Medicine: Unsafe at Any Speed

Speed kills. It really does. Amphetamine, methedrine, etc. can, and will, rot your teeth, freeze your mind and kill your body. The life expectancy of the average speed freak, from the first shot to the morgue, is less than five years. What a drag.

The editorial in the Boston psychedelic newspaper Avatar was to the point—and not all that far from the truth. Methedrine, a powerful amphetamine known to hippies as “speed,” is fast becoming one of the freakiest and most dangerous ways of turning on in the drug users’ pharmacopoeia.

Linda Fitzpatrick, 18, the suburban dropout who was murdered with her latest hippie boy friend in a Greenwich Village basement earlier this month, confessed that she was hooked on the drug, and may indeed have been lured to her death by a promise of the stuff. The number of speeders—called “speed freaks,” “meth freaks,” “meth monsters,” or “meth heads”—has, according to the hippies, increased enormously within recent months. Researchers writing in the Journal of the American Medical Association estimate that in San Francisco alone, 4,000 people regularly inject themselves with powerful amphetamines.

Clouds & Sparks. The attractions are obvious enough. Heroin produces a drowsy, drifting effect; LSD contorts and sometimes expands the mind. Methedrine, which is a harmless stimulant when taken orally in small doses, turns into a kind of mega-pep dose when it is concentrated and injected. It acts on the central nervous system in such a way as to give what the three medical researchers, who have studied addicts at the California Rehabilitation Center at Corona, describe as a “sudden generalized, overwhelming, pleasureful feeling.” With somewhat more enthusiasm, a female speeder says that “it fills you inside, like this churning cloud of light with sparks shooting off, jagged, in all the colors of the rainbow, the universe in the process of creation. And you’re a part of it.”

The overall effect is sexual—in the words of one user, like “an orgasm all over your body.” It is an aphrodisiac, tending also to prolong the time of sexual activity before climax is achieved. Obtainable legally only by prescription, the crystalline drug is, like LSD, relatively easily manufactured, with a production cost of something like $25 a pound.

The general pattern, says the California report, is for the user to inject methedrine into a vein about every two hours around the clock. He stays awake continuously for three to six days—sometimes as long as twelve days. Appetite for food is suppressed completely during this time, and there is a compulsion for constant action. At first this activity is purposeful, say the researchers, but as the “run” progresses, it becomes ever more disorganized. The taker himself, others note, becomes increasingly agitated, often shaking, quivering, working his mouth incoherently.

Other symptoms also appear. Uncomfortable hallucinations take the place of initial euphoria; in almost all cases, the feeling of omnipotence gives way to paranoia. Shadows and trees become disguised detectives, best friends turn informers, parked cars become police cruisers. Strangely enough, the speeder usually realizes that he is paranoid, and at the start does not take his delusions too seriously. Toward the end, however, he generally finds them considerably more convincing. Though he may collapse from intense exertion, the speeder most often requires a barbiturate for sleep, which lasts from twelve to 18 hours after a short run to as long as four or five days after an extended run. Fatigue persists for weeks after he awakens.

Milk & Oatmeal Cookies. Because of its end effects, genuine hippies have never taken to speed to any great extent and look with alarm, like the Avatar, at its growing use in their communities, mostly by teen-agers and would-be hippie converts like Linda Fitzpatrick. “Everybody says, ‘Acid: good and good for you. Grass: good like milk and oatmeal cookies,'” notes one Los Angeles rock musician. “So kids begin to think in terms of drugs and they think, ‘Meth! Groovy!’ But they don’t know that it can destroy them.”

Indeed it can. The potential for addiction, warn the article’s authors, is comparable to that of opiates or cocaine. Worse still, the drug may lead to psychosis or brain damage. About a third of the meth heads questioned at Corona indicated that their memory or ability to concentrate had been impaired by heavy doses. “From descriptions of the intensity of the paranoid state and the hypertension associated with amphetamine use,” adds the article, “crimes of violence by amphetamine users appear likely in the future.”