COLUMBUS, Ohio, Oct. 16 (UPI) — Nearly three-quarters of college students say it’s easy to buy controlled stimulants on campus without a prescription, and it’s almost as easy to get other drugs that generally require a prescription, according to a survey conducted by Ohio State University.
Nearly half of students also said it easy to find sedatives and about a third said they could get painkillers, researchers reported.
“At one time, college students most commonly misused drugs to get high,” said Kenneth Hale, a clinical professor of pharmacy at Ohio State University, in a press release. “But today, students also use medications to self-medicate, to manage their lives. They are using drugs to control pain, to go to sleep, to relieve anxiety and to study.”
Researchers in the study, published by the university, administered the survey to 27,495 students at six public and two private universities in five states. Researchers received 3,918 responses, or 14 percent, which they said is average for surveys of college students. Ohio State is the only university that was named in the study, per an agreement with the other schools.
Of those who responded, 71 percent of undergraduates said it was easy to obtain stimulants such as dexedrine and adderall; 42 percent said it was easy to get sedatives; and 33.5 percent said it was easy to get painkillers. The majority of those students said the drugs typically came from friends, with friends supplying stimulants more than 80 percent of the time.
Stimulants, the most popular prescription drug mentioned in the study, are used 84.9 percent of the time to study or improve grades. Just over half the students, 56.1 percent, using sedatives said they were for sleep, while 48.8 percent said they were to control anxiety. Similarly, 54.9 percent of students using painkillers without a prescription used them for the proper reason — to relieve pain — while the rest were just getting high.
Researchers said the idea these drugs can improve performance or help with class has nothing to do with the drugs themselves — which poses a problem with getting students to stop using them.
“They [the drugs] can certainly help us focus and stay awake, but the myth that we need to bust is that they can actually help you do better academically,” Hale told Cleveland.com. “They are not cognitive enhancers — it is cognitive compensation. They haven’t gone to class or done the work and need to cram and pull an all-nighter.”
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