This is a topic I could rant about for days on end, especially as someone with ADHD. Just for some background on myself, I'm 28 but haven't taken medication for my ADHD since I was maybe 8 when Ritalin was pretty much your only option. Anyone who ever took Ritalin could tell you how bad it was. For starters, it was super addictive for most people and, if you didn't take it, you'd crash and burn pretty hard, as in your motivation would go in the toilet and you'd only want to just sit or sleep for ridiculous amounts of time. My parents finally took me off it when they realized that it significantly altered my personality and was the source of extreme moodswings ranging from total rage to complete lethargy.
I mention this because Adderall wasn't something I even knew about until college. It's sort of the elephant in the room in American colleges nowadays because the longterm effects are starting to be seen. It's no small secret that a lot of college students use Adderall. Need to pull an all-nighter? Just pop an Adderall. Need to write a term paper in a few hours? Adderall. If you have ADHD, it makes you function like a normal person but if you're already there, it practically turns you into a super human. With high stakes scholarships and student loans, it's really no wonder so many people are turning to this but a storm that's brewing is that these same students are continuing to use Adderall when they enter the workforce.
Like any kind of drug addiction, if you overuse it or use it for specific things, you become dependent on it. Students wanting to make the dean's list are becoming employees who want to climb the corporate ladder and using the same method. Got a high stakes presentation to show to the boss? Just pop an Adderall. Need to complete a quarter project in less than a weekend? Adderall. These same people are slowly becoming so dependent on it that they're practically making themselves worse than people with ADHD in the process. I've lived my whole life with ADHD so I know how to manage it but these people are getting thrown out to sea.
To put ADHD in crude terms, it usually takes on three major forms: you have the attention span of a gold fish, you have the self control of a gerbil, or a grand mixture of both. Of course, either of these can make life problematic. Your memory takes a hit. You might have moodswings. Sleep problems are very common. Impulsive behavior (especially addiction and anger issues) are very common. It's even been shown to manifest in even uglier ways such as antisocial tendencies, both the avoiding people type and the "being an A-hole is hilarious" type. So, what's happening is we're winding up with adults who are pretty much burning out their brains and swandiving in the wonderful word of debilitating mental illness.
Back to what I mentioned earlier, it's the elephant in the room in colleges because it's well known that students abuse it but... the administrators aren't exactly unhappy about this. More students with better grades make the university look better even if it's technically "cheating." This is why drug use in professional sports is usually approached in such a limp wristed way. Performance enhancing drugs produce the results everyone wants.
A grand example of this is what happened to American baseball nearly two decades ago. The sport was on the decline nationally and many people were wondering if football was simply going to push it into complete irrelevancy. Then Mark Mcgwire of the St. Louis Cardinals and Sammy Sosa of the Chicago Cubs had a back and force slugfest to break the single season homerun record, something that hadn't even really been challenged in nearly 40 years. Growing up in St. Louis, this was incredibly exciting and the whole country was watching these two go at it. No American baseball fan will deny that this Homerun race saved the sport on a national level and made it culturally relevant again.
Now, people weren't dumb and most people suspected something was going on. Mcgwire had a neck that looked like a goddamn slab of roast beef and Sosa was freakishly buff too. Most people didn't care though. Even when the both of them were ratted out, their cities still loved them, even if their records now had to have asterisks next to them at the Hall of Fame. They got the results people wanted and most people shrugged off the ethical implications. This became even more apparent when Barry Bonds of the San Francisco Giants toppled Mcgwire's record only a few years later despite also being hilariously huge. Again, most people didn't care because it was exciting to watch and it made money pour in like water.
The relation to this story and E-sports should be more than apparent at this point. E-sports are getting bigger and bigger and tournaments that were once largely esoteric except to the most die hard fans are now getting worldwide attention and are starting to put many televised major league sports to shame. It's amazing but at the same time it all ties back to what people are willing to do stay on top. It could be argued that the game changing is pushing players to do this. It could be argued that it's simply human nature to want to be the best, even if it involves cheating. The problem is that it's becoming an ever growing problem that people are sacrificing their long term health for some key tournament wins over a couple of years.
Beyond E-sports, this is becoming a far reaching problem because standards are being raised and competition is becoming more fierce for just about everything. In my lifetime, getting a bachelor's degree has basically become a formality and most employers still DGAF unless you come from a better school. It's one of the harsh realities that pushed me to get a master's. We're humans who wish we were super humans but instead of allowing incremental progress or accepting our limitations, we want results as quickly as possible, even if it means long term problems later. This being said, it's hard to say how exactly to approach this problem beyond admitting that it's a problem. The science of widespread performance enhancing drug use is still fairly young and the first tangible dark clouds have only shown up in the past 5-10 years so, while it's a discussion that definitely needs to be had, it's hard to say where we ought to go from here.
