeleine recalled, she got Adderall and
> Vyvanse capsules the rest of the year from various classmates --- not
> in exchange for money, she said, but for tutoring them in calculus or
> proofreading their English papers.
>
> "Can I get a drink of water?" Madeleine said she would ask the teacher
> in one class, before excusing herself and heading to the water
> fountain. Making sure no one was watching, she would remove a
> 40-milligram Vyvanse capsule from her purse and swallow it. After 30
> minutes, the buzz began, she said: laser focus, instant recall and the
> fortitude to crush any test in her path.
>
> "People would have never looked at me and thought I used drugs like
> that --- I wasn't that kid," said Madeleine, who has just completed
> her freshman year at an Ivy League college and continues to use
> stimulants occasionally. "It wasn't that hard of a decision. Do I want
> only four hours of sleep and be a mess, and then underperform on the
> test and then in field hockey? Or make the teachers happy and the
> coach happy and get good grades, get into a good college and make my
> parents happy?"
>
> Madeleine estimated that one-third of her classmates at her small
> school, most of whom she knew well, used stimulants without a
> prescription to boost their scholastic performance. Many students
> across the United States made similar estimates for their schools, all
> of them emphasizing that the drugs were used not to get high, but
> mostly by conscientious students to work harder and meet ever-rising
> academic expectations.
>
> These estimates can be neither confirmed nor refuted because little
> data captures this specific type of drug misuse. A respected annual
> survey financed by the National Institute on Drug Abuse
> <http://www.drugabuse.gov/>, "Monitoring the Future," reports that
> abuse of prescription amphetamines by 10th and 12th graders nationally
> has actually dipped from the 1990s and is remaining relatively steady
> at about 10 percent.
>
> However, some experts note that the survey does not focus on the
> demographic where they believe such abuse is rising steadily ---
> students at high-pressure high schools --- and also that many
> teenagers barely know that what they often call "study drugs" are in
> fact illegal amphetamines.
>
> "Isn't it just like a vitamin?" asked one high school junior from
> Eastchester, a suburb of New York.
>
> Liz Jorgensen, a licensed addiction specialist who runs Insight
> Counseling in Ridgefield, Conn., said her small center had treated "at
> least 50 or 60" high school students from southern Connecticut this
> school year alone who had abused prescription stimulants for
> academics. Ms. Jorgensen said some of those teenagers landed in rehab
> directly from the stimulants or, more often, grew comfortable with
> prescription drugs in general and began abusing prescription
> painkillers like OxyContin.
>
> A spokesman for Shire, which manufactures Vyvanse and Adderall's
> extended-release capsules, said studies had shown no link between
> prescribed use of those drugs and later abuse.
>
> Dr. Jeff Jonas, Shire's senior vice president for research and
> development, said that the company was greatly concerned about the
> misuse of its stimulants but that the rate was very small. "I'm not
> aware of any systematic data that suggests there's a widespread
> problem," he said. "You can always find people who testify that it
> happens."
>
> Students who sell prescription stimulants to their classmates focus on
> their burdens and insecurities. One girl who sells to fellow students
> at Long Beach High School on Long Island said: "These kids would get
> in trouble if they don't do well in school. When people take tests,
> it's immediately, 'Who am I getting Adderall from?' They're always
> looking for it."
>
> Every school identified in this article was contacted regarding
> statements by its students and stimulant abuse in general. Those that
> responded generally said that they were concerned about some teenagers
> turning to these drugs, but that their numbers were far smaller than
> the students said.
>
> David Weiss, superintendent of Long Beach Public Schools, said the
> survey his district used to gauge student drug use asked about only
> prescription medications in general, not stimulants specifically.
>
> "It has not been a surface issue for us --- we're much more conscious
> of alcohol or other drug use," Mr. Weiss said in a telephone
> interview. "We haven't had word that it's a widespread issue."
>
> Douglas Young, a spokesman for the Lower Merion School District
> outside Philadelphia, said prescription stimulant abuse was covered in
> various student-wellness initiatives as well as in the 10th-grade
> health curriculum. Mr. Young expressed frustration that many parents
> seemed oblivious to the problem.
>
> "It's time for a serious wake-up call," Mr. Young said. "Straight A's
> and high SAT scores look great on paper, but they aren't reflective
> measures of a student's health and well-being. We need to better
> understand the pressures and temptations, and ultimately we need to
> embrace new definitions of student success. For many families and
> communities, that's simply not happening."
