This Is Your Country On Drugs Part 2

CHAPTER 4.

America's Little Helper.

The week before I went on leave from my day job to write this book, I visited my doctor. "I want some type of amphetamine, like Ritalin or something," I told him.

"Have you ever been diagnosed with ADHD?" he asked.

" No."

"Do you want to see a psychiatrist?"

" No."

" Do you have trouble concentrating?"

"No," I said, "but I've taken it before when friends have had it, and it makes it easier to work." He looked at the results of my blood work and said there was nothing to indicate that the drug would hurt me.

"How much do you want?"

The next day, a woman was in front of me at the local Rite Aid as I waited to pick up my prescription for Metadate, time-released speed that, according to my doctor, is better than Adderall. She asked for a packet of generic pseudoephedrine-which, of course, is stored behind the pharmacy counter, safe from the Washington area's meth manufacturers.

The clerk asked for ID, and the woman pulled out her wallet. "I have a couple credit cards with my name on them, but no ID with me," she pleaded fruitlessly.

Danielle Black, a Johns Hopkins University student, was smoking with a friend outside the pharmacy after her request was denied. She explained that she was visiting from Baltimore. She'd recently moved from New York City and doesn't drive, so she has no driver's license. "I usually carry my pa.s.sport, but I didn't bring it this weekend, so no Sudafed for me," she said. "I swear I' m not a meth dealer or anything."

Such is the result of a one-hundred-year effort to regulate a product that is at once medically useful, recreationally enjoyable, and potentially harmful. It's also the result of Big Pharma's role in the drug trade, especially its efforts to ban some drugs while keeping others freely available. In the case of speed, the industry managed to do both to the same drug. When amphetamine is made and sold by major corporations, it's no big deal. When methamphetamine is made by bikers or imported from Mexican manufacturers, we have a crisis-never mind that levels of use were higher when Big Pharma was the sole pusher. Reaction to speed's underground resurgence in the sixties opened the door to the modern war on drugs, becoming the impetus for a series of federal initiatives that refocused American drug policy from public health to law enforcement.

Speed is ubiquitous in the United States, whether shoved into a child's mouth before school in the form of Ritalin or injected as crystal meth by that scary guy in the trailer park. A DEA-sponsored audit at the turn of the millennium showed that the United States was consuming 85 percent of the world's prescription speed, with 80 percent of that going to children. More than 15 million prescriptions were written annually in the late nineties, amounting to more than 350 million daily doses. And that was just the legal speed. Today, around one in four Americans has used some illegal form of the drug, and no surprise: as abusable substances go, speed is most American in its effect. It makes you want to work, and work hard.

The Protestant quality of the amphetamine high was doc.u.mented more than seventy years ago. A 1938 study in Denmark administered a local brand of Benzedrine to one hundred men and women and found that the amphetamine derivative "increased their desire for work in general." Speed makes it easier to begin a task and get it done, and the latter requires that the drug be long-lasting-or at least available to the user in ample supply. Where I grew up, we could often spot evidence of meth trips that had petered out before the workload did: the contents of a fully dissected pickup truck strewn about someone's front yard. It would take another dose to get the truck together again. Unlike the buzzes from crack and powder cocaine, which begin to diminish after just a few minutes or half an hour, respectively, a meth spree can keep a user going anywhere from eight hours to several days-and for only about twenty-five dollars a dose.

Speed's current status in America is a relic of the libertine days when Big Pharma consolidated its control of an unregulated drug trade. It's a reminder, too, of the fact that no drug can be viewed in isolation. Policies enacted to counter other drugs-marijuana and cocaine, for example-have ended up encouraging the meth trade, as have laws against meth itself. Indeed, American drug policy can safely claim credit for the superstrength meth that we have today, as well as for the bodily devastation that has come with it. Every well-meaning law intent on cutting down the drug has been met with adaptation by its producers and dealers and an upturn in the underground market.

Among the first popular amphetamine products was a Benzedrine inhaler that could be purchased at pharmacies in the 1930s, no prescription needed. The small white tube came stuffed with a saturated cotton wick and was marketed as a decongestant for cold and allergy sufferers. Benzedrine dilates the nasal pa.s.sages, but patients soon focused their attention on the drug's remarkable side effects, which also included weight loss. Word quickly spread that the drug-soaked wicks could be removed and then dissolved in coffee or alcohol or simply chewed and swallowed, allowing the user to stay focused on a cross-country drive or to resist that second helping of meat loaf. Or just to get high.

Amphetamines are generalized brain stimulants; they trigger a ma.s.sive release of the neurotransmitter dopamine, which in turn amps up body temperature, heart rate, and blood pressure. Users experience increased movement-rats, for example, start running around in circles, while humans might talk too much. Extended use can contribute to depression, paranoia, and even some of the jittery symptoms a.s.sociated with Parkinson's disease. But the heightened attention to detail and decreased sense of fatigue users experience in the short term is why the military still gives pills to pilots and others who need to be awake and alert. In drugging its soldiers, the United States places itself in the company of n.a.z.i Germany, which doled out meth liberally during the Blitzkrieg and throughout the European occupation. Pervitin, the German brand, was first sold in 1938 by the Berlin-based Temmler pharmaceutical company.

