By the dawn of the new decade, there were two distinct varieties of amphetamine addicts – one old, one new – and neither having much in common with the other.
What’s important is the central idea that, in general, the older set did not see themselves as part of the drug culture. Indeed they were, as a group, innately averse to it. Although defined as being otherwise law-abiding, these old-fashioned amphetamine addicts had their dark actors.
The darkest of them arrived in the San Francisco Bay area in 1965. His name was Jim Jones, and he was said to be the head of a small, controversial congregation from Indiana. He had brought 140 of his followers here because he was certain that a nuclear holocaust was imminent, and he’d read that the town of Ukiah in Mendocino County, California, would be safe when the inevitable happened. Unfortunately for Jones, a man distinctly prone to bouts of paranoia, his new home happened to be awash in a drug that would not serve his nature and particular state of mind very well.
His church, which he called “The People’s Temple,” grew quickly over the next few years, and consisted largely of blacks and the poor. His doctrine was a mixture of Christianity and socialism, with a strong dose of anti-establishment sentiment. As the church grew, Jones became a familiar figure in mainstream San Francisco politics, Left-leaning as they were. United States Congressmen Phillip and John Burton, Assemblyman Willie Brown, and Mayor George Moscone all sought assistance from Jones, who gladly delivered votes and thousands of volunteers to help campaign on a moment’s notice. In retrospect it seems incredible, but in October of 1976 Mayor Moscone actually named Jim Jones to a seat on the San Francisco Housing Authority Commission.
Jones’s behavior was oftentimes bizarre, and didn’t entirely escape scrutiny by the local and regional press. During church services, Jones reportedly performed miracle “cancer healings” which were obviously faked, and it was learned through defectors of the church that many of his followers had suffered beatings at the hands of Jones and those in his inner circle. Jones’s paranoia and burgeoning megalomania became more pronounced as his daily intake of Quaaludes and amphetamines increased through the years; whenever he appeared in public he was surrounded by bodyguards. In spite of negative publicity, Jones’s church continued to grow, and by 1973 the People’s Temple had opened the doors of a sister church in Los Angeles.
And then came talk of building a People’s Temple “commune” in the jungles of Guyana, a small South American country. Here his followers would be promised a new life, one free of the persecution inflicted upon them in America. In the following years Jones was granted permission by the government of Guyana to begin construction of the commune on a remote 300-acre parcel of land near the Venezuelan border. In August of 1977 he and his followers moved to their jungle outpost, which came to known as “Jonestown.” During the course of the next year the population would come to exceed 1,000 people.
According to a federal report on Jones and his People’s Temple, Jones had a physician who would prescribe amphetamine to him on demand. The doctor also saw that shipments of barbiturates were sent down to Jonestown on a regular basis. The amphetamines were for Jones, the barbiturates for his followers. The amphetamines fueled endless sermons broadcast over a loudspeaker system; all the while, the drinking water was being laced with the barbiturates, which Jones believed would make his followers more compliant. In spite of the barbiturates, however, complaints emerged from the jungle and made their way back to the United States.
In June of 1978 a Jonestown defector by the name of Deborah Layton was interviewed by the San Francisco Chronicle. Layton described the jungle outpost as a place of public beatings and mass suicide drills. In response to concerns from relatives of Jonestown residents, U.S. Representative Leo Ryan of San Mateo announced plans to visit Jonestown to investigate. While there in November of 1978 some of the residents secretly passed notes to Ryan expressing their wish to leave with him. When Ryan finally did leave, he and his party were mowed down by automatic rifle fire before their plane as it idled on the tarmac. But this was only the beginning of the madness.
Simultaneous to the shooting, Jones announced over the loudspeaker system that the American government was coming to destroy him and anyone involved with the People’s Temple. He then instructed his followers to drink a cyanide-laced concoction. At 5:00 p.m. on November 18, 1978, the mass suicide commenced, with nearly everyone complying. Early the next morning Guyanese rescue forces arrived at Jonestown, where they discovered 914 dead. Among them was the body of Jim Jones. Upon closer examination it became clear that small children were given injections of cyanide, and those who refused were simply shot and killed.