>
> *Fooling the Doctors*
>
> During an interview in March, the dealer at Lower Merion High reached
> into his pocket and pulled out the container for his daily stash of
> the prescription stimulants Concerta and Focalin: a hollowed-out
> bullet. Unlike his other products --- marijuana
> <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/m/marijuana/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier>
> and heroin, which come from higher-level dealers --- his amphetamines
> came from a more trusted, and trusting, source, he said.
>
> "I lie to my psychiatrist --- I expressed feelings I didn't really
> have, knowing the consequences of it," he said, standing in a park a
> few miles from the high school. "I tell the doctor, 'I find myself
> very distracted, and I feel this really deep pain inside, like I'm
> anxious all the time,' or something like that."
>
> He coughed out a chuckle and added proudly, "Generally, if you keep
> playing the angsty-teen role, you'll get something good."
>
> Christine, a junior sitting nearby, said she followed the well-known
> lines to get her drugs directly and legally, a script for scripts.
> "I'm not able to focus on schoolwork," she said in a mockingly anxious
> voice. "I'm constantly looking out the window." Although she often
> uses the drugs herself, snorting them for a faster and more intense
> effect, she said she preferred to save them for when her customers
> crave them most.
>
> "Right before everybody took the PSATs, a bunch of kids went to the
> bathroom to snort their Addies," she said.
>
> This is one of the more vexing problems with stimulants in high
> schools, experts said --- the drugs enter the schools via students who
> get them legally, if not legitimately.
>
> Older A.D.H.D. drugs required low doses every few hours, and schools,
> not wanting students to carry the drugs themselves, had the school
> nurse hold and dispense the pills. Newer long-lasting versions like
> Adderall XR and Vyvanse allow parents to give children a single dose
> in the morning, often unaware that the pills can go down a pants
> pocket as easily as the throat. Some students said they took their
> pills only during the week and gave their weekend pills to friends.
>
> The mother of one high school freshman in Westchester County said she
> would open the kitchen cabinet every morning and watch her son take
> his prescribed dose of Ritalin. She noticed one day that the capsule
> was strangely airy and held it up to the light. It was empty.
>
> "There were a few times we were short in the month, and I couldn't
> understand why," recalled the woman, whose son was in eighth grade at
> the time. "It never dawned on me until I found those empty capsules,
> and then I started discovering the little packets of powder. He was
> selling it to other kids."
>
> A number of teenagers interviewed laughed at the ease with which they
> got some doctors to write prescriptions for A.D.H.D. The disorder's
> definition requires inattentiveness, hyperactivity
> <http://health.nytimes.com/health/guides/symptoms/hyperactivity/overview.html?inline=nyt-classifier>
> or impulse control to present "clinically significant impairment" in
> at least two settings (school and home, for example), according to the
> Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Crucially, some of this
> impairment must have been in evidence by age 7; a proper diagnosis for
> a teenager claiming to have A.D.H.D., several doctors said, requires
> interviewing parents, teachers and others to confirm that the problems
> existed long before.
>
> Many youngsters with prescriptions said their doctors merely listened
> to their stories and took out their prescription pads. Dr. Hilda R.
> Roque, a primary-care physician in West New York, N.J., said she never
> prescribed A.D.H.D. medicine but knew many doctors who did. She said
> many parents could push as hard for prescriptions as their children
> did, telling her: "My child is not doing well in school. I understand
> there are meds he can take to make him smarter."
>
> "To get a prescription for Adderall was the Golden Ticket --- it
> really was," said William, the recent graduate of Birch Wathen in
> Manhattan.
>
> A high school senior in Connecticut who has used his friend's Adderall
> for school said: "These are academic steroids
> <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/health/diseasesconditionsandhealthtopics/steroids/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier>.
> But usually, parents don't get the steroids for you."
>
> As with the steroids taken by athletes, the downside of prescription
> stimulants appears after they provide the desired short-term
> competitive benefits. This was the case with a recent graduate of
> McLean High School in Virginia, one of the top public schools in the
> Washington area.
>
> Late in his sophomore year, the boy wanted some help to raise his B
> average --- far from what top colleges expected, especially from a
> McLean student. So he told his psychologist what she needed to hear
> for a diagnosis of A.D.H.D. --- even gazing out the window during the
> appointment for effect --- and was soon getting 30 pills of Adderall
> every month, 10 milligrams each. They worked. He focused late into the
> night studying, concentrated better during exams and got an A-minus
> average for his junior year.
