7

OVERREACH

At nine in the evening on 12 September 1970, a dark figure crept along the roof of the San Luis Obispo men’s prison in California. Over the edge of the roof hung a telephone wire. Low enough to be grabbed, it led to a pole just beyond the perimeter fence. The conditions were right. Earlier, the convict had ticked them off one by one: ‘One: moonless night. Two: fog. Three: a Saturday night; wait until the patrol car returns from CMC-East with the snack-bar trusties – around 8:30. Four: paint white trim on sneakers black. Five: write farewell note and leave in locker.’1

Still, it had not been easy getting onto that roof. Inside the cellblocks, even though a football game was playing on TV, a few prisoners remained lurking, not all of them trustworthy. After several attempts, the man had trusted to his luck and slipped into the exercise yard. ‘I opened the door, walked onto the prison yard, lit by floodlights. No one walks the yard in dead of night. Not even the guards. I stood in front of the tree, directly in front of a window. Inside, facing the window, was Metcalf braying at two cons. Climb the tree two feet in front of the snitch?’ Eventually the fugitive snatched at a drooping branch, then another, and vaulted onto the roof.

I pulled on the handball gloves and lay on the angled roof just under the cable. I hooked my ankles over the wire, reached up my hands, and pulled out head first.

It was hard going. Every ten inches there was a loop that held the telephone cord below the cable. My legs bumped and tangled in the cord. Easy sweeping pulls were impossible. I had to reach, then wrench ten inches. Hands out. Pulled body. Hauled legs. Ten inches. The cable bounced and swung. A strain to hang on. Weird wrestling motions, my body clinging to the swaying wire. Sweating. Heaving awkwardly. After fifty pulls – a pause. Horrid discovery. Completely exhausted. Lungs gasping. Arms drained. Body limp and weak. Can’t go another foot. Only one-third across the wire. Hadn’t even reached the road. Exhausted.

My hands couldn’t hold the weight of my body. With desperate sexual writhing I embraced the cable with elbows and knees. Rested.

Eventually the climber resumed his crawl, twenty feet above the road. But a patrol car appeared beneath.

A sudden glare of light . . . My denim arms turned lavender in the headlight. The driver leaned over to crush his cigarette in the ashtray. The car passed under me and disappeared.

Now I tumbled into some kind of delirium. Arms crossed, I inched along the wire like a caterpillar. My mind fixed on reaching the fence, so I’d fall to freedom outside the perimeter. Still my hand kept getting tangled in the phone-wire loops. A compulsive wrench to free my hand set the cable bounding wildly. Mouth gasping, face bulging, glasses twisted, sweat dripping . . . From some inner reservoir came LIVE! SURVIVE!, a flow of energy and a curious erotic lightness . . . Hand over hand till fingers hit the pole. Hanging by my legs (I’d practiced it a thousand times in my bunk) I reached and grabbed the spike, dropped my body, wrapped legs around the splintery wood, slid down.

In one bound, he was free. The man staggered up the neighbouring hill, then along a dry creek bed. The cellblock windows shone through the penumbra. On the road ahead, car lights flashed by. Trees appeared. ‘Not here. Over there: three trees joined at the roots. A long wait, cars roaring by. Two minutes. Five minutes. Ten minutes. Suppose they didn’t come? Had they been busted? Accident? Fuck-up in plans? Could I hitchhike north on Highway I in prison garb? A car. Right blinker flashing. I ran from the shadows. The car door swung open.’

Timothy Leary was fleeing a sentence for marijuana possession, but he was a symbol for much more. A spokesman for drug freedom, the grand apostle of LSD, he was the leading icon of a new, psychedelic movement. As he escaped, a drug craze was likewise in runaway mode from the dead hand of prohibition. The counter-culture of which Leary was a model was not solely responsible for the explosion in recreational drugs that was rippling through the United States, Europe and beyond. At best the hippie movement was associated with the rise of a limited class of drugs. But this was not necessarily how it looked, and soon the movement’s antics would be triggering everywhere the repressive reflexes of anti-narcotics authorities.

Leary’s trajectory had been erratic even before he found himself in jail. Originally a failed West Point cadet, he had majored in psychology at the University of Alabama, then earned a doctorate at Berkeley. In the 1950s he had married, had two kids and settled in a suburban ranch in the Berkeley hills. He became research director at a psychiatric clinic in Oakland. But Leary was a serial womanizer. On the morning of his 35th birthday, his wife Marianne committed suicide. He resigned from his post and took his children on an extended trip to Europe. When he returned, he was offered a place in psychology research at Harvard. By then, he had already become interested in psychotropic drugs.2

Leary was at first attracted to psilocybin, the active compound found in so-called magic mushrooms. His Harvard research tested the substance’s uses in experiments on various groups comprising local housewives, writers and fellow psychologists as well as students.³ In 1961 he was introduced to the more powerful LSD, and became an instant convert. But already the psilocybin programme had been controversial. ‘I began to realize that there were only a few subjects and many researchers, which meant that the researchers were taking more of the drug than anybody else,’ commented a colleague.⁴ In 1962 scandal broke. Leary was accused of having coerced students into taking the drug. The next year, he left Harvard, the more freely to explore LSD’S virtues.⁵

LSD was yet another fallen medicine. The Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann first synthesized it in search of a migraine drug for the pharmaceutical company Sandoz in 1943. The substance was one of many he had been experimentally isolating from ergot, a fungus growing on diseased kernels of rye. Ergot is dangerous: it is mainly known as the cause of St Anthony’s Fire, an awful disease that causes the fingers and toes to blacken and drop off. Ergotism may also have been responsible for the dancing plague of medieval Europe, a mania by which hundreds inexplicably began to dance until they expired from exhaustion.

Hofmann decided to try his new batch on himself: ‘At 4:20 in the afternoon, with his assistants gathered around, he dissolved what he thought was a prudently infinitesimal amount of the drug – 250 millionths of a gram – in a glass of water and drank it down . . . At 4:50 he noted no effect. At 5:00 he recorded a growing dizziness, some visual disturbance, and a marked desire to laugh. Forty-two words later he stopped writing altogether and asked one of his lab assistants to call a doctor before accompanying him home.’ Hofmann reached home without accident, but he discovered he had lost the ability to speak. ‘When the doctor reached Hofmann’s house, he found his patient to be physically sound, but mentally . . . mentally Hofmann was hovering near the ceiling, gazing down on what he thought was his dead body . . . He had been invaded by a demon. When his neighbour arrived with milk, a liquid Hofmann hoped would neutralize the poison, she was no longer gentle Mrs R., but a “malevolent insidious witch”, a “lurid mask”.’6 What if his wife and children returned and found him a lunatic?

Hofmann had actually absorbed an enormous dose, five times what is nowadays typically taken for leisure. At low concentrations, Sandoz decided LSD had value in psychiatry and began marketing it under the trade name Delysid. It proposed two possible uses: to elicit the release by patients of repressed psychological material, and to help psychiatrists gain an insight into their world of ideas and sensations. The drug took off in the 1950s among the community of Los Angeles psychological analysts. Prominent subjects included Cary Grant and Anaïs Nin.⁷ It was also taken up therapeutically in Britain at various institutions; in a nationwide programme, an estimated 1,500 patients were fed the drug to help them regress their ‘inner being’ into a childlike state which psychiatrists hoped would release repressed thoughts and feelings.⁸

By 1965 an estimated 30,000 to 40,000 patients around the world were receiving LSD therapeutically.⁹ Already, however, therapists were becoming wary of the drug. The replication of early research findings was lacking, and many of the results were now said to have been faked. Psychotherapy, which was reaching peak popularity anyway, was finding LSD an unreliable prop. Nor was it entirely safe. For every 1,000 LSD ingestions, one study showed, there were 1.8 psychotic episodes and 1.2 attempted suicides.10 At the UCLA medical centre, people came in with hallucinations, anxiety attacks and depressed thoughts. Another symptom was a ‘psychotic defence reaction’. A doctor testified: ‘We talked to one gentlemen who is not in the hospital because the “head culture” supports him. Here is a fellow who took LSD several times and became convinced he was an orange. He withdrew to his room and refused to leave the room for fear that if someone touched him he’d turn into orange juice.’¹¹

