In an increasingly competitive and cutthroat world, Adderall is seen as a way to give users an edge. Although that edge can sometimes come with a cost. The new documentary, Take Your Pills, which played this week at SXSW, tackles this very complicated subject.
We sat down the the documentary’s director, Alison Klayman, about how she approached the subject, and how the making of Take Your Pills changed her mind about its increasingly prevalent use.
What was it that drove you to make this movie?
The project was brought to me by Netflix and Christina Schwartzenegger [and] Maria Shriver. They were just like, we should make a movie about Adderall. First off I was like, ‘Yeah, this is an iconic drug of this moment.’ Then, as soon as I had just started talking, even just to friends and family, I realized how much this was really like a personal but like almost like identity issue for people that I was suddenly having these really deep and poignant conversations on this topic with people I thought I knew really well, and I didn’t realize that this was like a whole side of their personal history that they have wrestled with at different points in their life.
That, to me, was a signal. There’s like a lot of good story here, and the chance to further conversation. I knew that it needed to be something that had like a lot of different characters because I couldn’t think of what the one or two or three main stories of adderall would be. And it’s not a movie that doesn’t have a point of view or doesn’t say something, but it’s not a like pro or con kind of movie, and it’s not a movie to tell you if you should take adderall or not. I had no interest in that. I decided not to be a doctor a long time ago.
Was it difficult to get people to open up about it?
I think on camera, yeah. In the beginning when first envisioned it, at the outset, one of my reference points were in Austin. So it’s good. Like it was our Waking Life, because I’ve always loved that film, but this idea of it being this sort of like going from story to story to story because I knew I needed to fit a lot of different people and it’s sort of a snapshot of America right now through all these people. But I also figured that it would be hard that we would probably need to have tools to allow for anonymous stories because I felt like this is deeply personal. It also is stories that touch a lot of like highly successful people who might not want to talk about it. So I wanted to have a solution for that. I was kind of surprised, but pleasantly surprised.
It was partly because I had a great team and then all the research we did. There’s only two characters in the story I think that are like fully anonymous. A lot of people, some of our college students, we don’t share their last name. And again, if they choose to, their friends and family will know it’s them and if they choose to link socially and identify themselves, they also can have some privacy. But I think what united everybody that was in the film is that they felt like their story was something that they wanted to share just because they thought that there needed to be a movie like this, and they wanted there to be more conversation.
What surprised me is that their Adderall use has become part of these people’s identity. What was your pre-conceived notion about going in, and how did that change over the course of talking to these people?
I think I had this vague understanding like, ‘Oh, it works differently depending who you are.’ And like this is a drug that it’s the medicine for ADD, and it’s not a coincidence that it has all these other side effects. I think that was one of the assumptions I had that once I just learned a little more like that.
I didn’t know Adderall was amphetamine. I just thought it’s really effective branding. I just literally didn’t know what it was. That’s probably the easiest way to say that. I think the fact that people questioned people start to attribute their success to the adderall and that also coming off is a both physically can be if you’ve been taking it for a really long time, that there’s a crash. There’s the crash when it wears off, when you become habituated to it, but also that there’s this like big crash if you’re really trying to come off it and how many people just trying to figure themselves out when you take something every day. Like how much it was tied to people’s identity. I think I just hadn’t thought about it. It’s not surprising, but it felt surprising.
I felt like part of the challenge of this story or the mission was to be like, what [makes it] unique? Adderall is our topic. That was like the constant thing. You could start to go down the road of talking about a lot of other things and also the fundamental prescription drug. Americans take a lot of prescription drugs, but this isn’t a movie about pharmaceutical industry or doctors, but it’s all there and we all can kind of understand that’s the backdrop of this, but why this drug?
So, to me, this story is connected also to a lot of other drugs. Like there isn’t a single person we’ve talked to who didn’t talk about if they were on one of these stimulants. They were also smoking weed to calm down or taking other prescription medications to come down. I recently lost a friend to the opioid crisis and it turns out he also had tons and tons of Adderall prescriptions over many, many years. It’s a crisis, just like the opioid crisis. No, it’s very different, but also they aren’t distinct. There’s a cycle, and we’re all part of the same system.
I think the one thing that really sort of jumped out at me was that there’s this dependency, and then people either rationalize it or they want to, they know that they have a problem and want to break free and can’t or whatever, but Adderall seems to be the only one where people are so afraid to come off it because they attributed to their success. And even to a larger extent, they were afraid of not only losing their drive, but losing kind of who they were on top of that.
