If you’re in college, chances are you’ve run across those infamous peach pills at some point. I’m talking about Adderall. These little orange suckers are everywhere, from the library to the lecture hall…to your local sketchy party.

Adderall is designed to be used as study tool for students diagnosed with ADD or ADHD, but you don’t need to have either diagnosis to feel the desired effects of this drug. It’s an amphetamine, so it enhances your attention span and wakes you up, thus helping you pull all-nighters during finals week and just have more stamina for academia in general.

Basically, it’s like Red Bull. On cocaine. With five iced lattes.

But, Adderall is not always used for it’s intended medical purpose (shocker!). These pills can also aid in weight loss, making it popular with girls looking for an easy way to shed the pounds. Not only that, but it’s used to help people party more effectively. Adderall keeps you awake and sharpens your mind, both allowing you to keep that party goin’ a little longer.

As a prescribed user of Adderall, I have used the drug for all of the above reasons. I’ve taken Adderall to help me write twenty pagers, to drop some of my winter weight, and to party.

My Adderall partying usage has ranged from popping half a pill to invigorate bar-hopping to snorting mass quantities of the stuff with a small group of friends. (The latter is not so fun. Putting anything up your nose is foolish, and Adderall is no exception.) At first it was exciting; your heart beats a million miles a minute and you can’t stop talking. Anyone you’re having a conversation with instantly becomes your best friend. You get them; they get you. Best of all: it doesn’t give you the munchies, and due to the sharpening of the mind, you can drink like a sailor and still keep your composure.

However, four hours later, you start to become sick to your stomach. The happy high wears off and all you want to do is hide for days. After a particularly intense binge I remember my crash more distinctly than the high because it was that terrible. Not to mention, this binge did some serious damage on my immune system and didn’t help my mono. Even worse, the people I did it with that time just talked about Seinfeld. All night. At a lightning fast pace. Then we ended up watching Fight Club, and I couldn’t even appreciate Brad Pitt’s hotness because you know what else Adderall does? Takes all the blood away from your downtown area and rushes it to your brain.

No sex drive, yippee!

Even after the lame experiences of partying with it, I still take Adderall for classes and my studies. I’ve learned to use it in moderation and only when necessary. Most importantly, I refuse to give it to people, especially friends. When people know you have it, it’s difficult to know whether they want to see you for you, or for your orange bottle.

What are your thoughts? Any experiences with the peach stuff, good or bad?

About two weeks ago, I decided that it would be an amazingly brilliant idea to try different energy drinks. I never hear the same thing said about an energy drink twice; it’s always a different response, and very few of them encompass the drink as a whole. So I decided to test stuff out on my own.

See? I didn’t die.

Still, once I found myself working my way down (or up) this list, I was getting a lot more negative side affects than positive. So use caution when drinking these guys, and for God’s sake, don’t drink them all in a two-week span like I did.

5. Mad Croc: I wasn’t crazy about this stuff, I’ll be honest. It tasted a lot like Red Bull and bubblegum ice cream combined (gross combo, I know). . If you’re looking for something to just keep you up, this is probably your product. I had a mild case of the shakes for about fifteen minutes, but no other noticeable side affects really showed up.

4. 5 Hour Energy: The reason that this is so high on my little countdown is that it really does live up to its name. The reason it’s so low is that I wish it lasted longer. I had just about five and a half hours of energy out of this, and though it didn’t make me super-twitchy like the others have, I was awake and alert. It’s the only one on this second countdown that I will actually probably buy again.

3. No. 5 (Powershot): Now, they didn’t have the regular drink in stores, so I had to settle for this two-ounce little bottle. Mistake number one on my part. I didn’t realize that quite so much would be put into a little bottle, despite the little “Caution: Powerful!” on the front. About a half hour after downing this, I had a bad stomach ache. About an hour later, I was bouncing my leg like there was a spring in my heel. I was up for a good seven hours on this stuff, and one of the nice things I noticed was that there was no crash – much like the 5 Hour Power stuff. Still, the side affects were a little scary.

2. Redline: This would have beaten number one if it weren’t for one little problem. I had to order this and the number one on-line because I couldn’t find them in stores. I had about half the bottle when my stomach decided that it had no interest in continuing the experiment, and back up came about $2 worth of Redline. And though I know I won’t be drinking this stuff ever again, I was too stubborn to give up (at the time I rationalized it with “commitment”). So half an hour later, I downed the rest of the bottle. With only drinking half of the product, an hour later I had the shakes, and for the first time noticed a side effect that none of the others had given me; my heart rate was an easy 170 BPM. And then the crash, which, I think was more from being sick than anything else. Never again, though. Neverrrr.

1. Cocaine: Just like how I’m pretty sure the real stuff is, this was not easy to get. When it finally arrived in the mail, my heart rate went up just thinking about the horrible things it was going to do to my body. And down the hatch it went. The taste was nothing to write home about – unless you enjoy writing home about how your throat burns – but it definitely lived up to its name when it started working. I felt like I had just had a can of Powerthirst. I couldn’t stop shaking for a good hour, and I was so hyper that I couldn’t actually focus on doing one thing. Eventually, I just ending up working out from three in the morning until about four thirty in the morning. And I still wasn’t tired. Surprisingly, though, there was no crash to speak of when I finally noticed my energy levels declining nine or ten hours later. Still, this stuff should probably be as illegal as the white powder it’s named after.

All in all, I wouldn’t really recommend doing this to anybody, much less another girl. I’m pretty sure an in-shape guy would have been able to handle this experience a little better than I did, but I still don’t think I did a half-bad job. Overall side affects? Well, I now have horrible caffeine headaches when I haven’t had my dose for a while, and I’m really heavily contemplating buying a whole case of Cocaine. (God, I hope no one only reads that one sentence.)

But when I need energy from now on, I think I’ll either stick to either the guys I told you last week or a just have a good ol’ apple.

[Photo by TIO, of Flickr.]