The use and abuse of prescription drugs in America has to be seen to be believed. Some people are addicted to painkillers; others are stealing medication as a desperate form of recreation; an alarming number, including children, are trying to boost their academic performance with amphetamines innocently packaged as cognitive enhancers.
At any rate, for millions of US citizens, ranging from seniors in Miami retirement homes to seniors at Harvard Law, those bottles of pills have become a way of life. It’s a problem in Britain, too. In fact, it’s been a problem for me. But first let me tell you about my encounters with the prescription drug subculture in California.
My friend Tim earns a living setting off fireworks. He’s one of the most skilled and fearless pyrotechnicians on the West Coast. He has also been diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), for which he is treated with the amphetamine-based drug Adderall. ADHD is a dangerous condition to have if you rely on split-second judgements while running between giant fireworks that could fry off your face if your attention wanders. Adderall allows you to summon up mighty reserves of concentration. So it would seem to be in everybody’s interests for Tim’s perfectly legal prescriptions to be dispensed by pharmacies.
But there’s a problem. It’s difficult to get a prescription for Adderall filled in California. This I know, because one day in October 2011, Tim and I drove round a dozen pharmacies in East LA, only to be met with frowns and theatrical shrugs as soon as the staff saw what the script was for.
If you’ve never visited a US drugstore, imagine a full-sized supermarket stocked with reading glasses, vitamin supplements, cut-price toiletries and hair-loss products – plus a pharmacy section that looks like the reception desk of a hospital.
To say that Tim hates pharmacists is an understatement. ‘Think of Kafka, with the punitive snarl of the prosecuting magistrate replaced by the passive-aggressive smile of a “friendly” pharmacist whose teeth are too white to trust,’ he says.
‘You’d assume that picking up a legal medication prescribed to you from a doctor with a wall full of degree certificates would be a snap, particularly when you consider that it costs nearly $400. But no. These lab-coated “professionals” specialise in what I call spontaneous legislation – that is, their own bullshit excuses for refusing to serve you.’
I sympathise. Over the years, I’ve had run-ins of my own with Boots pharmacists who behave like professors of medicine. (Hint for those on the receiving end of their pomposity: ‘It’s not my fault you didn’t get into med school’ is a good parting shot.) But I’ve never encountered the sort of difficulties we had that day.
Tim and I wasted five hours visiting pharmacies in Glendale, Eagle Rock and Pasadena trying to get his Adderall. The excuse in nearly every store was the same: the whole county of Los Angeles was running low on the drug. Tim didn’t believe them, and spent the night cold-calling pharmacies. No luck. It put him in a foul mood. Despite his protestations that Adderall simply restores him to normality, Tim does like the stuff. His postdated prescription had suddenly become valid and, like the sugar-chasing snackers we met in Chapter 5, he was experiencing the chemical rush of anticipation. His script was a powerful cue – only it wasn’t delivering.
By this stage he was convinced that there was some sort of conspiracy against him. As it turns out, however, all those unhelpful pharmacists were telling the truth. They couldn’t have given Tim the drug even if they’d wanted to.
In January 2012, ABC news ran a story on the chronic shortage of Adderall. Apparently, patients all over the country were having the same experience in drugstores. The report included some scary statistics: as of 2007, 5.4 million US schoolchildren had been diagnosed with ADD (attention deficit disorder without the hyperactivity) or ADHD – that’s nearly 10 per cent of children in the country. A total of 18 million Adderall prescriptions were written in 2010, an increase of 13.4 per cent since 2009.
‘As demand for the drug grows, more and more patients have found the medication is out of stock at local pharmacies,’ said the report. ‘Experts say it’s difficult to say where the reason for the drug shortage lies.’1
That seems rather naive of the experts. As Tim says, Adderall is one of those medications that can put a smile on your face. It is, after all, a powerful psychostimulant made from amphetamine salts. Basically, it’s a sort of slow-release speed.
The Drug Enforcement Agency is deeply suspicious of its popularity and has imposed quotas on the amount drug companies can manufacture. Those quotas are supposed to meet the legitimate demand for Adderall – but demand for it extends way beyond people with rock-solid diagnoses of ADD or ADHD, to include millions of consumers whose ‘attention deficit’ is little more than creative self-diagnosis, happily accepted by gullible doctors. In January 2012, the actress Demi Moore suffered a seizure apparently brought on by a combination of self-starvation and Adderall – which, among other things, is a powerful appetite suppressant.2
Let me tell you about the time I took Adderall.