The hallucinogen had meanwhile been put to even less orthodox uses. In a bizarre episode, the CIA tested LSD, among other substances, as a potential mind-control drug under a long-running project that eventually became known as MK Ultra. Potential means of deployment involved a disorientation bomb alongside more conventional use in interrogation or indoctrination in the style of the film The Manchurian Candidate. (In 1964 the British Royal Marines also experimented with LSD with a view to using it on enemy forces.¹²) The CIA began testing LSD in 1953. At first this took place via hospitals and universities, but the agency found these settings too constraining. In parallel, it converted one of its San Francisco safe houses into a field laboratory. Prostitutes would lure customers into the house, where they would be exposed to LSD or psilocybin, usually in a drink or through a spray. Reflecting what the organization thought a brothel should look like, the decor mixed swatches of African fabric with reproductions of Toulouse-Lautrec pictures, tables covered in black velvet and heavy red curtains.¹³ Agents observed the punters’ behaviour through two-way mirrors. In an even stranger twist, Anslinger himself vetted the programme, seconding two of his star Federal Bureau of Narcotics agents, George White and Charles Siragusa, to supervise the experiments.¹⁴ ‘It was fun, fun, fun,’ testified White to an official inquiry some years later.¹⁵

If this went on behind closed doors, Leary’s proselytizing could not have been more open. Leary attracted followers into the precincts of a 64-room mansion made available by wealthy well-wishers in the village of Millbrook, upstate New York. It was a ‘strange mutation of Thoreau’s Walden and a Tantric Buddhist temple’, as a Time journalist described it. ‘In the drafty hall of the main house, part of a grand piano sits on its side, its strings waiting to be plucked. The rooms are furnished with legless tables, bedless mattresses and mandalas on which the eye of the true believer is supposed to “lock” during drugless exercises.’16 Millbrook, at once model community and pulpit, attracted both urbanites seeking new experiences on weekend retreats and more permanent residents. A visitor listed the activities as follows: ‘With some people on a macrobiotic diet, the family around the fireplace smoking pot after dinner . . . palm reading, the reading of Jung, Gurdjieff and Ouspensky, Tantric chants, bells continually ringing, wrestling matches, children, popcorn, motorbikes, racoon coats.’¹⁷

Before leaving Harvard, the psychiatrist had befriended enthusiasts such as the Beat Generation poet Allen Ginsberg and the novelist Aldous Huxley, author of Brave New World as well as The Island, his final book, in which the protagonist explores a utopia made possible by a psychedelic drug.¹⁸ Ginsberg had proposed: ‘First we would initiate and train influential Americans in consciousness expansion. They would help us generate a wave of public opinion to support massive research programs, licensing procedures, training centers in the intelligent use of drugs.’¹⁹ Leary agreed: ‘We calculated that the critical figure for blowing the mind of the American society would be four million LSD users and this would happen by 1969.’²⁰

Leary aimed to do no less than transform man, to ‘change and elevate the consciousness of every American within the next few years’.²¹ The Millbrook gurus, or the International Foundation for Internal Freedom, as they called it, edited a Psychedelic Review. What America needed, this proposed, was a break from ‘linear, typographical thinking’ in favour of a ‘multilevel Oriental logic’.²² It all seemed calculated to provoke, as when the 1967 issue explained how to use psychotropic drugs during sex: ‘They may feel themselves to be gods, as indeed at that moment they are. Here again we see confirmation through psychedelics of the ancient Tantric teachings that the lovers have to become gods in order to go beyond the normal spheres of awareness and reach transcendent union.’²³

Notwithstanding their own dabbling in hallucinogenic drugs, by the mid-1960s the authorities became worried. The medical body was turning against the drug. The New England Journal of Medicine had called for an end to LSD research. Sandoz announced that it was terminating supplies. In a first blow, the State of California, the epicentre of the psychedelic revolution, banned the drug in 1966.²⁴

Leary, for one, decided to double down. In the same year, with both Millbrook and himself at threat from a first marijuana conviction, he announced he was founding a League for Spiritual Discovery. Half religion and half social movement, this held its first ‘public worship service’, a play performed in New York’s East Village with the title Death of the Mind. To the mystified audience, an acolyte of Leary lay on the stage writhing or danced behind a scrim, lost in the depths of an LSD trip. The guru sat front stage, dressed in white, intoning the words: ‘Relax, float downstream, trust your divinity, trust your energy processes.’25 LSD lab courses should become part of college curriculums, Leary explained to a congressional subcommittee. People should be licensed to use it, and training centres established.²⁶

The drug had by then been making more adepts. Another proselytizing group was the Merry Pranksters, formed around the meteorically successful author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Ken Kesey. Kesey, who had been introduced to LSD as part of Stanford University experiments under CIA sponsorship, gave up literature in favour of tripping. Around him coalesced a loose community including Beat Generation writer Neal Cassady and on occasion Allen Ginsberg. Kesey hosted happenings at his La Honda cabin, where he had repainted the redwoods in Day-glo colours. The Pranksters ran LSD parties called Acid Tests, dressed in the same fluorescent tones. This morphed into a bus tour mixing practical jokes with a travelling show, but the Pranksters more effectively agitated at rock concerts, swinging in their Day-glo finery, pressing Acid Test invitations into the hands of revellers. Kesey eventually hired a band for the Tests, a group of Palo Alto rockers initially called the Warlocks but later renamed the Grateful Dead.²⁷

As legal supplies dried up, bootleg manufacturers emerged. Augustus Owsley Stanley, a college dropout and former conman, briefly became America’s largest LSD producer. Owsley, like the Pranksters and like Leary, fitted the image of the counter-culture hero. He gifted sound equipment to the Grateful Dead. He bankrolled The Oracle, the newspaper of the famous hippie community based in the Haight, San Francisco. He collected orientalia and rare perfumes, and he kept an owl to which he fed live mice. According to his housemates, Owsley received petitioners at his Los Angeles base ‘like serfs pleading for a boon from the king . . . enthroned in the nude on a huge fur-covered chair, drying his hair with a hair-dryer’.²⁸ Owsley had first set up his lab in a bathroom near the Berkeley campus, later to move to Los Angeles, where he began buying chemicals in bulk. Making LSD was dangerous, but he managed to secure the equipment, including a hard-to-procure tableting machine.29

Such activities were not small-scale. Because LSD is effective in such small doses, the right tools and chemicals suffice to supply large populations from a single lab. Seeded, in turn, by Owsley was the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, bringing together a group of Laguna Beach surfers and the hippie community of Idyllwild, California.³⁰ The Brotherhood’s primary focus was marijuana, but it saw LSD distribution as a charitable activity, and it sold it at cost. After Owsley exited the market, it became responsible, with distributors in California, Hawaii and Oregon, for up to half of all LSD sales in the United States.³¹ The Brotherhood became associated, finally, with a uk-based ring known as the Microdot Gang. The Microdot Gang, improbably, had been put together by a couple of doctors – Richard Kemp and his partner Christine Bott – who had set up shop in a Welsh village named Blaencaron. Kemp, an exceptional chemist, became responsible for a prodigious output. He sold millions of tiny pills (‘microdots’, available in eight different colours) to a circle of individuals based in London, Birmingham, Lochhead and Swindon, who in turn sold them internationally. His operation briefly grew into the largest in the world.³²

By then, LSD had begun to be banned everywhere: in the United States in 1970, in the UK in 1971, and under a new UN treaty named the Psychotropic Convention in the same year. In 1966, when California had been the first to clamp down on the drug, Owsley had gone underground. He was caught a few days before the Christmas of 1967 in the town of Orinda, tableting away: found in possession of 217 grams (7.6 oz) of LSD or about 750,000 doses by a group of narcotic agents, he tried to argue that they were for personal consumption.³³ The Brotherhood would last a while longer, but in 1972 forty of its members were arrested – the Drug Enforcement Administration would seize 14 million doses in LSD crystals from four of its underground labs.³⁴ Kemp’s ring, last of all, was busted in a major police action dubbed Operation Julie in 1977.³⁵

