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Towards the smarter use of smart drugs: perceptions and experiences of university students in the Netherlands and Lithuania

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journal contribution
posted on 2016-06-20, 09:14 authored by Aleksi Hupli, Gabija Didziokaite, Marte Ydema
The use of cognitive enhancement drugs (CEDs) among university students has raised widespread concerns about non-medical prescription drug use, safety, exam cheating, and study-related stress. While much of the empirical research to date has been conducted in the United States and Australia, this article examines perceptions and experiences of CED use among university students in the Netherlands and Lithuania. Our data comes from two qualitative studies and one mixed-methods study drawing in total of 35 semi-structured interviews (20 in the Netherlands; 15 in Lithuania) and from open-ended online survey responses among a convenience sample of 113 students in the Netherlands. Employing a crowded theory approach to interpret our qualitative data, we found most of our informants turned to CEDs to enhance their studying through better concentration and time management. Students used a broad range of pharmaceuticals (with and without a physician’s prescription), recreational drugs, and nutritional supplements as cognitive enhancers, were generally well informed about the safety and efficacy of the substances they used, experienced both beneficial and adverse effects, and self-regulated their CED use to balance these effects, ensuring that their use remained moderate and thoughtful.

History

School

  • Social Sciences

Department

  • Communication, Media, Social and Policy Studies

Published in

Contemporary Drug Problems

Citation

HUPLI, A., DIDZIOKAITE, G. and YDEMA, M., 2016. Towards the smarter use of smart drugs: perceptions and experiences of university students in the Netherlands and Lithuania. Contemporary Drug Problems, 43 (3), pp. 242-257.

Publisher

© The Authors. Published by Sage.

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Acceptance date

2016-05-24

Publication date

2016

Notes

This paper was accepted for publication in the journal Contemporary Drug Problems and the definitive published version is available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0091450916660143

ISSN

0091-4509

eISSN

2163-1808

Language

  • en