Otto Ranke, a military doctor and director of the Inst.i.tute for General and Defense Physiology at Berlin's Academy of Military Medicine, tested Pervitin on ninety university students in September 1939 and concluded that the drug could help win the war. The German military ordered more than thirty-five million tablets of it and a modified version called Isophan between April and July 1940. The drug was banned in 1941 under the Opium Law, yet that same year, ten million pills were sent to the frontlines. Adolf Hitler, a vegetarian teetotaler, was injected daily with speed from 1942 on, making him the first meth-head to have the power of a major industrial economy at his command.

Early on, as is often the case with a new drug, many doctors believed that amphetamine and its derivatives had nearly unlimited potential. Meth was considered a possible treatment for all manner of disorders, including epilepsy, Parkinson's, schizophrenia, and alcoholism-in addition to, of course, depression, obesity, and fatigue. The harmful side effects were as yet unnoted-or at least considered manageable.

Average Americans glommed on to amphetamines as a way to work harder, stay up longer, or lose weight. Amphetamine pills became available by the late thirties, marketed as a way to get a little lift or curb the appet.i.te. By 1943, half of the prescriptions for Benzedrine written in the United States were for patients seeking an energy boost or weight loss. A 1950 trade ad for Dexedrine urged doctors to prescribe the drug to women: "Many of your patients-particularly housewives-are crushed under a load of dull, routine duties that leave them in a state of mental and emotional fatigue. Dexedrine will give them a feeling of energy and well-being, renewing their interest in life and living." Norodin, its makers promised, "is useful in reducing the desire for food and counteracting the low spirits a.s.sociated with the rigors of an enforced diet." According to the FDA, by the late sixties, 80 percent of amphetamine prescriptions were written for women.

With the imprimatur of corporate America, the pills escaped banishment to prohibition's underground marketplace. Although a prescription was needed, "pep pills" weren't hard to obtain legally, and a healthy chunk of them was surely diverted to unsanctioned users. (It still is: within an hour of picking up my prescription, I had split a pill with a friend, who promptly took it to study for the bar exam.) In 1958, Americans took 3.5 billion amphetamine tablets. In 1967, they took 8 billion.

Early concerns about the potential for the drug to be habit-forming resulted in halfhearted efforts to control its availability. The FDA banned using certain amphetamines in inhalers in 1959 but, in a significant concession to Big Pharma, continued to allow drug companies to use merthamphetamine, which closely resembles methamphetamine. By the early sixties, however, the ride was coming to an end. President John F. Kennedy, himself an amphetamine user, told Congress in 1962 that "[o]ne problem meriting special attention deals with the growing abuse of non-narcotic drugs, including barbiturates and amphetamines. Society's gains will be illusory if we reduce the incidence of one kind of drug dependence, only to have new kinds of drugs subst.i.tuted. The use of these drugs is increasing problems of abnormal and anti-social behavior, highway accidents, juvenile delinquency, and broken homes."

A new progressive wave was cresting. America was bound not westward but upward, dedicated to reaching the moon and winning a moral struggle against Communism. The civil rights movement was gaining national acceptance and broadening minds. Such times of national pride can breed abstinence and antidrug legislation, and sure enough, the Senate pushed a radical overhaul of earlier tax acts, intent on replacing them with stricter controls.

But if the national mood was progressive, expansive, and idealistic, how could there have been such an explosion of drug use among young people? The answer lies in the significant difference between their drugs and their parents'. Alcohol and amphetamines create experiences that are essentially escapist. An acid trip is certainly a departure from everyday reality, but it's no drunken stupor or exhilarating high. The term "high" isn't used by acid aficionados, who a.s.sociate the drug with expanding consciousness, and dub themselves "psychonauts," or psychic explorers. Though it's true that marijuana use can often result in little more than lethargy, it can also induce a more introspective experience, with some psychedelic flavor to it. Both drugs, acid and marijuana, allowed an emerging youth culture to define itself against its elders and their preferences-which in turn led to a conservative backlash and even stricter drug controls.

The 1963 a.s.sa.s.sination of President Kennedy might have sharpened youthful opposition to an American culture that seemed out of control, but it also aided the development of the counterculture by delaying a federal drug crackdown. Presidential successor Lyndon B. Johnson had little initial interest in waging a drug war, partly because the man who would be prosecuting it, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, was a political enemy. Kennedy had opposed Johnson's vice presidency, and the two men were to become divided over issues as diverse as urban development, American travel to Cuba, and the Vietnam War. To halt congressional action on amphetamines, Johnson promised renewed vigor and coordinated federal action-a time-tested method of doing nothing. With the lobbying a.s.sistance of the American Medical a.s.sociation and the Pharmaceutical Manufacturers a.s.sociation, Johnson was able to stop in the House a 1964 attempt to control drugs that had already pa.s.sed the Senate.

The next year, in a bit of undercover journalism, CBS News managed to buy more than a million barbiturate and amphetamine pills by setting up a fake company with little more than a post-office box. The drugs supposedly had a retail value of $500,000 on the black market and had cost CBS only $628. The Senate reintroduced its bill amid a public outcry. Freshman senator Robert Kennedy was a cosponsor, and with him out of the Justice Department, the White House dropped its opposition.

Big Pharma was closely watching the deliberations between Congress and the White House. It sensed that continuing opposition might be futile, thanks to the combined impact of Robert Kennedy's leaving the White House and joining the Senate, the CBS News investigation, and the rise in amphetamine use in the counterculture. The lobbying prowess of the pharmaceutical industry had long protected its lucrative amphetamine market from government intervention, but no good lobby wants to be on the losing side of a national issue, so Big Pharma decided to get behind the new legislation-for a price.

