Conceptualizing Instrumental Drug Use: Undergraduate Student Non-Prescription Use of Stimulant Medications as Study Aids

• In Event: 156 - Section on Alcohol, Drugs, and Tobacco Paper Session. Social and Contextual Dimensions of Substance Abuse

Abstract

This paper investigates NP-stimulant use via 37 interviews with illicit drug-using and nonusing undergraduates at the University of Toronto, a top-tier research university. Of primary concern is developing understanding of the dynamics of drug acceptability operating within a competitive university context. Interviews are analyzed with attention to practices students engage in to assess NP-stimulant use, contextual pressures informing use, and discourses students draw from to position NP-stimulant acceptability. 'Instrumental' drug use--as contrasted with 'recreational' or 'problematic' use--is used to conceptualize this increasingly salient form of drug acceptability. Findings suggest NP-stimulant use is positioned as instrumental and acceptable in so far as it is prosthetic: that is, used as a tool which temporarily enhances alertness, but that neither fundamentally changes learning capacities of students beyond what one would be capable of in 'un-stimulated' circumstances, nor interferes with ongoing achievement through compulsive usage patterns. Thus instrumental NP-stimulant acceptability is rooted in an ethic of self-sufficiency. This ethic is held in tension by an orientation to sustained educational capital accrual, whereby the risk of NP-stimulant use to undermine self-sufficiency is located as appropriate in circumstances where one's educational credits are threatened. Implications for future research and university policy are considered.

Author

• Kat Kolar, University of Toronto