I was staying with a hospital consultant and his attorney wife in the East Bay just outside San Francisco. I’d driven overnight from Los Angeles after a flight from London; I was jetlagged, sleep-deprived and facing a deadline to write an article for the Spectator about, of all things, Bach cantatas.
Sitting in the courtyard garden with my laptop, I tapped and deleted one clumsy sentence after another. The sun was going down; my hostess saw me shivering and popped out with a blanket, a cup of herbal tea and ‘something to help you concentrate’.
I took the pill, didn’t notice any effect, and was glad when I was called in for dinner.
The dining room was a Californian take on the Second Empire. The lady next to me was a Southern Belle turned realtor, her eyelids already drooping from the effects of her third giant glass of Napa Valley chardonnay. She began to tell me about her divorce. Every time she refilled her glass, her new husband raised his eyes to heaven.
It felt as if I was stuck in an episode of Dallas, or a very bad Tennessee Williams play. But it didn’t matter in the least because, at some stage between the mozzarella salad and the grilled chicken, I’d become as high as a kite.
Adderall helps you concentrate, no doubt about it. I was riveted by the details of this woman’s alimony settlement. Even she, utterly self-obsessed as she was, was surprised by my gushing empathy. After dinner, I sat down at the kitchen table to finish the article. The head rush was beginning to wear off, but then, just as I started typing, a second wave of amphetamine pushed its way into my bloodstream. This was timed-release Adderall. Gratefully I plunged into 18th-century Leipzig, meticulously noting the catalogue numbers of cantatas. It was as if the great Johann Sebastian himself was looking over my shoulder. By the time I glanced at the clock, it was five in the morning. My pleasure at finishing the article was boosted by the dopamine high. What a lovely drug.
The blues didn’t hit me until the next day – and took the best part of a week to banish.
And this is what they give to restless nine-year-olds. Defenders of the practice say kids with attention deficit who take Adderall and Ritalin, another amphetamine-based stimulant, are given the gift of concentration without the potentially addictive high. They don’t experience the chemical thrill I felt because their brain deficiency cancels out the chemical thrill I experienced.
I’ve always been suspicious of this argument, so I was interested to read, in January 2012, an article in the New York Times by L. Alan Sroufe, a retired professor of child psychology who has closely monitored the pharmaceutical treatment of children with ADD for over 30 years. Sroufe now believes that millions of children diagnosed with ADD are being treated for brain abnormalities that they don’t actually have – that their genuine behavioural problems, which like all behaviour are governed by the brain, are often induced by environmental factors.
Yes, Adderall and Ritalin calmed them down in the classroom. But, said Sroufe, the drugs have the same effect on all children, not just those diagnosed with attention deficit.
Also, like anyone else who takes stimulant drugs, these children develop a tolerance to them. As he put it: ‘Many parents who take their children off the drugs find that behaviour worsens, which most likely confirms their belief that the drugs work. But the behaviour worsens because the children’s bodies have become adapted to the drug. Adults may have similar reactions if they suddenly cut back on coffee, or stop smoking.’3
One can’t help suspecting that the children themselves worked out most of this a long time ago. They know Adderall and Ritalin can be used to get high. That’s why some of them claim to have ADD or ADHD: the symptoms aren’t exactly hard to fake, after all. And that’s why some kids with legitimate prescriptions are happy to sell their pills to classmates – or to let their mother or father ‘borrow’ a few. Older siblings, too, like to get hold of these drugs: what could be nicer than a mellow form of speed that enhances the experience of video games and sex?
The naivety of American doctors when it comes to prescribing Adderall and Ritalin is a constant source of astonishment to their British colleagues. Let’s take the case of another American friend of mine, Patrick. He exhibits the symptoms of attention deficit disorder in abundance – alternately daydreaming and rushing off on wild errands, losing his drift in the middle of sentences, shifting and squirming in his seat until his eyes alight on a new object over which he can obsess.
Patrick had no difficulty persuading a string of doctors that he needed Adderall, which he said was the only drug that allowed him to concentrate on his office job. That’s not the whole story, though. Patrick spent his mid thirties addicted to crystal meth. He’s been clean for a couple of years, which is miraculous – but this is absolutely no guarantee that he’ll stay clean.