Pharmaceutical companies produce pills for a few pennies and sell them for well upward of a few dollars. The only thing preventing a compet.i.tor from underselling them is copyrights and patents. For a long time, Big Pharma had wanted better protection. It figured that if this new drug-control law had momentum, it ought to use the law as a vehicle to combat generic and counterfeit producers.

Lobbyists for Big Pharma saw to it that the counterfeit production of, say, aspirin was no longer an issue for Bayer to investigate and resolve in the courts on its own. Now it was the responsibility of the FDA, which was given the authority to arrest and jail violators. It was a significant but unsurprising concession to the pharmaceutical industry. After all, the FDA and Big Pharma had a history of mutual a.s.sistance: in 1962, one top FDA official with oversight of the drug-approval process, Henry Welch, was found to have taken more than $300,000 in "honoraria" from Big Pharma for various promotional speeches and articles. But the new law took that cooperation to another level.

The sophisticated PR campaign on behalf of the Drug Abuse Control Amendments of 1965 mostly involved hysterical accounts of speed-freak truckers causing highway pileups. A representative of the American Trucking a.s.sociation testified before Congress that despite this heated rhetoric, only about a dozen of the twenty-five thousand truck accidents in the previous seven years had been tied to speed-and that, in fact, the drug generally improved driver performance. Much like the AMA's testimony on pot three decades earlier, the Trucking a.s.sociation testimony was dismissed and then distorted. ("We had testimony last week from . . . a representative of the American Trucking a.s.sociation that such occurrences were rather rampant all over the country," said Democratic Chairman Oren Harris of the House Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce. Lyndon Johnson would make him a district judge later that year.) The bill pa.s.sed 402-0 in the House and cruised through the Senate.

In an attempt to curb diversion to the black market, the law required closer record keeping by producers and pharmacists. First, though, the FDA had to deal with the fallout from the Welch scandal. George Larrick, a protege of drug warrior Harry Anslinger and a proponent of the Drug Abuse Control Amendments, was forced out of his top position at the agency. To its chagrin, the drug industry was unable to anoint one of its own to the commissioner's position. Instead, the job went to James G.o.ddard, a doctor with a background in consumer-protection and public-health advocacy. In his first year, drug recalls increased 75 percent, according to the FDA-not quite what Big Pharma had bargained for.

G.o.ddard came to the agency with a moderate view of illegal drug users, if not of illegal drugs. He told Congress:Let me explain that the Food and Drug Administration is not engaged in tracking down the users of these dangerous drugs. But we are actively engaged in closing down the manufacturers, counterfeiters, wholesalers, and peddlers of these drugs. To the user, we hold out a compa.s.sionate hand: we are ready to aid the drug abuser to find his way back to reality with the help of proper medical expertise. I believe that the job we have is far greater in scope than the one which the Government has waged thus far against the hard narcotics: cocaine, morphine, heroin, and the opiates. The FDA's efforts take in thousands of drug manufacturers, jobbers, distributors, repackers, and dispensaries where illegal diversion of the controlled drugs may take place.

That scope soon became even greater. Using the Drug Abuse Control Amendments, the government quickly added LSD to the list of drugs that G.o.ddard was to suppress. No bill needed to be debated or signed by the president this time, because the act had given the executive the power to expand the law to include any "stimulant, depressant, or hallucinogenic" drug that it thought was dangerous. Legislation that had been written for the purpose of containing speed now began to apply to drugs a.s.sociated with the rising counterculture.

The man pushing hardest against acid was Robert F. Kennedy. He wasn't the chair of the Senate subcommittee that looked at LSD in 1966, but he was nevertheless allowed by his seniors to lead much-covered hearings on the dangers of the drug. G.o.ddard was reluctant to play along, even though the actual chairman of the subcommittee, Senator Abraham Ribicoff, had made clear the panel's intention. "Only when you sensationalize a subject matter do you get reform," advised Ribicoff, a longtime friend of the Kennedys. "Without sensationalizing it, you don't. That is one of the great problems. You scientists may know something, a senator may know something, but only when the press and television come in and give it a real play because it hits home as something that affects all of the country, do you get action."

Kennedy, trying to get G.o.ddard to sensationalize acid's dangers, mentioned the potential of suicide while tripping. "Those suicidal tendencies I would suppose probably existed prior to taking the drug, in latent form," G.o.ddard suggested. Acid was banned anyway.

In 1968, President Johnson officially made drug use a law-enforcement issue rather than a public health one. By executive order, he created the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, transferring enforcement of all drug laws from the Department of the Treasury and the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare to the Department of Justice. That same year, Americans installed in the presidency the man who, on June 17, 1971, would officially declare the nation's war on drugs: Richard M. Nixon. "We have the moral resources to do the job," he said in a press conference outlining his national and international drug policy. "We now need the authority and the funds to match our moral resources. I am confident that we will prevail in this struggle as we have in many others."

Johnson's attorney general, Ramsey Clark, had taken a far more humanitarian approach. In 1966, he had urged presidential approval of the Narcotic Addict Rehabilitation Act, which allowed users to serve civil-commitment sentences in the custody of the surgeon general rather than prison time and provided $15 million in funding for research and local treatment centers. Keith Stroup, founder of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, told me that before he launched his marijuana-legalization group, in 1970, he'd been personally encouraged by Clark to make the effort.

