25% of students age 16-32 take Adderall 1-7 times per week, not prescribed
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When this last happened under the Qin dynasty, it ended in the Taiping Rebellion, and produced nothing of value except those little canned oranges.
I hear pornographic performers are on Viagra too.
Meanwhile nobody actually has children, and CO2 PPM keeps going up and up and up.
What the fuck is everyone doing?
Just going through the motions on pills, while our intrinsic motivations scream at us that we're supposed to be doing something else.
It kind of reminds me of Vernor Vinge's A Deepness In The Sky[1] where the antagonists use technology/chemistry they called "Focus" on the protagonists in order to induce obsession of a single idea and turn them into brilliant and overachieving slaves. Except many of us, here in the real world, are willingly doing this to ourselves to out-compete each other, for the benefit of our corporate captors.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Deepness_in_the_Sky
2: (EDIT, since I'm post-limited) Yes, not just coffee. Ritalin/Adderall use to cope with workload is not unheard of in offices I've worked. Probably more common than I think since I'm not really in "the scene". If a square like me has seen it, it's probably widespread.
The most obese person I knew drank like a large latte every 45 minutes, smoked more than 10 cigarettes a day.I thought he was addicted to coffee, but it was actually a combination of both sugar and coffee. Eventually I saw that spillover to him eating bowls of desserts every day at lunch. Cans of beers by eod. The office free food just made that worse.
He made lots of money, but he had to retire early, he was like close to 160 kgs or something and would breath heavily just standing 5 minutes during the daily stand up. He had troubles using the rest room. And it was pretty clear he was just months away from a heart attack.
He just had to quit and fix his health.
Another manager I knew had similar problems, eventually it took him a lot to quit smoking. For coffee addiction he would keep a small quantity of black coffee decoction around and would just feel the taste on his tongue by taking an occasional sip. By his own admission it was next to impossible to get rid of this. He wasn't obese but being a chain smoker and coffee drinker does as equal damage to your health.
We are still absolutely at the mercy of such forces. They rule us. We sort of understand them (game theory, complexity, evolutionary dynamics) but have yet to come up with any reliable way of controlling them. Totalitarian government force is the best we can do, and it comes with equally large downsides and is itself subject to the same forces over time. It’s a very clunky primitive instrument.
I feel like we will not truly become an intelligent species until we are able to flip the table on the complex system in which we are embedded. Until then we are merely very clever animals. True intelligence has yet to evolve on this planet.
If humans behaved like ants, but had the current capabilities, we could colonize mars, at huge cost to many's lives. Essentially, they will be sacrifices for the greater "good", whatever that good means in that context.
Despotic systems like communism on the other hand only reflect the goals of a chosen few. So by human limitation these goals can never adequately represent the complexity of the governed. Such societies will inevitably degenerate and fall behind.
While pure market oriented societies can fall into “activity traps” from which it might be hard for them to climb out of.
The fact that it is considered remarkable is absurd. From the perspective of a money system that rewards short term thinking it is easy to fall into the trap of believing that short term thinking is natural. You can also build a money system that rewards long term thinking and then short term thinking becomes remarkable.
You can call it an activity trap if you want. What I think is remarkable that there is this idea of "the" free market. There is no such thing. As soon as you mandate any monetary system its properties will permeate throughout the entire market.
Consider Say's law. It assumes people do not keep money over the long term and always spend everything they earn. In other words, general gluts and the recessions they cause, are impossible. He simply assumed the properties of money away and treated money equivalent to barter. This alone is enough to blame money. One could now construct a huge barter exchange and solve all money related problems by getting rid of it. Alternatively one could merely do away with the ability to keep money over the long term and force everyone to spend everything they earn. Another extreme proposal but it would work. People will argue, hey but there are lots of debtors promising to pay later so holding onto money will help them do investments. So banks do fulfill an important role and they do offer a reason why people shouldn't spend their money or rather, why they should be allowed to keep it. But then people forget that it is the debtors who are the ones providing the ability to accumulate money. People want savings to drive investments when in reality it is investments that should drive savings.
