Students about Ritalin: What role do drugs play in their studies?

Max has an exam in a week, but there's a party tonight.

Of course, the political science student wants to do well.

"But if you're already doing something for the university six out of seven days a week, you want to go away," he says.

The next day it will be difficult for him to get out of bed.

He'll be tired, hungover, unmotivated.

He won't be able to match his normal level of performance, he says.

Because this is what a typical morning after a night of partying looks like for Max.

But he doesn't care, Max takes Ritalin.

Ten milligrams and he'll be in the library until evening.

He gets the pills from people who have been prescribed the actual ADHD medication by a doctor.

"Of course it's somehow fairer if you're not doped," says Max, who, like all the students in this text, actually has a different name.

But you can't control it.

Only the result counts.

"And how you get there is up to you." What Max and many of his fellow students practice is called neuroenhancing.

"Neuroenhancing is the use of prescription psychotropic drugs without a medical diagnosis," says Greta Wagner from the Institute of Sociology at the Technical University of Darmstadt.

She did her doctorate on the subject of self-optimization through neuroenhancement in Germany and the USA.

Ritalin doesn't make you smarter, she says.

However, the active ingredient methylphenidate can provide a boost in motivation and activity - and therefore maintain the concentration of the students.

However, according to Wagner, the hoped-for effect only occurs in very few people: "For many, the effect is simply that they feel a vague nervousness, start sweating, how wildly they clean up their whole apartment," she says.

In the end, the students would have done a lot, but everything "except writing their homework".

dubious effect

Wagner therefore considers a debate about the gross violation of fairness in studies by neuroenhancers to be exaggerated.

It is true that individuals could gain a certain advantage if Ritalin worked on them in a specific way.

But: "We don't all start from scratch, and then take some performance-enhancing drugs and thus have this substantial advantage," says the sociologist.

Medical tests have shown that subjects under the influence of performance-enhancing drugs were not able to solve tasks significantly better than those who did not take any of the drugs.

Ritalin can even be a hindrance when writing term papers: "You may have managed to type a lot of pages in a very short time," she says.

But don't get to the point or think everything is important.

Those who take neuroenhancers do not automatically get better grades, says the sociologist.

Rather, the benefit of brain doping is dubious.

Ritalin can also have serious side effects.

In addition to sweating, users reported problems falling asleep, loss of appetite, physical exhaustion and brief periods of depression when the tablets wear off.