Nixon's Justice Department had no such liberal leanings. Will Wilson, Nixon's second in command in the Department of Justice, typified the new administration's att.i.tude when he described the problems he had with Clark's approach. "Clark's trouble was that he was philosophically concerned with the rights of the individual," Wilson said. "Our concern is more an orderly society through law enforcement. Clark put too many restraints on the law-enforcement agencies. He was like a football coach warning his players not to violate the rules, when he should have been telling them to go in there and win. I' m not opposed to civil liberties, but I think they come from good law enforcement."

That mind-set was common among people who'd been shocked by the protests and riots and far-out movements of the sixties. One thing that could be a.s.sociated with partic.i.p.ants in each of those movements, from the antiwar effort to black nationalism, was drugs. It wasn't much of a stretch to extend that a.s.sociation to liberal humanitarianism as a whole, which is what Nixon's camp did when it called the Democrats the party of "acid, amnesty, and abortion." Going after drugs was the easiest way for the establishment to defend itself against the counterculture, and it had decided to so with the full force of the law.

More than thirty-five years later-and more than two decades after President Ronald Reagan's call for a "nationwide crusade against drugs, a sustained, relentless effort to rid America of this scourge"-ro ughly five times as many drug offenders are sent to prison as are treated for addiction. Speed was the original impetus for the legislative charge that resulted in this situation. As the drug drifted from Mom's medicine cabinet to hippie stash, it fueled hysteria about both drug use in general and the imminent collapse of America at the hands of the counterculture. Each successive federal drug initiative from 1965 on pushed U.S. drug policy closer to an enforcement-based approach. In 1973, the DEA was created, and the battle fully joined.

Once a year, the Department of Health and Human Services releases its drug-use data. In theory, these numbers should mean a lot to the DEA, whose mission includes "reducing the availability of illicit controlled substances on the domestic and international markets." In practice, however, the stats hardly matter at all, at least in terms of funding: If they' re up, the DEA will ask for more money to combat the growing threat. If they' re down, it will ask for more money to finish drugs off once and for all.

In the fall of 2005, the numbers were down-and by 2006, the DEA had managed to secure its largest ever budget: $2.4 billion, enough to pay for a record 5,320 special agents. In the meantime, though, some self-congratulation was in order. Then drug czar John Walters and Charles G. Curie, head of the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, which runs the annual survey, were happy to provide it, speaking for more than an hour to a Capitol Hill auditorium speckled with a cross section of local, national, and international media. "Our partnerships and the work of prevention professionals, schools, parents, teachers, law enforcement, religious leaders, and local community anti-drug coalitions are paying off," said Curie.

Then the show's dogs gave the stage to its ponies: Diedre Forbes and her daughter, Carrick Forbes, and Vicki Sickels, all recovering from addictions to meth, heroin, or c.o.ke or some combination of them. Their stories were harrowing: lives of privilege squandered (the Forbeses were from affluent Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, Sickels from a middle-cla.s.s home in Iowa), homelessness, recovery, relapse, and finally the treatment that made the difference. Their stories were proof that, yes, a personal victory over drugs is possible.

Scarlett Swerdlow, then head of Students for Sensible Drug Policy, had a question about Sickels's particular about-face, which included not only triumphing over addiction, but also becoming a substance-abuse counselor and social worker. Sickels had spoken of a raid on her house after which she had avoided prison because her brother was one of the cops-and because meth "wasn't that big of a deal at the time." Under current law, Swerdlow explained, you would have been denied federal aid for school after your arrest. What effect would that have had on your recovery?

" It would have been disastrous," Sickels told her, adding, "I've heard of that. It's not a good rule." I followed up: "Do you think you would have benefited from being sent to prison? In general, do you think it's worthwhile to imprison recreational and addicted drug users?" Carrick Forbes stood and walked to the podium. A former heroin addict, she was attending Hunter College in New York.

The speech that followed touched on the many reasons she thought that drug addicts ought not to be imprisoned. "There is very little treatment in prison," she said. "Prisons are just a place to warehouse addicts. . . . I've heard a lot of times that people are actually introduced to new drugs while they' re in prison. I never went to prison, but a good friend of mine went for four years. It definitely changed his life, but it didn't help his addiction." She concluded by saying, "We need to focus on treatment, not punishment."

Her a.s.sertion prompted Walters to retake the podium to note that there is a "movement toward interest in treatment" over incarceration for addicts like Sickels and the Forbeses, and that most cases are diverted from the prison system to treatment through "drug courts." As Walters sat down, I asked him if he could back up his claim with data. "I' ll get that for you," he said.

What his office sent me instead was a report on the number of arrestees that the government sent to treatment for marijuana use, not for addiction to c.o.ke, heroin, or meth. I told Walters's office that this couldn't be what he meant to give me. Nothing else was provided.

I found Sickels outside the event as she was being whisked away by federal officials. She called out her e-mail address and asked me to write. Later that day, I did, and she wrote back: "If I'd had a chance to respond to your question about prison versus treatment . . . I probably would have said something inflammatory about the criminalization of addiction. . . . In my neck of the woods, the courts and jails are clogged with people who have committed crimes related to their addiction to meth and crack cocaine. The drug courts are a great thing and I have seen them work for many, but Far Too Few have access to them."