The former position creates the illusion that raising interest rates will drive more investments. It also gives an excuse to always demand at least 0% interest on their unspent money. The latter position shatters that illusion. Rather than letting interest rates be determined by fantasies, the providers of that interest rate have to exist. It means that 0% interest isn't a magic number but rather a distortion of the free market and that is why I have no sympathy for those who cry about inflation. The fact that it is possible to hold onto non degrading money in a world that is degrading all the time is absurd.
It's why the deflation money story (gold standard or Bitcoin) is so ridiculous. Money goes up in value, therefore you receive your most valuable income when you are young. Possibly enough to retire by 40. The incentives are clear, earn as much money as quickly as possible, no matter the long term damage. Who cares about reality when the value of your money is going up? Yet the outcome is obvious, reality catches up, your money will be worthless. The boom is followed by a bust, ahem, because the value of that money didn't follow the fundamentals it was based on, a degrading world. Short term thinking was built into money itself.
If your money system accounts for degradation of the real world, it will reward people to minimize degradation rather than earn money in a way that accelerates degradation and then use money to extract a growing share out of the degrading world. The idea that you can exist independently of the real world if you have money is an "activity trap".
The value of money goes down because of inflation, which is why you are incentivised to earn more when you’re younger, so after accounting for decay, you have enough saved up for your eventual retirement.
But a deflationary system like gold, btc etc. are a tad unfair because the early adopters in the founding generation accumulate “a fortune for generations” for say an x amount of work, whereas an individual born in an established crypto or gold system will only accumulate an exponentially low fortune for a similar kind of effort. So this locks in permanent inequality like in the old days.
By activity trap I mean things that
- prevent science from moving forward
- prevent society from expanding its social space for everyone (ie every society has outcasts who don’t have a place in the current system)
- invent activities that keep obsolete arrangements relevant etc
Given such a broad definition I admit I’m not in a position to say what is an activity trap and what isn’t. It could all just be necessary drudge work to get to a better situation. But right now it “feels” like an activity trap.
Your solution, if I understand correctly, is to have some type of money that decays back into the system, if left accumulated and unspent after some time.
But there is still nothing here to stop someone from gathering enough quantum of value to force some sort of gate-keeping type situation. People will always be incentivised to save what they earn. Maybe for tomorrow, a bad season or the next 10 generations. It isn’t people who are thinking short term. People in large groups behave in ways that suggest to the observer that short term benefits trump long term goals.
While money seems like a good tool for societies to manage social behaviour perhaps we are looking at it wrong when we think it can easily be used to set the kind of long term goals that can easily avoid activity traps. The obsession with money and monetary system, maybe distracting attention from avenues where much greater improvements can be made.
What is becoming increasingly complex is the amount of band-aids you have to apply to achieve a semblance of stability.
They are busy with specializing themselves to keep the society machine going.
The easy part is imagining a future in which all that stress is unnecessary. The hard part is getting there, even if all it takes is the courage to open the door and walk up some stairs.
What?
Kind of an oblique reference to the exam system and the system of bureaucratic appointments.
If I'd wanted to be serious I'd have said something about "involution".
I take armodafinil. When I won't have to work for money in a few years, I'll still take it, because it allows me to do things I care about.
I think this is a lot like the whole debate around depression: unless you've been affected, you won't understand or know what you're talking about.
But I have zero familiarity with his work (maybe I saw The Grandmaster? I saw some movie about Ip Man... actually it was probably just Ip Man...) so I would need some help to actually understand your reference. Given that his parents fled to Hong Kong in advance of the Cultural Revolution (says Wikipedia), I have to assume that they had some resources, would have been more on the Revolution's receiving end, and might have been more sympathetic to meritocratic order -- and maybe their son absorbed some similar opinions? Am I on the right track? (Probably not, simply given my ignorance.)
So, I'd be grateful if you could explain what the heck you meant :-) ... but I'd also just take a film suggestion!
