Students take to anti-sleep pills in exam season

Lucknow: Prajakta Swarup, a Class 10 student, underwent a major brain surgery for a clot that led to swelling of nerves, last week.

The girl had been staying up all night preparing for her board examinations. Her mother had been giving her steaming cups of coffee to help her stay awake.

Prajakta collapsed one evening and was hospitalised. Her parents later found a bottleful of pills in her drawer and when they handed them over to the doctor, they were shocked to learn that their daughter had been on anti-sleep pills.

“Shocking though it may sound, an increasing number of students, today, are taking these anti-sleep pills that help them stay awake during examinations. This is a very dangerous trend and the drugs are being smuggled in from countries like Bangkok. These drugs can have dangerous side effects, especially if taken with an overdose of caffeine -- too many cups of coffee -- as it happened in Prajakta’s case,” said a leading neurosurgeon Dr Sharad Srivastava. (IANS)

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