Estimates of the U.S. population in prison for drug offenses vary, but Eric Sterling, head of the Criminal Justice Policy Foundation, has been able to cobble together a number from government data, and he puts the figure at around 500,000. In the government survey released at the press conference, the feds noted that in 2004, 1.4 million people were treated for illicit drug use in a specialty facility. The number of those who were diverted from prison wasn't available, but the 2002 numbers indicate that of the 655,000 who were referred to treatment through the criminal justice system, 25 percent came from a state or federal court, a prison, or a diversionary program. That would be 164,000 people. The same report says that another 6.6 million needed treatment but didn't receive it.

While Nixon was pushing law enforcement to tackle drug use, a significant effort was under way to find a different solution. It was similar to the one advocated by Ramsey Clark and the Johnson administration-and it was embraced by none other than Richard M. Nixon.

In Chicago in the late sixties, psychopharmacologist Jerome Jaffe established an experimental methadone clinic to help heroin addicts. At the time, psychiatrist Robert DuPont had just moved to Washington, D.C., to work for the National Inst.i.tutes of Health on drug-policy issues. In 1969, he was able to persuade District mayor Walter Washington to establish a small methadone program modeled after Jaffe's.

DuPont's interests paralleled those of Nixon, who had not only promised a moral victory over drugs but had also vowed to reduce crime in the District. Presidential aide Egil "Bud" Krogh Jr. called DuPont-who would later work for President Jimmy Carter and even later set up a lucrative drug-testing business-into his office and asked if he believed he could expand his methadone program across the city. He did. With increased funding secured by Krogh, the Narcotics Treatment Administration became a startling success. Washington's crime rate, which had been climbing throughout the sixties, fell by 5.2 percent as the national rate continued to rise.

Nixon was impressed. By the middle of 1971, he had tapped Jaffe to run a national version of the NTA, which proceeded to spend hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding. A year later, treatment was available to any heroin addict who wanted it. The national crime rate, after rising every year since 1955, dropped by 3 percent in 1972. In the District, it fell by 27 percent. Each month in 1972 saw fewer people die from heroin overdoses than the month before. Just as Nixon was able to travel to China because of his unimpeachable anti - Communist credentials, he was able to advocate a treatment-based approach to drug addiction because of his solid law-and-order reputation. It was in Nixon's best interest to bring the crime rate down leading into the 1972 election, and weaning addicts off drugs seemed like one way to do it.

Soon, however, Nixon had other problems to deal with, thanks partly to Krogh, who authorized a proto-Watergate break-in relating to Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg. The drug-treatment effort foundered. Under Nixon, two-thirds of that budget had been directed toward curbing addiction. During Reagan's presidency, the NTA was allowed to collapse entirely as his administration spent four-fifths of its drug-war money on enforcement.

By the time DuPont established his methadone program in Washington, the counterculture heavily overlapped with an underground of a different type. The strongest link between the two was the h.e.l.l's Angels, a gang of speed-dealing bikers who mingled freely with drug-using hippies. The trade was dominated by the gang so much so that the drug was known as "biker speed" or "biker meth." As the Angels' product crossed from the criminal underworld to the hippie counterculture, the New York Times wrote of speed freaks hanging out at Tracy's doughnut shop in Haight-Ashbury and strung-out "meth monsters" haunting the East Village. Some turned-on kids, much to the alarm of speed-eschewing psychonauts, were doing their parents' drug. During the Summer of Love, "Speed Kills" b.u.t.tons were distributed by a Haight-Ashbury free clinic as the counterculture tried to correct itself with a self-devised antimeth campaign.

By the fall, the b.u.t.tons had made an ironic cameo in a lurid Time magazine rape-and-murder story informing readers that "[d]rug-induced violence is nothing new to the neighborhoods where hippies live." From its opening scene of "a tawdry tenement at 169 Avenue B on Manhattan's Lower East Side" with "c.o.c.kroach-scampered walls" to its description of the killings of twenty-one-year-old sometime speed dealer James "Groovy" Hutchinson and his eighteen-year-old girlfriend, Linda Fitzpatrick, carried out with boiler-room bricks by "turned on" speed freaks who presumably "demanded to ' make it' with Linda," the piece vividly embodies mainstream America's worst prejudices and fears about the counterculture:Police later arrested three Negroes. Donald Ramsey, 26, who wears the fez of the Yoruba sect, a Black Nationalist cult, and whose apartment on the fifth floor of the murder building is decorated with Black Power posters; Thomas Dennis, also 26, a pot-smoking wino who hung out on the hippie fringe and proclaimed a code of racial violence; and Fred Wright, 31, a.s.sistant janitor in the building who lived in a small room just off the cellar, and who was held on "related" charges of raping and robbing another hippie girl just hours before the slayings.

For the most part, the new crop of speed freaks eschewed inhalers and pills; they injected liquid amphetamines obtained through the black market or cooked up in secret labs. A 1970 feature in the Times described the new image of meth in now-familiar terms: "The speed epidemic blossomed about three years ago in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district and quickly popped up in the nation's other hippie drug haven, New York's East Village. Quiet flower children became ravaged scarecrows. The cannibalism of speed was easy to spot: emaciated bodies c.o.c.ked in twisted postures; caved-in jaws, grinding and grinding; pockmarked skin, torn and scratched and white, and a constant talking, talking, talking." The story states that, according to the FDA, methamphetamine was the "most popular drug of clandestine chemists." The Times had the course of the epidemic backward, however: New York's underground arts scene had embraced meth in the sixties. The drug only later-though not much later-infiltrated San Francisco, drifting up the West Coast from San Diego, by 1970 dubbed the Meth Capital of the United States.