Leary’s existence had long before turned precarious. While returning from a trip to Mexico in 1966, he was detained at the border in Laredo, Texas. The car was searched and a female friend was found to be carrying marijuana, for which Leary foolishly took responsibility. Leary fought the case: he announced that he had become a Hindu and that the drug was really a religious aid, pleading that prohibition was equal to religious discrimination. His argumentation did not go down well with the jury: this being a repeat offence, he was sentenced to thirty years in prison plus a large fine.36 Leary appealed and got out on bail, gaining time. Three years later he would win a spectacular Supreme Court victory. But he faced continued trouble: the police raided his Millbrook retreat, and his drug infractions were mounting. In 1970 another jury convicted him anew, this time for good. He was remanded to prison for a long term of confinement.³⁷ It was from this sentence that he would abscond a few months later – the Brotherhood of Eternal Love having paid for and organized his escape.³⁸ The judge had called Leary ‘a menace to this country’.³⁹

Such exasperation as the magistrate’s was unsurprising, and yet whether the psychedelic or the hippie movement were effectively responsible for the contemporary resurgence in drug use is open to question. No doubt Leary, his followers and his emulators did much to promote and even directly disseminate hallucinogens among a new generation. The hippies openly adopted marijuana, which they considered a gift to mankind and should be legal. It did not follow that all drugs, and the established narcotics in particular, owed them the same debt. There were identifiably two parallel booms: one centred on hallucinogens, closely associated with the new youth culture, and another centred on the more customary drugs of abuse (opiates, cocaine), spreading through a different population and owing its rise to different factors.

Before the rise of 1960s contestation, drugs had featured within the alternative cultural movements that were jazz music and Beat Generation literature. Jazz musicians known to have been on heroin included the trumpeters Fats Navarro and Chet Baker and the saxophonists Wardell Gray and Art Pepper, as well as Stan Getz and, later, Ray Charles. Miles Davis only recovered from addiction in the 1960s. When Billie Holiday lay dying in hospital, New York police raided her room, confiscating heroin among her other possessions and snapping photographs of her in extremis to make a scarecrow of her.⁴⁰

The same phenomenon played out on the larger stages that were rock ’n’ roll and the pop music of the 1960s and ’70s. Heroin addicts who recovered included Keith Richards, Marianne Faithfull and Eric Clapton.⁴¹ Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones died of an overdose in 1969, Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin in 1970, and Jim Morrison in 1971. In 1978 it was the turn of Keith Moon of the Who and in 1979 Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols. The music itself contained references to drugs. To list only songs from 1966 and 1967, the chorus to Bob Dylan’s ‘Rainy Day Woman’ repeats an instruction to get stoned, The Beatles’ ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ formed the acronym LSD, and both ‘With a Little Help from My Friends’ and the Rolling Stones’ ‘Mother’s Little Helper’ were allusions to drugs. So was Frank Zappa’s ‘Help I’m a Rock’, Procol Harum’s ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’ and, more explicitly, the Velvet Underground’s ‘Heroin’.42

Rebellious youth itself embraced marijuana and hallucinogens because they were forbidden and alternative. Students espoused behaviours that put them at odds with the mainstream, whether that was civil disobedience, growing their hair long or taking drugs.⁴³ The anthropologist Lewis Yablonsky immersed himself in hippie culture, visiting various ‘tribes’ or communes. Young men and women, his interviews confirmed, took LSD in search of a new morality: ‘I could become an alcoholic. I could ruin my health. I could tear my body down. That’s what my father did to himself. If you smoke grass then you’re not addicted to it and it is a pleasure to smoke it . . . As for acid, I think that acid is very good for finding out a few things about yourself and the feelings around you.’⁴⁴ According to another witness: ‘My first trip changed my world. I quit my job and I haven’t worked since then. There were a few things that happened to me before my ego buster. I was more selfish and more money-minded and I was more society minded like where I was before. But now, it is kind of a love thing, a humanity thing.’⁴⁵ (A sceptic commented: ‘Who paves the highway so that daddy’s car can bring the hippie to sit there and drop out?’⁴⁶)

At the same time, what applied to hallucinogens did not necessarily apply to the other drugs. One intoxicant’s rise did not automatically proceed alongside another’s. Youthful contestation was a predominantly middle-class phenomenon, while heroin and cocaine use tapped into a different sociological base. Even the flaunting of drugs of all types by rock stars was no more than proof of their entry into mass culture.

The boldest Beat Generation statement on drugs is surely Junky, by William S. Burroughs. This takes the reader through a no-holdsbarred account of the author’s lifelong affair with heroin. But Burroughs’s book hardly glamorizes junkies. ‘What a crew!’ the narrator writes. ‘Mooches, fags, flour-flushers, stool pigeons, bums – unwilling to work, unable to steal, always short of money, always whining for credit. In the whole lot there was not one who wouldn’t wilt and spill as soon as someone belted him in the mouth and said “Where did you get it?”’47 (The term junkie or junky itself originated in 1920s New York, where addicts supported themselves by picking through rubbish dumps.⁴⁸) Nor does Burroughs’s work invite the reader to scenes of heroin-induced ecstasy. On the contrary, it is filled with dirt and nausea, and the best things it writes in the drug’s favour is that: ‘Junk takes everything and gives nothing but insurance against junk sickness.’⁴⁹ Of his experience, Burroughs writes: ‘In forty-eight hours the backlog of morphine in my body ran out. The solution barely cut the sickness. I drank it all with two Nembutals and slept several hours. When I woke up, my clothes were soaked through with sweat. My eyes were watering and smarting. My whole body felt itchy and irritable. I twisted about on the bed, arching my back and stretching my arms and legs . . . I got up and changed my underwear.’⁵⁰

While middle-class youths experimented with hallucinogens and marijuana, heroin spread among the urban poor. Opiate addiction was associated with ‘poverty, urban problems, failure of integration’, not the hippie’s search for meaning.⁵¹ Contemporaries differentiated between a hippie drug culture, mostly young and middle-class, and a ‘negro’ drug culture rooted in rebellion against discrimination and lack of opportunity.⁵² This contained much racial stereotyping: opiate injecting was equally prevalent among white populations. Yet the point stood that it was disadvantage, not hippie contestation, that fed heroin use.

The same is observed of heroin’s spread in other developed countries than the USA. Surveys show that when heroin became more prevalent in Germany it was a working-class phenomenon, with only 23 per cent of users having passed end-of-school exams.⁵³ In France, when it began to take off, the drug was adopted overwhelmingly by the unemployed.⁵⁴ In the UK, likewise, when opiate use began to achieve significant numbers, it was typically men with no or minimal educational achievements who took it, often with a history of delinquency. The vast majority were without jobs.⁵⁵

But that the surge in drugs was not a counter-culture phenomenon is irrefutably confirmed by its chronology. While marijuana and the hallucinogens began to stir in the 1960s, the generalized rise, including heroin and cocaine, began in the 1970s. Illicit drug use as a whole, boosted by the crack epidemic, only reached scale in the 1980s and ’90s.

