MLS and Other Drugs

14/5/2019

Issue 10, Semester 1, 2019

ANONYMOUS

I get up at 7:00am. As usual, I haven’t slept anywhere near enough, maybe four or five hours. Realistically, that’s entirely my fault. Once again, I didn’t plan out my week properly and was left rushing to catch up on assignments and readings late into the night. I make myself a coffee before I shower and have another one immediately afterward. If this isn’t one of the months I’ve quit smoking then I’ll have a cigarette or two. If it is, then I’ll apply a patch and chew some Nicorette gum. Either way, by the time I’m out the door, with a sandwich in hand for breakfast, my blood is already swimming with caffeine and nicotine, and I’m riding another wave of blood pressure and heart palpitations throughout the day.

When I arrive back home in the evening, I still have a good six hours of work ahead of me. Exams are around the corner, essay research has not yet begun, I have work tomorrow morning. I quickly do the math in my head. My poor time management has screwed me again, there’s no way I can get everything done with the sleep budget I’ve allocated myself. With a sigh I reach for the bottle tucked at the back of my dresser and dry swallow another white tablet.

The drug I’ve just taken is modafinil, a wakefulness agent prescribed for narcolepsy sufferers and US Air Force pilots on extreme fatigue missions. In Australia it’s illegal without a prescription, however as with most pharmaceuticals in the age of globalisation, it’s surprisingly easy to order from Amazon with a third-party courier service to redirect shipping. The dose will keep me alert for about fourteen hours, after which I’ll have to balance myself out with a dose of Melatonin ordered from Taiwan. In three days, it’ll be Saturday, during which I can probably afford the necessary twenty or so hour comedown and system crash that I’m setting myself up for. Until then, I’ll have to walk a tight rope between these two medications, rationing out my sleep so as to maintain the effects during waking hours. The effect is a bit like running a car on a near-empty radiator. I’ll be alert and mentally stable, but by the end of it my mind will feel like a whipcord of dry nerves, my neurons scraped raw by chemical overclocking.

It’s unsurprising that I’ve managed to stumble my way into this destructive habit. During my time at university, I’ve collected chemical addictions like they were Pokémon. During my undergraduate I rotated through weed, ADHD medication and anti-psychotics, sometimes to keep myself running, other times just out of curiosity. By the time I started law school, self-medicating to sustain the costs of continuous and high-pressure mental work seemed natural. At the end of the semester I’ll tell myself that I’m putting an end to it. For a few weeks I’ll exercise more, try to eat healthily, cut out caffeine and keep a sleep diary. Within a month I’ll miss a deadline or stay up late too many nights in a row and find out that I still have a few tablets left, just for emergencies.

Drug abuse is nothing new in the legal profession, or among tertiary students. I know that I’m not the only one, or even in a particularly small minority; there are quite a few of us at MLS. Sometimes we swap or sell our respective drugs at parties. Usually I keep my habits to myself or share them with my housemates when they’re struggling with shift work. Law students aren’t even close to the worst offenders. One of my friends studying medicine has just started her residency at Royal Melbourne Hospital. She compensates for twenty-four plus hour shifts with yoga and amphetamines.

I know that sooner or later I will have to seriously look this problem in the eye, but as with everything in my life these days, any serious attempt at self-care or improvement is measured in the currency of time, and I simply don’t have enough of it to keep myself off the pills for good. Every week I feel myself burning a little more. The tablets don’t stop that, but they make me at least a little bit fireproof.

Anonymous is a former JD Student.

If you are reading this article and need support please reach out to those close to you or seek professional help via one of many available resources such as:

Beyond Blue 1300 22 4636
Lifeline 13 11 14
Headspace (under 25yos)
University of Melbourne Counselling and Psychological Service
Melbourne Law School Wellbeing and Academic Support

Three Things

14/5/2019 03:31:20 pm

1. You sound like you need help to manage your life. Get it. Maybe take leave from your job / studies if you can to get yourself back on track.
2. Your drug taking may affect whether you are a fit and proper person to practice law now or in the future. So maybe deal with this issue sooner rather than later.
3. If these drugs have not been prescribed to you, you are putting your health at risk when you take them, and you are also risking the health of people you supply them to. Think about your own wellbeing and that of others.