The role of amphetamine in the Jonestown tragedy should perhaps be viewed in the same light as Hitler’s use of the drug. That is, amphetamine influenced two minds prone to paranoia and delusion, in both cases magnifying personal tendencies of aggression and self-destruction.
First and foremost, it should be noted that amphetamine itself killed no one in the Jonestown tragedy; cyanide did, and no one blames that drug for the hundreds of deaths. And yet it is difficult to fathom this outcome without amphetamine coursing through the veins of the architect of this uniquely twentieth-century nightmare. Indeed, the drug’s fingerprints are everywhere – from Jones’s paranoid, delusional thinking to the megalomania to the mass murder that in retrospect seems so strangely inevitable.
From this point of view, the parallels to Hitler’s amphetamine use, the Holocaust, and his eventual suicide would seem legitimate, for it appears plausible that in both cases amphetamine enhanced each man’s weakness for epic violence and escape by way of apocalypse. Clearly, homicidal dimensions are magnified by this strange crystalline powder. In such bloody aftermath, suicide appears an acceptable – if not the only – way out for the charismatic hosts.
By the end of the sixties, nearly everyone in the Bay area was, in Free Clinic founder and addiction specialist Dr. David Smith’s words, “taking something.” Few gave much thought to the consequences. For young people in other corners of the country, and indeed around the world, San Francisco was their cultural Mecca, as much a state of mind as a place. And thus a pandemic like no other was well underway, with tens of millions of people in their formative years experimenting with every kind of mind-altering compound.
The phenomenon, however, wouldn’t go entirely unchecked. A consensus gradually developed on Capitol Hill that something had to be done at the federal level about illicit drug use, something on a grand scale matching that of the epidemic. And so it was, with landmark legislation rendered in the form of the Controlled Substances Act of 1970. The CSA, as it would come to be known, was the legal foundation of the federal government’s mandate to stem what appeared to be an unstoppable tide.
Amphetamine in its various forms was officially placed on what was called “Schedule II” of the CSA. Of the five schedules of controlled substances, the second merely indicates that the drug has a high potential for abuse, but also legitimate medical uses. Abuse of a schedule II drug may lead to severe psychological or physical dependence. Other schedule II drugs such as cocaine and codeine, for example, are used in various medications to control pain. Of course, amphetamine had legitimate medical uses, such as for weight control and attention deficit disorder, hence its placement. According to the CSA, Schedule I drugs – such as heroin and mescaline – have a high potential for abuse but no accepted medical use. The scheduling of substances, however, would prove eternally controversial, with drugs like marijuana being relegated to Schedule I for its actual or perceived lack of medical usefulness according to the American medical establishment. But as Dr. Smith points out, “there’s nothing inherently evil about a molecule.”
Amphetamine’s placement on Schedule II had a profound effect on how it would be come by in the future. First and foremost, the placement severely curtailed federally approved production quotas of amphetamine and methamphetamine by drug companies, and forced them to pull injectable liquid products from the shelf altogether. Mainstream America could still get amphetamines in pill form from their doctors, but only in very limited quantities. Mexico would help fill the vacuum among the most ardent fans of pep pills, which gained infamy on the street as “Cartwheels” or “White Crosses.” They were still cheap, though not as ridiculously so as they had been in the early sixties. A decade later one could still come by a hundred tablets for five or ten dollars, while today a single tablet costs one to five dollars.
The habits of the younger generation of amphetamine users were left largely untouched by the CSA. Speed labs need only raw materials, all of which could be bought legally from wholesalers and local retail stores. And by the time the CSA came into effect, the bristling mood of the Haight-Ashbury District had swept up and down the West Coast like waves of bad weather. The mood was always preceded by the subtle installation of a speed lab. In the national media, the problem was characterized as being a problem unique to “Coastal California,” a phenomenon limited to the absurd street theatre of that famously eccentric state.
For the chemist of the clandestine lab, legal obstacles remained remarkably few for a long period of time. For decades, the principal problem would merely be a matter of knowing where to come by the ingredients. According to Will Glaspy, a former DEA agent who worked meth cases in Southern California, “You could literally walk into a chemical supply company with a recipe for methamphetamine, hand them the recipe, and tell them: ‘Give me everything on that list so that I can manufacture methamphetamine.’” Though not exactly legal to do this, Glaspy says, neither were the laws developed enough at the time to make it decidedly illegal. Such legislation wouldn’t come onto the books until late the following decade.
