On Speed: The Many Lives of Amphetamine

1. The New Sensation

1 The New Sensation ON JUNE 3, 1929, a twenty-seven-year-old chemist in Los Angeles took an injection of a mystery chemical he had recently created. Beyond an estimate of how much it would take to kill him, and the expectation that his blood pressure would rise—both derived from guinea pig tests—he had little idea what the injection would do. He was hoping to discover a new allergy medicine that day. It took a little while for anything to happen, because his doctor friend had injected the drug subcutaneously, rather than directly into a vein. But within ten minutes his blood pressure started to go up sharply, worrying both men until it stabilized a couple of hours later at about one and a half times his normal level. Around the time that he starting feeling some small effect, the chemist sniffed and, optimistically, recorded that his nose was clear. Soon after, some eighteen minutes after the injection , he noticed something more interesting and unexpected. “Feeling of well being,” reads the notebook entry dryly. The chemist was enjoying this experiment. His doctor friend, Hyman Miller, sat with him for a few hours, chatting with the unusually talkative chemist and checking his blood pressure regularly, eventually inviting him home to dinner with his wife. The chemist recalled being an especially witty guest that evening. After Miller packed him off to bed, the chemist, still in good spirits, experienced a “rather sleepless night” where his “mind seemed to race from one subject to another,” according to his notebook (Figure 1). Still, he felt fairly well in the morning.1 As a chemist, Gordon Alles called the substance he took that day beta-phenyl-isopropylamine, better known today as amphetamine . That day Alles had taken 50 milligrams (mg), five times what would become the standard dose once the substance was medically approved eight years later. Although he had no idea what it would be used for, the chemist knew right away that he had made a significant discovery. What no one could have guessed is how irresistible this powerful drug would prove to be, holding Americans in its thrall 6 for three generations, all the way to the present day. So began the age of speed. Adrenalin: New Medicine for a New Century Alles, appropriately enough, was born in 1901, the year that ParkeDavis & Company of Detroit launched its brand-name “Adrenalin” on the market. At the time the drug business was undergoing drastic change. Adapting to dramatic advances and new attitudes in medicine presented a great challenge to pharmaceutical firms accustomed to selling mostly traditional herbs and tinctures. In Europe, the past few decades had seen the triumph of a totally new approach to healing. Called “scientific medicine,” it was based in part on the careful, quantitative analysis of how well different treatments worked when administered under controlled conditions, like those found in the large hospitals that had recently been linked to medical schools. This new approach was also based in the laboratory work of experimental biologists , especially in the fields of bacteriology and physiology. Bacteriologists like Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch had identified the microbes that caused many dreaded illnesses, and also invented new vaccines that could prevent some of them. In the case of a few diseases such as diphtheria, they had even invented serums that could be used to save those already ill. Meanwhile, physiologists had been probing the chemical function of the different organs and discovered that some controlled bodily function by releasing powerful biochemical signals, or “hormones.” In 1894, British physiologists identified a hormone made by the adrenal gland, soon named “adrenaline,”2 by showing that an extract of the organ raises blood pressure when injected in experimental animals (implying that the adrenal gland plays a role in regulating circulation under some circumstances). Several scientists in Germany claimed success in isolating the hormone, and drug companies working closely with them put purified adrenal hormones on the market around 1900. But the most successful was Parke, Davis “& Company’s ‘Adrenalin’ ” preparation, based on a procedure developed by the leading American pharmacologist of the day, J. J. Abel of Johns Hopkins University (although it was the Japanese biochemist Jokichi Takamine who, after working briefly with Abel in Baltimore and improving his method, patented it and sold it to Parke, Davis). The New Sensation 7 This product, arguably the...