Black Market for ADD Drugs

"I wasn’t a habitual drug user. But I was driven to do well in school and couldn’t see my way through all the papers, tests and projects on two or three hours of sleep a night."

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By Michelle Jarboe

Sales of popular Attention Deficit Drugs like Ritalin and Adderall added up to over 2.7 billion dollars in 2004, with more than 33 million prescriptions filled in the U.S. That’s according to the prescription auditing firm IMS Health. Youth Radio’s Michelle Jarboe is part of what some people call the “Ritalin generation” because her peers have been familiar with Attention Deficit drugs since elementary school. Now that her generation has hit college, ADD drugs have become a hot commodity as a study aid and even a party drug. Michelle reports from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, her alma mater, on the black market for these drugs on campus. (February 9 on American Public Media's Marketplace)

The few times I took Ritalin, I got the pills from a boyfriend whose parents were psychiatrists. He didn’t have Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD), but mom and dad were willing to write him a prescription so he could stay up nights to cram for exams. I was 17, and figured if someone’s highly educated and expert parents would casually hand him a drug, then it had to be safe.

The first time I tried Adderall wasn’t much different – this time, the source was a friend who got the drug from a roommate with a prescription. Look, I wasn’t a habitual drug user. But I was driven to do well in school, and couldn’t see my way through all the papers, tests and projects on two or three hours of sleep a night. That is, until I encountered my friends’ little pills.

Sometimes they were free, and sometimes a single pill could cost as much as seven or eight dollars. Whatever the cost, the returns were amazing.

JESSE (on tape)
The whole time you’re on it, you just feel like that’s the way things are supposed to be. You feel like it’s gotten you normal.

MICHELLE
That’s Jesse Anderson, a friend of mine who used Adderall for the first time in a college study group. Someone gave it to him, and he thought, "Sure, why not."

JESSE (on tape)
I remember everyone sitting around and thinking, "You know, maybe we all have ADD, because this stuff makes me feel great, like I don’t feel weird. I feel like I want to do my work."

MICHELLE
You can pop a pill at midnight, he says, write a 10-page paper in a few hours and still have time to clean your room and catch breakfast before your 8 a.m. class.

And though transactions in these stimulants aren’t always in the open, they don’t carry the same stigma as many recreational drugs. Jesse knows a lot of people who won’t touch marijuana – but it doesn’t take much for them to chow down Adderall without a prescription.

JESSE (on tape)
Because it’s made by a company, it comes in a nice pre-packaged way. They’re not going to sell anything to millions of kids that’s going to kill them. It seems relatively safe.

HAMRICK (on tape)
When a student brings up the fact that stimulant use actually makes them perform better, I can’t deny that.

MICHELLE
That’s Psychiatrist Allen Hamrick. He says it’s tough to fight abuse because the little pills work so well.

HAMRICK (on tape)
The stimulant itself would lead any of us to feel more attentive and probably do better on a test. But so would crack cocaine.

MICHELLE
Hamrick is one of the higher-ups with UNC’s Counseling and Psychological Services. He’s seen students taking 500 milligrams of Ritalin a day, a huge jump from the 10 milligrams a day typical for a new ADD patient.

Hamrick’s office has stopped prescribing stimulants to students without a full battery of psychological tests. He says counselors worried they were contributing to the black market for Attention Deficit drugs.

Tobias Butts, a recent UNC graduate, says the docs are right. He saw lots of students make a killing off selling pills during his time in college.

TOBIAS (on tape)
So, you've got roughly 90 pills, and then you sell each one of those for $5. Do the math. That’s $450 for a $30 investment. If that’s not highway robbery, then I don’t know what is.

PSYCHOLOGY MAJOR(on tape)
I have to stockpile that stuff during exams and midterms.

MICHELLE
That’s a psychology major who asked to remain anonymous, since he freely shares Adderall with his friends. Using his knowledge of ADD symptoms, and a little bit of help from the field’s diagnostic manual, he faked the learning disorder to get a prescription. He takes a small percentage of his pills each month and gives away the rest.

PSYCHOLOGY MAJOR (on tape)
I never have a surplus, but I have to take into consideration that demand fluctuates depending on what kind of university-wide pressures are placed on the student body.

MICHELLE
Those pressures also hit students trying to protect their medications. Melinda Manning, an assistant dean of students at UNC, talks to students every week who say they’re being pestered for their Adderall supply. She graduated from UNC a decade ago, and says this kind of stimulant abuse didn’t exist when she was an undergrad.

MELINDA (on tape)
The most my friends were taking were No-Doz and other caffeine. I don’t remember hearing of anyone who took anything like Ritalin or Adderall. But, honestly, I didn’t know any friends who were prescribed Ritalin or Adderall for ADD. So I don’t think there was any access to it at that point.

MICHELLE
Times have changed. Myself? I didn’t consider what might happen if I got caught taking someone else’s prescription medication. Sure, my friends and I knew sharing regulated stimulants was illegal, but it didn’t seem that different from underage drinking. Kids in every college town do it, and most of them don’t get caught.

My stint taking the pills was brief. It ended after I realized that I’d rather fail a paper than risk dependency on a drug in order to achieve my goals. But I still hear a lot about stimulant abuse at UNC, and, more and more, it's not just academic. Plenty of people pop an Adderall with a beer before heading to a party, making the night last longer...and expanding the market for these drugs.