Howard Marks' Book of Dope Stories (14 page)

Barbiturates enjoyed popularity comparable to that of the stimulants. If the word
narcotic
is taken literally – as something that produces numbness in the user – one could say that barbiturates, among known drugs, are the ones with the highest capacity to produce numbness, were it not for the appearance in the end of the fifties of the neuroleptics, or major tranquilizers: compounds able to compete with barbiturates for that dubious honor. But numbness became useful, especially in the absence of opiates – more so if alcohol was banned, as was the case in North America when massive sales of them started. Contrary to stimulants, barbiturates incline to extroversion and disinhibition; their effect is to produce a state between alcoholic inebriation and sleep, providing numbness as a release for those pursued by their conscience, and satisfaction obtained by the timid when they are able to access their nerve. We must add to those qualities the almost inevitable ability to kill in high doses: a detail that converted these drugs into the most common means of committing suicide.

But the fact that they were not ‘narcotics’ under the law, and their free sales without prescription throughout the world, with an honourable description as ‘sedatives, not opiates,’ led many people to have a container of barbiturates in their night tables, with foreseeable results. By 1965 about 135,000 British subjects were dependent on these drugs, and in Scandinavia, by 1960, 73 percent of addicts were users of barbiturates. In 1962 a doctor stated before a special committee created by President Kennedy that there might be 250,000 American addicts (‘and they are addicts who ignore their status,’ he added – not an inflated number, considering that by then the nation manufactured some thirty tablets per capita annually. In narcotic power, this production was equivalent to 4,000 tons of crude opium, and we must remember that the first voices of alarm on account of the ‘narcotic problem’ were raised in the United States when imports amounted to 200 tons annually.

Otherwise, any competent doctor had known since the twenties that there is no worse dependency that is more destructive to personality. Studies made within the American prison population from 1945 to 1948 showed that ‘the same convicts subjected to doses of morphine and heroin were sensate, prudent, able and scarcely affected sexually, while under the effects of barbiturates they became obstinate, aggressive, capable of masturbation in public, repeating idle excuses for the stumbling gait and mumbling speech.’ The catastrophic withdrawal syndromes were also well known, much more prolonged than that of heroin and with greater risks of death, both in the convulsive phase and in the later protracted delirium.

Last, there existed the possibilities of accidental overdose; this occurred when people ingested pills when inebriated, or else took some, forgot they had done so, and took them again, as probably happened to Marilyn Monroe.

There was no legal recourse regarding ‘functional disturbances and insomnia,’ one of the main reasons to visit a doctor until different hypnotics and sedatives were introduced, and combinations of barbiturates and amphetamines were the rage in medical offices, since they avoided extensive testing of patients. Despite their ability to serve as a comfortable remedy for nerves – available, inexpensive and pure – during the space of almost fifty years, only some few million people became addicted to these drugs and had to travel that miserable road. The great majority had the same bottle of Veronal or Luminal in their night tables for months or years and used it with moderation. As was the case with stimulant amines, barbiturates were never linked to social or ethnic minorities, and the absence of stigma protected them from the passion for the forbidden.

Among the drugs discovered during the period between the two world wars, we must mention several dozen synthetic opiates. The preparations for a second world conflict induced armies to search for anesthetics that were independent of the poppy, synthethized from coal tar and heavy oils, and they were introduced around 1945.

One of the common ones was pethidine, commercialized as Dolantin by Hoechst, and introduced as a non-addictive analgesic. In 1952 some 500 people addicted to the drug were admitted to American hospitals, unable to suppress a habit induced by their own doctors in 81 percent of the cases. By 1967 the American production of pethidine reached nineteen tons, sold under more than eighty different names.

Methadone turned out to be seven times more active; it was discovered by German army chemists and originally christened Dolofin by Adolf Hitler, although it was considered to be too addictive and toxic, and was never given to German troops. In 1964, under several names, some ten tons were consumed in the United States.