That was a conversation I had with a friend early on, before really starting the project. And that was exactly what I found in him. I feel like I knew him really well and then I was like, ‘This is a whole other thing.’ I mean that was really more of [something] he went through in high school, but I knew him in high school. I think that also became a divide. It’s not a perfect divide, but I also feel like if you’re taking something daily, you’re going to have this issue no matter what. And I think when you’re taking something daily because your mom or your dad tells you to take your pills.
There’s a lot of talk about gateway drugs or like, does this make you take more drugs? And I don’t know, I mean, this is totally anecdotal, but it felt like a lot of people who grew up on this medication had this real drive around college time. This was not everyone by any means, but like a lot of people, it’s like they start to question, ‘What would I be like off of this? Could I do it without it? Who am I?” I thought that was really fascinating. And I think that is to me a pretty different experience than people who, you know, in late high school or in college or in the workforce come to it. Um, you know, also you’re, you’re more formed as a, in your personality.
Also, even [in] your cognitive development, you’re just more formed as a person and then when you were using it as a tool, you can still have that dependence. But I was really interested in that kind of divide. This feeling of like this is a form of social control and what would I be like off of it? And I think that’s a very different question than ‘Gee, I’ve really started to rely on this thing because it helps me. But I wish I could get off it.’
It’s almost like they couldn’t separate who they were from the drug. It’s also such a part of their social construct. Like the texting back and forth, asking who’s got adderall and the little black markets that campuses develop. This really opened my eyes.
I mean, in some ways I wasn’t surprised at all, but to see the specifics I still had moments of surprise because you couldn’t guess exactly how it is. The social tools and the technology that facilitate that marketplace and the increase in prescriptions even since I went to college, like made it, I wasn’t surprised by [that], but I was surprised because this is really in your face. And I’m really grateful to the students who let us do that. And again, we talked to a lot of other students that weren’t on camera, but we felt pretty confident that this is representative of a scene. I think you could still go to college and be somewhat unaware of it.
And I think sometimes when kids are like, ‘Everybody’s doing it,’ it’s also hyperbole, right? When you’re like, ‘It feels like because if all of your friends smoke weed, everybody smokes weed,’ but that was the thing. There aren’t great numbers. Some of the stuff that I wished we could know and have some data for. It’s hard to know about black market stuff, and it’s hard to know. I think pharmaceuticals don’t feel as illicit as some other drugs because they come from a doctor, [and] there have been studies that show that college kids don’t think they’re as illegal to do, like sell your prescription or take someone else’s prescription.
There certainly seems to be a comfortableness on the medical side of it. I’ve been in situations a couple of times in my life where I talk to a shrink for 25 or 30 minutes and they want to put me on Prozac. And I’m not against those drugs existing, they do help a lot of people but it’s like, ‘Shouldn’t we talk about this longer?’ But, like what you were just saying, the people you talk to here, there’s this idea of, ‘Oh, well my doctor gave it to me, so it’s fine.’
It’s like most drugs, [they] all have a range of effects, right? And so the question is what are they marketed for and what do we accept? And also they all have risks. That’s the other thing. [A] medical assessment of like what’s acceptable to take and when it’s all about risk. What drug doesn’t have downsides? And the question is: what are we willing to accept? And again, I don’t know how I could answer those questions. I think they’re really complicated, but I hope it shows how complicated and also how vital they are to talk about.
Documentaries by definition are supposed to be objective and observational, and a lot of them are that way. A lot of them aren’t. And there’s that old argument that just by having a camera there, you’ve created subjectivity simply through observing. But Take Your Pills really does seem to like succeed in your mission statement which is just present the stories as is.
People are going to come to it with their own set of questions and biases. They might be a particular issue that the film isn’t necessarily focused on, but they’ll bring that focus. So, for me, I think I often see a lot of sides to things. So glad you felt the movie came off [that way]. That that really was my goal. Alongside that, though, I think possible to have a point of view and have a lot to say, but it doesn’t mean that you’re certain. It doesn’t mean you’re engaging with every question.
So, is it a pro or con? And I reject that question, but it doesn’t mean I’m just trying to walk some middle ground and say nothing because what’s the point of that? So I think people will come away with different takeaways, but I think in general the most important thing was to ask the questions that I wanted to ask about society, about what it says about us? And to be non-judgmental when it comes to people’s personal experiences because I thought that was really important and because I want to speak to a wide audience. I think that’s a good way to do it.
Take Your Pills is now available to stream on Netflix.
See our SXSW review here.
