Wired for Success?

I suppose I’d be a better writer if I could hold my liquor. After all, plenty of U.S. winners of the Nobel Prize for literature—from Sinclair Lewis to William Faulkner to Eugene O’Neill to Ernest Hemingway—were friendly with the bottle. Liquor as a literary lubricant dates back to the authors of the U.S. Constitution. According to Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader, the U.S. National Constitution Center discovered material in 1992 that drives the point home: “One document that survived is the booze bill for the celebration party thrown two days before the U.S. Constitution was signed on Sept. 17, 1787. According to the bill, the 55 people at the party drank 54 bottles of Madeira, 60 bottles of claret, eight bottles of whisky, 22 bottles of port, eight bottles of cider, 12 bottles of beer and seven large bowls of alcoholic punch.”

This is terrifically bad news for lightweights with a penchant for the pen. Try as I might, I just can’t get my writing gene and my drinking gene properly connected. When I’m hemmed in by deadlines, a glass of wine takes the edge off just enough to scoot me from the keyboard to the couch. A second or third glass starts me into a frenzied bout of chatting and a spark of sexiness that ends abruptly with sudden-onset narcolepsy. Sorry to say, I’m a much better writer (and a livelier date) on the single-drink plan.
Truth is, since I’m rather chronically underslept, my greatest hope of high achievement may lie not in rum but in Ritalin. It seems the controversial attention deficit drug is now being used by college students who want to stay awake for finals and research papers.

A study of Ritalin abuse on campus, by Dr. Eric Heiligenstein at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, found that one out of every five students he interviewed had used Ritalin or similar drugs without being diagnosed with Attention Deficit Disorder—the typical reason people are prescribed the hefty stimulant.

Whatever happened to No-Doz? Or even coffee? They’ve been bested, it seems. Ritalin is said to have the power not only to keep you awake, but to increase your concentration and focus, as well.

Student.com reports that a single Ritalin pill commonly sells in the dorms for $5 to $10. If the aim is to get high and forget about the finals, then illegal users may crush it into a powder and snort it, or smoke it, or even mix it with a liquid and inject it.

Not surprisingly, the effects of Ritalin on students without attention disorders have not been evaluated (particularly in its crushed and injected forms). But good old common sense is sufficient to suggest that anything in the wrong quantity or combination can be dangerous—or deadly.

Overall abuse of prescription drugs is an increasingly common problem for college and high-school students across the country, and federal drug officials say Ritalin is among the top controlled prescription drugs reported stolen in the United States.

The fact is that the United States consumes 90 percent of the world’s Ritalin, and production of Ritalin is up 700 percent since 1990. An estimated 6 million American youngsters take Ritalin or another drug for ADHD. Ten to 12 percent of all boys between the ages of 6 and 14 in the United States have been diagnosed as having ADD.

Now, none of this means that the next burning trend will be Ritalin abuse among writers with low tolerance for alcohol, but then again, who would have predicted Ritalin for toddlers? Even those in the very middle of the Ritalin debate were disturbed by a recent Journal of the American Medical Association article showing the number of Ritalin prescriptions were exploding for toddlers as young as two, for alleged ADHD.

Ritalin for toddlers can only underscore the central question of exactly how much activity, distractibility, and impulsivity constitutes a “disorder” in children under five, or children in general. Show me a two-year-old without “ADHD symptoms” and I’ll predict she’s asleep.

Just like me after two glasses of wine. Which leads me to believe that perhaps it’s not Ritalin we all need, but more naps. Granted, frequent napping is not, as far as I know, a trait widely shared by my literary heroes, but nevertheless I’m happy to test the theory myself… just as soon as I get myself another cup of coffee and polish off my deadlines.