Drug Types 13was freely available to U.S. personnel who wanted it and was a standard item
in survival packs. To improve alertness, national leaders such as British Prime
Minister Winston Churchill and, later on, President John F. Kennedy freely
used amphetamines as well.^1 Kennedy’s New Frontier rhetoric was character-
ized by his frequent call for “vigor,” a prime effect of amphetamines, and a
state of being that was important to him.
In athletic events, long-standing records fell after amphetamines became
available; speculation exists about whether diet and training were solely re-
sponsible for a sudden burst of feats that no human had ever been able to
perform. We know for sure that racehorses were doped with amphetamines
in that era.
The wartime habit of using amphetamines to increase worker productivity
made a peacetime transition in Japan and Sweden, where amphetamine abuse
became a major concern in the 1950s. In the United States concern also grew
with publicity about dangerous ingestion of these tablets by exhausted long-
haul truckers. Even though federal officials had cracked down on “upper”
sales at truck stops and gas stations, in 1965 the Interstate Commerce Com-
mission (ICC) described amphetamines as a serious threat to motorists sharing
the road with trucks, a claim disputed by the American Trucking Association.^2
Reports that a drug is used for recreation traditionally raise suspicions about
it in America, and an undercurrent of such reports about amphetamines
picked up strength in the 1950s. Members of New York’s fashionable “beau-
tiful people” who used the drug were called the Benzedrine Set, and in Hol-
lywood the tablets were called “Dolls.” Connoisseurs began dosing themselves
simultaneously with barbiturate depressants for what was called “a bolt and
a jolt.” At the social scale’s other end, investigators confirmed a brisk business
at various prisons where guards were illicitly selling inhalers to prisoners.
Outside the jails, crimes against property and persons were attributed to in-
halers.
Although restrictions governed sales of inhalers, they were officially non-
prescription and priced under a dollar. One inhaler would yield the equivalent
of 25 Benzedrine tablets. The original manufacturer of amphetamine sulfate,
along with competitors who produced the drug, tried to mix substances into
inhalers that would thwart misuse. Abusers found ways to overcome those
deterrents, however.
Hearing about alleged results of amphetamine abuse may have been exotic
entertainment for most Americans, but they became alarmed by stories of
pleasure usage by youths. Inhaler parties by teenagers became so notorious
around Kansas City, Missouri, that a U.S. senator introduced federal legisla-
tion to curb inhaler sales (Kansas City merchants were retailing hundreds
more a week than would be expected in a medicinal context).^3 Pharmaceutical
companies began withdrawing brands from the market, and in 1959 the U.S.
Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced that the product would
henceforth be available by prescription only.
In the 1960s amphetamines received publicity as an element of the hippie
pharmacopeia, with that association promoting disdain for a type of drug that
had originally been welcomed by ordinary people. Illicit usage of injectable
amphetamines became known as “speeding,” a reference to hyperactivity re-