America frowns on chemical enhancement. By eschewing pesticide-treated foods, ostracizing ’roided-out baseball legends and giggling at Levitra commercials, we have made that much clear. It is puzzling, therefore, that a similar crusade for chemical purity has not gained traction in a realm historically preoccupied with issues of fairness — academia.

Since the turn of the millennium, a series of mental stimulants — Adderall, Ritalin, Concerta and Daytrana, among others — has crept its way to the forefront of higher learning’s collective conscious. Unlike their recreational counterparts, these drugs purport to sharpen rather than mollify the mind, to aid concentration during studying and exam-taking and to improve one’s grades. Law school is a particularly ripe climate for the use of such drugs: What better way to spend six to eight hours poring over dense legal texts than under the influence of powerful amphetamines?

Cornell has thus far remained quiet on the issue of nonmedical prescription stimulant use. The Law School Code of Academic Integrity makes no specific mention of such drugs, and the Cornell Code of Campus does not explicitly distinguish between the use of prescription stimulants and the use of marijuana, lumping both into a general “controlled substances” statute. So while Cornell recognizes that these stimulants are harmful and illegal, it (at least officially) does not condemn the use of such drugs from an academic standpoint.

Yet there seems something fundamentally unfair about the use of prescription stimulants for academic purposes, especially in law school. Unlike most college courses, law school classes are subject to a strict curve, meaning that a student’s grades are tied inextricably to those of his or her peers. In law school, therefore, it is difficult to say “to each his own” when a student’s drug use may impact the larger community.

This academic interdependence raises two specific ethical problems: unequal access to such drugs, and an increased incentive for all students to use them. Prescription stimulants are commonplace but not ubiquitous, and students with freer access to such drugs may gain unfair advantages over those with less access. Wealthier students may obtain prescriptions to these drugs outright — ADHD diagnoses are notoriously easy to come by, but actual prescriptions are often prohibitively expensive.

More fundamentally, if the use of such stimulants really does make a substantial difference on exams, then drug use increasingly becomes a necessary evil in obtaining a high grade in the presence of a strict curve. In the current legal industry, where articles about debt-riddled, jobless law grads from top tier institutions are published almost weekly, the pressure to look for any edge over one’s classmates can be enormous. The increasing use of prescription stimulants effectively sets the bar higher, and those who refrain from stimulant use risk sliding down the curve as a result. Cornell should therefore consider the implications of its quiet tolerance of nonmedical prescription stimulant use: Does it really want to encourage its students to rely on chemical supplements in order to remain competitive?

Before we condemn prescription stimulants as a pernicious influence, however, consider that the answer to the previous question may be “yes.” On a basic physiological level, the use of prescription stimulants simply entails altering one’s brain chemistry in order to more forcefully concentrate. In this sense, the use of such stimulants is not vastly different from, say, downing two Monsters over the span of a few hours, or even getting a good night’s sleep. And although prescription stimulants can sometimes pose dangerous health risks, so do many other aspects of law school. Typical law students get little sleep, subsist on coffee and pizza, drink excessively and spend the majority of their sober hours hunched over books. So, while prescription stimulants may not be strictly “good for you,” neither is pretty much anything else in law school.

Nor is the problem of unequal access unique to prescription drugs. Many students spend hundreds of dollars each semester on supplemental treatises and outlines. Hughes Hall, which houses about a fourth of the first-year class, affords the advantage of proximity to those lucky enough to enjoy its clammy ambience. Indeed, law school itself is an opportunity not all can afford.

Perhaps the real societal threat is not the increasing use of stimulants but the chemical Puritanism that currently dominates America’s acute sense of vitriol. At a time when foreign ambitions run high and American hegemony is quietly questioned around the world, perhaps the ideal of substance-free success has become obsolete. Maybe the question should not be whether stimulant use is unhealthy or unfair but simply whether it makes better lawyers. In a society entranced by the ideals of a free market, such a notion should hardly seem outlandish.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go take my Adderall.

Tom Schultz  is a first-year law student at Cornell Law School. He can be reached at ts495@cornell.edu. Barely Legal appears alternate Fridays this semester.