American marijuana statistics are not uniformly available, and the data remain for this period fragmentary, but the drug’s uptake can be approached through arrest numbers. Marijuana-related arrests stood at 18,815 in 1965, within their historical ballpark. By 1969 they had multiplied sixfold to number 118,682. A continuous rise was seen thereafter, up to 416,000 in 1975.56 In the 1950s marijuana had remained an obscure drug few people dared try. By the end of the 1970s the number of Americans smoking it at least once a year had reached the once-unimaginable total of 29.8 million, or 13.3 per cent of the population.⁵⁷ The total number declined gently thereafter, to 18.7 million by 1998.⁵⁸

For the other two main illicit drugs, however – heroin and cocaine – the rise clearly took place in the 1970s and ’80s. As of 1972, 2.2 per cent of American adults reported having tried cocaine once in their lives: in 1982 this was 26.5 per cent.⁵⁹ The peak for cocaine use, including crack, occurred in 1985.⁶⁰ Immediately after the Second World War the number of heroin users had been around 50,000. In the late 1960s the total stood at about 100,000.⁶¹ As of 1979 the health services thought there were 427,000 heroin users in the United States. The pre-2000 peak would be reached only in 1997, at 597,000.⁶²

The same picture emerges even more markedly elsewhere. In the UK, the Home Office estimated that there were around 3,000 heroin or morphine addicts as of the late 1960s. For cocaine this was a few hundred.⁶³ By the mid-1980s the country would have an estimated 100,000+ heroin users.⁶⁴ Even marijuana use did not pick up in earnest until after 1970. Police seizures of cannabis, at 126 kilograms in 1960, had only risen to 192 kilograms by 1967.⁶⁵ By contrast, the median for the 1970s was 6,211 kilograms, and in 1982 UK cannabis seizures totalled 17,440 kilograms.⁶⁶ In West Germany, opiate addict numbers held roughly constant at around 4,000 between the mid-1950s and 1970, when they suddenly began to rise. By 1976 the total stood at 40,000.⁶⁷ According to one estimate, by the beginning of the 1990s Germany had 100,000 heroin users as well as 30,000–40,000 cocaine users.⁶⁸

Iran offers an example outside the developed world. Though the statistics were imprecise, the mid-1950s eradication campaign caused a steep fall in opium-user numbers, from over a million to the 200,000–300,000 area in 1960. In 1969 the government felt able to relax its hold, and it allowed poppy cultivation to resume. Opiate addicts were asked to register and were steered towards treatment – within two years, 84,000 had done so.69 When it replaced the shah in 1979, by contrast, the Islamic Republic made a ham-fisted effort to suppress drugs altogether. Police raided areas where addicts congregated and razed entire settlements to the ground. In some years, the regime executed as many as five hundred traffickers, sometimes leaving a body hanging from the gallows for several days to make an example. By the late 1990s, regardless, opiate user numbers had climbed back over 1 million, many of whom now used the far stronger products that are morphine and heroin.⁷⁰

Worldwide, illicit drug trafficking took off in the 1970s and accelerated again in the 1980s and ’90s. Globally, seizures of refined opiates (heroin and morphine) stood at a median of 274 kilograms per annum in the 1950s, 953 kilograms in the 1960s, 2,485 kilograms in the 1970s, 10,389 kilograms in the 1980s and 41,434 kilograms in the 1990s. (See Appendix III for tables.) The percentage rate of increase, from the 1960s onward, was approximately constant. But in absolute terms the largest rise actually took place in the 1990s: 31,045 kilograms, itself a multiple of the 1960s and 1970s numbers.

Using seizures as a proxy for trafficking involves certain methodological problems, since increased seizures can also reflect more effective policing. Generally, however, UNODC assumes that approximately 10 per cent of trafficked heroin was seized in the 1980s and 12 per cent in the 1990s. This was twice to three times the probable rate (4 to 5 per cent) for the 1950s. For cocaine, UNODC believes that police effectiveness achieved even higher levels.⁷¹ Yet even allowing for such adjustments, the data point to massive increases in drug trafficking, and show that they occurred in the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s, with the largest absolute rise in that last decade. Refined opiate seizures increased 150-fold between the 1950s and the 1990s: even if one assumes that anti-narcotic effectiveness tripled, trafficking still increased fiftyfold. For cocaine, the rise was even more staggering: median seizures stood at 10 kilograms in the 1950s, 69 kilograms in the 1960s, 1,933 kilograms in the 1970s, 41,543 kilograms in the 1980s and 320,100 kilograms in the 1990s. Even allowing for considerable improvement in anti-narcotics inception rates, this was a more than thousandfold rise.⁷²

What accounts, then, for this flood? If not Leary and his ilk, who or what was at fault for having prompted the tsunami? A hint is given by the arrival on the scene of two more major drug categories: amphetamines and tranquilizers.

Amphetamines, among which are methamphetamines, are chemical stimulants or ‘uppers’, much like cocaine. Stimulants arouse the brain and nervous system, producing wakefulness, energy and heightened awareness, as well as increased heart rate and blood pressure. They are versatile substances. Amphetamines continue to be used as pharmaceutical products (to treat attention deficit disorder, for example). As drugs of abuse, they are sometimes known as ‘speed’, while methamphetamine has been known as ‘crank’ (for its use by motorcycle gangs), ‘ice’, ‘glass’, ‘crystal meth’ and, in Asia, ‘yaba’ (‘crazy drug’ in Thai). Meth forms the base for yet another compound: MDMA, or Ecstasy.73

The Japanese pharmacologist Nagai Nagayoshi was the first to synthesize methamphetamine, in the late nineteenth century. A Romanian chemist named Lazar Edeleanu, working in Berlin, described the production of amphetamine around the same time.⁷⁴ The first commercial application, however, was developed in the United States in 1929 by a chemist named Gordon Alles. Alles, who worked for a Los Angeles laboratory specializing in allergies, was in search of an asthma drug.⁷⁵ Much like Albert Hofmann with LSD, he first tried the drug on himself. Early experiments showed that the compound might make a passable decongestant but that it was a poor asthma remedy. It was, however, a potent central nervous system stimulant, triggering a ‘feeling of well-being’, ‘exhilaration’ and ‘palpitation’.⁷⁶

Alles patented his drug in 1932. Soon thereafter, he and his invention moved to the larger pharmaceutical firm Smith, Kline, & French (SKF). The company sold a spray containing small amounts of the drug for use as a decongestant: the Benzedrine inhaler. From 1937 SKF put Benzedrine on sale in a more concentrated pill form. As such, it was offered as a remedy for narcolepsy, Parkinson’s disease and mood elevation in depression. Advertisements came out in the major medical journals. In 1939 Benzedrine brought in sales of $330,000.⁷⁷

A popular myth is that the German army fought the Second World War on an amphetamine high. In 1938 the Temmler pharmaceutical company had introduced a methamphetamine product named Pervitin to the European market. Pervitin was listed for psychiatric use, but the military authorities soon discovered that soldiers were taking it and, based on tests that showed marginal improvements in mental tasks, they authorized it for requisitioning by army doctors. At the height of the French campaign, in April–June 1940, the Wehrmacht issued 35 million pills each month to its soldiers. This sounds like a large number only until it is remembered that the German Army comprised several million men. At six pills per day, this could sustain a high among no more than eight or so army divisions out of a total of 150, without even counting the air force and navy. The military soon became worried, anyway: amphetamines depleted soldiers’ energy stores, and it made pilots inattentive. By the end of the year distribution had dropped to 1 million tablets a month. It would fall yet further in 1941 and 1942 as Germany placed methamphetamine, along with amphetamine, under strict regulation.78

This did not stop rumours from reaching the British War Office of a drug that made German pilots invulnerable. The British Army and Royal Navy, and the U.S. Army and Marines, possibly distributed more amphetamine pills to their men than the Germans gave theirs. In 1942 Bomber Command decided to supply two half-dose pills to pilots per tour of duty, one to be taken at the beginning and one after the bombing run. The British Army performed its own studies in parallel. Field tests by Field Marshall Montgomery in Egypt, in particular, convinced him of amphetamine’s usefulness in raising soldiers’ energy levels, and he ordered them distributed to his troops. In total, the British military purchased 72 million Benzedrine tablets from SKF throughout the war. The U.S. Army also adopted the tablet and, from 1943, it was included in combat first-aid kits, with instructions that one half-dose Benzedrine tablet should be taken every six hours for ‘extreme’ mental fatigue, or two tablets for physical fatigue, up to three times running. The quantities distributed by the American military were never disclosed.⁷⁹

