Pursuing Pleasures of Productivity: University Students’ Use of Prescription Stimulants for Enhancement and the Moral Uncertainty of Making Work Fun

Abstract

This article presents ethnographic data on the use of prescription stimulants for enhancement purposes by university students in New York City. The study shows that students find stimulants a helpful tool in preventing procrastination, particularly in relation to feeling disinterested, overloaded, or insecure. Using stimulants, students seek pleasure in the study situation, for example, to get rid of unpleasant states of mind or intensify an already existing excitement. The article illustrates the notion that enhancement strategies do not only concern productivity in the quantitative sense of bettering results, performances, and opportunities. Students also measure their own success in terms of the qualitative experience of working hard. The article further argues that taking an ethnographic approach facilitates the study of norms in the making, as students experience moral uncertainty-not because they improve study skills and results-but because they enhance the study experience, making work fun. The article thereby seeks to nuance simplistic neoliberal ideas of personhood.

Enhancement, ethics and society: towards an empirical research agenda for the medical humanities and social sciences

“… 61 Such findings resonate with the more recent research of Margit Anne Petersen and colleagues, who likewise have underscored the role of prescription stimulants in sharpening students’ focus on their work, as well as on the subjective experience of work per se (and also on the moral ambivalences that characterise drug use in this context). 59 60 These experiences challenge the more ‘unemotional’ (as Vrecko puts it), sometimes strongly rationalist, accounts of decision-making and use that have found a home within much bioethical deliberation on cognitive enhancement. Hence, Vrecko's and Petersen et al 's findings are suggestive of the need to bring in the perspectives of actual users into the discursive spheres of bioethical and policy deliberation.…”

Research on Academic Procrastination among OEC Students

“…The principle of happiness means avoiding negative emotions and delaying stressful tasks, which may be the cause of the procrastination. [14] This assumption implies that stress is another incentive for procrastination. Psychologists believe that this stress-related procrastination is the mechanism by which tasks and decisions are related to the occurrence of anxiety.…”

“At Such a Good School, Everybody Needs It”: Contested Meanings of Prescription Stimulant Use in College Academics

“…). Scholars conducting in‐depth research with college students have provided valuable insights, but they tend to only include illicit users’ perspectives (DeSantis and Curtis Hane ; Karim ; Petersen, Nørgaard, and Traulsen ; Petersen et al. ; Vrecko , ).…”

“…The researchers identified shared narratives that justified illicit stimulant use, such as the idea that “stimulants caused no societal harm” (38). Based on ethnographic research with illicit users in New York, Petersen, Nørgaard, and Traulsen () found that their informants viewed self‐administered stimulant use as a morally acceptable practice while studying because studying was considered work. However, these students experienced moral uncertainty over the fact that stimulants made their work pleasurable in certain ways, troubling the distinction between using drugs for justifiable purposes (work) and unjustifiable purposes (pleasure).…”