Sweet summer child

14/5/2019 03:49:48 pm

Oh boy are you going to be in for a shock when you join the profession...

brruhhhh

14/5/2019 03:50:05 pm

Bruh its modafinil, not meth... its a bit savage to say op ain't a 'fit and proper person' because of some narcolepsy medication.

Not the point

14/5/2019 06:31:14 pm

I don't think the point is that modafinil is prone to destructive abuse in the same way that heroine or meth is. The issue in terms of whether the OP is 'fit and proper' is that they're cheating. They're using a stimulant not available to the general population to gain an advantage in their degree.

Clarification

14/5/2019 08:22:29 pm

My concern is genuinely just OP’s welfare. If non prescribed (or other) drugs are being used as a means to cope / self-medicate, that puts OP at risk in a professional and personal sense.

Plenty of lawyers have experienced issues with substance use and abuse and it has affected their ability to practice long term. OP may not be in that exact situation but it seemed sensible to raise it in any case.

Lucas

14/5/2019 10:12:08 pm

This kind of "frank" advice is the type that's far more likely to exacerbate any underlying shame/insecurities/personal problems than to fix it. If you're going to give advice of the "pull yourself up by the bootstraps" variety, recognise instead that it's far more useful if you offer practical steps and pathways to affect that advice, rather than shaming the person about: 1) not getting the help they may need, 2) jeopardising their career prospects, and 3) claiming that they aren't even thinking of their own well-being, and are putting other people in harm's way

1. What's really good and helpful is telling people who seem like they need help to "get help" and ending your sage words of advice there

If it were that easy this article wouldn't have been written

2. "Maybe deal with the drug use sooner rather than later"

Again, not helpful advice. Just the kind of advice that makes people feel shit about themselves

The author clearly acknowledges that their level of drug use and reliance is unhealthy and they state multiple times that when they can, they try to avoid them

3. "You're a danger to yourself and others, and aren't thinking of your own wellbeing"

Needless to say, this may well be the last thing someone who already relies on drugs (even though they explicitly do not want to) needs to hear as they struggle to feel in control of their own life

TLDR; there's helpful advice, and there's unhelpful advice. Yours falls into the second category. Before you give advice, think about whether it's helpful, or whether (even with the best of intentions) you're kind-of just moralising or (in a worst case scenario) exacerbating the problem

Chill

14/5/2019 10:27:34 pm

All I said was
1. Get help, you seem to need it (because)
2. This could hurt your career
3. This could hurt you and the people you care about / give drugs to

Pretty normal reaction, pretty standard advice.

I recommend censorship

14/5/2019 04:40:24 pm

Do we need to know how to get modafinil easily?

Anon

14/5/2019 05:30:08 pm

[Content warning: mental illness]

Pushing ourselves past our limits to get through this degree should not be normalised. Fatigue, extreme stress, and self-medication/drug use shouldn't be something that we take lightly and see as just being part of the profession. Our brains are fragile organs. We wouldn't expect our bodies to be able to run a marathon every day, because it would be obvious that we would get injured or just completely collapse. Mental health is the same - I know of young lawyers and other professionals having pushed themselves so hard that they've endured psychosis as a result of sustained stress/sleep deprivation/drug use.

In a way, I think I'm lucky that I experienced a (relatively minor) mental health crisis of sorts before I started my law degree. It was hard to go talk to a professional about it but my stress had slipped out of my control and was incapacitating me. I realised I had always thought my symptoms (like struggling to relax) were helping me to be productive, when it was actually the opposite. Unsurprisingly, a doctor told me I have an anxiety disorder - something that can be associated with being perfectionistic and putting a huge amount of pressure on yourself. Going on a mental health plan and seeing a psychologist didn't 'fix' my anxiety, but it is helping me to live with it!

