The world of drug laws is a world of unintended consequences. Nowhere has this been more apparent than in the government’s attempts at getting a handle on the amphetamine and methamphetamine epidemics.
Government regulation of amphetamine put forth by the Kennedy administration hardly dented the supply of the drugs used for recreational purposes. The main culprits remained the pharmaceutical companies and physicians willing to produce and prescribe the drug, respectively, in vast quantities. As then-FDA Commissioner George Larrick testified to a House committee in 1965, “…our survey of production figures was incomplete because records kept by several basic manufacturers were grossly inadequate, and also because two of the nation’s largest pharmaceutical companies declined…to provide the information requested.”
A few doctors in the San Francisco area were particularly complicit, as they began prescribing amphetamine injections for the treatment of heroin addiction – as difficult as that might be to believe today. Restrictions for the pill form of amphetamine were not taken terribly seriously either for the balance of the decade. By late in the decade an especially unruly corner of the flourishing counterculture had developed a taste for the drug, producing a demand that could never be met by any company pretending to legitimacy. The injectable form became popular among serious users, and a vacuum resulted – not from diminished supply but rather from soaring demand. The void would be filled in a most ominous manner, one that haunts the world today. It has everything to do with the nature of methamphetamine and is what sets it apart from every other family of drugs.
It’s no secret that phenomena related to supply and demand are the products of market economies. Quite simply, where there is demand there will be a supplier to meet it. The principle that ruined Prohibition seemed to be setting spark to kindling in the Haight-Ashbury District of San Francisco, where there was an enormous population in a dangerously experimental mood.
During the mid and late 1960s, San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district was transformed in the imaginations of millions of young people into a new kind of Promised Land, one that promoted the now-familiar stereotype of peace, free love, and an abundance of mind-altering drugs. Dr. David E. Smith, a young physician practicing medicine there at the time, characterizes the scene as the “the biggest drug taking culture in the history of human civilization.” The drugs of choice were hallucinogens, namely LSD and mescaline. But the source of the Haight’s most serious problems lay with other compounds.
Just prior to what came to be known as “The Summer of Love,” California fire departments began reporting something strange – a rash of explosions and fires in local residences tucked away in the hills of Northern California. Once the fires were extinguished, officials waded through the charred ruins of sophisticated labs containing the scorched remains of enormous triple-neck reaction vessels, Buchner funnels, separatory funnels, Bunsen burners, stashes of hydrochloric acid, sulfuric acid, acetone, benzyl chloride, methyl ethyl ketone, lead acetate, and a substance the name of which they could hardly pronounce. The latter was phenyl-2-propanone, also known as phenyacetone, or, as it would be widely called, P2P. P2P was not only legal but widely available as the active ingredient in a variety of cold medicines. Pharmaceutical companies had also been using it for years to make amphetamine and methamphetamine.
The problem for law enforcement lay in the reality that nothing in these burned-out labs was a controlled substance. Indeed, none of it was really illegal until the process of cooking the methamphetamine was complete, which presented a legal challenge that did not apply to other drugs (you don’t outlaw telephones because the Mafia uses them to conduct business, nor do you outlaw P2P because bad people might use it to make meth). Interdiction was also vastly complicated as the drugs were not being smuggled into the country, and the ingredients were not only here, but here legally. In theory, they could be legally put together so long as the chemist stopped one step shy of forming the first molecule of methamphetamine.
These clandestine labs were soon producing tremendous quantities of the liquid methamphetamine, the most dangerous and least available from pharmaceutical companies. In the main, the labs were run by motorcycle gangs, namely the Hell’s Angels. The meth hit the streets of Haight-Ashbury in substantial quantity at the middle of the decade, but its dramatic impact on the community wouldn’t be fully felt for a few more years. To the mind of Dr. Smith, its arrival meant the death of the idea of the sixties, the romantic image the decade aspired to be about.
Smith was perhaps the first to understand what everyone was seeing. Born in Bakersfield and educated at the University of California at Berkeley, he went on to medical school there, specializing in pharmacology and toxicology. In 1965 he began research on amphetamine at the University of California at San Francisco General Hospital, working on a post-doctoral fellowship treating addiction. When he wasn’t working, he went home to his Victorian home in the Haight. The distinction between work and home then began to blur.
