You went about your semester the same way as the rest of your friends did, more or less. You started out strong, scribing meticulous notes detailed with graphs, footnotes, and coffee stains. You read before you came to class. You even emailed the teacher once.

Of course, you don’t keep that pace up for the whole year — more like a week and a half or up to a month if you don’t have friends.

You’re too busy. You have people to do, things to see, intoxicants to abuse. By the time finals come around, you’re way behind on your reading, your notebooks are littered with doodles of zombie-ducks and you … might know where your book is? Jason’s car, you’re pretty sure.

No matter. Everybody does this. That’s what finals week is for, to learn four months’ worth of material 12 hours before your test.

Now, it’s finals week, and you’re really starting to stress out. You aren’t learning the material fast enough. You visit that one person’s Facebook page at least three times as often as you turn a page in your book. You find that you’re learning more about Tim Tebow’s throwing mechanics than you are about organic chemistry. What’s the matter? All your friends are studying fine.

That’s because your friends are on performance-enhancing drugs, probably Adderall. And if you care more about your GPA than you do about your "academic integrity," your health, or the slim chance of getting caught, you probably will be, too.

So you try it.

Zoom! Zoom zoom! You have no interest in Facebook, all you want to do is learn, learn this right now, because if you don’t get chapter three done by 3:17 a.m., it will mess up your whole schedule, and you won’t even have time for a snack, but then again snacks are a waste of time. Time. Time? Six hours before your test — that’s basically eternity. You have time to blow through this textbook, go home, clean your room, call your mom, and read at least half of that Edgar Allan Poe anthology that’s been sitting on your roommate’s shelf.

(Not that I would know. You see, I have academic integrity.)

What if you could live every day of your life like this? Well, unless you have a prescription, it’s pretty darn illegal. The Food and Drug Administration classifies it as a schedule II drug — just like opium and cocaine.

So it has to be bad for you if it’s illegal, right? That’s why drugs are usually illegal, you reason.

You do some research and find out … not a whole lot. Don’t feel bad — Canada tried to find out, too, and it couldn’t find anything, either. After 20 deaths and 12 strokes were reported among patients, they tried to find out whether Adderall increases the risk of cardiac death, but it couldn’t. So, it put the drug back on the market, where this is a vehemently strong demand for increased cognitive ability. Yeah, you can relate to that.

Some scientists advocate for the widespread availability and distribution of Adderall and other brain-enhancing drugs. Mentally capable adults should be able to make their own decisions about taking the drugs. If they want them, they should be able to take them, and those that don’t shouldn’t be able to stop those that do.

What a ground-breaking concept.

There are thousands of studies out there. If you’re interested, you can look them up and make your own decisions. Talk to a doctor. If you’re unable to be prescribed, maybe the drugs aren’t right for you. It might be better not to develop that kind of dependency, anyway.

But then again, what do I know about you? Nothing. You know your values, you know your goals, and you have the Internet.

Whatever you think about the subject, you should probably get off Facebook and hit the books right about now.