Crystal meth, or methamphetamine, has been described as dopamine’s evil twin. The dopamine it produces is thought to be 600 times the normal amount of the chemical the brain releases during pleasurable events. Users binge, crash, fall into a fitful slumber, then often start again. Weight loss is dramatic – which is cool at first, but not so cool when you became so malnourished that you start looking like a toothless 90-year-old. Which is what Patrick resembled, judging by the Facebook photographs worried friends sent me during the worst of his addiction. At one stage even his mother told me she was resigned to him dying.
Here’s what I find incredible. Every single American doctor who wrote Patrick prescriptions for amphetamine drugs for his ADHD, or supposed ADHD, knew he was a former meth addict. Don’t ask me what was going through their minds. ‘Attention deficit’ has a quasi-mythical status in the US that seems to override the medical profession’s common sense. Also, Patrick is a brilliant talker, and maybe he managed to deflect the doctors’ attention away from evidence of multiple drug rehab sessions on his medical records.
At any rate, I’m pretty certain that no honest British GP would hand out a prescription for amphetamines to a man who has been brought to the brink of death by crystal meth. Just to check, I asked one of my oldest friends, a family doctor in the Midlands, whether he would have given Patrick the drug. ‘Are you kidding?’ he asked. ‘I don’t prescribe that shit for anything.’
Patrick’s story illustrates how chaotic the prescribing of mood-altering drugs has become in the United States. In 2004 six million Americans admitted to non-medical use of prescription drugs – that’s 2.5 per cent of the population.4 Many of them were doing so for understandable reasons. For example, it’s hard to blame an old lady who’s given Vicodin for a twisted ankle if she carries on using the drug even after pain disappears; it may be the only thing that lifts her mood since her husband died. And if a husband ‘borrows’ his wife’s Valium when his nerves are shot to pieces by a round of redundancies in his office, is that a hanging offence?
A codeine addict who is prescribed the medicine for arthritis explained to me: ‘I find it hard to tell when the pain relief ends and you’re simply enjoying the medicine. Let’s just say that, while it doesn’t get you very high, it makes the furniture really comfortable.’
One is inclined to be less sympathetic, however, if a college student raids his room-mate’s (legal) supply of Ritalin to get him through an essay crisis – and even less so if, after an all-night cocaine binge, he calms down his central nervous system with Xanax ordered through the internet.
What we’re confronting here goes further than a blurring of the boundary between legal and illegal drugs. Also evaporating are the distinctions between the legal, inappropriate and unlawful use of medicines, plus the difference between medication and self-medication.
The problem is nicely illustrated by an anonymous question submitted to a website where lawyers answer readers’ queries. Someone, presumably a young male, had been caught with nine Adderall pills without prescription. The lawyer’s advice? Quick – find a doctor who will diagnose you with ADHD and give you the drug before the case comes to court, and then you could find your offence downgraded from a felony to a misdemeanour.5
That trick wouldn’t work in Britain: our doctors aren’t so easily manipulated, at least in this area. But, as we shall see later, Adderall and the addictive problems associated with it are already an everyday part of life on the campuses of Britain’s elite universities. And the authorities haven’t a clue what to do about it.
There is no experience quite like dropping a tranquilliser on top of a vicious, late-stage hangover. I’m thinking of the point at which the headache has disappeared, but your muscles are aching, you’re disorientated from lack of sleep and you feel morbidly guilty about what you’ve done to yourself. Again.
I actually used to look forward to arriving at that pitch of discomfort, because that was when I could reach for the blister pack of Zimovane, a trade name for the relatively new sleeping pill zopiclone, and push out two oval-shaped 7.5 mg pills, twice the prescribed dose.
Zopiclone, like other tranquillisers and sleeping pills, suppresses the central nervous system. Its chemical profile is very similar to those of benzodiazepine drugs such as diazepam (Valium), though the experience of taking it is quite different. It isn’t one of those drugs that creep up on you; it suddenly announces its presence by changing the visual texture of the world around you. No amount of photoshopping could recreate the effect, and it’s not easy to put into words. But let’s suppose I was wearing a woolly sweater. It would look … woollier. My coffee table would look more woody. And as I stepped through this pharmaceutical looking glass, my hangover would melt away.
So, alas, would my inhibitions. Zopiclone didn’t put silly, giggly thoughts into my head, like marijuana; nor did it produce the egocentric monologues you hear from cocaine users. It was worse than that.
