I hardly had a chance to pop a squat in the proverbial “And how does that make you feel?” leather recliner and introduce myself before Dr. Bacchus pulled out his Rx pad and got straight to business.

“What script do you want me to write?”

So much for the Hippocratic oath. While his circumvention of all standard diagnostic procedures came as a surprise, the hurried fiend in me allowed no time for reticence. Just as abruptly as he had posed the question, I responded, “Adderall. Forty milligrams [per day] should be enough.”

It was more than enough. I could typically only stomach 20 before the palpitating side effects of the stuff would jerk my heart out of rhythm. But I wanted some extras to fall back on, if necessary. Accounting for those extras, he scribbled down my request on a DEA certified piece of paper and handed me the slip.

By the time my appointment was scheduled to end, I had already booked it to the nearest CVS, filled the script, and popped two of my four daily pills. They began working their magic within 20 minutes, kicking my system into overdrive. I was ready to write my term paper.

In a 1969 article, “Amphetamine Explosion,” New York Magazine called amphetamine “a Christmas package with a ticking time bomb inside.” At this time, Amphetamine usage had reached epidemic rates, with an estimated 9.7 million Americans users, 32,000 of those being addicts, according to an National Institute of Health study conducted by Dr. Nicolas Rasmussen in 2008.

The guy at the end of the supply chain was no Tony Montana, either; as mentioned in Rasmussen’s study, American pharmaceutical companies manufactured over eight billion ten-milligram doses of amphetamine in 1969 alone. These were the days of Benzedrine and Dexedrine, commonly referred to as “Benny” and “Dexy.” Amphetamine would not become a controlled substance until 1971, so at the time, doctors passed out these uppers as liberally as ibuprofen, treating them as cure-alls for everything from weight loss and depression to narcolepsy and general mental stress.

Aproned housewives popped them to perk up their lonely, picket-fenced lives. G.I.’s inhaled them in Vietnam to keep their eyes peeled for what, at any moment, could become a Vietcong ambush. Lower East Side novelists gobbled them to bypass writer’s block and help them pump out 300 pages in a fortnight.

Nearly anything and everything could be improved with the boost of an amphetamine-based miracle pill. The logic was primitive. And yet, the logic is still applied today; the “ticking time bomb” has merely been repackaged with another euphemism for amphetamine: Adderall, or “Addy.” The “bomb” may be constructed a bit differently, but it’s still there, and it’s still ticking.

Have you ever seen the movie Limitless? The first time I threw back an Adderall, I felt like Bradley Fucking Cooper on NZT.

It was only my freshman year of high school, but the stratospheric expectations of my all-boys prep school had me putting in college hours. Caught in a shitstorm of exams, I needed help navigating. Desperate, I even considered mapping out all conjugated tenses of -ar, -er, and -ir verbs on the inside of my forearm, and accessible portions of my thigh if necessary, for a Spanish exam that even my teacher insisted was worth dreading. But where would I write the crucial facts about Borges and Marquez? There was little hope. And then came the fateful question: “Yo bro, you want an Addy?”

I guess I was wearing my stress on my sleeve (and it was smearing my cheat sheet). At the time I didn’t know much about Adderall, but I still had a firm D.A.R.E. outlook on drugs, so I was reluctant to say yes.

The same classmate then pulled out and handed me what looked to be the Holy Grail. Somehow this lacrosse bum had managed to put together a comprehensive study guide, totaling 36 pages, with neater handwriting than any girl I’ve ever met. The X-Factor? Falsely diagnosed ADD–according to him–and enough prescribed Adderall to take down Hunter S. Thompson.

I was impressed with what I saw. If Adderall could turn a Spicoli into a bookworm with color-coded study guides, then it couldn’t be all that bad. Besides, no doctor would prescribe anything that could pose a serious threat to my health–at least that was my naive justification for turning to a chemical study aid. I acquiesced and gulped down the orange tablet with a glass of water.

Thirty minutes later, I was still waiting for that galvanizing oomph. Just as I was about to call “Placebo Effect” on my homie, the amphetamines kicked, and they kicked hard. I recall my synapses firing at unprecedented speeds, at which point I pulled out my xeroxed copy of homeboy’s study guide.

Verb conjugations, check; Magic Realism, check; that list of vocab words I forgot all about, check. Within the hour I felt capable of writing an A+ essay, entirely in Spanish, on One Hundred Years of Solitude. In fact, I had already written that essay in the margins of my book.

But the night was still young; the sun had just gone down and this gaucho could already hold his own in a language he hardly knew two hours earlier. (And after familiarizing himself with Borges, he had no qualms with referring to himself in the third person.)

Not only had Adderall given me tunnel-vision focus, but it also made me wildly enthusiastic about even the most arduous tasks. I was prepared to take the old adage, “Rome wasn’t built in a day,” and say, Fuck that; the Romans clearly weren’t on enough amphetamines to work through the night.

Even as the witching hour passed, euphoric ambition continued to surge from within, and so I put it to use. In the next twelve hours, I deep cleaned my room; put together a discretionary review guide of every Western literary movement from the Renaissance to Postmodernism; wrote a complete rap song; and wooed a buxom blonde into a date that Friday.

