Speed Kills

A recent conversation with someone dealing with a particularly old-fashioned substance issue brought to mind how fashions come and go in such matters, but never go completely.

There are fads in intoxicants and fads in moral panics over them. There always will be another one because users and abusers of intoxicants, faddish or otherwise, are a constant. Author of Brave New World Aldous Huxley, writing about the fictional “soma,” had no doubt about how popular it would be if it were real: “Today alcohol and tobacco are available, and people spend considerably more on these very unsatisfactory euphorics, pseudo-stimulants and sedatives than they are ready to spend on the education of their children.”

Most people like a chemically assisted bump in happiness from time to time (alcohol still being the first choice) while some find life intolerable without it. These latter are people whose rest state is unhappy: that is to say they are unhappy unless fun things are happening, as opposed to mellower folks who are happy unless bad things are happening. We all know people who are uncomfortable in their own skins in this way, and they are the most likely to be substance abusers. I remember being in a car in the 1990s with some friends including a troubled and chronically unhappy young lady who had just left the Limelight disco in NYC. “Some guy gave me this Ecstasy,” she said while holding a pill twixt thumb and index finger. “Just throw it away,” I said. “You don’t know what that is.” Instead she popped it her mouth, entirely willing to take the risk rather than face the risk of feeling normal. By dumb luck, whatever it was did her no obvious harm that night, but the choice she made (however stupid) was not so very uncommon.

The poor results of attempting a law enforcement solution to intoxicant abuse during the moral panic over alcohol in the 1920s apparently taught us nothing about how to respond – or rather not respond – to later moral panics. In my youth the faddish panic was over psychedelics. It was followed in turn by ones over cocaine, PCP, crack, and meth. The current one is over opioid addiction. Don’t get me wrong. All these stuffs do real and sometimes deadly harm to the people who use them. Even leaving aside (which I don’t) the right of free people to make bad choices, however, it’s pretty clear that Prohibition isn’t working any better today than it did 90 years ago with alcohol. Our tendency is to get worked up politically about one substance at a time, so the current focus on opioids has diverted attention from the return of meth, use of which in the US had declined a decade ago after a crackdown on kitchen laboratories temporarily reduced supply. (One wonders how much Breaking Bad had to do with that.) The supply is once again bountiful since (as always happens after domestic crackdowns) foreign criminal cartels stepped in to meet the unfilled demand. Usage is back up.

Meth, Ecstasy, Bennies, et al. are all closely related and are at bottom amphetamines. Chemist Gordon Alles synthesized amphetamine in 1929 and tested it on himself. He was looking for an asthma treatment. It wasn’t effective on asthma, but it did make him feel alert and better. (It turned out Alles wasn’t the first to synthesize the substance, but he was the first to claim medical value for it and he received a patent for that.) It was marketed as treatment for mild depression, for which it works in the short term, though in practice it was mostly used recreationally for the euphoria. As a pep pill it also was far more effective than coffee; it became popular for this reason in the ‘30s with college students cramming for exams. In World War 2 the militaries on all sides of the conflict provided amphetamine to soldiers and pilots to keep awake and alert. After the war it became one of the go-to recreational drugs (especially in inhaler form) of the Beat Generation. It was much beloved by the likes of Kerouac and Ginsberg. It sped up metabolism (hence “speed”), which also gave it popularity as a diet pill. By 1962, when the U.S. population was little more than half of what it is today, 8 billion amphetamine pills were sold domestically annually by legal manufacturers. Though usually prescribed (quite freely) for various reasons (mild depression still being a big one), most continued to be used recreationally as uppers even if many of the users denied it.

By the mid-60s, the addictive nature of the drug was impossible to ignore. So were the deleterious mental and health effects of amphetamine abuse. Blood pressure related illnesses including heart attacks were among the risks; paranoia was a common effect of large doses and there were cases of full-blown amphetamine psychosis. Ginsberg changed his mind about the drug at this time, saying in 1965, “Speed is anti-social, paranoid making, it’s a drag, bad for your body, bad for your mind.” Nevertheless, while it wasn’t the preferred drug of hippiedom, it was still present. Speed freaks weren’t well regarded in 60s counterculture but were definitely in the mix. In 1971 amphetamine was classified as a Schedule II drug along with opium, cocaine, and morphine. Yet it keeps making a comeback in one form or other thanks to its short-term feel-good effect. For regular users that’s enough. As Lenina says about soma in Brave New World, "Was and will make me ill, I take a gramme and only am."

I offer no “solution.” I don’t think there is one. (On a societal scale, I mean; individuals always have a chance of cleaning up their acts.) As long as large numbers of people want to get high (which is to say always), mitigation of harm is the most for which we have a realistic chance. The Portuguese have done a better job than we at reducing the harm to the users and also to the rest of society by legalizing hard drugs as well as soft. They thereby eliminated much organized and petty crime at a stroke of the pen. There has been no increase in addiction rates. This approach is a tough sell in most of the world. The U.S. is still fitfully coming to terms merely with marijuana. Nonetheless, it is a model worth noting.

Canned Heat – Amphetamine Annie