Parents are generally unaware of how often young people use the stimulant drugs now: intravenously, by injection. Beginning with diet pills they may find in their parents' medicine cabinet, or with the standard prescription of 15 mg. of Dexamyl handed out liberally by college health services for "mild depression," they find that by taking more than the prescribed three pills daily, they feel even more than euphoric. They have eureka experiences:
"Prolonged periods of thinking about the meaning of life . . . intense religiosity . . . later degenerating into delusions and the compulsion to analyze a variety of details to find meaning," describes the British Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease. Sensitivity to what others think or feel is lost.
Moving on to injection, users shoot melted pills or liquid "Meth" [Methedrine]. The veins constrict. The body's metabolism is jolted into high gear, blood forces through the tightened vessels, and euphoria hits the brain almost immediately.
In New York one shot of Methedrine sells for about the same street price as heroin—$5 a bag. Penalties for amphetamine abuse are much lighter than those for heroin; many heroin addicts have, in fact, gradually switched. This is due to the game of semantics:
Amphetamine is legally classified a "dangerous drug" but not a narcotic. Abusers are called "habitués" rather than addicts. Amphetamines are not physically addicting, but tolerance does occur, requiring a user to increase his dose. Semantics. As medical research indicates and every user knows, the big problem shared by all pleasure-giving drugs is the same: dependency. Or, as a rehabilitated speed user says: "It's okay until you shoot. Then it might as well be heroin."
Dr. Donald B. Louria at Cornell University Medical College in New York is a widely published authority on drug abuse. Amphetamines are being introduced at such young ages that Dr. Louria writes about the subject in pediatrics journals. Speaking at Boston Children's Hospital, he traced the correlation between amphetamines and the demise of the hippie movement:
"This [psychic and physical] energizer could not be rationalized as consistent with the hippie ethic of peace and expansion of the individual's inner world. Instead, it represents a drug taken solely for kicks by a subculture increasingly populated by thrill-seekers, psychopaths, angry sociopaths and young persons who find themselves incapable of functioning in our society."
The results of amphetamine abuse around the world are almost standardized by now: bizarre behavior, elaborate sexual fantasies, striking changes in females who were frigid, sudden marked increase in sexual deviations and extreme masochism, fear and terror reactions (more common than depression), hepatitis, weight loss—and, finally, paranoid psychosis. Or simply, paranoia. Speed makes people behave as though they are crazy. And, in fact, anti-social and schizoid personalities are attracted to amphetamine more than they are to other dangerous drugs.
Sweden had an experience with amphetamine that has something to say to New York. In 1965 Stockholm alone had an estimated 3,000 users. Medical authorities decided stimulant abuse was a medical disease, rather than a psychiatric problem, as it is considered in the U.S. They would treat it by maintenance therapy. Habitués were given virtually unlimited amounts of the drug. They supplemented this with their old black-market supplies, increased their own dosages and sold the rest to new users. Paranoid psychosis among the maintained users increased enormously. Two years later, Stockholm's amphetamine habitués doubled to 6,000. The experiment was declared an "unmitigated disaster." Sweden banned amphetamines.
The paradoxical effect of amphetamine makes it even more dangerous to New York. Here, as on campuses in revolt or anyplace young people gather where worship of the eureka experience runs high and faith in America runs low, amphetamine is becoming a god. It has no Leary; it makes no pretense of having a high priest. Cops have Mace. Kids have speed.
Parents find amphetamine abuse very difficult to spot. They can be easily conned. Doctors have difficulty with the diagnosis. It takes months for an amphetamine "addiction" to show its ravages.
Amphetamine is like a Christmas package with a time bomb inside.
Email
Print
Eight Year-End Films Vie for Oscar Contention
Sondheim and Lansbury on a Lifetime in Theater
The Black Keys Release Their Hip-hop Debut 
How the BQE Became an Artistic Muse
On Great Jones Street, Shopping Is Art 
Classic Fare, Old-world Charm at Le Caprice
Buy a Brownstone for Less Than $1 Million
Fifty of the City's Tastiest Soups
Reasons to Love New York 2009
New York Politicians Refuse to Quit
A-Rod Has Babe Ruth in His Sights
McCain Yields to the Party's Pressure