The Energizer bunny in me beat its drums all the way through my Spanish exam at noon the following day, which I aced. When I finally crashed, I was sure I had finally found a way to keep up with the frenetic conditions of contemporary life and effortlessly toggle the multiple tabs of my metaphorical Google Chrome window. I needed my own supply of 21st century lifeblood.

“Speed is antisocial, paranoid making, it’s a drag, bad for your body, bad for your mind, generally speaking, in the long run uncreative and it’s a plague in the whole dope industry. All the nice gentle dope fiends are getting screwed up by the real horror monster Frankenstein speed freaks.”

• Allen Ginsberg to Art Kunkin, 1965

Since 2002, prescribed stimulant consumption has more than quintupled in America, data from IMS Health says. Sales have also skyrocketed, reaching nearly $9 billion in 2012. According to Rasmussen, this spike in consumption puts us right back at epidemic status, with big pharma distributing the supposedly innocuous stimulants in bulk, and doctors handing out AD(H)D pills, i.e. study drugs, almost as freely as they did back in ’69.

The marketable spin on today’s speed-of-choice is that “It Improves Academic Performance,” as alleged in a 2002 Adderall advertisement put together by Shire Pharmaceuticals, today’s leading manufacturer of stimulants intended to treat Attention Deficit (Hyperactive) Disorder. Problem is, academic performance is hardly relevant to anyone other than kids and young adults, so when over-concerned parents catch sight of a bad grade, the inclination is to think something is wrong with their child. Out goes a call to Dr. Bacchus to get the kid tested.

A colleague of mine, R&B singer Nicholas Hunt, was one of those kids. At five, Nick wasn’t the biggest fan of sitting still, as seems to be the case with nearly all five-year-olds I’ve encountered (even ones who have gone on to have planets named after them for devoting extraordinary amounts of sedentary time to writing complex algorithms that have drastically improved neuroimaging).

However, concerned by a “Needs Improvement” report from Nick’s teachers regarding his “Ability to Pay Attention in Class,” Nick’s parents reached out to a psychiatrist for solutions to their son’s “problem.” The solution offered: five milligrams of Adderall with breakfast every morning. Nick was in kindergarten the first time he mixed Captain Crunch with amphetamine salts. According to him, that’s when he really started developing problems:

“Taking amphetamines every day when you don’t understand what’s going on distances you from people on a social level. My thoughts would race all day long, and I could feel myself getting emptier and emptier. I sat still and focused, I guess, but I was also a shell of a human being. My parents didn’t understand why I never wanted to sleep, and it was stupid—how they didn’t know it was because I was on amphetamines, I don’t know. I didn’t know either back then. I would just take a pill my parents gave me with cereal every morning. But I eventually put the pieces together and started spitting the pills.”

Eventually, I put the pieces together too. However, by the time I saw the ominous, bigger picture, five years and 7,200 doses had sped by since my initial Bradley Cooper experience, and I was hopelessly dependent on Adderall-iatrogenic addiction at its worst.

Anything involving cognition, however remote, sent me scrounging for the pill vial. Attentiveness became neuroticism, and impeccable time management became painfully intense dedication to the minutiae of everyday tasks before the crash, followed by lethargic apathy towards top priorities that still remained after I came down. Days were no longer 24-hour cycles; they were a series of two, maybe three, five-hour amphetamine cycles, punctuated by recuperative periods of mindless pleasure seeking–lots of pot smoke, Pornhub, alcohol, and anything else that could deliver a swift dopamine rush.

During binge weeks I fell off the map entirely, becoming a near-autistic solipsist and outright misanthropic bastard, despite my otherwise active social life. Regardless of the countless hours spent in my pleasure dome of a head, even my grades began to plummet. Tick, Tock, Tick, Tock–Time was running out, or at least that’s what my overriding sense of paranoia led me to believe.

And then, on a gray December morning of my sophomore year at Cornell, came the infernal wakeup call. Beep… Beep… Beep… Beep. It was already ten, and I hadn’t slept a wink; heart-racing thoughts of impending doom had kept me up all night. Eyes wide open; I shut the damn thing off and staggered down the hall to the bathroom. There, I splashed my face in a vain attempt to wash away the incessant chatter of my restless mind, and then looked up at the mirror, only to see a cracked-out zombie staring back at me.

This wasn’t the Bradley Cooper that learns how to speak Chinese in a morning; make multimillion-dollar returns on small investments by mid-afternoon; and fix a seemingly irreparable relationship by suppertime. This was the Bradley Cooper who, after enough time on NZT, suffers from extreme blackouts and hobbles around with a cane like a decrepit, old man.

Adderall was taking a serious toll on my body.

In addition to the emotional battle taking place inside me between the warring forces of manic optimism and nihilistic despair, my body itself felt like a bombed-out warzone more toxic than Chernobyl. My naturally tan complexion had gone pallid; my rapid metabolism had eaten away at my waistline; and the black rings around my eyes had grown large enough to make a leading geneticist reconsider mankind’s ancestral link to raccoons.

At one point or another, I had experienced nearly every side effect in the book associated with this purportedly safe drug. Enough was enough. I made an appointment with Dr. Bacchus and went in to explain to her everything I had experienced. Her response:

“Hmm… that does sound like a negative experience. I recommend you go off Adderall immediately. Now, some of our patients respond more positively to other stimulants. Have you ever heard of Vyvanse?”