But the success of synthetic narcotics amounted to nothing compared with that of other drugs introduced during the fifties. Described as remedies for ‘the rhythm of modern life,’ their effect in small and medium doses is that of muscle relaxants, which instead of producing the emotional analgesia of opium (with its rich currents of dreamlike visions) give rise to an intellectual analgesia, characterized by logic and esthetic indifference.

Meprobamate, another petroleum derivative, was introduced in 1955 under hundreds of different names, with an unprecedented publicity barrage, as a ‘happy pill, granting moral tranquillity with addiction,’ even though three years later several experiments showed that its spectacular withdrawal syndrome closely resembled that of alcoholl/barbiturates.

Nevertheless, 600 tons of this drug were consumed in the United States in 1965, and several thousand in the rest of the world; in that same year, for example, India notified the United States that this ‘happy pill’ was creating many cases of imbecility and dependence among the middle and upper classes of that country, who lined up behind the cause of substituting traditional opium for scientific medicines.

The kilos of meprobamate were soon to be exceeded – and later tripled – by the benzodiazepines, which arrived as anxiolytics (‘dissolvers of anxiety’) and hypnotics, free of addictive properties. Studies published in 1961 showed that the withdrawal syndromes of the benzodiazepines (Valium, diazepam, Aneural, Orfidal, Rohypnol, Dormodor, etc.) included trembling, nausea, muscular fibrillation, anorexia, insomnia, depression, and convulsive crises lasting several days.

Several thousand tons of many other hypnotics and sedatives were sold. The one with the bitterest memory was softenon, or thalidomide, commercialized in 1957 as a ‘harmless sleeping pill, ideal for pregnant women.’ Two years later, the birth of deformed babies began, rising to more than 3,000 and producing a wave of abortions in Europe as well as a famous euthanasia trial in Liège, where one doctor and four relatives were absolved.

A Brief History of Drugs
, 1999

I
N THE BEGINNING
was the amphetamine. The amphetamine drugs are a chemical family initially synthesized in the late nineteenth century in order to mimic the effects of natural and herbal substances like ephedrine: they are archetypal designer drugs. Benzedrine (racemic or dextro-levo-amphetamine) was first synthesized in 1887, but its uses were not widely recognized until the 1920s, when its ‘right-handed’ isomer, dextro-amphetamine, or Dexedrine, also came into use. Also synthesized at about this time was d-phenyl-isopropyl-methylamine hydrochloride, better known as methamphetamine, which was marketed under the brand names Methedrine and Desoxyn. By 1970, over thirty amphetamine preparations were being distributed by fifteen pharmaceutical companies. The reason these drugs are so powerful has only become apparent with the investigation of the brain’s neurotransmitters in recent decades.

Amphetamines, we now know, have a close chemical relationship to naturally occurring catecholamines like dopemine, epinephrine and norepinephrine, which help regulate cardiovascular functions and the central nervous system. As sympathomimetic drugs, the amphetamines mimic naturally occurring neurotransmitters and help trigger the release of additional natural chemicals. Amphetamines thus cause the nervous system to become intensely aroused, mimicking the effects of extreme external stimuli.

From 1932, amphetamines were widely used in the legal form of Benzedrine inhalers, marketed by the Smith Mine French corporation, and from 1936 tablets became available, ostensibly to treat the rare condition of narcolepsy. Through the mid-twentieth century, the amphetamine group was so widely prescribed for a variety of physical and emotional conditions as to make it seem an authentic wonder drug; coincidentally or not, 1932 was also the year in which Aldous Huxley described his fictional Soma. Amphetamines were associated with endurance, wakefulness, and the capacity to undertake long and demanding tasks of manual labor. As such, they were particularly favored by truck drivers. The stimulant was a godsend for workers in heavy industrial plants operating under the shift system, which paid so little regard to normal biorhythms. The drug had military applications as well: during the Second World War and afterwards, the United States and other nations issued amphetamine products (mainly Benzedrine) to soldiers facing long periods without sleep. Illicit supplies were available to almost anyone living in proximity to a military base, an industrial plant or a major trucking center.