Far from sending me to sleep, this sleeping pill would persuade me to say the most stupid, inappropriate thing that came into my head. The only consolation is that no drug empties the memory bank more thoroughly. So I have only the dimmest recollection of being in the Groucho Club, then the most fashionable media venue in London, at the same time as Robbie Coltrane, the Scottish actor best known for his starring role in the crime series Cracker and for playing Hagrid in the Harry Potter films. This was 1993, by which point in his career Coltrane was already alarmingly fat. It’s a topic he famously hates talking about. In interviews he has declared his weight to be ‘a taboo subject’ – but there’s no such thing as a taboo when you’ve just washed down 15 mg of zopiclone with a vodka and tonic.
According to the friend who was with me, I did the one thing guaranteed to cause even more offence than teasing Coltrane about his weight: I went up to him and congratulated him on coming to terms with his fatness.
I’ve occasionally asked my friend what happened next. ‘You really don’t want to know,’ he replies. ‘Let’s just say you made the most complete and utter prat of yourself.’
Soon afterwards, I gave up alcohol. It was a relatively straightforward business: the stuff had beaten me and I never wanted to touch it again. But the insidious habit of self-medicating with tranquillisers proved more difficult to kick.
In the summer of 1994, a couple of months into my so-called sobriety, my AA sponsor, an Anglican clergyman, told me firmly to stay off the zopiclone. I must have sounded surprised, because he went on: ‘Don’t you remember ringing me last night?’ I didn’t.
‘Then you won’t remember asking me how I reconciled being married with being secretly gay.’
Does zopiclone mess with other people’s brains in the same humiliating fashion? Most people use it as intended – that is, by taking it just before getting into bed – so you don’t hear many accounts of its strange properties. But a few years ago I did come across a report of one normally reticent old lady who, having taken her pills, rang up her friends to regale them with jolly stories about her late husband’s infidelities. They were mortified on her behalf. She had no recollection of the conversations.
My abuse of zopiclone wasn’t reinforced by my friendships, as my drinking had been. In fact, my friends dreaded hearing me ramble on under its influence. Sometimes I would try to conceal the fact that I’d dropped a tablet – but the drug always gave me away, not just because I talked drivel but because it made me trip over my words in a distinctive fashion.
This was a late stage in my addiction to alcohol, by which time most of my relationships were in ruins anyway and I was busily replacing people by things. So I don’t think it’s a coincidence that I developed a ritualised relationship with zopiclone pills. There must have been an almighty dopamine rush when the chemist handed me that paper bag of goodies – not unlike the thrill the compulsive shopper feels when a credit card payment goes through. And I know that, from the moment I had the pills in my pocket, I was already planning what was, in effect, the ceremony of taking them.
These solitary rituals usually happened the night after a crippling alcohol binge. I would starve myself during the day – I was too hung over to eat, anyway – in preparation for the 15 mg of zopiclone at 9.30 p.m. On an empty stomach they would hit me like a train. Quite why I chose that time of night I’m not sure: I think it was the earliest I could take the dose without the effect wearing off before I went to bed.
A couple of hours before taking the pills, I would arrange them neatly on the coffee table. My friend Tim saw me do this once. ‘You look like a hooker’s client laying out his money in advance,’ he said. But the analogy that occurs to me now is a religious one. It was like a parody of Holy Communion – including the fast that the faithful observe before receiving the sacrament. Once addiction fixes on things rather than people, rituals inevitably follow. Earlier I compared the rituals of the blackjack table to the rubrics of the Missal. Heroin users, too, treat knives, pipes and needles like sacred implements whose preparation is part of the high – which it probably is, since anticipation releases dopamine.
I don’t know to what extent I was physically addicted to zopiclone: the glorious sensations of the first few months wore off quickly, while the nasty bits – the memory loss, the metallic taste in the mouth – lingered. My relationship with it was certainly unhealthy, but I didn’t use it as a sleeping pill, because the quality of the sleep it produced was so poor. I’d wake up feeling dirty and exhausted. Other people who took zopiclone told me the same thing, so I thought GPs might eventually give up on it as an alternative to other sleeping pills.
Far from it: in 2007 nearly four and half million prescriptions for zopiclone were written in England. A report by Dr Russell Newcombe published in 2009 by the charity Lifeline revealed that ‘zimmies’ (from Zimovane) were a popular street drug in the north-east of England – sometimes in the form of 15 mg tablets not available in the UK, which suggests that they came from an internet pharmacy.6
One interviewee said heavy zopiclone users ‘looked really evil’, with their bloodshot eyes, messy hair, untidy clothes, drooling mouth and drunken sailor’s gait. ‘Trying to sit down can take them half an hour – it has to be seen to be believed, if it wasn’t so sad it would be funny.’ No wonder my friends gave me a wide berth. But those were the worst cases. For regular all-night partygoers, ‘zimmies’ were something to help you come down after a night on stimulants – the pattern Dr Max Pemberton described in the previous chapter.
