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Adderall Addiction Stories
The Hunt
While countless friends had prescriptions for my newfound friend, I knew my younger brother had recently stopped taking his prescription due to the appetite loss side effect. When I went home for break after finals, I located the bottle beneath my parents’ bathroom sink and dumped out a hundred or so into my palm.
Scurrying back to my bedroom, I immediately smashed out a few lines and was flying high for the afternoon. Nevermind that I had to care for my brother; Adderall had taken hold.
Within two weeks of returning to school, I was carrying a pre-crushed jar of powder in my backpack with one end of a tampon applicator to snort it. It took less than that amount of time to run through what I had stolen from my brother.
Fueled by a diet of prescription amphetamines, coffee, alcohol, weed and cigarettes, I began to pilfer from my friends’ prescriptions. They would give me some and I always took a few extra for the road, justifying it with the reasoning that they would have more next month. They only needed it to study — I needed it to survive. Or so I thought.
The Comedown
My run with Adderall was a sporadic and passionate love affair. There were times my ability to find it would dry up and I would slave through the weeks of frustration, agitation and cravings. Then I would find another friend with a prescription and repeat the process all over again.
It all culminated when the Adderall, alcohol, marijuana and other drugs landed me at the end of my senior year with three uncompleted classes, three weeks before graduation. I knew there was nothing normal about the amount of substances I used. I couldn’t do anything without smoking a bowl, snorting a line or swallowing a shot.
A caring professor sat me down after class one day and mentioned the papers I had produced throughout the year. She brought up the allusions to substance abuse peppered throughout my work, the run-on sentences and rambling thoughts fueled by “legal” amphetamines. She explained to me that she had just celebrated 10 years of sobriety in March using a program with a path to sobriety.
She told me her story of swigging from bottles beneath her desk before classes started. It was as though she was looking into my mind, reading the thoughts as they raced through my brain. She knew me and she didn’t even know me.
She put me in touch with another student in the program who took me to my first meeting. I was astounded at the things these people shared, amazed that I felt the same way they did. Still wary of giving up my drugs, I went to a few meetings high. After a couple of weeks, though, something stuck and I found myself sober for days at a time.
That same teacher helped me develop a course of action to complete my school work. She helped me realize how capable I was when I wasn’t fueled by a concoction of substances. She gave me hope that I was worth more than the toxins I fed my body.