The appeal of amphetamine was many-sided. Women were likely to encounter amphetamine in its role as appetite suppressant. In middle-class circles, the drug found its main users among college and high-school students studying desperately for exams. According to Harvey Cohen, ‘[a]mphetamine is very much an over-achiever’s type of chemical,’ and as such it had a following among business people and executives. It also had a large surreptitious market in college and professional sports, as speed promoted desirable qualities of aggression and toughness; the habit was probably introduced by servicemen returning after the Second World War. In schools, amphetamine analogs such as Ritalin (methylphenidate) were prescribed for schoolchildren diagnosed, rightly or wrongly, as hyperactive. The amphetamine business became a vast and profitable economic enterprise: by 1958, some eight billion pills and tablets were produced legally each year in the United States, in addition to the sizable illegal market and clandestine imports from Mexico; by 1971 legal production had risen to twelve billion pills. Just the amount produced within the law had the potential ‘to provide a month’s supply to every man, woman and child in the country.’

Synthetic Panics: The Symbolic Politics of Designer Drugs
, 1999

Humphrey Osmond

I
N THE BEGINNING
, more exactly, in 1943, Albert Hoffman, a Swiss biochemist working at the Sandoz Pharmaceutical Laboratories in Basel, discovered – by accident, of course; one does not deliberately create such a situation – a new drug which had some very remarkable effects on the human consciousness. The name of this drug was d-Lysergic Acid Diethylamide Tartrate-25, a semi-synthetic compound, the lysergic-acid portion of which is a natural product of the ergot fungus
Claviceps pupurea
, which grows on rye and other grains. Its most striking pharmacological characteristic is its extreme potency – it is effective at doses as little as ten-millionths of a gram, which makes it 5,000 times more potent than mescaline.

It was during the synthesis of d-LSD-25 that chance intervened when Dr Hoffman inhaled some of the whitish-brown powder and discovered that it produced some strange effects on his mind . . . ‘Objects, as well as the shape of my associates in the laboratory, appeared to undergo optical change . . . fantastic pictures of extraordinary plasticity and intensive colour seemed to surge towards me.’

New York City, 1960
, seventeen years later . . . a small package from Switzerland arrived in my mail one morning containing one gram of Dr Hoffman’s acid, which I had arranged to be sent to me. There was also a bill for $285. I had first heard of LSD from Aldous Huxley, when I had telephoned him at his home in Los Angeles to enquire about obtaining some mescaline, which he had recently been using. His information also included the name of Dr Albert Hoffman and a caution, subsequently unheeded, to take great care if ever I should take any of the stuff:

‘It is much more potent than mescaline, though Gerald [Heard] and I have used it with some quite astonishing results really.’

There had been no difficulty obtaining even one gram of LSD. I simply asked an English doctor friend of mine to write the order on a sheet of New York hospital letterhead saying that I needed this ergot-derivative as a ‘control’ drug for a series of bone-marrow experiments. Eagerly I unwrapped the package. The acid was in a small dark jar marked ‘Lot Number H-00047’, and in appearance looked a bit like malted milk powder. My problem was how to convert the loose powder into a more manageable form. One gram would make 5,000 individual doses and I was obviously going to need to measure it out in some way. I decided to randomise it by mixing it into a stiff paste made from icing sugar.

I cleared the kitchen table and set to work. First I poured some distilled water into a bowl, and then mixed in the LSD. When all the acid had dissolved I added confectioner’s sugar until the mixture was thick paste. Then I transferred my ‘divine confection’, spoon by laborious spoon, into a sixteen-ounce mayonnaise jar, and, by what magical alchemic process, the stuff measured exactly 5,000 spoonfuls! In other words, one teaspoon of the stuff ought to contain 200 gamma (millionths of a gram), which would be sufficient for an eight-to ten-hour session, and a pretty intense one at that.

I should add at this point that I had, like all good chefs, been tasting the preparation during its making with my finger, and must have absorbed about the equivalent of five heavy doses before I finally screwed the lid on the mayonnaise jar, which left me somewhat unprepared for what was to follow.