In terms of chemistry and pharmacology, there isn't much of a practical difference between methamphetamine cooked in home labs and amphetamine derivatives sold by pharmaceutical companies. The main difference for users is in the way the drugs are administered. Home cooks don't put their product in pills. The chemicals get bagged up in raw form, designed for injecting, snorting, and, with pure crystal meth, smoking. These methods send the drug almost straight into the bloodstream and on its way to the brain-delivering a bigger, faster rush than orally ingested pills, which must first pa.s.s through the stomach, the intestines, and the liver, journeys that take time and dilute the power of the high.

The first Americans to inject speed were likely soldiers stationed in j.a.pan and Korea in the early fifties, where the practice was widespread. Back home, injectable meth was easily available at pharmacies with a prescription, rarely a deterrent for a determined customer. Injection caught on, and in 1963, following increased reports of intravenous abuse, the state of California finally asked manufacturers of injectable amphetamines to stop selling their products in the state. When drug makers complied, home-based speed kitchens started booming. The Drug Abuse Control Amendments of 1965 law gave black-market manufacturers a second boon, helping to take high-powered pills off the street and leaving the home labs with a near monopoly.

In 1970, over the objections of the pharmaceutical industry, which was seeing its pill sales plummet, President Nixon unified American drug legislation under the Controlled Substances Act. The regulatory centerpiece of today's drug laws, it utterly rejected the notion that Congress could regulate drugs only through its power to tax, claiming authority over the drug trade through the Const.i.tution's long-debated Commerce Clause. The law divides drugs into five categories, called schedules, based on their perceived harmfulness, addictive potential, and medical value. Marijuana, which is relatively safe, is not addictive, and has medical value, was placed into Schedule I, where it remains, along with heroin and LSD. Cocaine is in Schedule II. Liquid meth was originally put into Schedule II but was b.u.mped up to I; regular amphetamines started in III but were moved up to II. Schedule V includes low-potency preparations of codeine and opium.

The laws also kicked speed down the social scale, at least for a while. The Controlled Substances Act managed to reduce production of amphetamines by American pharmaceutical companies, from 165,000 kilograms in 1958 to just 1,000 kilograms in 1973. Rather than turn to the biker-a.s.sociated drug, wealthier users began to shun speed for another upper that was becoming available again: cocaine, which ticked up in use in the mid- to late seventies. Quaaludes and other downers, including heroin, also quietly rose in popularity as meth use consolidated on the fringes. The more the feds cracked down on speed, the more it traveled in the underground-and the more powerful it got.

A 1970 ban on phenyl-2-propanone, known as P2P, had sent home cooks scrambling for a new meth precursor. By the early eighties, they found it in the readily available pseudoephedrine, which Big Pharma had fought to keep legal in bulk sales. The ephedrine-reduction method of speed production turned out to produce a much more powerful drug, especially once Mexican cartels began obtaining pure ephedrine powder in large quant.i.ties from pharmaceutical suppliers overseas. In the 2007 book No Speed Limit: The Highs and Lows of Meth, journalist Frank Owen writes of the profoundly changed meth experience:Taking what I presumed was a modest amount, half a gram, which barely covered the bottom of a small plastic baggie, I ground up the chunks into a fine powder and separated them into eight lines, which were to be taken twice a day over four days, to be accompanied by the occasional nap and lots of fluids. At least, that was the plan. I had a pile of boring fact-checking work to do and I figured meth would make the task easier.

Right from the first line, I could tell this was different from the old biker meth I used to do. Some new plateau of intensity had been reached here. This was powerful, maybe too powerful. Still, for the first twelve hours, I managed to stay on an even keel, working at the computer, dropping off dry cleaning, going to the Korean deli to pick up some beer and cigarettes. Then, as night fell on Sunday evening just before Thanksgiving 2006, I was sitting at my desk in my twenty-second-floor midtown Manhattan apartment when I was startled by a fierce blast of music that filled up the whole room: "O Tannenbaum, O Tannenbaum."

The music was merely coming from a department store across the street, but Owen didn't realize that until five days later, when he eased out of the fantasyland meth had created. In those five days, he had hallucinated being arrested by FBI agents for communicating with an underground organization and believed that he was having s.e.x with "half-human, half-animal creatures." Owen realized when he came down that the new meth "was so powerful that it had given me this extraordinary ability to surrealize reality, animate my surroundings like a cosmic cartoonist. I had experienced meth hallucinations before, but never with such intensity or duration. If a half a gram of Mexican ice spread out over four days could do this to me, imagine what an eight ball could do."

Today, the DEA tacitly acknowledges the P2P ban's role in the creation of the new supermeth. "The ephedrine/pseudoephedrine reduction method is preferred over the P2P method for several reasons," reads one agency report. "First, it is a simpler route of synthesis. Second, ephedrine/pseudoephedrine is less strictly controlled than P2P, and, therefore, is more readily available to clandestine laboratory operators."

