On Speed: The Many Lives of Amphetamine (review)

There is much to praise in Nicolas Rasmussen's engaging and lively history of amphetamines in the twentieth century. (Amphetamines refer both to a distinct compound and to a class of pharmaceuticals from which other compounds—including Dexedrine, "crystal meth," and Ecstasy—have been derived.) Rasmussen knows how to tell a good story, and he tells it well. On Speed is replete with fascinating anecdotes and bold suggestions about a group of drugs that, as he rightly contends, have been understudied despite their profitability and long therapeutic lifespan.

Rasmussen begins with the creation of amphetamines in 1929 by Caltech professor Gordon Alles, whose discovery became commercially viable after the chemist partnered with Smith, Kline, and French. The pharmaceutical firm already owned rights to the Benzedrine inhaler, an over-the-counter decongestant, but it was looking to expand its line of ethical medications. With SFK's financial support and marketing savvy, amphetamines became a blockbuster prescribed to boost the mood and sharpen the minds of millions of Americans. Researchers discovered many therapeutic indications for amphetamines, but it was their psychiatric applications, Rasmussen contends, that proved most profitable. Upending conventional wisdom about the origins of the antidepressant market, Rasmussen argues that amphetamines struck gold in the late 1930s as the "first mass-market antidepressant" (50), embraced by countless Americans who pined for a quick pharmaceutical pick-me-up. In an era when neuropsychiatry was less doctrinaire and more pragmatic than historians have assumed, amphetamine tablets found an enduring niche in outpatient psychiatry.

Speed delivered, and it was no wonder that military officials in Germany, Britain, and the United States employed it to strategic advantage during World War II. In a particularly riveting chapter, Rasmussen shows how, in the absence of credible scientific evidence demonstrating the drug's ability to increase efficiency and endurance, leaders on both sides dispensed millions of Benzedrine capsules to power their men to victory. By the war's end, as many as 16 million American servicemen had taken amphetamines, often fashioning its uses to meet their own wants and whims. Military experience, built on the back of government support (by 1943, 5 mg Benzedrine pills were standard issue for American bombers) blazed a trail for civilian use. In the 1950s and 1960s, amphetamines—which now included a cornucopia of chemically related concoctions—found a large following in disparate communities: as diet pills for housewives, antidepressants for middle-class patients, study aids for students, enhancers for athletes, and cheap energizers prized by prisoners, jazz musicians, writers, hippies, and thrill-seeking "speed freaks." Among the latter were those who reveled in their "Benzedrine Benders," the immediate, energizing wallop that came from eating the inhalers' paper insert. At the peak of the drug's popularity in the late 1960s, Rasmussen estimates that about one in twenty American adults took amphetamines regularly. By the 1970s, age would become a meaningless distinction as rising interest in a pharmaceutical corrective for attention deficit disorder and hyperactivity brought Ritalin to the homes of millions of children, mainly boys.

America's affection for amphetamines was curbed by the twinned forces of government regulation and social stigmatization. Here, the fate of amphetamines closely followed that of other prescription drugs, such as the benzodiazepines. As concern about amphetamines' recreational abuses and addictive potential mounted, legislators enacted measures to curtail patient access and restrict manufacture. How effective these restrictions were is unclear given the subsequent popularity of ecstasy, ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) medications, and other drugs whose success, Rasmussen argues, reflects the just-pop-a-pill mindset that the amphetamine craze began.

Indeed, Rasmussen's argument for continuity across decades of change frames his book. If we want to know when the age of psychopharmacology really began, he avers, it is to amphetamines—not chlorpromazine—that historians must turn. The success of today's selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRI) antidepressant market owes much to the consumer desires and business practices...