One of his studies involved administering amphetamine to lab mice in escalating quantities until half of the mice died either by stroke or by cardiac arrest. The medical term for this dose is “medium dose lethal.” The mice that survived were then placed in a cage with other mice that had also been given a medium dose lethal and survived, while a control group of mice were kept in a separate cage altogether. With this latter group all was perfectly serene. They ate their food, drank their water, and, significantly, groomed each other as good mice do. But Smith noticed something extraordinary occurring in the other cage. The amphetamine-dosed mice there were attacking each other on a regular basis. Upon closer inspection, he noticed that the mice were interpreting normal grooming behavior as aggressive. In fact, more mice were dying by attack rather than by seizure brought about by massive doses of the drug. The amount of amphetamine required to kill half of the mice in this manner is called the “aggregate amphetamine toxicity,” and is a much smaller dose than the medium dose lethal. What the study indicated to Smith was that while all the variables were kept the same, the amount of drug required to kill by way of injury was substantially lower than what was required to kill by way of overdose. In time, Dr. Smith could hardly fail to notice the unmistakable parallels between the mice in his lab and the people all around him on the streets of the Haight.
In 1967 most of the young people in the Haight-Ashbury District were still into LSD, mescaline, and music. Indeed the psychedelic drugs seemed to be an intimate aspect of not only the music scene, but of the music itself. Experimental light shows that accompanied rock concerts by bands such as Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin, and the Grateful Dead sought to imitate an LSD trip. The concert gatherings, many of which were organized by Smith’s friend, legendary promoter Bill Graham, were generally peaceful enough.
During the latter half of the decade Smith began setting up free clinics in the Haight. These became the much-emulated Haight-Ashbury Free Clinics, which serve as primary care facilities for the uninsured, and deal to a large degree with the homeless and the addicted.
Smith happened across another telling discovery. While working at the alcohol and drug screening unit at San Francisco General Hospital, he’d been conducting routine urine screens on patients in the psychiatric ward when it occurred to him that a full fifty percent of the patients diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia tested positive for amphetamine use. Upon closer examination, he concluded that these patients were not schizophrenic at all, but suffering from amphetamine psychosis. That is, their auditory and visual hallucinations were not necessarily the chronic product of an organic mental illness, but rather the acute effect of heavy methamphetamine use. This was certainly good news, but still a serious problem, as these patients were receiving the wrong treatment and being given the wrong class of drugs. They didn’t belong in the psych ward, but in a recovery program.
The discovery highlighted just how unprepared the medical community was for the amphetamine epidemic. So too was the rest of San Francisco society. “The kids who were into LSD and mescaline moved out, leaving the Haight to the speed freak,” says Smith. Recalling a 1968 60 Minutes piece by correspondent Harry Reasoner, Smith says, “You could pick out the healthy kids in the footage shot on the street, and you could spot the speed freaks. Their behavior was that pronounced.” This was the time of speed “shoot-ups” in Golden Gate Park, and the “Crystal Palace,” a kind of needle-sharing ritual that involved young people shooting enormous quantities of liquid methamphetamine.
The free clinics were born into a strange place and time, and saw more than their share of strange visitors. But one was particularly unforgettable. He had stringy black hair and a glowering stare, and was the leader of a motley group of hippies. Most striking, however, was the indelible swastika set into his forehead. His small group of followers, most of whom were women, were into LSD, and they had come, as so many others had, for the standing offer of free medical care. This strange fellow called himself Charlie Manson.
Manson’s arrival at the clinic could be interpreted as a portent of things to come. By the following summer, the summer of 1968, the Haight was beginning to change. This was the year that methamphetamine, arriving in massive quantities from the labs, made its impact felt. According to Manson family member Susan Atkins, shortly after leaving San Francisco, Manson and his family were said to have begun taking speed along with LSD. The combination would inflame the insanity that became the bloody madness of Helter Skelter.
The essence of the change in the decade’s tone was somehow present in this bizarre carnage that captured worldwide attention in the summer of 1969. In August, less than a week before the legendary peace-and-love festival Woodstock, the world was shocked by the Manson family’s murderous rampage. In Smith’s words, “The dream of the sixties became a nightmare.” Certainly there were manifold reasons for the developing madness, but the prevalence of methamphetamine seems to have been widely overlooked.
In December of that same year, all of the elements of the new amphetamine culture made for yet another lethal mix at the Rolling Stones concert at Altamont Speedway in Livermore, California. On advice of the Grateful Dead, the decision was made to have security provided by the Hell’s Angels. “It was supposed to be Woodstock West,” Smith says. “But it was destroyed by speed.”
While the Stones played “Under my Thumb,” a Hell’s Angel’s biker knifed a young fan by the name of Meredith Hunter, killing him. Three other people also died at the concert from various causes. It should be noted, however, that there were also four births.
The bizarre event was vaguely presented to the public as the bookend to an age of peace and love, evidence that the party of the sixties was over and that the hangover of the seventies underway. Rarely, however, is methamphetamine’s role ever mentioned.