Non-Medical Use of Prescription Psychoactive Drugs in University Campuses

Manasa Veluvali

Awareness camps about substance abuse on university campuses are usually met with a collective groan. The gist of the campaign is usually the same: don’t do drugs, reach out for help, look out for your friends, know your limits. However, there is no denying that substance abuse is rampant on campuses, and not confined to social situations, and often used for academic efficiency and productivity. This is a crisis not just of drug abuse, but also of the effects of stressful academic culture on one’s mental and physical health. 

Non-medical prescription (psychoactive) drug (NMPD) use is intrinsically linked to mental health, as their functions work on the brain, stimulating activity, depressing activity, modulating neurotransmitter systems. It is safe to say every university student is familiar with late night study sessions, increasing competition, mounting pressure, the lot. Fatigue becomes the backdrop against which one’s life unfolds; one has to make it to classes, power through their work, maintain a good GPA, pursue hobbies on the side, have a social life, make it to grad school, etc. This sort of atmosphere becomes highly conducive to substance abuse—sometimes not only to “let loose,” but to simply be more efficient. A poor state of mental health makes it much harder to cope with daily stressors, and in vulnerable positions, with little or no access to mental health facilities, the easier (and not to mention high-risk) route is to illicitly use psychoactive medication, which is easy (and cheap) to come by, with varying degrees of restrictions in the country, as Uttara Chaudhuri explains in her article ‘Thinking Fast and Slow.’ 

A class of drugs called ‘smart drugs,’ of which Modafinil is a popular choice, has been common amongst students, especially in medical and engineering schools (Chaudhuri, 2018). Modafinil is known to increase wakefulness, attentiveness, and decision-making skills—effects that university students desperately want to utilise. While it is a prescribed medicine for conditions like Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and narcolepsy, the article states that it is not difficult to come by this medication without having a prescription. Nor is it impossible to get a false prescription written. One needn’t even go that far to get such medication; a study concluded that the easiest way adolescents procure NMPDs is through actual prescriptions of their friends, or of older family members (Perlmutter, Bauman, Mantha, et al, 3).  There are even guides on how and why to use this ‘smart drug.’  (It should go without saying that I absolutely do not encourage the use of smart drugs, and I will go on to make this clear.) Simply calling a drug ‘medication,’ lends legitimacy to its unregulated use, giving people the illusion that it must be safe because doctors do prescribe them (never mind to whom), and searches on the internet, such as the link mentioned above, provide simplified data, making one believe a doctor’s recommendation is completely redundant (Compton and Volkow, 6). Given that adolescents and young adults are the most common users of NMPDs (Compton and Volkow, 5), it is easy to blame youthful, adventurous, disobedient behaviour for this phenomenon, but it would be myopic to disregard why even the ‘smartest’ of the youth are pushed in this direction. 

Crucial questions arise from this rampant, unregulated usage: Is it prompted by poor mental health?  Does the abuse exacerbate mental health in the long run? How are medically prescribed users of such drugs affected by this phenomenon? 

While inability to cope with mental illness can make one consider taking NMPDs, it is also harmful to mental health in the long run. While there are reports saying Modafinil has low potential to be addictive, more recent studies say that we are only starting to understand the interactions of Modafinil with the dopamine pathway, aka the reward mechanism pathway, which is a key element to determining how addictive a drug can be (Volkow et al, 6). The argument that Modafinil is not addictive no longer stands. Moreover, interviews from the article ‘Thinking Fast and Slow’ reveal that the drug arrests creative thinking, not simply in the artistic sense, but the ability to do any more than a single task in a fixed way. Perhaps, this drug abuse could also result in the ban of such medication, which means that those who clinically require it will be deprived of it. 

Apart from the clinical effects of drug abuse, what we are not researching enough is: What is it about our educational institutions that makes NMPD use seem like the best option? 

Works Cited 

Asprey, Dave. (5 October, 2011). “Modafinil: The Rise of Smart Drugs”. Bulletproof.

Chaudhuri, Uthara. (1 June, 2018). “Thinking Fast and Slow.” The Caravan. 

Compton and Volkow. (2005). “Abuse of Prescription Drugs and the Risk of Addiction”. Elsevier Ireland Ltd. 

Perlmutter, Bauman, Mantha, et al. (2018). “Nonmedical Prescription Drug Use among Adolescents: Global Epidemiological Evidence for Prevention, Assessment, Diagnosis, and Treatment.” Springer Nature 2018. 

Volkow, Fowler, Logan et al. (2009). “Effects of Modafinil on Dopamine and Dopamine Transporters in the Male Human Brain: Clinical Implications”. The Journal of the American Medical Association.