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25% of students age 16-32 take Adderall 1-7 times per week, not prescribed

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Re: 25% of students age 16-32 take Adderall 1-7 times per week, not prescribed

#101

Post by wheelinsupial »

ramphastidae wrote: post #80

The title and tweet contents are completely anecdotal (ie false), although the title implies a study was done. I flagged this.

I suppose I should have read all of the comments before posting my response to another comment. There has been a study on this:

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.

Re: 25% of students age 16-32 take Adderall 1-7 times per week, not prescribed

#102

Post by cannabis_sam »

FooBarBizBazz wrote: post #30

Apparently we have constructed a society in which everyone, including children, has to spend all day doing things they can't care about without pharmaceutical help. 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…

> I hear pornographic performers are on Viagra too.

That seems obvious to me, the scary part is how many “regular dudes” use viagra without having any impotence problems..

Re: 25% of students age 16-32 take Adderall 1-7 times per week, not prescribed

#103

Post by luckylion »

david_allison wrote: post #72
danShumway wrote: post #56

If this is actually true, it does seem to be worth asking whether we're doing a good job with how we're structuring secondary education. 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 probabl…

It's similar to issues with performance enhancing drugs. 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.

> The end state is everyone taking drugs, and nobody being any better off academically.

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?

Re: 25% of students age 16-32 take Adderall 1-7 times per week, not prescribed

#104

Post by true_religion »

FooBarBizBazz wrote: post #30

Apparently we have constructed a society in which everyone, including children, has to spend all day doing things they can't care about without pharmaceutical help. 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…

It’s the ages of 16 through 32. Most of these people are not children in the legal, emotional or intellectual sense.

Re: 25% of students age 16-32 take Adderall 1-7 times per week, not prescribed

#105

Post by ac29 »

snvzz wrote: post #7
BrianOnHN wrote: post #2

> I just learned from a colleague and it was confirmed by every student I asked, that 25% of students age 16-32 take Adderall 1-7X/week (not prescribed). And 5-10% do the same w/Modafinil or Armodafanil; 30-35% of students are on amphetamine 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.

>Modafinil isn't an amphetamine. 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.

> Amphetamine being popular like that is, however, insanity.

Why? Amphetamine is arguably better than caffeine as well, and serves a similar purpose. Thats obviously somewhat subjective, though.

Re: 25% of students age 16-32 take Adderall 1-7 times per week, not prescribed

#106

Post by ac29 »

wheelinsupial wrote: post #101
ramphastidae wrote: post #80

The title and tweet contents are completely anecdotal (ie false), although the title implies a study was done. I flagged this.

I suppose I should have read all of the comments before posting my response to another comment. There has been a study on this: 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 inst…

> In 2015 18.6% and in 2018 15.9% of respondents admitted to misusing stimulants for non-medical reasons

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.

Re: 25% of students age 16-32 take Adderall 1-7 times per week, not prescribed

#107

Post by FooBarBizBazz »

cannabis_sam wrote: post #102
FooBarBizBazz wrote: post #30

Apparently we have constructed a society in which everyone, including children, has to spend all day doing things they can't care about without pharmaceutical help. 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…

> I hear pornographic performers are on Viagra too. That seems obvious to me, the scary part is how many “regular dudes” use viagra without having any impotence problems..

I first heard about this in college. Secondhand story about how a friend's roommate had burst out of her room distraught and frantic because she was with her boyfriend and they had run out of Viagra. It just raised questions for me: Like, this guy was probably around 20; presumably he didn't have E.D.? How bad could the sex have possibly been? Though older me goes "maybe he was on Prozac; I think that may cause impotence". The whole thing just made me sad.

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.

Re: 25% of students age 16-32 take Adderall 1-7 times per week, not prescribed

#108

Post by FooBarBizBazz »

stackbutterflow wrote: post #53
api wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody planned this. It’s the result of emergent behavior in complex systems and feedback loops. 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 subj…

Like ants? All for the colony. We would already be on Mars if we behaved like ants but what kind of life is that.

Or this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant_mill

Re: 25% of students age 16-32 take Adderall 1-7 times per week, not prescribed

#109

Post by danShumway »

david_allison wrote: post #72
danShumway wrote: post #56

If this is actually true, it does seem to be worth asking whether we're doing a good job with how we're structuring secondary education. 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 probabl…

It's similar to issues with performance enhancing drugs. 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.

> If your course is graded so the top x% get an A

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.

Re: 25% of students age 16-32 take Adderall 1-7 times per week, not prescribed

#110

Post by chii »

ChainOfFools wrote: post #67
stackbutterflow wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like ants? All for the colony. We would already be on Mars if we behaved like ants but what kind of life is that.

If we behaved like ants we'd have no more interest in going to Mars than ants do.

how would you know ants have no interest in spreading their species to mars, if they could've?

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.

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