I would never advise using adderall for academic "performance" mostly because of the risks to the user ... not an issue of "fairness" really. Do we ban coffee next?
Disagree. As a society, we are certainly capable of forming and exercising cutoffs of acceptable and unacceptable behavior (unless you're Rick Santorum...). It's perfectly rational for a society to ban a new dietary supplement or pharmaceutical, while accepting chemicals that have been with us for ages and intense physical training research, even though there is no objective reason to do so. The same is true for coffee vs amphetamine salts: we are perfectly capable of saying, "hey, everybody drinks coffee, but amphetamine is a drug!" even though any six year old can mock you and say "caffeine is a drug, too!"
If you have a disorder for which a psychostimulant is appropriate, it is ethical to take it. If not, it's a scummy thing to do. Of course, given the way we define these disorders, on mostly statistical and arbitrary bases, there is an obvious flaw to my reasoning.
Which isn't to say that other approaches to this topic aren't rational. I think ticket scalpers should be dragged through the streets and have their entrails strung through the bleacher seats, but I'm sure plenty of people on this forum see ticket scalpers as a necessary cog in a very inefficient wheel of product distribution. Whatever.
If you don't have a medical indication for a psychostimulant, then the provider who is writing a prescription is unethical. If you're obtaining amphetamines from a source other than a physician, then you're committing a crime. So whether you buy my weak argument for why taking amphetamines is scummy, it's clear that there is no way for a healthy college student to obtain amphetamines without
somebody doing something wrong.
Of course, given how many of your healthy pre-med and medical student contemporaries take psychostimulants from their daddy's prescription pad because the bar was so much more tempting than the organic chemistry textbook, I'm probably filing a minority report here.
