Amphetamine and culture

HPSC2665 short essay (week 6), S2 2006

New behaviours, attitudes and ideas don't just sweep through a population and become entrenched in popular culture overnight. Before any trend gains currency, the ground needs to be prepared somehow. For this reason, it is not particularly enlightening to view the amphetamine epidemic of the 1960s as a psychological maladjustment or other cultural disorder, but rather a phenomenon made possible by pre-existing aspects of culture. These include attitudes toward drugs and drug use, ideas about health, happiness and 'normal' and 'impaired' mental states. Ideas about the roles of business and government and the power of the state to dictate such things as the health and private behaviour of its citizens would also play a part in shaping any kind of 'drug epidemic', not just the 1960's amphetamine epidemic.

Anglophone culture has always been ambivalent on the subject of drugs and drug supply. The freedom to conduct commerce very nearly trumps the moral and ethical concerns that crystallise around the issue of drugs. It is this trade-off between profit and propriety that led to such memorable events as the Opium Wars between Britain and China. Despite being proscribed in China and its use as a pleasure-drug considered immoral back home, the British discovered that opium was the only thing the Chinese were willing to buy and the value of this trade was considered so important for the Empire that they were eventually willing to go to war to keep it open. Contrast this with the behaviour of the Smith, Kline and French company, who were perfectly well aware that their Benzedrine nasal inhaler (released in 1932) was being used for non-therapeutic reasons (Jackson, 1971). A cynic might attribute their eventual willingness to replace the amphetamine with a non-amphetamine nasal decongestant in 1949 as a decision to cut their losses, with governments threatening legislative restrictions on the inhaler and a mere three years exclusive profit left on their patent anyway. But until quotas on amphetamine production were enforced[1] the production and wholesale supply of amphetamine was not regulated, although its retail supply and medical use was. This laissez-faire attitude to amphetamine production therefore undermined the effective restriction of its use to medical purposes[2], an available supply of the drug being an essential precondition for any drug epidemic.

But the availability of the drug for illegal use was just one side of the coin. The theoretical primary use of amphetamine was therapeutic and its initial production was for this purpose. Once production is in place it became a matter of supply and demand, where there was no way of telling how much demand stemmed from the medical uses of the drug and how much from the recreational. The therapeutic value of amphetamine came from cultural assumptions about health, happiness and normal behaviours and feelings. As well as being shaped by the medical profession (especially psychiatry), other ideas and assumptions played a part. Happiness was equated with variety, action, productivity and excitement. An unexcited person was thought to be an unhappy person. Unhappiness, in turn, began to be viewed as symptomatic of a disease, namely depression. Once happiness becomes associated with normality, there is a social pressure to be happy to fit in and get ahead. Thus positive feelings become equated with normality and negative with abnormality. And once medicine comes up with a solution to this kind of abnormality, it could even be seen as socially irresponsible not to choose to be medicated. Part of the myth of progress is, after all, that nobody is left out or left behind. However, for those many who felt they were failed or cheated by society and progress, happiness was still available chemically through amphetamines. By prescribing massive amounts of amphetamine for unhappy patients, the medical establishment could thus be seen to be picking up the pieces for a culture that worships progress and shuns those who haven't managed to secure themselves a piece.

Existing aspects of culture, rather than a disorder of culture, can help explain how the amphetamine epidemic of the 1960s arose. On one hand, our culture's emphasis on capitalism, the manufacture of goods and the right to sell them to some extent conflicts with the responsibility of the government to protect its citizens' interests and protect them from harm. In the case of amphetamine production, this created a situation that meant while the personal non-medical consumption was proscribed, the drug was made available in response to wholesale demand, which in the 1960s encompassed both legal and illegal use. On the other hand, cultural ideas of progress meant that general happiness and welfare was supposed to be markedly better than ever before. This was the groundwork for later characterising unhappiness as not just abnormal or socially unacceptable, but a symptom of disease, namely depression. When amphetamine became available as an effective medication to alleviate unhappiness, it was only to be expected that it would be widely prescribed and, almost by definition, widely enjoyed.

References

Grinspoon, L and Hedblom, P (1972) 'Amphetamines Reconsidered', Saturday Review. 55:33-46 (8 July 1972).

Jackson, C O (1971) 'The amphetamine inhaler: a case study of medical abuse', Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences. 26 (2):187-196. [Online: http://jhmas.oxfordjournals.org]

[1] Grinspoon and Hedblom (1972) do not have a specific date for the introduction of amphetamine production quotas in the United States, but I guess it would have been sometime after 1971, at least 20 years after SKF stopped producing the amphetamine inhalers.
[2] cf. the case of Jay McMullen's drug procurement experiment, as reported in Grinspoon and Hedblom (1972, p.39?).