The drug was separately sold in a fourth market: Japan. After the Second World War, this would provide the occasion for a rare, decisive victory in the long war on drugs. Twenty companies manufactured methamphetamine in 1940s Japan, where it was known as Hiropon, the trademark of the Dai-Nippon Seiyaku company. The Japanese authorities, learning of its use by the German military, had distributed Hiropon widely during the war, both to soldiers and to civilian workers. A large number of people became dependent after 1945, whether from having taken the drug in wartime or, more often, because it helped them deal with the harsh conditions of reconstruction. In 1948–9 the Ministry of Health, convinced it faced an epidemic, tightened regulations on distribution. It asked pharmaceutical companies to stop producing the drug. In 1951 the parliament passed legislation criminalizing the unauthorized manufacture, distribution and possession of Hiropon, complete with prison penalties.80 But makeshift dealers had already learnt how to make it. Law enforcement found methamphetamine labs hidden in factories making paint, tuberculosis remedies, ice cream, window casings, cold perm solution, cosmetics and hair dye. Many labs were mom-and-pop affairs: in May 1953 police searched the Tokyo residence of 46-year-old Tanaka Seiji and his wife. Finding about 10,000 doses plus paraphernalia, they took the couple into custody. The spouses, an investigation revealed, had been making upwards of 1,500 doses of Hiropon per day.⁸¹ A large-scale survey conducted a year later by the Ministry of Welfare found that 550,000 Japanese citizens had become regular methamphetamine users, and that 2 million had tried the drug at least once.⁸²

The government responded with a crackdown involving thousands of police in addition to the Narcotics Section. In one all-night investigation, in 1954 in Osaka, 2,000 officers searched nearly eight hundred buildings in various neighbourhoods, netting over three hundred people. The number of suspects taken in that year reached 54,104, or 96 per cent of all drug crime. Almost all convicted offenders received penal sentences, and within the first five years of the law’s passage 9,000 violators had served time.⁸³ Alongside, the government issued anti-Hiropon pamphlets, leaflets and posters, and it backed a press campaign featuring lurid portaits of drug users, printed interviews, cautionary tales by doctors and so on. The authorities, finally, enlisted volunteers to provide counselling to users or help them find employment, and they subsidized medical institutions for treating withdrawal, with mandatory institutionalization. The crackdown worked. By 1956 Hiropon had passed its peak. By 1958 the number of violators had fallen below 1,000. The epidemic was never more than a flash in the pan.⁸⁴

While this was going on, amphetamines were enjoying their pharmaceutical heyday in the USA and Europe. After the Second World War, SKF renewed its Benzedrine marketing push, promoting it as a remedy for psychiatric disorders. An advertisement featured ‘a big blue “b” together with photos of an elderly man changing from sad to smiling, illustrating how the drug helps “when persistent depression settles upon the aged patient”’.85 To fight patent expiry, the company released a lookalike: Dexedrine, for use as a weight-loss pill. In 1950 it released Dexamyl, another stimulant and antidepressant. All three pills were heart-shaped: Dexamyl in blue, Dexedrine in yellow, Benzedrine in pink.⁸⁶ The three products and their imitators became blockbusters in the USA and the UK. In 1963 American amphetamine sales reached $48 million.⁸⁷ In the UK in the same year, amphetamines accounted for 3 per cent of all prescriptions.⁸⁸

From 1940 SKF had begun labelling Benzedrine as prescription-only, and in 1951 the FDA introduced new rules restricting all stimulants to a prescription basis.⁸⁹ A grey market developed, whether from recycled Benzedrine inhalers, from enthusiastic prescribing by doctors or, as the 1960s dawned, through diversion from pharmaceutical inventory. A young man explained: ‘A typical doctor’s appointment would run as follows. I’d fabricate a story, usually to the effect that my girlfriend had moved in with my best male friend on the same day that my brother had committed suicide and/or my mother and/or father either had been admitted to a mental hospital or had died in epilepsy. The doctor would listen, express sympathy, sorrow, etc. (how many of these doctors could have believed such nonsense!) . . . Then, in 98 percent of the interviews, he would write a prescription for thirty to one hundred Eskatrols.’⁹⁰ Hiropon had not been alone. Amphetamines were on their way to becoming a major black-market drug.

The success of amphetamines in turn points to the fundamental reasons for the groundswell in drug use that began in the 1960s and continues to this day. They had nothing to do with hippies, to whom amphetamines were actually inimical. Allen Ginsberg warned in 1965: ‘Speed is anti-social, paranoid making, it’s a drag, bad for your body, bad for your mind, generally speaking, in the long run uncreative and it’s a plague in the whole dope industry. All the nice gentle dope fiends are getting screwed up by the real horror monster Frankenstein Speedfreaks who are going around stealing and bad mouthing everybody.’ Buttons labelled ‘speed kills’ became common in the San Francisco communes.⁹¹

Benzedrine may have made progress among jazzmen and the Beat Generation.⁹² Amphetamine pills may feature in Burroughs’s Junkie, but this reflected no more than their general integration into pop culture. The rise of speed was a separate phenomenon from the counterculture. Perhaps Mick Jagger and the Beatles took amphetamines, but so did the film producer Cecil B. DeMille, the composer Leonard Bernstein, the playwright Tennessee Williams and the movie star Judy Garland. So also, less publicly, did the politicians Anthony Eden and John F. Kennedy.93

Amphetamines, far from helping their adherents drop out of conventional society and escape its stifling norms, assisted them in performing better within it and sustaining its competitive pressures. A student who took amphetamines confessed: ‘Speed not only made getting [exams] done much easier; it also made subjects that were dry and boring under any other conditions seem very interesting and important.’⁹⁴ Likewise, according to another: ‘Speed makes the most routine task, function, or conversation take on a different and more tolerable light.’⁹⁵ Alternatively, amphetamine use, for example in the variant known as Ecstasy, could be purely hedonistic. Drug users themselves betrayed, in their stated motivations, a simple thirst for fun.⁹⁶ Some devotees even reported that they could be ‘the most powerful aphrodisiacs known’, describing their effect as ‘orgasm over your whole body’.⁹⁷

Disposable incomes were rising. Advertising had become ubiquitous. Mass consumption made materialistic pursuits worthy. A sometimes frantic consumerism took hold in the post-war years, social theorists noted, fed at once by the economic boom and fears of a return to the Depression. This new consumerism in turn brought with it what the French sociologist Jean Baudrillard has called a materialistic, new, ‘fun morality’.⁹⁸ Vladimir Kusevic, a director of the UN’S Division of Narcotic Drugs, noted that ‘certain psychotropic substances have become “consumer goods” in certain Western countries, resulting in large numbers of dependent persons.’⁹⁹ If this sounds too general as an explanation, part of the challenge is to recognize that drugs differed and the motivations varied just as widely for taking them: from the rave-goer popping Ecstasy to the New Age experimenter sampling LSD, from the student preparing for exams with amphetamines to the ghetto-dweller injecting heroin or smoking crack out of enforced idleness. Kusevic elaborated:

During the last two decades . . . the development of drug abuse has been quite different. In countries where it was unknown, it has appeared; in countries where it touched only the fringe of society, it is now well settled – even in well-to-do groups and among people to whom it would have been abhorrent earlier. The reasons for this new phenomenon are not the same everywhere because of differences in social economic and cultural structures in different countries. There is no doubt that the condition of life created by the huge development of technology and of the modern ‘consumer society’ have laid the ground for this new development.100

Amphetamines originally owed their success to promotion by the pharmaceutical industry. Because SKF held the patent on amphetamine, or Benzedrine, other firms concentrated at first on the methamphetamine market. Burroughs Wellcome entered the market in 1944 with Methedrine, a product distributed in injectable and pill form. Abbott Laboratories released a methamphetamine product under the trade name Desoxyn shortly thereafter. Other branded products launched in the decades following the Second World War included Clark-O-Tabs Modified, Gerilets Filmtab, Oesoxyn, Meditussin, Methampex, Amerital, Span-RD, Amphaplex, Obetrol . . .¹⁰¹ An FDA’S manufacturer’s survey dated 1962 arrived at an annual output of 8 billion standard 10 milligram tablets of amphetamines.¹⁰²

The background was one of emerging medical wonders, including antibiotics, vaccines for diseases such as polio, and the birth control pill. The mental-health market itself was exploding. By the early 1960s some 30 million Americans, or 15 per cent of the population, were on prescription drugs for psychiatric complaints.¹⁰³ Pharmaceutical advertising was tapping into a ready seam: a newly born culture of medicating for happiness. There was a solution to everything, and it was commercially available. The notion applied to mental health just as it did in other walks of life.