Until then, law enforcement had to resign itself to working within the existing, albeit inadequate, legal framework. But there were tactics that could be adopted; all that was required was an understanding of the phenomenon whereby this methamphetamine actually came into being. In numerous cases, according to Glaspy, DEA agents would set up surveillance at chemical supply companies and wait for a methamphetamine chemist to come in and “fill up his El Rancho with all the glassware and chemicals that he needed, and then follow him back to his home. Three days later he’d have methamphetamine.” If the arrest was made too early or late, all was for naught. Although such tactics bred some success, the whole charade highlighted the unique and perhaps insurmountable obstacles in controlling the drug in the years to come.
It wasn’t until 1980 that P2P itself was placed in Schedule II of the Controlled Substance Act. The result was a decline in lab seizures, but the decline was brief. Its brevity was the result of the street chemists’ innovations. In the wake of the scheduling came the infamous decade of the eighties, widely thought to be the sire of the modern meth epidemic we recognize today. According to the DEA, more than 400 labs were seized in 1987.
But one was different from all the rest. Upon close inspection agents saw that this lab was the first of its kind to use a new precursor chemical, a substitute for P2P. This new lab employed what was known as the hydriodic acid/ephedrine reduction method, which is considerably simpler than any that came before. Just as P2P had been a decade earlier, ephedrine was still unregulated.
The drug has been around for millennia. More than five thousand years ago, the Chinese discovered the stimulant properties of the ma huang plant, known in the West as the ephedra plant, from which ephedrine is derived. Ephedra’s recent history is more controversial, as it has been the active ingredient in various “food supplements” marketed to athletes and people who just want to lose weight. But ephedrine has a long medical history here in the United States as well. For decades ephedrine had been used by pharmaceutical companies as the active ingredient in bronchial dilators to treat asthma. Since ephedrine is not produced in the United States, it had to be imported – and in tremendous quantities – from abroad by operators of clandestine labs. For years the importation was entirely legal.
An omen could be read in the tea leaves. Purity of the drug was on the rise as meth cooks refined their skills: in the early seventies, the purity of seized methamphetamine averaged thirty percent; by 1983 average purity had reached sixty percent. Perhaps it seemed innocuous at the time, but to Glaspy’s mind, the ethereal ingredient of knowledge was the true menace of the methamphetamine epidemic. And it had a lower common denominator than anyone thought possible. Chemistry would prove to be an imminently creative science, capable of being dumbed-down to a level understood by fry cooks. What if some inspired Doctor Morell developed a recipe for making meth from a beaker of sand and water? And what if he could teach any but the most simple-minded to make it?
According to Glaspy, this was precisely the direction things seemed to be proceeding by the late 1980s. But problems for law enforcement were now compounded by underground research and development of entirely new drugs. Someone somewhere (some say China, others Korea) came up with a smokeable form of methamphetamine, the dextro isomer methamphetamine, which proved to be extremely potent and wildly popular in Hawaii and on the West Coast. For a while it seemed little more than a fad that went by various names such as “glass,” “batu,” and “shabu.” It was also known as “Ice.” As a result of this spike in popularity, it cost more, although the process for making Ice is a relatively straightforward one of converting methamphetamine into a crystal. In any case, profits exploded as addiction proliferated beyond anyone’s worst nightmare. When Ice is smoked, it almost instantly enters the bloodstream and finds its way to the brain. It’s similar in effect to injecting meth, and far more potent than any oral dose. Its power lay in the “d.” The manufacturing process produces the stereochemically pure d-isomer, the most active form of methamphetamine.
The effects of the drug are much like those experienced by smokers of crack cocaine. The high from Ice, however, lasts anywhere from eight to twenty-four hours, whereas a typical crack high lasts twenty minutes. The crime Ice inspires is phenomenally violent, as the user typically becomes paranoid, suffering from both auditory and visual hallucinations.
The manifestation of Ice completed methamphetamine’s parallel with cocaine, as it had been typically snorted and injected. Now it could be smoked, just like crack. Clearly a great many methamphetamine users were engaged in the sincerest form of flattery.