Ex-pro KiLLa claims “everyone is on” Adderall in the CoD esports scene
EsportsNation / MinnPostFormer Call of Duty pro player and World Champion Adam ‘KiLLa’ Sloss opened up about the alleged rampant usage of Adderall in CoD esports, and how the drug affected his own career path.
It’s no secret that one of the biggest negatives of the esports scene, particularly in Call of Duty, is the seemingly unchecked and widespread usage of Adderall.
Adderall is a prescription drug that’s mainly intended to treat patients with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). However, its ability to sharpen response times and reflexes has increasingly appealed to professional gamers over the years, to the point where the drug is used at almost every competitive gaming event.
Adderall is a drug usually prescribed to patients who had ADHD.Speaking to the Washington Post about the issue, KiLLa revealed that many players in the CoD scene have been taking the substance for years.
According to the 2013 World Champion, however, it’s not something that gets talked about, because it’s essentially an open secret.
“Nobody talks about it because everyone is on it,” he claimed. “Witnessed? Yeah, very frequently and a lot to be honest. It’s a major problem.”
KiLLA (left center) says he stopped competing in CoD partly due to not being able to “keep up” with the Adderall abuse.KiLLa also revealed that Adderall was “a big reason” why he stopped competing in the early months of 2019. He said that the widespread use of the drug was something he couldn’t “keep up with.”
As the Washington Post article highlights, Call of Duty is just one of several major esports scenes that suffer from Adderall overuse.
CS:GO pro Kory “Semphis” Friesen, Overwatch League player Timo “Taimou” Kettunen and former Gears of War star Jimmy “HighDistortion” Moreno all claimed that their respective esports have the same issue.
Overwatch League pro Taimou claims that at least 20 players in the OWL are on Adderall.These claims continue to arise, despite most organizers of these esports scenes enacting policies against the usage of performance-enhancing prescription drugs. The OWL, for example, says “prescription drugs may only be used to treat the condition for which they are prescribed and may not be used to enhance performance in a game, match or tournament.”
Thus, the root of the problem seems to not be the lack of such policies, but rather the enforcement of these rules, since players clearly aren’t policing themselves on arguably one of the biggest issues in esports.