None of the young people I know in London take zopiclone for kicks – it would be a strange choice, given the available alternatives in a city this size. But several of them have been prescribed it as a sleeping pill. It turned out that my friends were using their parents’ private doctors to sort out their sleeping problems, and that often the drug was prescribed in tandem with anti-depressants, which can’t easily be abused recreationally.
What fascinates me is that young Britons from all backgrounds are now so familiar with the names and special effects of psychoactive medicines. ‘I’ve been on escitalopram for depression since I split up with my boyfriend, with zopiclone if I can’t sleep, though I prefer zolpidem because it’s shorter-acting,’ says Anna, 23.
Twenty years ago I felt like a freak because I knew the difference between Valium and Zimovane. Not any more.
Universities have their own problems with prescription drugs. ‘Students ask me for modafinil all the time,’ says a psychiatrist friend of mine who works at a university. His tone of voice is weary.
And does he give it to them?
‘No. I don’t like any of these drugs. Do we really know what effect they’ll have on people’s brains a few years down the line? Of course not – even if they’ve passed clinical tests, they’re simply too new.’
Modafinil, manufactured by Cephalon, is a drug that boosts your memory even when you’re sleep-deprived. It increases the levels of dopamine and serotonin in your brain, but doesn’t generate the euphoric high associated with amphetamine drugs such as Adderall. According to a review of its properties in the journal Neuropsychiatric Disease and Treatment, ‘its primary mechanism of action remains elusive’.7 It’s astonishing how often one reads those words, or something very similar, about a psychoactive drug that’s already on the market. (As a footnote, it’s interesting to learn from an article by Jonah Lehrer in Wired that two pharmaceutical giants, AstraZeneca and GlaxoSmithKline, have scaled back research into the brain because the effects of new drugs are simply too unpredictable in practice, however promising their formulations look on paper.)8
Modafinil isn’t a cognitive enhancer in the sense that it makes you smarter. But it reduces the need for sleep and enables students to carry on studying while their peers are crashed out from exhaustion – so the distinction is a pretty fine one.
Here’s a description of taking modafinil from a student interviewed by the York University newspaper, Nouse:
‘In a typical modafinil-fuelled night, I take the drug with dinner, go to the pub with my friends and maybe watch a film, before getting in at around 1 a.m. and working for another eight hours. It’s a productive way of living; it lets me be sociable and academic at the same time.’
What that really means, of course, is that he can dispense with the annoyingly time-consuming business of sleeping.
No one disputes that modafinil has an almost miraculous capacity to reduce the need for sleep: the US military has already approved it for use on Air Force missions. According to the Scotsman, the British Ministry of Defence ‘has ploughed hundreds of thousands of pounds into researching whether they should follow the lead of forces including the French Foreign Legion and start using the drug to keep military personnel vigilant for up to 60 hours at a time.’9
The Scotsman refers disapprovingly to these ‘secret pep pills’, as if research on them were a scandalous misuse of public funds. But does Britain really want to find itself in a position where potential enemies are mentally more alert than its own personnel? Obviously not. Then again, what happens when you apply the same argument to competition between university students? Are they wrong to use psychoactive weapons to gain advantage over their peers?
Modafinil and Adderall are omnipresent on Ivy League campuses, where students imagine – with some justification, given how seriously Americans take education – that their entire futures rest on their Grade Point Average. They are also up against foreign students, especially from East Asia, with a well-earned reputation for phenomenally hard work (and less of an appetite for partying). So American kids are relying on these drugs to stop them slipping behind the competition.
One of the reasons American university students have slipped comfortably into prescription drug abuse is that so many of them spent their formative years taking Ritalin for ADD and ADHD. Of course, whether these maladies really exist is a controversial question. As we saw in the first part of this chapter, at least one leading American expert in the medication of children for attention deficit regards the diagnoses as questionable and the drug treatment as worse than useless.
