Perscription Study Aids?

When I stumbled across this article back when it was published, I took quite a bit of offense at some of the claims of the article. The article is called "Studying off the Label", which appeared in the Minnesota Daily. The article discusses the abuse of Adderall, but contains less science and more outrageous, unsolicited claims than anything else. While the author attempts to underline the reasons of use, the demographic most likely to use this "study aid", and outline the potential problems and threats of a drug such as this (morally and academically), there really is no substance to any of the arguments. The article contains hardly any solid statistics and, in a rather lost effort to bring medical science into the argument, a use of an "expert" technique is included in the form of two doctors explaining side effects and the fact that it is possible for people to get prescriptions without TRULY having ADHD or ADD. This article is more opinion than fact, but plays it off as though social science and medical science are being employed to form the argument.

I did, however, have some trouble coming up with a way to formulate a proper letter to the editor. But here is the draft I finally settled on:

Let me just begin by stating that I am in no way claiming a naïve innocence; I am not attempting to paint the world – or at least the world of college campuses – as filled with honest, well-balanced, hard-working people. But in each section of this article written to apparently “shed light” on the problems of Adderall on college campuses, I found various statements not only composed of highly exaggerated elements, but also increasingly more offensive. To begin, one could walk away from this article with the belief that schools are filled mostly with lazy, aggressive people pressuring poor ADHD / ADD diagnosed students into selling them their prescriptions because those lazy, aggressive people would rather play video games than study properly. One would also assume that no college student has any way to properly plan their lives – school, work, activities – and therefore relies on chemicals in order to be able to succeed at anything.

Contained in this article are statistics from a vague “college poll” of people who have used the drug to enhance their studying abilities, but there is no break-down of these numbers as to who actively abuses the drug to “cheat” (as this article seems to favor the idea that the use of this drug is a form of cheating). This is not scientific proof of a new trend of study methods, or an indicator of a new wave of prescription drug abuse. This is a poll that could have been vaguely asking if people had ever tried any drug, and then making a claim that huge numbers of students are abusers of various drugs.

For the argument brought up at the end of the article of fairness, this article takes an extremist view of worst-case-scenario, in essence viewing the use of Adderall as comparable to the use of steroids, but claiming somehow that students will soon feel pressure to take this drug in order to compete with fellow students for better grades.