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Overlooked & Underrated Docs & Features
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Take Your Pills: For the Love of Addy $13 Billion Annually
That’s the upside to the marketing and sales of prescription performance enhancing drugs. Alison Klayman’s “Take Your Pills” is an exploration of what we’re getting for our money.
The primary focus is on Adderall (referred to by high schoolers as ‘Addy’) and, secondarily on Ritalin—as used by people who do not have ADHD or ADD. It’s relatively easy to secure a prescription, however, without the actual presence of those syndromes.
Klayman’s interviewees point out the plusses and minuses of what seems to be a ubiquitous use of these drugs by students and adults. At film’s end she takes a quick look at ‘nootropics’—nutritional supplements to enhance brain functioning—and ‘micro-dosing,’ the use of small doses of psychedelic substances to enhance job performance. ‘Brain hacking’ one interviewee calls it.
Researcher Martha Farah and company from the University of Pennsylvania decided to test the impact of Adderall on students’ cognitive performance. The study was done only on students without a formal diagnosis of ADHD or ADD. “It was across a huge battery of different tasks,” Farah states, “and in the end we found no significant difference between Adderall and placebo except for one question: Do you feel that the pill you took today enhanced your cognition?”
Yes, they did. The drug “boosts their false self-confidence in how well they’re learning,” another researcher concludes.
Whatever the motivations or rationales are to take what is nothing more or less than amphetamine—its use seems deeply entrenched in various layers of American society. One interviewee predicts Adderall and its cousins will take opioids’ place in the media world when people finally develop opioid coverage fatigue. From the information in “Take Your Pills”, in an ‘end-stage capitalism’ world, I doubt controversy in the media is going to hinder its prescription and use.