That seems obvious to me, the scary part is how many “regular dudes” use viagra without having any impotence problems..
Not very related: I hear Viagra was the one thing Americans had that reliability bought the support of aging warlords in Afghanistan. Between their "wives" and "dancing boys", I imagine those septuagenarians must have been exhausted. God bless America.
Modafinil isn't an amphetamine.
Source is seemingly "anecdata."
And this was posted on Twitter.
Probably not much to see here other than some outrage for attention.
Yeah, it isn't. It's a nootropic like caffeine.
Similar effects, lasts longer, doesn't create a dependence. It's arguably better than caffeine, and I can understand its use.
Amphetamine being popular like that is, however, insanity.
So adderall is both an amephetamine and a nootropic?
Wait until you learn about all the people that smoke and/or drink alcohol!
It also gave me a low-grade headache, dry mouth, grinding my teeth, and my pee stank of sulphur. Wouldn't recommend.
[1] https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/dehydration/s...
I do hear that some people are super sensitive to modafinil, and that these people often divide a standard pill in 4 slices and take just one such slice. I did try it in the past and, as far as I can tell, I am one of these people (took 1/4 from the very start, and yet so strong).
It was very good at helping with being awake (and not sleepy) and making it slightly easier to focus.
But it also had this annoying "higher threshold for finger movement" that absolutely killed automatic finger movement and thus playing rhythm games (deresute/mirishita/sif/...)
Why? Amphetamine is arguably better than caffeine as well, and serves a similar purpose. Thats obviously somewhat subjective, though.
That's not what he said. The different responses he gave to the questions asked on his tweet are actually interesting, you might have a look.
Sure, there is still some issues with the methodology since it's a self-reported internet survey. Data I'll report below is formatted as 2015/2018.
18.6% / 15.9% of respondents admitted to misusing stimulants for non-medical reasons, 84.9% / 79.2% of stimulant users reported using it to study or improve grades. Consequence of use: 63% / 60% of stimulant users reported "Experienced a positive impact on your academics as a result of your use"
What follows was only reported in 2018: When are you most likely to misuse prescription drugs to study? 76% answered during finals or exams, 53% Before a test or project, 38% When I feel behind, 17% When I want to get ahead, 6% When I need a competitive edge, 8% Continuously throughout the term.
When did you start misusing prescription drugs to study? Undergrads n = 1,399: 29% Before college, 38% first year, 21% second year, 10% third year, 3% fourth year or later.
Grads / professional students n = 381: 10% Before college, 73% during college, 3% between grad college and grad school, 8% first year of grad / prof, 6% second year of grad/prof or later.
The 2015 study reports: Actual versus Perceived Use Among CPDS Student Respondents - Stimulants Undergrads Actual: 18.6% Perceived: 33.6%
Grads Actual: 6.8% Perceived: 24.2%
We can use that to potentially assess the reported anecdata.
> Probably not much to see here other than some outrage for attention.
I think it depends. If the research quoted in [1] is correct, then taking these drugs either has no effect, or it only benefits low-performers. So, if it's only benefiting low-performers, then it needs to be determined if these low-performers are turned into high-performers, and, if so, does this mean typical high-performers without additional enhancements are losing out to those who are enhanced?
I suppose it's more an ethical / moral value judgement than anything else.
As they say in American sports: if you're not cheating, you're not competing.
[1] https://www.altamirarecovery.com/blog/adderall-addiction-amo...
The last time I went on a modafinil bender I didn't sleep for a week and ended that with a 12 hour masturbation session involving a lot of blood.
That's not really that much different to what happened the one time I did meth, apart from there being a lot less violence.
Modafinil should be way more regulated than it is.
lies
> Among U.S. adults, 6.6% (annual average) used prescription stimulants overall; 4.5% used without misuse, 1.9% misused without use disorders, and 0.2% had use disorders. [0]
With that as a prior, this anecdata seems far off unless there's something horribly wrong at Stanford.
