2008 Woodie Awards
The UVM Study Drug Craze Reaches its Zenith in the Coming Weeks
Frank Sacchetti
Issue date: 4/11/06 Section: News
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Historically, the use of performance enhancing drugs in the academic field is a common practice. Honore de Balzac was known to stay up writing for days while gorging on strong coffee, and eventually paid for his lifestyle with an early death. Sigmund Freud, Robert Lewis Stevenson and Max Weber all used cocaine. In a letter to his fiancée Martha Bernays dated June 2, 1884 Freud wrote "Woe to you, my Princess, when I come…you shall see who is stronger, a gentle girl who doesn't eat enough or a big wild man who has cocaine in his body." But who hasn't said that before?
Stevenson wrote his most famous work, Dr Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, on a six day cocaine binge, which begs the question: could the personality changes represented in the novel have been inspired by the characteristic up's and down's of cocaine use?
Weber also spent some of the most productive years of his life under the influence of cocaine, and the painter Salvador Dali once said "I do not take drugs. I am drugs." One can only assume he was high.
The prevalence of study drugs in academia, while still a widely unresearched phenomenon, is a simple fact of college life. "Whether you're selling your prescription or in need of study aids," says senior Kathering Sadis, "UVM traffics heavily in Adderall and Ritalin, especially during finals week."
With so many students living in close quarters, the dorms are swamped with prescriptions of every kind and students generally don't need to look any further than their own dorm floor. The use and abuse of Adderall, Ritalin and prescriptions in general, elicits complicated questions about our culture, our academic system, and also the pharmaceutical industry itself. I spoke recently to sociologist Andrew Golub, who teaches a Drugs and Society course at UVM, in an attempt to get a better grasp on the subject.