pls hndle thx

Pls Hndle Thx Rprts: Dancing with Mr. Brownstone

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Ed. note: Have a question for next week? Send it in to advice@abovethelaw.com.
When you think of drug addicts, you probably think of people with jawline zits and corroded teeth who hang out in tunnels with spoons and needles. Thankfully, the ten or so people who, in fact, do live like that have been located and will be featured in the upcoming season of Intervention. What about the less dramatic cases of drug use? Would you know it if the dumpy kid with the laptop next to you was juicin’? If he’s wearing Ed Hardy getting A’s on his Corporations exam, he very well might be.
This week, a tipster sent this email:

As I sit here in my cave trying to focus on Bankruptcy and Secured Transactions, I can’t help but be distracted by what eliminates distractions for many of my classmates, along with a large amount of law students around the country… [What] is becoming clearer and more apparent to me is the use of Adderall…

Adderall, or “beans,” “Christmas trees,” “black beauties,” or “double trouble” as my mom calls them, is normally used to help parents feel like they can do something about their troublemaker children. When abused in adults, the drug can have devastating effects including being unspeakably corny and being a huge loser.
But law students around the country aren’t juicin’ to hit harder, run faster or some other noble cause.


They’re ragin’ to…study harder:

I hope I am not alone when I consider it a performance enhancing drug for law school. Everyone has problems focusing, especially when it comes time to studying the in’s and out’s of fraudulent transfers. Am I the only person that finds its usage unfair?

Hang on to your coke mirrors, people: Adderall does not gives law student users an unfair advantage. It doesn’t miraculously supply the right answers on exams. Its only benefit is that it helps students who are too insecure to take an exam sober feel like they have an advantage, kind of like rolling up to an exam in lucky underwear or a Princeton Review t-shirt. Adderall may help students “concentrate” on studying prior to the exam, but in law school, studying and exam performance have absolutely nothing to do with one another.
Make no mistake: drug use of any kind among law students is troubling. But perhaps even more troubling is that students are using Adderall, not to do something cool like drive to AC in the middle of the night and bash bottles of Cristal over their heads, but to memorize acronyms. That people would waste precious drugs on school work displays a disturbing lack of judgment that, more than the drug use itself, directly bears on their fitness for the profession.

Wow. I did not know that Marin was one of these “high-on-life” people. Good for her. I guess she can look forward to a very long and healthy life of doing wind sprints when she’s 80 and listening to Jonas Brothers mix tapes.
For the rest of us, it goes without saying that the key is not what drugs you take, but how you balance the drugs in your system. In law school, I had a very strict regimen of drinking coffee exclusively until it was time to bring on the liquor. If my drunkening time happened to be before noon, I’d roll with Irish coffee. I never snorted Adderall, but I did have an I.V. full of red bull hooked up beside my desk during finals period. To balance it out, after my last final I would always [redacted] from a three foot [redacted] while [redacting] my wife and listening to Marvin Gaye. Good times!
So, to answer your question, not only are you one of the few people who feels drug abuse is an unfair competitive advantage, you are also losing.
Don’t you want to be a winner? C’mon, all the cool kids are doing it. Look how well it’s turned out for me.
Trust me,
Bubbles

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