Practically, I'm not sure where kids are getting this stuff to supply amphetamine at a 1-7 rate, unless they're buying straight up meth. I'd be more inclined to believe 25% have taken it once a semester or in their careers, but weekly?
[0]: https://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/abs/10.1176/appi.ajp.20...
> Patients who are using their medication for cognitive enhancement or diverting their medication to others present a high risk.
I think the Standford population do not fit with the results of your study (that look at the US population in general).
These people ARE using these drugs for cognitive enhancement. Now get back to the article conclusion.
Not getting through an education and being saddled with a heavy student debt without a well paying job is an extremely severe, extremely long lasting and quite horrible at times life destroying side effect of not doing everything the two people next to you the first day of class are to get by. Also it’s much more likely if you ascribe to the typical “look to your left, look to your right” speech.
I think it’s unfair putting the blame on the individual when objectively looking at the two alternatives presented to them has the one you want them not to follow being the objectively better. It’s like arguing that Arnold Schwarzenegger never should have done steroids.
I got through my studies without any drugs, but had you offered the opportunity to those in my starting class who flunked out, one now homeless and struggling with alcoholism incapable, I am certain they would chose it. And had you that first day given me the opportunity, I likely would have taken it just to reduce risk.
what is this root cause? Are you saying that people should not compete?
How else would you propose answering the question, besides asking people?
Election polling is also "anecdotal".
There's a range of things you need to do to turn asking people into data successfully.
The distinction between anecdotes and data is whether you gather the information in a structured and reliable way.
I would, in all seriousness, recommend a high school statistics textbook if this is new to you. There's a whole bunch of interesting stuff, including how you don't need a very large sample size to be able to draw conclusions from the data, but you do need to ask your questions in a rigorous way.
Makes it sounds like every student confirmed that 30% of students were taking stims, instead of 30% of students he asked was taking stims.
2018: https://cssl.osu.edu/documents/cpds-key-findings-2018.pdf
2015: https://cssl.osu.edu/posts/632320bc-704d-4eef-8bcb-87c83019f...
In 2015 18.6% and in 2018 15.9% of respondents admitted to misusing stimulants for non-medical reasons
Perhaps adjust the Twitter link to an actual study instead of being removed altogether. It does seem there is something to discuss even if the reported anecdotes are flawed.
I read the 2018 study. It should be noted that the 15.9% who reported using stimulants was for lifetime use. Of those 15.9%, 37% hadn't used them even once in the past year, and 47% had used them 1-9 times in the past year.
This is a huge difference from 25% of students using "1-7X/week" like in the tweet. 1-7X a week would put them into the 50+ in the past year category, which in this study was 3% of the 15.9% of lifetime users, or 0.4% overall. Two orders of magnitude less.
If someone isn't in a position where they have a medical reason to take this stuff, but they still feel like they need to -- there are a lot of reasons that might be happening, but it also could indicate something may be wrong with the environment they're in, and that should probably be a part of the conversation.
I think part of it is due to the pressure to perform, of course. But part of it is also due to feeling terrible when I can't do anything and am tired all the time.
It's not a great situation and I'm slowly trying to change this, but on the other hand it's better than being alcoholic or even a smoker.
If your course is graded so the top x% get an A, and people are using drugs to get ahead, then there's pressure to take study drugs to level the playing field with your peers.
The end state is everyone taking drugs, and nobody being any better off academically.
Is this... normal? I never had a single college course graded this way. If I had found myself inside of one I would have dropped out of the class and swapped to another as soon I looked at the syllabus.
Forget drug abuse, think about what workplace dynamics that teaches students to embrace. I was just talking about if we were working kids too hard or something, I didn't think we were explicitly encouraging students to view learning as a contest and their coworkers as enemies. I hope we wouldn't need to wait for a drug epidemic to realize that competitive grading is a really bad idea.
The people in my classes were my friends. We studied together outside of class, we worked together on group projects, we spent time figuring out our specialties and academic strengths, we sent each other links to tutorials and cheered each other on during difficult classes. Viewing those people as competitors would have been so toxic; I probably wouldn't have even learned half as much without a collaborative environment.
