‘Take Your Pills’ Is an Unexpected Look into Adderall Abuse

Most documentaries about America’s drug dependence follow one of two basic formats. Either they’re like The Trade or Heroin(e), documentaries that explore the dangers and cycle of abuse associated with opioids, or they go the route of Dirty Money‘s “Drug Short,” a documentary episode that dives into the questionable morals of the drugmaking company Valeant. Netflix’s latest drug-focused documentary takes neither of those approaches. Rather, Take Your Pills uses Adderall and other prescription stimulants to discuss the tolls America’s constant expectations of success can have.

Take Your Pills, directed by Alison Klayman, is not your typical anti-drug documentary. Instead of a finger-wagging condemnation of the drug’s users, the film offers a nuanced take on why this drug is so popular among college students. Take Your Pills‘ subjects, which range from wide-eyed freshmen to more weary seniors, don’t look like the typical subjects of drug-focused documentaries. They all tell the same story, though — they needed a boost to pass a test that would alter their GPA, and they heard that Adderall would help. Why not sacrifice a bit of your personality and feel numb for a few hours in exchange for accomplishing your goals?

The documentary then swings a bit wider, focusing to include adult subjects who regularly use amphetamines to boost their performances at work. These profiles are broken up with interviews from medical professionals who explain the potential harm in taking these drugs, as well as fast-paced graphics, which wonderfully recreate what it’s like to be on an amphetamine. However, besides from a few complaints for some users that their personality disappears when they’re on Adderall, there are very few stories of negative repercussions for buying and selling this controlled substance. During an especially jarring part of the documentary, Take Your Pills‘ college-aged subjects explain how surprisingly easy it is to buy the drug; many regularly buy and sell it on Facebook.

The only subject who has a real Adderall horror story is former NFL player Eben Britton, whose amphetamine dependance cost him his career. Even then, his failed drug test feels like more of a stupid mistake than an action the documentary condemns. According to Britton, he was prescribed an amphetamine to help him with his ADHD, but one day when he was out of his pills, he took Ritalin from one of his teammates. That also happened to be the day there was a drug test, and he was on an unprescribed controlled substance.

As disappointing as Britton’s story is, his experience seems to fall in the minority of amphetamine use experiences, and that’s the ultimate point of Take Your Pills. Early in the documentary, a software engineer and outspoken Adderall user named Nathanael says, “Adderall is a performance enhancer, and I don’t think anything is wrong with that.” That statement inversely acts as the premise of the documentary as a whole. Should regular people be penalized for using performance enhancing substances to further their careers? And what does it say about our society that people right out of high school feel like they need to turn to pills in order to compete, as one expert says, “beyond their possibilities to get ahead”?

The point of Take Your Pills isn’t fully addressed until Dr. Anjan Chatterjee, the Chair of Neurology at the University of Pennsylvania, gives the documentary its closing interview. “This kind of focus on material progress and productivity — what’s the cost of that? And is that a cost we’re will to live with,” he asks.

Take Your Pills doesn’t have an answer for why our society is so focused on success, or how we should handle the stresses that come along with achieving it. However, the film makes a point that’s perhaps even more powerful. Adderall and amphetamine use isn’t something that should be something that should just be dismissed as college kids being college kids. It’s a genuine problem, and if our society doesn’t figure out how to handle it, it may become one with disastrous consequences.

Stream Take Your Pills on Netflix