But the statistics are clear: according to the US body Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, ‘a million more kids had a parent-reported ADHD diagnosis in 2007 compared to 2003 – a 22 per cent increase’.10
Generally speaking, American and, increasingly, British schools don’t have a problem with this sort of medication: perhaps the greatest beneficiaries of all are schoolteachers, for whom the effect of amphetamines on hyperactive students is nothing short of a disciplinary miracle. Universities are more anxious about it, however. They know that these drugs are being traded, and that – certainly in the case of Ritalin and Adderall – they can easily be recreationally abused by people whose ‘attention deficit’ is caused by partying all night.
According to Professor Sean Esteban McCabe at the University of Michigan’s Substance Abuse Center, users of Adderall tend to be white male undergraduates at competitive universities. They are likely to be a member of a fraternity, have a GPA of 3.0 or below and regularly admit to taking other drugs. ‘In other words, they are decent students at schools where, to be a great student, you have to give up a lot more partying than they’re willing to give up.’11
By using Adderall, students are making the act of studying part of the overall hedonic experience of university: when poring over your books becomes pleasurable, the distinction between work and play is eroded. An article in the New Yorker in 2009 described the experiences of ‘Alex’, a Harvard student who used Adderall to reconstruct his weekly routine into a cycle of eating, drinking and studying, punctuated by long sleeps.
‘When you conceive of what you have do to for school, it’s not in terms of nine to five but in terms of what you can physically do in a week while still achieving a variety of goals in a variety of realms – social, romantic, sexual, extracurricular, résumé-building, academic commitments,’ he said.
Alex mentioned a side effect of the drug I recognise from young friends with similar chemical enthusiasms. ‘The number of times I’ve taken Adderall late at night and decided that, rather than starting my paper, hey, I’ll organise my entire music library!’
Rebecca, the 25-year-old daughter of one of my friends, says that sounds very familiar: ‘If an Adderall user drops from exhaustion, the culprit is as likely to be iTunes as a law textbook. At university, I used to live with a gay guy who became obsessed with making sure every album in his library was meticulously classified. Every Madonna track had the release date added, and every episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer would have a concordance attached, along with the names of the directors and producers for every episode. It was astonishing. Like a work of art, really.
‘I used to go to bed when he was “settling in” for the night. When I got up for a shower in the morning he’d still be there, eyes glued to the screen, feverishly re-entering metadata because he’d found “a better way to sort everything”.’
Predictably, the consumption of brain-boosting drugs doesn’t end with these students’ final papers. Why stop using them when you’re about to enter a work environment in which every week brings the sort of pressure you experienced before your final exams? The same New Yorker article described how cognitive-enhancing drugs are seeping into corporate life, quoting a reader who wrote to Wired complaining about ‘a rising young star’ who was ‘using unprescribed modafinil to work crazy hours. Our boss has started getting on my case for not being as productive.’
It’s hardly surprising that people don’t think of these mind-altering drugs as a big deal when Cephalon describes Provigil, its brand name for modafinil, as a remedy for tiredness and ‘decreased activity’. Hardly the ‘excessive daytime sleepiness’ mandated by its original government approval. The FDA reprimanded the company for this ‘expansion’ of labelling.12
Drugs such as modafinil and Adderall weren’t a feature of British university life until recently. They made their first appearance at Oxford and Cambridge, from where they are slowly making their way down the university food chain.
I spoke to Lewis, 24, a recent graduate of one of Cambridge’s grandest colleges. ‘You’ve got to remember that Oxbridge undergraduates think they have more in common with the Ivy League than they do with students on redbrick campuses,’ he said. ‘Many of them learned about modafinil through talking to friends at Harvard and Yale on Facebook. And they thought, I want some of that, because I’m going to be entering the same sort of high-pressure environment as my Harvard buddies.’
He added: ‘It’s a sort of alpha male thing. An Ivy League wannabe would order shitloads of modafinil off the internet and sell it to friends who were planning to become corporate lawyers. What could be cooler than studying your arse off and not getting bored?’
What indeed? But let’s go back to the article by L. Alan Sroufe quoted earlier. In addition to the damage these drugs may do to the people who take them, he says, they have another flaw: they don’t actually deliver any long-term cognitive enhancement. Children’s exam results pick up because they’re concentrating, but the effect fades – leaving them with the withdrawal symptoms produced by taking psychostimulants for a long time.
Cambridge’s alpha males may find that so-called cognitive-enhancing drugs improve their performance in Finals, but if they carry over their habit into a high-pressure workplace they could find themselves trapped by what once seemed to be a risk-free shortcut to success. As with the clubbers we described in the previous chapter, it might be worth checking on the state of their brain chemistry in a few years’ time.