I'm kind of horrified by the idea: if anyone here is currently a student and your professors are doing competitive grading, they're not giving you your money's worth in education, you should be in a different class.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norm-referenced_test
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> I was just talking about if we were working kids too hard or something
We are, the internet isn't helping. If you haven't read it, [0] is a fantastic piece showing the anxieties of modern studying. I see it as similar to how gaming has changed over the past ~20 years, the 'best' strategies have been democratized, and the general bar for skill is much higher. This is fantastic if your goal for education is a better educated workforce, and destructive if you're using academic success as a differentiator.
Will society be better off though? I mean, the same point can be made for using any new technology. I use a computer so now you need to use a computer to stay competitive. Now we both use a computer, so we're at a stale mate once again. But we're both working much more efficiently on a much higher level, and society is definitely better off even if neither of us has any lasting advantage over the other.
Whether that's the case with academics and stimulants, I don't know. Would Paul Erdős have made the same contributions without stimulants? Would we be settling on Mars if everyone optimized for maximum brain output?
The difference is that some technology don't harm the user, while others do. Drugs tend to harm your biology, usually - that's why taking steroids isn't recommended.
So is society willing to sacrifice (some people' s) health for such progress?
Strong yes. We accept health issues in shift workers, traffic deaths etc because of economic benefits. With moderate use, I don't think stimulants are having worse effects than that, and they have a much higher pay off.
I have a vague feeling that the general rejection is similar to that regarding anti-depressants. People are much more hesitant to use drugs that target what we think of as "the mind" than anything else. Very few people refuse antibiotics, but many refuse to take anti-depressants.
This is a common misconception. Amphetamine was used to treat childhood ADHD going back to the 1930s. (Not to mention that amphetamine was widely used to treat sinus congestion and allergies in everyone, including children.) Medical amphetamine usage was significantly higher in the 1950s and 1960s than today. We’ve been on a long term secular decline in amphetamine usage (along with caffeine, nicotine and other stimulants).
Anyway, given that medical use was probably high enough back in the day that we can draw reliable conclusions about its long-term effects, are there any studies discussing this?
The biggest risk is probably a 50% or so increased risk of Parkinsons. May be of more concern if you have the APOE4 allele.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/12/28/adderall-risks-much-mo...
Edit: according to the tweet, all of this is due to recreational or performance enhancing use.
When did this start to become a phenomenon, because it certainly was not in the time and place I studied.
I kind of tumbled into IT after school and it worked for me, if I got 2 hours of concentrated work in per day, I'd get by.
A friend of mine had taken modafinil and recommended it to me like three years ago. I tried it and it was extreme, I was able to sit down and just work on stuff and get it done without getting distracted every few minutes. I took it once or twice a week because of all the propaganda surrounding all drugs.
I've switch to armodafinil because I found it to work more reliable for me. About two years ago, I started taking armodafinil each & every day, and it's great. I have no negative side-effects that I attribute to it (well, I've gained weight, but weight has been up & down for me my whole life), I sleep well, and it allows me to get into the flow quickly, remain there for hours, and stay productive. I still have the occasional day where I don't get anything done, but it tends to be because I'm subconsciously avoiding some task, and recognizing that helps me get over it.
These past two years were easily more productive than the previous 8-10. I wish I had known about it earlier. Looking back, it feels like I've wasted a lot of time before.
I'm far from an expert on any of this. I found something that works very well for me, but I'm not making any claims that it'll work for anyone else. I personally know two others who take modafinil, and while there's some overlap in our experiences, they don't have the same effects I do (they do have effects though, and both take it occasionally, but not regularly).
I haven't found it to be physically addictive, and don't experience any crash or withdrawal if there's a gap when getting my prescription filled. I think it can be mentally addictive though, because once I became able to study and communicate the same way my peers do, I definitely miss the benefits when I don't have it.
However, the crash afterwards was so brutal that despite the extraordinary effect on my short-term memory abilities, I never wanted to try it again.
