Low on energy, drained of resources and out of ideas about what to do, I consulted an expert on recovery and was given my personal stimulus package. It came in a small brown bottle of 60 pills, a dose of which was to be taken twice a day (but not too late in the day, because it might cause sleeplessness, and not too closely together, because it might cause dizziness). The psychiatrist who prescribed them predicted good things — enhanced concentration, a new competitive edge — and he minimized the risks, which is what finally sold me on Adderall. The drug was a compound of amphetamines meant to combat attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, he said, that had proved safe in many trials — if used as directed. I sensed an insult. Did I look like someone who couldn't take direction? I let it pass.
To strivers young and old, the lure of mental accelerants like Adderall and its many molecular cousins has only grown since I swallowed my first dose and started down a pharmacological path that was more dizzying than I expected. I found out the hard way that revving up your brain in order to win the race, or just stay in it, comes at a cost that may exceed the benefits. Lately, others are learning this lesson, too, sometimes in traumatic ways. In the last eight years, it was recently reported, calls to poison-control centers concerning overdoses of legal stimulants by young people shot up 76 percent. The increase tracked a near doubling of the rates at which such medications are prescribed, from about four million prescriptions eight years ago to eight million today. Neither of these figures surprises me. In matters related to modern pep pills, everything seems to double every few years, including, sometimes, a person's appetite for them.
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