Could there be a more enticing description? My friend pulled two blue pills out of tinfoil and handed them to me. An hour later, I was in the basement of the library, hunkered down in the Absolute Quiet Room, in a state of peerless ecstasy. The world fell away; it was only me, locked in a passionate embrace with the book I was reading and the thoughts I was having about it, which tumbled out of nowhere and built into what seemed an amazing pile of riches. When dawn came to Providence, R.I., I was hunched over in the grubby lounge of my dormitory, typing my last fevered perceptions, vaguely aware that outside the window, the sky was turning pink. I was alone in my new secret world, and that very aloneness was part of the great intoxication. I needed nothing and no one.

I would experience this same sensation again and again over the next two years, whenever I could get my hands on Adderall on campus, which was frequently, but not, I began to feel, frequently enough. My Adderall hours became the most precious hours of my life, far too precious for the Absolute Quiet Room. I now needed to locate the most remote desk in the darkest, most neglected corner of the upper-level stacks, tucked farthest from the humming campus life going on outside. That life was no longer the life that interested me. Instead, what mattered, what compelled, were the hours I spent in isolation, poring over, for instance, Immanuel Kant’s thoughts on “the sublime.”

It was fitting: This was sublime, these afternoons I spent in untrammeled focus, absorbing the complicated ideas in the texts in front of me, mastering them, covering their every surface with my razor-like comprehension, devouring them, making them a part of myself. Or rather, of what I now thought of as my self, which is to say, the steely, undistractable person whom I vastly preferred to the lazier, glitchier person I knew my actual self to be, the one who was subject to fits of lassitude and a tendency to eat too many Swedish Fish.

Adderall wiped away the question of willpower. Now I could study all night, then run 10 miles, then breeze through that week’s New Yorker, all without pausing to consider whether I might prefer to chat with classmates or go to the movies. It was fantastic. I lost weight. That was nice, too. Though I did snap at friends, abruptly accessing huge depths of fury I wouldn’t have thought I possessed. When a roommate went home one weekend and forgot to turn off her alarm clock so that it beeped behind her locked door for 48 hours, I entirely lost control, calling her in New York to berate her. I didn’t know how long it had been since I’d slept more than five hours. Why bother?

By my senior year of college, my school work had grown more unmanageable, not less. For the first time in my life, I wasn’t able to complete it. My droll, aristocratic Russian-history professor granted me an extension on the final term paper. One Friday evening well into December, when the idyllic New England campus had already begun to empty out for winter break, I was alone in the Sciences Library — the one that stayed open all night — squinting down at my notes on the Russian intelligentsia. Outside, it was blizzarding. Inside, the fluorescent lights beat down on the empty basement-level room. I felt dizzy and strange. It had been a particularly chemical week; several days had passed since I had slept more than a handful of hours, and I was taking more and more pills to compensate. Suddenly, when I looked up from the page, the bright room seemed to dilate around me, as if I weren’t really there but rather stuck in some strange mirage. I seized with panic — what was happening? I tried to breathe, to snap myself back into reality, but I couldn’t. Shakily, I stood and made my way toward the phones. I dialed my friend Dave in his dorm room. “I’m having some kind of problem in the Sci Li,” I told him. My own voice sounded as if it belonged to someone else.

An hour later, I was in an ambulance, being taken through the snowstorm to the nearest hospital. The volunteer E.M.T. was a Brown student I’d met once or twice. He held my hand the whole way. “Am I going to die?” I kept asking him. Dave and I sat for hours in the emergency room, until I was ushered behind a curtain and a skeptical-looking doctor came in to see me. I wasn’t used to being looked at the way he was looking at me, which is to say, as if I were potentially insane, certifiable even. By then, I was feeling a little better, no longer so sure I was dying, and as I lay down on the examination table, I joked to him, “I will recline, like the Romans!” His expression remained unamused. I described what I’d been taking. His diagnosis: “Anxiety, amphetamine induced.” I had had my first panic attack — an uncommon but by no means unknown reaction to taking too much Adderall. When I left the hospital, I left behind the canister of blue pills that I had painstakingly scrounged together. I still remember the sight of it sitting next to the examination bed.