Ashe About Your Health: Unprescribed stimulants can have negative side effects

Many students have a friend, or a friend of a friend, who has been prescribed Adderall or another stimulant.

Patients who take stimulants see numerous improvements in their symptoms, including greater alertness and concentration, and decreased distraction and procrastination.

In the college-age group, stimulants (medicines like Adderall and Ritalin) are often prescribed for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Less commonly, they are also prescribed for disorders such as narcolepsy or treatment-resistant depression.

For people who have ADHD – with impaired attention, lack of focus, poor follow-through and disorganization – stimulants can provide life-changing relief from debilitating symptoms.

The problem here is that stimulants can also improve most anyone’s attention span and provide immediate improvement in focus and concentration, so you can study more efficiently, improving last-minute concentration.

A 2008 study in the Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry found that over 12 months, up to 9 percent of high school students and up to 35 percent of college students had taken a stimulant without a prescription. And up to 29 percent of students who were prescribed stimulants had been asked to give, sell or trade their stimulant medication.

While stimulants are incredibly helpful for some patients, they also have numerous side effects that vary from unpleasant to life-threatening. Some of the side effects can be worsened if taken with other medications or drugs, like cold medicines, caffeine or alcohol. The list is long, and a little scary: loss of appetite, sleep disturbances, emotional instability, development of involuntary movements, increased heart rate and blood pressure (even heart failure), headaches, delusional thinking and addiction.

On more than one occasion students who have illicitly taken Adderall or another stimulant with the goal of cramming for tests wound up in the emergency room with symptoms that felt like a heart attack, or in the psychiatric ward with psychosis.

Beyond side effects, some students give their medication away, trade it or sell it. As noted above, this has clear health risks to the person who is using the stimulant illicitly, but it also has legal consequences for both people. Possessors of stimulants without a prescription can be charged with a felony offense. Selling, and possession with intent to sell, is too. Even giving it away for free to a friend is illegal and considered practicing medicine without a license.

Because of the medical risks associated with stimulants, as well as the concern for diversion for patients giving or selling their prescriptions to someone else, psychiatrists need to be extremely cautious. Stimulants are only prescribed when there is a demonstrated clinical need, when any medical conditions or risks have been taken into consideration, and then only under ongoing supervision by their doctor. That’s the kind of thing we do correctly at the Counseling and Psychological Services center. So if you think you have ADHD, come see one of us at CAPS and let us help you get the appropriate medical care, the right way, the legal way and, most importantly, the safe way.

Dr. Charles McDaniel is the director of psychiatry at UCLA’s Counseling and Psychological Services.