By Julia Tuck
If you could experience limitlessness, would you take the risk? The latest brain supplement on the market is known as Adderin, a powerful brain enhancer. It is popularly known for steadily improving the brain’s cognitive ability, which enables a person to think and focus. Those who take Adderin can feel a sense of strong positivity and a high level of concentration. Although this may seem to be beneficial to the user of Adderin, it is commonly known to be extremely addictive.
Adderin first gained publicity after being the inspiration for the fictional drug NZT-48 in the movie Limitless. Soon after, students began using Adderin to boost their attention span and focus. The supplement provided them with an artificial edge that helped them excel beyond the average student. Their ordinary cognitive skills were amplified due to the brain’s reaction to the strong supplement. Many universities and television shows such as Jeopardy! have banned Adderin. Still, people continue to use it to gain advantage.
Alan Fraiser, the editor of the Health & Science section of NBC NEWS, decided to test if it was really worth all the “hype”. He used Adderin over a four week period to experience what exactly it’s like to have your brain attention, memory, flexibility, problem solving skills, and speed amped up. The first step in the experiment was to obtain a bottle of Adderin. Interestingly enough, this was not as easy of a task as he had thought. Many pharmaceutical stores and online websites were sold out. Some websites that he found Adderin on were very expensive — it was priced at about $300 per bottle! After finally obtaining a bottle at a reasonable price, he gave it a shot. When Fraiser was about thirty minutes into the experiment, he could already feel the effects. He remembers his experience as a “pleasant wave of calmness that washed over [his] entire body like a warm blanket. The mental fog and stress [he’d] been carrying around vanished instantly. Soon, [he] reached a level of alertness and concentration [he’d] never experienced before. Sounds didn’t even register. It was like walking around on a winter day after it just snowed. It became easy for [him] to ignore distractions and outside noises.”
Fraiser enjoyed his experience on the supplement, however, he noticed his behavior started getting addictive. “Over the past four weeks, I found myself bouncing out of bed, sometimes even before my alarm went off because I couldn’t wait to take Adderin,” he admits. Although the brain enhancer may feel “great” now, the long term effects are still yet to be identified.
Adderin may seem the best thing out there to improve your school performance and enhance your life, but it is certainly not worth it. First of all, Adderin provides an unfair advantage to the user and promotes a negative message to society. Why should one person who is hardworking and dedicated without an artificial substance be competing against someone who has an unfair advantage? In addition, the enhancer is sending across the message that in order to achieve remarkable grades and be happy, one must take this pill. This is a dangerous message to send out to our society and, more importantly, to the hardworking students who hope to achieve success on their own, without the aid of a pill.
As if it is not bad enough, Adderin is clearly enslaving its host with its addictive chemicals. Fraiser told us of his strong desire for the supplement every day when he was testing it; he craved the sensation it gave him. As most people would probably agree, addictions are not healthy. Even worse, the long term effects of this supplement are so far unknown. Using this supplement now may seem wonderful, but in a few years the consumer may be left with an addiction that has deadly effects.
Overall, Adderin may seem to be the perfect brain enhancer, but the product does not make you as “limitness” you might think. The consequences of this supplement have not been discovered yet and it is not really worth the risk. The world needs to know how to draw the line when students are introduced with new supplements which can possibly turn them into addicts. So next time you see Adderin in your local pharmacy, you may think twice about snagging a bottle to try.