That said, I didn't see what would be the benefit of taking Adderall consistently, given I could achieve similar results with adrafinil, various racetams, and other nootropic drugs.
But generally, the noticeable effects for me are very subtle, I've joked before that if someone swapped out my drugs with a placebo, I wouldn't be able to immediately tell. It doesn't help me at all with my time blindness, it doesn't improve my memory (that I can tell). And (contrary to other people's experiences) it doesn't even really help me avoid getting distracted (for example, I'm on HN right now). But what it does help me with is starting tasks and getting over executive dysfunction.
With my experiences with ADHD, there's this huge gulf between wanting to do something and actually doing it. So what I notice when I'm on Concerta is that it lessens that gulf. So if I tell myself to go put clothes in the dryer, then I actually go put clothes in the dryer, it's not as much of a monumental multi-step effort of "stand up, put on your shoes, find the laundry room key, walk out the door."
This could be related to the time-release, it could be that people taking this in non-prescribed settings are taking much higher dosages, it could be an individual thing? But I'm always a little weirded out by the idea of people getting addicted to this stuff, because I have to set timers and actively remind myself to take it. It doesn't make me feel wired or unable to sleep or constantly focused. When I started taking Concerta, I spent multiple months with my psychiatrist just tracking day-to-day tasks like how often I ate, whether or not I was brushing my teeth -- because without the charts I didn't feel confident that it wasn't just a placebo effect, I needed to track data to know for sure that anything was even happening.
I'm assuming that people using unprescribed Ritalin are taking it in different ways and in higher dosages. But... I mean, it's not going to make you smarter, at most it seems like it's going to make you more focused on something? But speaking as someone who is constantly hyperfocusing and hyperfixating on things, there are a nontrivial number of college/life tasks where hyperfixation is not helpful and where it would be convenient to be able to turn that behavior off. I spend a lot of time trying to manage hyperfixations, they can be beneficial but they're not universally good.
But I do know that Ritalin/Adderall affects different people differently. Back when I was in college I was not aware of people doing stuff like this as a norm, but I don't know how I would have known about it, so maybe it was happening in other circles.
You know that feeling when you think ‘I should really start X right now’ or ‘I could use a break but probably shouldn’t yet?’ As I understand it, that’s the kind of thing I innately am at a disadvantage against. It’s also what treatment helps with. It’s easier to actually start and continue the things I want to do.
Adderall specifically also makes me too tense and physically over sensitive in a very hard to describe way.
I had friends then on all sides of the spectrum (in terms of "study drug" usage). Two most common drugs going around were Adderall and Vyvanse. Lot of people took them but I would divide them into 3 groups
* Group 1: These folks are prescribed it, they usually take it as prescribed or cut back their intake so they can sell the excess.
* Group 2: These folks were not prescribed it but took them all the time. Because there are so many people in Group 1 on campus, finding these study drugs was really easy. This group took them for every test, every remotely hard thing, and this was largely the same group that abused them outside of class (don't take an Addy and go drinking, bad things happen)
* Group 3: These folks are also not prescribed it, but they take them very seldomly, usually for finals. I was in this group, taking a handfull over the course of 2-3 semesters as a Junior and Senior. Often times when taking them you're not taking them to "study" or "concentrate" but to just get work done and stay awake.
As someone who took them every now and again, I could never understand how someone could take them regularly or even semi regularly. I had the usual side effects, loss of appetite, feeling like (very awake) zombie, and just the general feeling like you're on a drug bender even though you took just one.
As someone who has been on Vyvanse (prescribed) for a few years now, I can say that this feeling definitely goes away eventually. Unless I drink a lot of really strong coffee…
A lot of people were graduating addicted to stimulants. I probably should've been prescribed ADD medication, but I never went through the necessary hurdles.
Anecdotal, but that was my experience.
Pretty useless as a study drug, great for a party drug and sex enhancer. You can easily stay up for a week on it. A lot like meth in that way.
Does anyone have data across countries?