Alcohol use is very notorious in the higher ed in general too, so is all sorts of drug use. Hollywood is notorious for drug abuse too.

The privileges of wealth and intelligence and self-discipline - you get to afford drugs and avoid the bad parts and get the good parts, like the possible longevity boosts of moderate alcohol consumption.

Are you referring to this survey by chance? Around 20% ever used, 10% regularly.

Just one of many surveys. Like iodine surveys of pregnant women, there seems to be a cottage industry of surveying college students and academics to find out how much Ritalin/modafinil/Vyvanse/Adderall/etc they use lately.

It's perfectly consistent with my opinion that gains are a: generally small, and b: likely occur only in a portion of the population. (a random small change to brain parameters should be expected to improve performance in about 50% of people, assuming brain parameters are not precisely at the local maximum for performance)

'I don't know anyone smart who uses them.'

'Here's a ton of real-world evidence that shows tons of smart people use them, think they benefit, and also the obvious explanation for your ignorance'.

'That's all perfectly consistent with my opinion...'

You can contrast that with physical sports, where if you just let people dope, people who aren't doping wouldn't stand a chance (and people who are would die young).

Pro athlete dope all the time in highly organized circles; do BALCO or Lance Armstrong ring any bells? While it's hard to make any overall comparisons because pro athletes are a very selected part of the population and one might expect them to either live much longer than average (because they're selected for good health and strong bodies and get lots of exercise) or much less (because sports can break down bodies, sometime grotesquely so in the case of the NFL recently admitting brain degeneration is endemic among pro football players and setting aside hundreds of millions of dollars for their treatment), the little research I've seen doesn't show any big decreases in longevity as one would expect if doping were really that bad.