Performance enhancing drugs? Oh sure, we've all seen the sports stories and Olympic medals stripped away from cheating-ass athletes, but what about the little guy? What about the average work-a-day university student?
Let's face it: college is hard. It's competitive. It's harsh. It's really, really easy to miss a step and fall straight from the 4.0 summit to the bottomless pit of failure. Your GPA hangs as a yoke on your incessantly straining neck, struggling to stay above water, with your only carrot-stick incentive being entrance exams to grad school. Joy. It's amazing the suicide rates are as low as they are (what is it now? 500% higher than the rest of the population???) Some of us, however, accept our mediocrity and wash away our failures and depression by hitting the bottle.
But listen up you brave-heartened patrons of Bar Des Pins, there's still hope!
So you've got one more exam before midterms are over? One last final before you can head home for some well-earned December R&R? Just take this little pill and all your worries can be over. What is it you ask? It’s a drug. It’s approved by the FDA to help people focus when they can’t seem to do so on their own. You need to focus. You need to get work done. Why not?
What? Legal? Who cares? It's not like you're going to be taking the pill and robbing banks or raping school children. Your drug use is a quest for knowledge. You're just a nice, liberal university student. You're just trying to make it through that one last exam, that one last night of cramming before it's all behind you. So why not? One little Adderall (corrupted as Aderol) or maybe a couple of Ritalin and you're flying high over studious island with your seat in its upright and kick-ass position, drinking a knowledge-cocktail brought to you by Learning Airlines. And let's face it; you're still DOING the work. You're still sitting and READING the words, this is just a little memory aid—A little alertness tool. In 2 days the whole experience will be over. You'll score that last big A to impress the grad school of your dreams. Won't your folks be proud?
Think of it as leveling the playing field. Some students were unfairly blessed with more brains and organizational structure in their lives (and less alcoholism). Screw them. You'd be just as efficient if you didn't have a social life either, right? Well, now you can have both.
Plan on cramming your entire semester of learning into a few nights of drug-induced, educational ecstasy. Why not? You owe it to yourself. Go have a beer and relax. The studying CAN wait.
So there are some of you who say that it's cheating. It's not fair. Let me tell you something about fair. Is it fair when a professor decides arbitrarily (yeah, my ass) to put your exam the day after the biggest drinking holiday of the year? All of your friends are at the bar. They call you at 11:30 from their cell phones and you can hardly hear them over the FUN in the background. Everyone else is out and you aren’t. What’s your excuse? “I have to study.”
Is that fair? Did you waste the better of part of 20 years to sit in a goddamned room and read a boring book while greedy time passes you by? Carpe Diem, baby! Make ol’ Horace proud. When you’re old and grey and looking to die, what do you think you’ll look back upon more fondly? That one crazy night when you hooked up with those cute twins from out of town or reading over your pompous professor’s new book, which you were forced to buy at $200 (and last year’s edition is no good, so forget about getting it used). Oh, but you get to sell the book back at the end of the semester for $10. Is THAT fair? So here's what you do. You put the cap back on the pen, put on a nice clean shirt and get yourself to the pub for a pint. That sounds fair to me. You buy the prof’s book at $200 bucks, pretend like your read it all semester, actually read it in one night, and nobody knows the better. Sure you’ll be tired the next day, but how often do you wake up tired anyways? At least this time you’ll be tired from kickboxing the holy hell out of your studies, not struggling in vain to make sense of the same paragraph 6 times.
Maybe you DO have a learning disability. The tests they give you to decide are basically as arbitrary as your exam date, so who knows? I’m convinced that the doctors and the professors are in cahoots. They want you to fail. They want you to be as miserable as they were, lousy keeners, studying every night through undergrad and never getting to hook up with the cute twins like you, you lucky devil.
So what’s the WORST that could happen? Nobody is going to catch you. Let’s face the truth: this isn’t the first drug you’ve experimented with (be honest!) and you didn’t get caught then. You won’t now. You bought the pills from a friend of a friend (very un-sketchy) for only a few dollars. Sure, it’s addictive. Sure it’s basically speed or coke. We all know the horror stories of amphetamines (Requiem for a Dream??). But let’s not forget that drug use and drug abuse are two very different things. You’re an intelligent, aspiring-professional-class citizen, who just wants to enjoy youth while you’ve got it. You’re not some bumbling wino looking to score another high to make it through the night. You’re studying so that you can learn. You’re learning so that you can help to fix this crazy shit-storm of a world. Who can argue with that? Who can dare tell you that these don’t deserve to be the best years of your life? Who can dare tell you that you shouldn’t help humanity? You owe it to yourself. You owe it to the future. You owe it to god... well, maybe not, but it's his fault you can concentrate right now anyways, so go ahead and take one.
Take a pill for every major cram session that you have. Devote an entire day to studying. You were probably going to procrastinate anyway, so you may as well make sure that you CAN focus when crunch-time gets here. You’ve got 15 lectures to watch online still, and the exam is in two days. Yeah, you fucked up the planning. Yeah, you accept responsibility. But part of becoming a responsible adult is learning how to get out of the messes you’ve gotten yourself into. So here’s your shovel. With this pill you can dig straight up out of this hole. And you still get to honour St. Patrick.
Plus, these drugs are over prescribed as it is, right? You always read stories about children whose parents put them on Ritalin when there’s nothing wrong with them (aside from having lazy parents). So it seems like you were just out of the loop. Had you been growing up right now, you could probably go to the school nurse and explain your case: you can’t focus, you’re restless, you have a hard time retaining information that you read--the list goes on. They’d surely call up good ol’ Doc Jones to hook you up with some Ritalin. So forget him. Forget lining his coffers with more money so that he can share a bottle of champagne with your rotten Professor, who, by the way, probably took an Adderall (given to him by the doctor, of course) to write his crappy book in the first place.
I’m not saying it’s a perfect system. Actually, I’m saying that since it’s not a perfect system this is your way out. One pill is like the life preserver just in reach when you take that last breath and the yoke forces your head under the cold waves. So grab on. Pull yourself up and dust yourself off. Go to class early the next day and sit in the front row. Smile to yourself while you drink your coffee and eat your breakfast, looking at the signs that say “No eating or drinking in this lecture hall.” Read the newspaper for the first 5 or 10 minutes of lecture, just to let the professor know that his book was so great it covered the material for him. You couldn’t put it down. Hell, last night you actually read AHEAD in the class for the first time. Thanks to your little friend. Our little secret.
And it’s at that moment when you realize something. University isn’t that hard. It’s competitive, but you’re up for it. You’re a keener after all; you just needed to reach deep down within yourself. You just needed a little help along the way. The depression and stress you felt at being so far behind in your work is replaced with the satisfaction of knowing that you’re fully capable of handling everything. You’re fully capable. Now you’re on top of things. Now you’re learning because you love it. Now you’re kickboxing exams left and right, excited for grad school. The renewed vigor in your studies makes you smile to yourself as you remember that you actually ARE interested in your major. This IS what you want to do with your life, and can you believe you almost forgot that? Performance enhancing drugs? Refreshing reminders of why life is great. Refreshing reminders of why you want to be here in the first place. Who can argue with that?