Nowhere was this more palpable than in the success of yet another category of drugs known as the minor tranquilizers. The first of these sedatives, eventually branded under the name Miltown, was synthesized by a Czech researcher named Frank Berger who had been hired by British Drug House Ltd to research antibiotics. Berger later moved to the American patent medicine firm Carter Products, taking his invention with him. Carter launched Miltown in 1955. Sales immediately leapt. The pill and its emulators promptly achieved a turnover in excess of $100 million.¹⁰⁴ Within a few years, American physicians were prescribing Miltown and its chemically equivalent competitor Equanil 50 million times annually. Their successor, Valium, would reach an even higher peak in the 1970s, when it became the single most prescribed branded medicine in the world.105

These drugs, mild muscle relaxants, were prescribed to ease tension or anxiety. Taken as antidepressants, they helped elevate mood, reduce suicidal impulses and counteract a range of other depressive symptoms. In the 1980s they would be replaced by Prozac, the next wonder drug in the field. Prozac was likewise an overnight marketing success, one of whose principal actors proclaimed that medicine had finally arrived at the stage of ‘cosmetic psychopharmacology’, a stage in which identities could be ‘sculpted’ in any desired way.¹⁰⁶ Commercialized medicine had come of age. As Aldous Huxley had once predicted, happiness could be bought in pill form. Perhaps the public could be forgiven for thinking that this applied to substances other than those available from the doctor.

Two clinical trials published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1955 had initially lauded Miltown as dramatically effective at relieving tension, anxiety and fear states among patients, with no toxicity or risk of addiction.¹⁰⁷ The drug’s golden age, though, did not last long. Whether the minor tranquilizers were addictive remained unclear. They induced no quick euphoria. Withdrawal could trigger such symptoms as vomiting, seizures, insomnia and temporary psychosis, but only from much higher doses than typically prescribed. Patients, however, sometimes increased their doses, showing signs of intoxication. When taken off the pills, they complained of feeling nervous and having ‘the jitters’.¹⁰⁸ Still more serious, double-blind, placebo-controlled trials coming out in the late 1950s questioned Miltown’s very effectiveness. Sales began to fall, and by 1964 Miltown was removed from the pharmacopoeia.¹⁰⁹

Amphetamines were likewise on borrowed time. By 1960 a number of critical academic appraisals had appeared, including British studies finding strong evidence of a hard core of heavy and constant users. Data from a Newcastle survey of family doctors found that up to a quarter of the mostly middle-aged patients who took amphetamines were ‘habituated’.¹¹⁰ There were dark side effects. Amphetamine users could be asocial, reacting impulsively and violently to perceived insults or threats. The drugs, it was discovered, could trigger paranoid schizophrenia. A 49-year-old lawyer had ‘turned up in a Massachusetts mental facility . . . insisting that six cars regularly trailed him, that his son (who was serving in the military) communicated with him from an invisible helicopter overhead, and that the government was spying on him and testing his loyalty for a top-secret mission.’ In another case, a 32-year-old man had arrived in a Kansas City hospital ‘complaining that his thoughts were being controlled telepathically and that he had been overhearing several of his acquaintances plotting against him’.111

Prescriptions began to plateau. The effect, however, was not that amphetamine use fell, but that it increasingly drifted into illicit use. What the doctors became hesitant to prescribe, the customers found a way to appropriate. In 1966 it was found that Abbott Laboratories had sold the equivalent of 2 million doses in powder form to an unlicensed Long Island dealer. In 1969 the owner of a large pharmacy in Kentucky was arrested for having sold large amounts of amphetamine to black-market pushers in neighbouring states. In 1970 a Tennessee jury indicted an employee of the pharmaceutical company Massengill on charges of stealing 380,000 tablets.¹¹² Eventually, as diversion from licit sources dried up, dealers would learn to make the product on their own. By then, authorities around the world had taken action.

It mattered hugely whether the resurgence in narcotics use was the work of a few agitators and dropouts, or whether it reflected deep-seated societal trends. If the multi-decade explosion in the making was the consequence of fundamental cultural change, itself buttressed by economic shifts, this called for a rethink or at least a considered response. If it was a matter of a few bad eggs, the system could deal with them. The same trap was being laid that had ensnared the Qing. Not completely unjustly, the nineteenth-century Chinese, too, had thought that they merely faced a few supply-side culprits. As the 1960s dawned the anti-narcotics authorities, national and supra-national, were unprepared. Their belief was that they had just slain the dragon and, with the Single Convention, written its epitaph. The spectacle of Timothy Leary preaching the psychedelic revolution was unwelcome.

Nothing spoke louder of the anti-narcotics order and its prevailing concerns than its differing responses to hallucinogens on the one hand and amphetamines on the other. The Commission on Narcotic Drugs dithered on amphetamines for the better part of two decades. It clamped down on LSD almost reflexively. The same may be said, with only a few exceptions, of national authorities. The insidious danger made benign-looking by the pharmaceutical industry was only faced off reluctantly. Preaching by the high priests of the hallucinogenic experience was met promptly and with firmness.

The CND’S first significant discussion of amphetamines occurred in the session of 1955. The Greek representative, named Panopoulos, suddenly proposed listing them among the drugs covered by the Single Convention, which was in preparation. Panopoulos ‘pointed to the dangers of amphetamines, which contained pervitin, a narcotic substance covered by the 1931 Convention’.113 (This was of course doubly untrue, and the chairman corrected him.) ‘In Greece several deaths had been attributed to the use of cures for obesity and other pharmaceutical preparations with a benzedrine base, sold without restriction in that country as in several others. During the final months before examinations many students were buying preparations with a pervitin base as stimulants, which was very dangerous,’ he added with more verisimilitude.

Anslinger objected, opining that controls should be restricted to the national level. ‘It was not certain that such products should be considered real narcotic drugs. The commission might ask WHO for its views in the matter.’ He was supported by the British delegate: ‘While cases of misuse were rare in his country, they were serious and alarming when they did occur. He could therefore readily understand the Greek Government’s concern. However, he agreed with the United States representative that the problem should be solved at the national level.’ The Canadian delegate likewise concurred.¹¹⁴ Why rock the boat and upset the pharmaceutical firms? The World Health Organization (WHO) observer who was present did not believe that amphetamines were addictive. They were prescription-only products in a number of countries, and this was enough security against abuse.¹¹⁵ (Even Panopoulos’s game was soon given away: ‘Mr Ozkol (Turkey) felt that in view of the fact that . . . national controls had failed to eliminate entirely the abuse mentioned by the Greek representative, the Commission should plan on international controls, at least in principle.’¹¹⁶ The Yugoslav member contributed his support. Greece, Turkey and Yugoslavia were all Opium Protocol holdouts. Amphetamines offered useful diversionary value.)

The subject was not meaningfully raised again until 1965. In that session: ‘The representative of Canada drew attention to the growing abuse – particularly among young people – of substances [including amphetamines] which . . . had effects that were harmful to the individual and to society itself.’117 The evidence was that these drugs were being consumed outside medical channels, including by ‘young persons’ who were ‘attracted to certain of these substances on account of their allegedly stimulating and thrilling effects’. Another concern was road safety. Various countries expressed worries, including Switzerland and Sweden, and pharmaceutical companies were criticized for their aggressive marketing. Altogether, nevertheless, the CND remained hesitant and no action was taken.¹¹⁸

A WHO expert committee advised that amphetamines be listed under the Single Convention, or placed under measures tantamount to listing, in the same year.¹¹⁹ Amphetamines were only recommended for scheduling after another four years, in 1969. Even this came at the emergency request of the Swedish delegate, who complained that ‘high-dose intravenous abuse of these substances [produced] an intense feeling of euphoria and a form of hyperactivity which was almost maniac. Sexual desire and potency were greatly increased and promiscuous behaviours among addicts were reported. They also become aggressive, took to roaming the streets, driving dangerously and causing accidents, even attacking peaceful pedestrians, and disturbing the peace in general.’¹²⁰ The CND put an end to prevarication – but only after time had run out and enough states complained.

