As the twin radioactive columns drifted into the jet stream, a devastated Japanese population staggered to its feet from the ashes of a four-year war.
But not all of Japan’s matériel had been destroyed. For example, the enormous stockpile of Philopon was still intact. In the months after the war, cash-strapped pharmaceutical companies sold off their vast supplies to the general public, who eagerly lost themselves in an amphetamine dream to escape a nuclear reality that included something horrible and new – tens of thousands of people dying of radiation exposure. The pharmaceutical companies’ most avid customers tended to be young veterans and juveniles, the most disillusioned of the most deeply disoriented population in the history of the civilized world. But the price for this business would be paid sooner rather than later. According to records of the Japanese government, the first Philopon addict was admitted into a Tokyo hospital one year after the signing ceremony in Tokyo Harbor. Hundreds of thousands would soon follow.
The Philopon problem became so grave so quickly that in 1948 a law was rushed through the Japanese parliament to regulate stimulants. The following year, the Ministry of Health chose to prohibit the production of methamphetamine – but only in its tablet and powder form, a curious move that would prove a colossal blunder. The liquid form was left unregulated, and the country was promptly consumed by an epidemic of intravenous use, the most addictive and destructive application of the drug.
Not until the following year were all forms of methamphetamine prohibited in Japan, but the genie was out of the bottle. Pharmaceutical companies were as addicted to easy profits as users were to liquid methamphetamine. Several companies continued production, moving the liquid onto the black market, spawning a great flourish of domestic criminal syndicates. Records kept by the Japanese government show that by 1951 police confiscated an incredible 4.6 million vials of injectable methamphetamine and arrested more than 17,000 people for using, manufacturing, or dealing the drug. Three years later, in 1954, the number had more than tripled to 55,600.
In the midst of the epidemic, Japanese law enforcement began to note some trends unique to this particular drug, trends that would foretell what was to come decades later in distant lands. According to the National Research Institute of Police Science in Tokyo, Japanese police saw the epidemic moving from urban to rural areas. They also noted a dramatic increase in the importation of ephedrine, a precursor chemical and active ingredient vital to making methamphetamine. Perhaps most disturbing of all, police were coming across increasingly sophisticated clandestine labs in thousands of small Japanese towns. As a result, there was little evidence of smuggling connections with other countries. There was no need. All that was required to make enormous batches of meth could be purchased legally in general stores and drug stores scattered throughout the countryside.
For the time being the situation wasn’t nearly so dire in the United States. But if you were trying to glimpse what was to come, you could see it. Amphetamine tablets, or “pep pills,” as they were coming to be known, began to replace caffeine tablets in truck stops, as well as on college campuses across the country where hundreds of thousands of veterans were taking classes on the G.I. Bill. And it was the era of the Cold War, a phenomenon that captured events great and small in its orbit. These were the days when some pretty powerful people saw the evil influence of Communism in every corner.
By 1949, millions of inhalers made by the Smith Kline and French Company were being dismantled by recreational drug users to get at the amphetamine-soaked paper strips inside. The problem became so acute that the company was pressured into taking the inhalers off the market. This was particularly necessary as Congress had weighed in on the recreational use of amphetamine and concluded that it was part of the “Red menace.”
California Superior Court Judge Twain Michelsen was sure he was witnessing something that not only he but no one else had ever seen before: hundreds of folks with horribly decayed teeth, skin lesions, and haggard gazes – all of whom were said to be hooked on drugs with names he’d never heard of. This was America’s first generation of amphetamine addicts passing through his courtroom, a whole population that seemed completely alien to 1950s America. Testifying before a House subcommittee that was holding hearings on amphetamine abuse, Judge Michelsen attributed the growing epidemic to “Communist China’s effort to despoil this country and other Western countries.”
Although no direct and credible evidence was ever revealed to back up such a claim, the amphetamine problem was very real. But in the U.S. it was still more or less unique to coastal California, and Congress effectively dismissed it as a real threat to domestic harmony. Dr. Halsey Hurt, the U.S. assistant Surgeon General, testified before the House Ways and Means Committee in 1955, saying that as far as he knew, amphetamine was “not addicting in the true sense of the word.” In many ways, it was still the age of innocence.