Introduction to Adderall

The chances are, especially if you read the news or have attended a college in the last five years, you already know a bit about Adderall. You probably know that it’s a pharmaceutical stimulant amphetamine used to treat attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), narcolepsy and sometimes severe depression. You’re also no doubt aware of its main effects: It increases a person’s energy, alertness, motivation and focus, especially for tasks that would ordinarily strain these faculties. You might also have heard about its less desirable side effects, like decreased appetite, heart palpitations and extreme anxiety. So instead of telling you more stuff you might already know or could read elsewhere, I’ll just give you the CliffsNotes–just the most useful facts about Adderall that are worth knowing before we delve into the things college students are saying about it.

Adderall affects people very differently, depending on whether or not they have a legitimate medical need for it.

There’s more of it than ever.

Two types, taken in lots of ways.

The main thing to bear in mind about Adderall, and this should become hugely apparent as this article progresses, is that young people who take it absolutely notice its effects, often to the point of attributing their chances of academic success directly to whether or not they take it while they study.

To millions of students, it’s the lifeline that will keep them diligently tied to the task at hand, whether it’s reading hundreds of pages of dry information, or taking copious notes on a complex subjects.

But at the same time, Adderall is, with no ifs, ands or buts, a hard drug–an extremely strong stimulant–and like all types of amphetamines, a person can build up a tolerance to it as time goes by.

His or her brain will be drowning in dopamine on a regular basis (Adderall blocks the normal absorption of this neurotransmitter, which results in the intense feeling of euphoria and peaked concentration people get from the drug).

Take too much Adderall, for too long, and you might end up physically dependent on it just to feel normal, as well as depressed, hostile, jittery and paranoid.

And yet the popularity of Adderall continues to soar. We’ve already seen the first sign of this in the ever-increasing amount of amphetamine that is manufactured each year. But let’s go deeper.

What evidence is there to suggest that the cult of Adderall is stronger than ever, both in popular culture and across social networks?

Search activity

If you want to know how interested young people are in Adderall, the logical place to begin is where they go to find out what it is, where they can get it, how they should take it and what the likely side effects will be.

That’s Google, in case you hadn’t guessed. The image above shows search activity for the query ‘Adderall’ over the last 5 years. It doesn’t take a graph scientist to deduce that it’s been receiving more and more interest year-on- year since 2005.

When you refine the search query to “Adderall studying,” the graph becomes even more interesting: Nothing before 2009, then a steady increase every year after that until the present time. You’ll notice though that the line doesn’t curve up smoothly as time goes on–it has jagged peaks and valleys. Here’s why.

Here’s another graph to show that more clearly. Notice how interest in “Adderall studying” is at its peak in May and December (midterms and fall finals), but totally flat-lines in the summer when college students aren’t cramming for their exams.

This is a finding that has been corroborated by chemists from the University of Puget Sound. They tested college campus waste water for traces of amphetamines and Ritalin metabolites at different points in the academic calendar.

They found that during times of relatively low stress, only a few percent of students were taking an amphetamine (probably for medical reasons). During exam periods, however, amphetamine use rose by a factor of 8, with an estimated 25% of students using Vyvanse or Adderall.

So, students most want to artificially enhance their focus and concentration during exam periods. This makes sense. But once they’ve Googled “Adderall studying” and decided they need it in their life, how are they going to get it? It turns out there are three main ways. Let’s start with the shadiest.

Drugs on the Deep Web

Let’s imagine I have an exam in four days’ time and I’m convinced that without Adderall in my system, there’s no chance I’ll be able to absorb all the information required to pass it.

Where can I get some without robbing a pharmacy or mugging a kid with ADHD? It turns out I can have it in my possession within three days without leaving the comfort of my computer chair.

I just need to log on to an anonymous drug marketplace like the Silk Road and add it to my shopping basket. Just like this:

In case you haven’t heard of the Silk Road, allow me to briefly summarize it. It is part of the internet that is not indexed by search engines (often called the “dark web”).

The dark web is a murky, strange place where- -if you’re so inclined–you can buy and sell any number of illegal things, including but not limited to guns, child pornography, fake IDs, cloned credit cards and drugs.

You can even swap bundles of raw cash for Bitcoins, which make up the crypto-currency dark web marketplaces like the Silk Road use to transact goods in an anonymous, difficult-to-trace manner.

