Medicine: Benzedrine for Barbiturates

Razors pain you;

Rivers are damp;

Acids stain you;

And drugs cause cramp.

Guns aren’t lawful;

Nooses give;

Gas smells awful;

You might as well live.*

These drawbacks to self-destruction, as ticked off by Dorothy Parker, do not apply to an overdose of sleeping pills. In recent years the barbiturates have enjoyed alarming popularity as a painless means of suicide, especially among women who are repelled by the more violent forms. Accidental as well as deliberate overdoses kill hundreds yearly.

Knowing no reliable antidote, doctors too often stood by helplessly as a victim sank from coma into death. Last week, when a “suitable antidote” was finally announced, it seemed obvious—benzedrine, a stimulant as widely used as the barbiturates.

The two drugs simply counteract each other, explained Drs. Abraham Freireich and Joseph Landsberg, in the A.M.A. Journal. Dr. Freireich, a Long Island county toxicologist, directed the treatments which revived 19 would-be suicides with massive intravenous injections of benzedrine. (The reviving dose of benzedrine would be equally poisonous to any but a thoroughly doped victim.) Benzedrine, he also found, prevents the pneumonia which frequently follows an unsuccessful barbiturate poisoning.

Dr. Freireich’s discovery was anticipated by bored Broadwayites, who have made a pastime of “bolts and jolts”—mixtures of barbiturates and benzedrine which knock them for a loop, then slap them to.

*Copyright 1926 by Dorothy Parker. Used by permission of Viking Press.