By contrast, the moment LSD came under its attention, the commission moved to have it banned. In 1966 the American delegate mentioned the appearance of home-made synthetic drugs, notably certain opiates and LSD.¹²¹ A subcommittee had been formed jointly to study amphetamines, barbiturates (earlier versions of the tranquilizers) and LSD. While deliberations continued on amphetamines and barbiturates, ‘The Commission noted the profound concern with which the Committee had viewed the abuse of LSD and substances producing similar effects. Several representatives provided information on the abuse of such drugs in their countries and on legislation which had been enacted to deal with that problem.’¹²² This sufficed. No need to consult the WHO or to procrastinate any further. The CND decided: ‘Recognizing the grave danger of this abuse to health and safety in respect to both the individual and to society, [it] Requests Governments to take immediate action to control strictly the import, export and production of LSD and substances producing similar ill effects either immediately or readily by conversion, and to place the distribution of these substances under the supervision of competent authorities, [and] Recommends that the use of these substances be restricted to scientific research and medical purposes and that their administration be only under very close and continuous medical supervision.’123 LSD would join the list of the prohibited drugs as a Schedule I drug, alongside heroin, while amphetamines only made it to Schedule II.¹²⁴

Social fears, not health concerns, called the tune. This is confirmed by the medical rationale that was developed to underpin the new ban. The CND/WHO discussions raised two separate yet fundamental issues. The first was whether the new substances, ultimately grouped together under the label ‘psychotropic drugs’, could simply be added to the Single Convention schedules. The legal experts decided they could not – and as a result a new conference was called, leading to the adoption of a 1971 Convention on Psychotropic Substances. The second question was how to characterize these drugs as addictive substances. Addiction was what singled out prohibited drugs. (A key preamble to the Single Convention reads: ‘Recognizing that addiction to narcotic drugs constitutes a serious evil for the individual and is fraught with social and economic danger to mankind . . .’.¹²⁵) To qualify as a narcotic, a substance had to lure its users into taking ever greater quantities of it and entrap them through painful withdrawal effects. Would this line of argumentation hold with amphetamines, LSD and the other psychotropics?

Opiates functioned as the original model for medically defined addiction. Cocaine, albeit based on questionable data, had been placed alongside them because it approximately conformed to this model. Opiate addiction depends on psychological as well as physical factors, and patterns of opiate consumption often fall short of compulsive use. Yet for heroin, at least, the effects are visible enough, sometimes even spectacular. A doctor provides this classic account of heroin withdrawal:

Eight to twelve hours after the last dose the addict begins to grow uneasy. A sense of weakness overcomes him, he yawns, shivers and sweats all at the same time while a watery discharge begins to trickle from the eyes and inside the nose which he compares to ‘hot water running up in the mouth’. [Later] the yawning may become so violent that it can dislocate the jaw, watery mucus pours from the nose, tears from the eyes. The pupils are widely dilated, the hair stands up and the skin itself is cold and shows that typical goose flesh which in the parlance of addicts is the original ‘cold turkey’.

Now, to add further to the addict’s miseries, his bowels begin to act with fantastic violence: great waves of contractions pass over the stomach, causing explosive vomiting, the vomit being frequently blood-stained. So extreme are the intestinal contractions that the surface of the abdomen appears corrugated and knotted, as if a tangle of snakes were fighting beneath the skin . . . As many as sixty large watery stools may be passed in twenty-four hours . . . In a desperate effort to gain comfort from the chills that rack his body he covers himself with every blanket he can find. His whole body is shaken by twitchings and his feet kick involuntarily.

Throughout this period the addict obtains neither sleep nor rest . . . The profuse sweating keeps bedding and mattress soaked. Filthy, unshaven, dishevelled, befouled with his own vomit and faeces, the addict at this stage presents an almost subhuman appearance.126

Amphetamines offer parallels with cocaine in that, as stimulants, they induce hyperactivity, which is often followed by sleep disturbance. Heavy long-term users can become exposed to ‘amphetamine psychosis’. Amphetamine withdrawal can also include ‘visual and tactile hallucinations of worms crawling over [the] body and small animals everywhere’.¹²⁷ Amphetamines, however, involve no tolerance mechanism. Any increase is psychological, driven by the desire for more, not bodily adaptation.¹²⁸ The drug, besides, rarely induces overdosing. Even methamphetamine seldom kills, except through the deleterious effects of long-term use. Among drug-induced hospital emergencies in the USA in 2010, for example, 30 per cent were cocaine-related whereas less than 7 per cent were for methamphetamine, even though its user population was larger.¹²⁹ As to LSD, despite its Schedule I classification, it is less dangerous by another degree. The drug involves some measure of tolerance, but this tends to dissipate rapidly. It creates no physical withdrawal effects. Nor do LSD users risk overdosing, though they might believe they can fly and jump out of a window.¹³⁰ The World Health Organization faced the problem of reconciling this increasingly diverse set with medical theory.

It also needed, incidentally, to justify marijuana’s continuing prohibition. Doing so had been easy while, as in the 1940s and ’50s, barely anyone knew anything about this supposedly deadly drug; by the 1960s the folklore around the madness-inducing weed that caused people to kill faced exposure. The WHO was neither prepared nor able to pretend that cannabis was addictive. In an appraisal, it wrote: ‘Typically, the abuse of cannabis is periodic but, even during long and continuous administration, no evidence of the development of physical dependence can be detected. There is, in consequence, no characteristic abstinence syndrome when use of the drug is discontinued. Whether administration of the drug is periodic or continuous, tolerance to its subjective and psychomotor effects has not been demonstrated.’131

The addiction model, originally built around opiates, did not fit the ramshackle group of substances now being brought under regulation. One solution might have been to question the system that had been established, ask what drugs belonged in it and how, and regulate accordingly. Instead, the WHO decided to reformulate what it meant by addiction.

As of the 1950s both the WHO and the CND had remained happy to use addiction as the key by which to identify narcotics. ‘Addiction-producing drugs were detrimental both to the individual and to society, while habit-forming drugs harmed only the individual, and the difference between the two classes had become widely recognized,’ explained the CND.¹³² From the 1960s, the organization began to retire the term in favour of a new and vaguer yardstick labelled dependence.¹³³ A WHO expert committee duly reported to the CND: ‘In the Expert Committee’s opinion, the long-felt need for adapting the present terms “drug addiction” and “drug habituation” to the present state of scientific knowledge and actual practice had now become imperative . . . Dependence, physical or psychic in nature or both, being a feature in common, the Expert Committee recommended that the single term “drug dependence” should be substituted for the terms “drug addiction” and “drug habituation” with the addition of a reference to the type of drug (such as morphine-, barbiturate-, cocaine-, amphetamine-, cannabis-type) on which dependence developed as a consequence of repeated administration.’¹³⁴

Medicine was made to fit the legal framework. Addiction, now relabelled dependence, was and remains a legal, not a scientific, category. Drug prohibition had not been constructed from a scientific consensus, and even less so was it expanded, in the 1960s, based on more precise science. It was the other way around: the scientific consensus was made to fit the mission creep of expanding prohibition.

The WHO itself confessed that its new definition was designed to fit around the enlarged group of the prohibited drugs: ‘Frequent misinterpretation of the term “addiction” and its confusion with “habituation”, and the increasing variety of substances entering into the considerations of the international narcotics control organs, had led to several attempts to find a general term applicable to abuses of different types of drugs.’ It even admitted that the underlying rationale resided in social control, and that it was intoxication and its negative social effects it wished to target. ‘The WHO representative recalled, in this connexion, the Expert Committee’s view expressed previously, that the primary criterion for the establishment and degree of control was the risk to the community resulting from the drug’s liability to be abused.’135

‘Dependence’ was a more pliable term than ‘addiction’. It could also mean, as the WHO experts explained, habituation. Scratch the surface, and it was a return to the old label ‘habit’, with added stigma and the stamp of medical authority. What did it mean with regard to marijuana? According to the WHO: ‘Its characteristics are: (a) Moderate to strong psychic dependence on account of the desired subjective effects. (b) Absence of physical dependence, so that there is no characteristic abstinence syndrome when the drug is discontinued. (c) Little tendency to increase the dose and no evidence of tolerance.’¹³⁶ What this boiled down to was that the user desired the drug. But do human beings not desire many things? The existing list – opiates, cocaine, cannabis – was disparate enough already. Rather than question it as new challenges arose, the prohibitionists chose to blur the lines yet further. It was a classic case of overreach.