Julia

14/5/2019 09:43:46 pm

If you are reading this article and need support please reach out to those close to you or seek professional help via one of many available resources such as:

Beyond Blue 1300 22 4636
Lifeline 13 11 14
Headspace (under 25yos)
Unimelb Counselling and Psychological Service
MLS Well-being

Dear editors it is poor that this needs to be commented and is not included on the article.

De Minimis link

14/5/2019 11:09:31 pm

Hi Julia - thank you for raising this point. We acknowledge our oversight and have amended the article to include the helplines and services for anyone who needs support. We will make sure to keep this in mind for future articles.

You’re joking

15/5/2019 12:44:56 am

Don’t bother using any of these services, they are all shit.

JUST STOP

15/5/2019 10:13:56 am

You are literally the problem.

Those services save lives and they are run by qualified, caring people who may be under resourced but literally do the best they can to help those who reach out.

Use those services, speak to friends and family, use anything that makes you feel like like you're not alone and just keep going.

Dexy-champ

15/5/2019 06:28:22 am

I took dexies like a fucking champ at law school. I stopped the day of my last exam, and am now a lawyer (it's been a little over 2 years since I graduated). I can honestly say I've never felt tempted to take dexies or other "PEDs" in the profession -- law school pressure is unique and very different to what you'll feel when you make it to the other side.

Great but

15/5/2019 11:23:42 am

Great that you’re proud that you’re a cheat.

Sick of the clear ableism

15/5/2019 12:01:56 pm

DEXY-CHAMP didn't state whether they had a valid prescription for the pills, so please don't able-splain and declare someone a cheat.

Person of unknown ability

15/5/2019 01:34:58 pm

Did you just assume his/her/xir ability?

I have narcolepsy and ADHD

15/5/2019 03:27:20 pm

I'm a law student who's had ADHD and narcolepsy type 1 from a young age. Parts of my brain never developed and the neurons that keep other people awake die too quickly in me to do anything useful. It also means my condition is incurable, as there is currently nothing that can replace the loss of brain cells.

I can't speak to any remarkable improvements in alertness or concentration because I'm so deficient that amphetamines and modafinil just help me exist in day-to-day life. Without it (and sometimes with), I hallucinate in class, walk into incoming traffic, sleep 15 hours a day, yawn uncontrollably blabla you get the drift.

Honestly, reading this article and the comments just makes me feel really envious. I've heard about the euphoria-super-concentration-14-hour-alertness that people experience when they take these meds, but have never experienced it myself. The only consistent effect I get from these meds is crippling nausea RIP.

I've had people ask me if I deal* and talk about how lucky I am to be prescribed these meds. But seriously, I would swap brains with someone neurotypical any day of the week. My meds only nudge me closer to normal...with a sprinkle of dizziness, migraines, and food that tastes like cardboard.

How am I surviving law school? Argh am I though?? Things take me thrice as long as it takes everyone else. But I want it and I've never let my conditions stop me before, so why start now? Sure, I need to read the same sentence 10 times and hear only 10% of what lecturers say, but I get...halfway there eventually (honestly still working out the kinks. Hmu if you have tips).

But seriously, I would not recommend stimulants to people without an autoimmune or neurological condition. Forget that it can lead to sudden death, seizures, heart attacks, psychosis etc etc. Heaps of studies have demonstrated they don't actually improve cognitive function. They just make you FEEL like you're doing better, but every time you take it, you're risking damage to your brain cells. I would not be taking any of it if I didn't have to.

But free will and all that. I just wouldn't be messing with my brain if I was lucky enough to have a perfectly normal one. I understand that drug and alcohol abuse is rampant in the legal profession and law school, but that's something we know is unfortunate and shouldn't just accept. We shouldn't be normalising stimulant abuse and acting like it's fine because it could be worse. Prescription stimulants aren't meth, but in a similar vein, painkiller-addiction isn't okay just because it's not heroin.

*Answer: No. Because stimulants are Schedule 8 drugs, they're up there with morphine, and even getting these meds from my psychiatrist/neurologist/GP as someone with ADHD+narc is a pain and takes forever. It's also so expensive I wanna cry.

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