College is a world full of freedom and stress, all mixed together, and is often bonded by the need of an ‘escape’. Stressed out and overworked college students will run to drinking caffeine or taking drugs to enhance their ability to focus, or escape to party using hallucinating or calming drugs. Those who are addicted to these drugs must quickly be checked into rehab to go under unique recovery approaches and free themselves from these harmful drugs.
To make it easier for you, we’ve broken down each type of drug that is most commonly abused by college students.
Adderall
If you are or were a college student, you know the type of piling assignments and studying that has to be done during exam week. Adderall is the most popular drug during finals, since it is designed to make you more concentrated and focused. Overachievers in college would pop one to two pills at the start of the day to make sure they can finish their studying and assignments before bedtime.
Adderall is originally an ADHD medication and requires prescription. However, since the demand for Adderall keeps rising, more college students are beginning to fake symptoms of ADHD to the psychiatrist so that they can get a prescription for Adderall. Some would even illegally re-sell their supply. An overdose of Adderall can result in restlessness, tremor, confusion and hallucination which can also affect the cardiovascular and gastrointestinal systems due to fatigue.
MDMA
MDMA, or more popularly known as Ecstasy or Molly, is the number one go-to partying drug. As partying, raving, and going to music festivals becomes more in-trend, taking ecstasy becomes part of that trend. It is now considered normal to take this drug, just as it is normal to drink alcohol during a party. The two substances are usually taken together, and the effects are intensified with music.
MDMA increases your dopamine levels (which are your feel-good hormones) to its peak, and in result you feel extremely happy, excited, and hyper all at once. However, those who take MDMA usually experience a withdrawal effect a few days letter, where there are no dopamine left in their system and it results in depression and fatigue. Those who are addicted to MDMA would even resort to self-harm due to the depression that they experience during the aftermath.
Marijuana
Whether or not marijuana is considered a drug is still debatable, since it is now legal in some states in the US. However, it does have drug-like effects. Marijuana can be consumed in many ways, it can be inhaled by smoking, cooked or baked and then eaten, and even brewed as tea. It has many names, such as grass, bud, greens, and weed. Many would say that marijuana is the safest drug that exists, because its effect is to put you in a sleep-like state, where you’re relaxed, sleepy, yet easily amused.
This effect would hinder college students from their responsibilities, because they are high to be doing anything else and would prefer chilling. Marijuana is said to be the exact opposite to Adderall, in which you can get very easily distracted under its effect. There hasn’t been any recorded incidents on an overdose of marijuana, but there has been incidents where driving under the effects of marijuana causes the driver to drive slower than usual or thinking they’ve moved when they haven’t.