The first version of the Silk Road was shut down by the FBI in October 2013, only to be replaced by the apparently more impervious second iteration barely a month later. I logged onto version 2.0 using the Tor browser and a VPN and within two minutes I had the above items in my shopping basket: both instant and extended release Adderall tablets and capsules for an average price of about $10 a piece.

It almost seemed too easy. Then again, the whole process was expedited by drug dealers who seem to go to every length to communicate the merits of their products. Case in point:

I originally located the “onion” address of the Silk Road through its discussion forum on the social news and entertainment site reddit.com. And it was by complete accident that, after screen-shotting the above and closing down my Tor browser, I returned to Chrome to close down the tab containing the Silk Road sub-reddit and noticed this post:

Astrohaven’s pills were among those I experimentally added to my Silk Road shopping basket.

I headed back to the Silk Road to check out its drug discussion forum. Lo and behold, the story was the same, but here I found more specific information on the matter.

It turns out that getting one’s hands on Adderall through the deep web might not be all plain sailing. It was while reading through the Silk Road’s forum that I noticed talk of the second method someone might use to acquire Adderall, which actually has nothing to do with the deep web.

Here a Silk Road user sums it up quite colorfully:

And several redditors back in the Silk Road subreddit echoed the above sentiment with their own thoughts:

This is a huge part of the Adderall debate: The ease with which a young person, especially a student, can secure a legitimate prescription for the drug merely by telling a doctor they need it, and then use and abuse it in whatever way they see fit.

And once they have the pills in their possession, they can do something other than eat and snort them. They can sell them to other students who can’t get their own Adderall, perhaps because they’re uninsured or have already blown through their personal supplies.

An uninsured student might pay $6 to $8 a pill at retail price, but buying them ten at a time from a student who does have insurance (or is still on their parents’), can drop the price to $3 to $5 a pill.

With a military or insurance discount, a college student can buy Adderall XR for under $1 a pill, wander into the library during finals and sell it to any number of stressed out students for three to five times more.

The result is college campuses that are scattered with millions of Adderall capsules and tablets. And I mean literally scattered. Forget the Dark Web. Just head to a college library or classroom at the end of a semester and have a general look around.
Those photos were posted on Twitter, which is my next calling point, and boy, it’s a doozy.

Adderall on Twitter

Twitter is fairly well known as being a place where people say anything and eveything that’s on their minds. It stands to reason then that during finals, some college students will tweet about Adderall. I expected this before I turned my attention to it as a source of information on the topic.

What I didn’t expect was the sheer volume of Adderall-related tweets that are flooding the microblogging site right now (mid-December 2013). Moreover, I had no idea so many students would be as open and blasé about their use of it as they are.

I began by scraping the most recent 10,000 tweets containing the word “Adderall.” It turns out it had only taken five days for these to amass. To the left you can see the profile photos of about 20% of the people who made the 10,000 tweets, along with a few facts about the messages they sent out.

I’ve estimated the gender breakdown of the group by randomly sampling 500 tweeters from the 10,000 and handcoding their genders based on their profile photos. According to this method, 57% of the 10,000 most recent Adderall tweets were made by females.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that females use Adderall more than males, however. Perhaps they just tweet about it more. Plus, there are more young women on Twitter than young men (60/40 in favor of females). So it seems gender doesn’t have much to do with it.

The most frequently used words in the 10,000 tweets (aside from “Adderall”) are more interesting though. “Finals” appeared the most, aside from everyday words, and was included in just over 9% of the tweets. The second most used, “haters,” is an interesting one because it comes from one particular phrase that has been retweeted hundreds and hundreds of times in the last week or so. It’s this:

As you can see, the tweet originated from @AdderallHadMe, which is a novelty account dedicated soley to tweeting different versions of the “Adderall had me…” phrase.

140,000 people follow the account and, based on a 30-second scroll through them, they appear to be exclusively young, college-age men and women. It’s an odd account and its popularity surprises me. I can’t imagine @CocaineHadMe garnering such a following. It’s not the only one of its kind, either. There’s also @AdderallCliches, which also has 140,000 of the same sort of followers. Oh, and @Adderall_XR, with 55,000.

By refining my search to include only tweets containing the word “Adderall” and “Buy” or “Sell,” I was able to get a more interesting insight into how much the drug is at the forefront of students’ minds right now–at least, the ones on Twitter who are publicly tweeting about it.