But the newly empowered drug warriors had more important intoxicants to attack than meth. The early eighties were dedicated to uprooting as much marijuana as possible. The focus then shifted to cocaine. By the mid-nineties, when the feds turned back to marijuana-this time branded as medicinal-meth had managed to spread eastward across the country in its new, more potent, Mexican form.

The first step in meth's nationwide march was the legislation that pushed its production below the border. The second was the treaty that opened that border: thanks to NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, meth would be back-and in force.

CHAPTER 5.

New c.o.ke.

Perfect, thought Keith Stroup as he put down the phone after a call from Griffin Smith, a speechwriter for President Jimmy Carter. Smith had invited Stroup to his apartment at the Watergate, where he needed some help composing a presidential statement on drug policy. Stroup was a pro-pot lobbyist running the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML). Drug culture, it seemed, was about to go mainstream.

"He and I were about the same age and had smoked together," Stroup recalled from his K Street office, where he still heads the organization. "I said, 'Whoa,' and I grabbed my best stuff and headed over there." Indeed, it was Stroup who came up with Carter's most memorable formulation of his liberal drug policy: "Penalties against possession of a drug should not be more damaging to an individual than the use of the drug itself."

"We ended up with a statement that I thought was awfully good," he said. "Even though they toned the statement down, it is still to this day the best statement any president has had on marijuana."

The 1977 meeting wasn't public knowledge, but even if it had been, America's relationship with drugs was such that the idea of pro-marijuana advocates consulting with the White House would have drawn little protest. Marijuana use had risen steadily through the sixties, in tandem with the countercultural revolution. "By the time we started going to the antiwar demonstrations, between sixty-five and sixty-eight," said Stroup, "one of the things we noticed was there was a lot of marijuana smoking. It was a way to let the news people covering the protest know that, yes, we were there primarily to protest the war in Vietnam, but there were a lot of other things about the government [we opposed], as well, and one of them was its marijuana laws."

Drugs were the counterculture's consolation prize, instead of a quick end to the Vietnam War, a new egalitarian society, or even a Democratic president. President Richard M. Nixon's war on drugs had been aborted when he resigned in 1974. Though Nixon had explicitly sought to divide the country along cultural lines in order to rule, his successor made healing the national psyche his highest priority. President Gerald Ford both pardoned Nixon and granted conditional amnesty to draft dodgers, actions that were together the essence of seventies detente.

Across America, mainstream acceptance-or at least tolerance-of drug use and drug culture was evident. Head shops publicly selling drug paraphernalia, sometimes thinly labeled as "For tobacco use only," were as common as Auntie Anne's Pretzels and other mallbased chains are today. News reports gradually became more favorable toward marijuana, and the att.i.tude of the general public and legislators alike tended toward a pro-pot stance. In 1973, Oregon became the first state to decriminalize pot, making possession of under an ounce a civil offense akin to speeding. Two years later, California followed. In 1978, Nebraska brought to eleven the number of states that had decriminalized possession of small quant.i.ties of the drug.

Tens of millions of people were living in places where smoking pot was effectively legal. Half of the high-school seniors polled by the University of Michigan in 1974 said that they had smoked marijuana in the last year, but there was little public outcry about any kind of "epidemic." As early as 1972, a commission had recommended to Richard Nixon that pot be decriminalized nationwide. He rejected the advice, but three years later, Carter campaigned under a promise to do just that.

"At that time, virtually everyone in the California pot movement thought we'd already won," recalls Jack Herer in the dedication of the cult cla.s.sic The Emperor Wears No Clothes: The Authoritative Historical Record of Cannabis and the Conspiracy against Marijuana . . . and How Hemp Can Save the World! "They'd begun to drift away from the movement and had gone back to their lives, thinking the battle was over and that the politicians would clean up the loose ends."

In the midterm elections following Nixon's resignation, the American people elected forty-nine new Democrats to the House of Representatives, creating a huge majority. Democrats also picked up four Senate seats, meaning that they had gained virtually dictatorial power in Congress. When Carter moved into the White House, Democrats had fully consolidated power. The GOP hollered here and there about rising pot use and the perennial scourge of heroin, but without control of either branch of the government, it was essentially powerless.

It was in this context that Stroup and Smith sat down to craft Carter's drug policy-and in which, a year later, Peter Bourne, Carter's top drug official, sat down to blow lines at a 1977 NORML Christmas party with Stroup, Hunter S. Thompson, and an a.s.sistant to newspaper columnist Jack Anderson.

It's no surprise that c.o.ke was their drug of choice. Rapidly gaining in popularity among the educated elite, cocaine was in its honeymoon phase-again. And just as in the previous century, its rise was facilitated by circ.u.mstances aligning against another drug. This time around, the drug wasn't demon rum but rather a substance that American culture was on the very verge of declaring respectable: marijuana.

"I clearly f.u.c.ked up," Stroup told me. The c.o.ke session with the drug czar, which had gone down at a Georgetown home, had been strictly private. But to get to it, Bourne and his companions had had to walk up a spiral staircase in full view of the entire party. Stroup, Hunter Thompson, and the government's drug man all ascending together made an interesting threesome. Word inevitably leaked out-in fact, Anderson broke the story, with Stroup agreeing to be quoted in the Washington Post. He was subsequently forced out of NORML and not allowed to return until many years later. Carter, deeply embarra.s.sed, never again entertained decriminalizing marijuana or any other liberal drug policies.

