Students are turning to drugs to do better in school, a poll has found, with almost 20 percent at an Ivy League university admitting to using ADHD drugs to improve their performance in school.
Lead researcher Andrew Adesman, who will present the poll findings at the annual meeting of the Pediatric Academy Society in Vancouver in Canada said he would not identify the college surveyed but said he believe the rate would be the same at other academic institutions.
"I don't think this is a phenomenon that's necessarily any greater a problem in the Ivies than anywhere else," says Adesman, chief of behavioral and developmental pediatrics at the Steven & Alexandra Cohen Children's Medical Center in New York.
Some students are turning to stimulant drugs meant to treat attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder in the belief it will give them an academic edge, Adesman reported.
The highest degree of the misuse of such stimulants was among college juniors, Adesman found.
Of those reporting stimulant use, 69 percent said they took them to help in writing essays, 66 percent said they did so while studying for exams while 27 percent took the stimulants before taking a test, Adesman's survey found.
While 41 percent of students polled in the survey said they though misusing the stimulants -- meant to improve concentration and focus in ADHD sufferers -- in an academic setting constituted a kind of cheating, 33 percent said they didn't see it that way. Twenty-five percent of survey respondents said they were unsure.
While some schools have honor codes explicitly forbidding the use of performance-enhancing prescription medications by students, most colleges and universities have yet to address the problem, Adesman says.
"While many colleges address alcohol and illicit drug abuse in their health and wellness campaigns, most have not addressed prescription stimulant misuse for academic purposes," he says.
"Because many students are misusing prescription stimulants for academic, not recreational purposes, colleges must develop specific programs to address this issue."
The poll -- which surveyed 616 college students at an Ivy League university in 2012, none of whom were diagnosed with ADHD -- found varsity athletes and students who were members of sororities or fraternities were most likely to admit using the medications.