>
> "I wanted to do everything I could to get into the quote-unquote right
> school," he recalled recently.
>
> As senior year began, when another round of SATs and one last set of
> good grades could put him over the top, the boy said he still had
> trouble concentrating. The doctor prescribed 30 milligrams a day. When
> college applications hit, he bought extra pills for $5 apiece from a
> girl in French class who had fooled her psychiatrist, too, and began
> taking several on some days.
>
> The boy said that as his A-minus average continued through senior
> year, no one suspected that "a kid who went to Bible camp" and had so
> improved his grades could be abusing drugs. By the time he was
> accepted and had enrolled at a good but not great college, he was up
> to 300 milligrams a day --- constantly taking more to stave off the
> inevitable crash.
>
> One night, after he had taken about 400 milligrams, his heart started
> beating wildly. He began hallucinating and then convulsing. He was
> rushed to the emergency room and wound up spending seven months at a
> drug rehabilitation center.
>
> To his surprise, two of 20 fellow patients there had also landed in
> rehab solely from abusing stimulants in high school.
>
> "No one seems to think that it's a real thing --- adults on the
> outside looking in," the boy said. "The other kids in rehab thought we
> weren't addicts because Adderall wasn't a real drug. It's so
> underestimated."
>
> *'No Way You'd Notice'*
>
> The Sklar family lives near the top of a daunting hill in Ardsley, a
> comfortable suburb north of New York City. Ardsley High School sends
> dozens of graduates every year to Ivy League-caliber colleges. When
> students there use Facebook, they all know that its founder, Mark
> Zuckerberg, once walked the same halls.
>
> At their kitchen table after school last month, Dodi Sklar listened as
> her ninth-grade son, Jonathan, described how some classmates already
> abused stimulants --- long before SATs and college applications. An
> accomplished student who said he would never join them, Jonathan
> described the ease with which he could.
>
> "There's no way you'd notice --- that's why so many kids are doing
> it," he told his mother. "I could say I'm going for a run, call
> someone I know who does it, get some pills from them, take them, come
> home and work. Just do it. You'd be just glad that I was studying hard."
>
> His mother sighed. "As a parent you worry about driving, you worry
> about drinking, you worry about all kinds of health and mental issues,
> social issues," she said. "Now I have to worry about this, too?
> Really? This shouldn't be what they need to do to get where they want
> to."
>
> Asked if the improper use of stimulants was cheating, students were
> split. Some considered that the extra studying hours and the
> heightened focus during exams amounted to an unfair advantage. Many
> countered that the drugs "don't give you the answers" and defended
> their use as a personal choice for test preparation, akin to tutoring.
>
> One consensus was clear: users were becoming more common, they said,
> and some students who would rather not take the drugs would be
> compelled to join them because of the competition over class rank and
> colleges' interest.
>
> A current law student in Manhattan, who said he dealt Adderall
> regularly while at his high school in Sarasota, Fla., said that
> insecurity was a main part of his sales pitch: that those students
> "would feel at a huge disadvantage," he said.
>
> William, the recent Birch Wathen graduate, said prescription
> stimulants became a point of contention when a girl with otherwise
> middling grades suddenly improved her SAT score.
>
> "There was an uproar among kids --- some people were really proud of
> her, and some kids were really jealous and mad," he recalled. "I don't
> remember if she had a prescription, but she definitely took more than
> was prescribed. People would say, 'You're so smart,' and she'd say,
> 'It wasn't all me.' "
>
> One sophomore at Harvard-Westlake School <http://www.hw.com/> in
> Studio City, Calif., is unsure what his future holds. Enrolled at one
> of the top high schools on the West Coast, he said he tried a friend's
> Adderall this semester but disliked the sensation of his heart beating
> rapidly for hours. He vowed never to do it again.
>
> But as he watches upperclassmen regularly abuse stimulants as they
> compete for top college slots, he is not quite sure.
>
> "Junior and senior year is a whole new ballgame," the boy said. "I
> promised myself I wouldn't take it, but that can easily, easily
> change. I can be convinced."
>
>
>
> --
> Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
> art.deco.studios at gmail.com <mailto:art.deco.studios at gmail.com>
>
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