Stroup narc'd because he was p.i.s.sed. While speaking softly about drugs at home, Carter had been vigorously prosecuting the drug war abroad. Well before the scandal broke, Stroup and Bourne had been feuding over a carcinogenic chemical being sprayed on Mexican pot by the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). It was supposed to kill the plants, but growers learned that if they harvested their crops immediately after they were sprayed, their pot would still at least appear normal. Pot smokers across the country were getting sick, and NORML, as their largest consumer-protection group, lobbied to have the spraying stopped. Bourne refused, and the rejection played some part in Stroup's outing of him to the Post.

The spraying was part of Operation Condor, a joint Mexican- American venture aimed at eradicating Mexican pot that had been going on since 1975. General Jose Hernandez Toledo, fresh from the 1968 student ma.s.sacres in Mexico City, led ten thousand soldiers into the hills of Sinaloa, Durango, and Chihuahua. "Tons of drugs were destroyed, production was reduced, prices rose, but drugs continued to flow into the American market, although in lesser quant.i.ty of Mexican origin," writes sociologist Luis Astorga in the paper "Drug Trafficking in Mexico: A First General a.s.sessment."

The action had several consequences. One, a rise in the price of pot in the United States, was intended. Others were not. The growth of domestic marijuana farming might have eased pot shortages slightly during the seventies, but the industry was hardly the high-tech, high-efficiency bud-producing machine it is today. The encouragement of a shift from pot to cocaine importation among drug smugglers was a much more significant development in the short term. c.o.ke, more valuable by weight and with a less detectable odor, was more profitable and much easier to move. A minor player in the c.o.ke trade in the seventies, Mexico would a decade later come to rival the Caribbean. By the late nineties, it would dominate the industry.

As domestic pot production began to take off in northern California, the quality of homegrown marijuana available to Americans was steadily improving. Ken Kesey's former girlfriend and the future wife of Jerry Garcia, Carolyn "Mountain Girl" Adams, was among the first to grow gourmet bud in northern California, in the early seventies. Some Vietnam vets who had picked up a taste for drugs while fighting Communists were happy to employ camouflage and b.o.o.by-trapping skills learned in the Asian jungle in the forests of northern California, and as they followed Adams's lead, U.S. pot farming was allowed to expand with near impunity.

Neither California governor Jerry Brown nor the Carter administration was particularly concerned with going after West Coast growers. Brown smoked pot himself, and he was almost brought down by it when, at the behest of federal agents, Timothy Leary's wife, hoping to free her husband from prison in the seventies, shared a joint with Brown in an entrapment scheme. (She ultimately decided not to cooperate, saving Brown's political career, which continues to this day.) The DEA, for its part, had no clue as to how much marijuana was being grown in the United States. In 1984, the agency estimated that domestic annual production was 2,100 metric tons and represented only 12 percent of total consumption. Government officials "were still screaming about all these dynamite, superstrength strains of Mexican marijuana, when we had moved on to Canadian or Thai sticks or stuff people grew domestically," said Stroup. "Their continued preoccupation with imported marijuana gave the domestic industry a chance to get on its feet."

The American marijuana market, however, remained dependent on imported and outdoor herb, both of which are susceptible to shortfalls. Pot grown outdoors is harvested in the fall-meaning that, by summer, supply would be depleted nationwide. Combined with foreign eradication efforts, these seasonal shortages helped open the door for cocaine, as users subst.i.tuted an available drug for an unavailable one.

"Without question, in the mid- to late-seventies, there were frequently months where even working at NORML we would have a drought," said Stroup. "But there was never a shortage of cocaine, because it didn't have anything to do with a growing season. Sometimes I'd go [to my dealer], and he didn't have any marijuana, but he always had cocaine."

Federal survey data show that c.o.ke use among eighteen- to twenty-five-year-olds doubled from 1977 to 1979. By the end of the decade, 40 percent of Americans in that age bracket admitted to trying the drug. "If present trends go unchecked," prophesied a 1979 DEA report, "a vast new youth market for the substance could be opened. High cost, rather than restricted availability, will remain the princ.i.p.al deterrent to regular use among less affluent persons."

Historian Christopher Lasch's 1979 book The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations captures the mood of those who made up this vast new market. "To live for the moment is the prevailing pa.s.sion-to live for yourself, not for your predecessors or posterity," he writes. "We are fast losing the sense of historical continuity, the sense of belonging to a succession of generations originating in the past and stretching into the future. It is the waning of the sense of historical time-in particular the erosion of any strong concern for posterity-that distinguishes the spiritual crisis of the '70s."

Nothing creates a more narcissistic high than cocaine, and post-Watergate, mistrustful Americans were more inclined to listen to themselves than to the government when it came to drug use. They lied to us about pot, the thinking went. Why should we believe them about c.o.ke?

Timothy Leary, whose bizarre career trajectory placed him at the heart of the American counterculture for decades on end, popped up again as a defender of the powder. "Obviously, cocaine is the drug of the day," he told an interviewer in the early eighties. "It is well-adapted to our times. Of course the narcs who are cracking down on its use rant and rave about the dangers of the miserable substance, which is, in reality, a harmless substance. It's a drug that causes euphoria, quite pleasant and sparkling like champagne. You feel powerful, as if you controlled the world-and intelligent, much more than you actually are."