On 14 July 1969, a few months after being elected, President Nixon invited the press to the White House to announce a ‘national drive on narcotics use’.¹³⁷ As a prominent feature, penalties would be raised on LSD. The famous music festival remained one month away, but Nixon’s recollections retrospectively reveal his state of mind: ‘To erase the grim legacy of Woodstock, we need[ed] a total war against drugs.’¹³⁸ Drugs had become associated with the protest movement against the Vietnam War. In a bitter twist, they had infected American GIS themselves, many of whom were offered opiates by local Saigon dealers. It was more tempting to blame the Woodstock concert-goers and subversion than it was to look for unfathomable social causes. The historian David Musto recalls: ‘When I interviewed former Narcotics Commissioner Harry J. Anslinger in 1972, he described his astonishment at the explosion of drug use in the 1960s . . . Anslinger had counted on stiff mandatory sentences, negative drug imagery, and the consensus of national institutions of defense, behind which lay an ignorance of drug users.’139

National authorities were just as bewildered elsewhere. In Britain, the government had put together a committee to investigate in 1964 (named the Brain committee, after its chairman, Sir Russell Brain). The report exposed the following concerns:

We are particularly concerned at the danger to the young. Witnesses have told us that there are numerous clubs, many in the West End of London, enjoying a vogue among young people who can find in them such diversions as modern music or all-night dancing. In such places it is known that some young people have indulged in stimulant drugs of the amphetamine type. Some of our witnesses have further maintained that in an atmosphere where drug taking is socially acceptable, there is a risk that young people may be persuaded to turn to cannabis, probably in the form of ‘reefer’ cigarettes.

There is a further risk that if they reach this stage they may move on to heroin and cocaine.¹⁴⁰

Britain placed amphetamines under anti-narcotics control in 1964.¹⁴¹ Under the Misuse of Drugs Act of 1971, it established LSD as a Class A substance, alongside heroin.¹⁴²

A few years later, another committee reported on cannabis. Cannabis, unlike heroin, did not produce withdrawal effects or physical dependence, this committee found. Nor was it physically dangerous, like barbiturates, amphetamines or tranquilizers, all of which had recently been the causes of hospital admissions and deaths.¹⁴³ In light of these observations, the committee’s conclusions were somewhat surprising. The most it was prepared to recommend was a reduction in penalties for possession, which under applicable law were the same as for dealing.¹⁴⁴ Even this met a stormy reception in the House of Commons in 1969 when it was presented – though in practice, the Home Office did reduce maximum sentences for cannabis offences and introduce greater differentiation between possession and sale.145

Germany criminalized the possession of drugs for the first time in 1971. Penalties on existing drug-related offences were raised, as they would be again in 1981.¹⁴⁶ The government prepared the passage of the 1971 law with a public relations campaign in which the health minister made most of the idea that Timothy Leary, due to his multiple LSD trips, no longer possessed a normal brain.¹⁴⁷ France updated its own narcotics law in 1970. Possession came under a minimum one-year prison sentence, though judges retained the power to impose rehabilitation as an alternative. Penalties on dealing were increased dramatically, up to forty years for a repeat offence.¹⁴⁸ An expanding core of European governments, including those of both countries, established a ‘Groupe Pompidou’ to act as a lobby for tough penalties on drugs. Its aim would be to ensure there was no turning back among participant states, thanks to resolutions against the liberalization of cannabis laws or making any distinction between ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ drugs.¹⁴⁹

The Psychotropic Convention, signed in February 1971, ensured the criminalization of non-medical amphetamines, hallucinogens and tranquilizers throughout the rest of the world. There was last-minute resistance: Switzerland, Germany, Belgium and Austria all voted against the convention, though in the Swiss case, at least, this was clearly based on lobbying by the pharmaceutical industry. The new treaty applied the same provisions as the Single Convention to the newly regulated drugs, including a four-part schedule.¹⁵⁰ Its scheduling, however, was not always intuitive. LSD, the weaker mescaline and psilocybin (magic mushrooms) as well as Ecstasy were all placed on Schedule I. Amphetamines, including methamphetamine, were classified as Schedule II. The more conventionally addictive and potentially lethal barbiturates were placed on Schedule III.¹⁵¹ Admittedly, the differences between schedules were not huge when it came to the regulations imposed by the convention itself.¹⁵² But the treaty had an important normative role: it acted as a model for domestic scheduling by member states, and for the associated penalties. The American authorities, for example, moved amphetamines from Schedule III up to II shortly after its signature.¹⁵³

The Nixon administration promulgated an extensive anti-narcotics programme of its own. In 1970 it passed a Comprehensive Drug Abuse Act consolidating existing federal drug laws. (This actually introduced scheduling in the USA, with Schedule I containing heroin, LSD and marijuana, Schedule II morphine and cocaine, and Schedule V tranquilizers.154) It also reorganized the American anti-narcotics agencies. The Federal Bureau of Narcotics had been replaced, after Anslinger’s departure, by a Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (BNDD). An Office of Drug Abuse Law Enforcement (ODALE) was now created, which was to have a parallel role to the BNDD – they were then merged into the Drug Enforcement Administration, or DEA, in 1973. Finally, the government significantly increased the drug-fighting budget. The means allocated to enforcement rose from $43 million in the last Johnson administration budget to $292 million in 1974.¹⁵⁵

Notably, the Nixon administration’s drug programme devoted significant efforts to prevention and rehabilitation alongside enforcement. President Nixon, the callous right-winger, may best be remembered for his declaration of yet another ‘war on drugs’ in 1971, but he also said, during the passage of the Drug Abuse Act: ‘I thought that the answer was simply to enforce the law and that will stop people from the use of drugs. But it is not that. When you are talking about 13-year-olds and 14-year-olds and 15-year-olds, the answer is not more penalties. The answer is information. The answer is understanding.’¹⁵⁶ The Comprehensive Drug Abuse Act reduced most penalties on drug offences, and it did away with almost all federal mandatory minimum sentences.¹⁵⁷ It was followed by a significant boost to treatment programmes: the federal budget for treatment rose above enforcement, reaching $462 million. The administration stimulated the expansion of drug treatment facilities in a number of American cities, also offering synthetic-opiate alternatives to heroin users, with tens of thousands benefiting. It created, finally, a National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), which remains responsible for research and for collecting essential statistics.¹⁵⁸

Yet no war on drugs was complete without action abroad. The old warhorse of supply suppression had never died; on the contrary. On 14 June 1971, days before he was to make his famous declaration, Nixon summoned the American ambassadors to France, Mexico, Thailand, Turkey, Vietnam and the United Nations to the White House. ‘The interdiction of narcotics was to be a first order priority of U.S. foreign policy,’ he told them.¹⁵⁹ American military and economic assistance would depend on cooperation in that field. The ambassador to Turkey was given $35 million in loans to offer his host country as an inducement.

Turkey had steadily been reducing the number of provinces where it allowed poppy cultivation as well as its total acreage in the 1960s. It had reorganized, trained and re-equipped its narcotics police, and it had invited in American agents.160 Before the end of 1971 the government passed a decree ending the cultivation of poppies in the country.¹⁶¹ After the quarrels of the 1950s, it was quite a coup. The following year, Nixon received the Turkish prime minister Nihat Erim at the White House. Before the cameras, Nixon shook hands with Erim on the same day he was to sign a Drug Abuse Office and Treatment Act.¹⁶²

The Turkish poppy ban would not hold for more than a few years: the proffered financial assistance was too low, and the ban was unpopular in Turkey, where too many farmers depended on the crop.¹⁶³ Its legacy would nevertheless endure. America had also dispatched narcotics agents sent to Marseilles. The target was America’s principal source of heroin: the French Connection. Leary, the Woodstockgoers and the hippies had convinced the drug crusaders that more than new laws with larger budgets was required. More forceful, visible action had to be taken. War was going to be taken to the drug lords.