Speed has tripped the light fantastic in America for more than 85 years. From Ritalin and Adderall to the twice-methylated Breaking Bad stuff, speed seduces both over-bright founders and scurvy garage-dwellers. But it’s not the drug for right now. Speed is not only deadly; it’s defeatist.
It’s been two sobering years. We’d do well to take stock of what we were blind to in the raciest days of Silicon Valley and the government-as-usual Obama years. When the writer Casey Schwartz gave up Adderall after having it define her youth, she identified deep regrets: “I had spent years of my life in a state of false intensity, always wondering if I should be somewhere else, working harder, achieving more.” America is plenty intense—and it requires more freethinking from its citizens now than ever. It’s time for a reckoning with reality, reflection and reform, principled action. It’s also a time for civil disobedience. As grandiose as Adderall makes some people feel, the history of amphetamine as a drug of subjugation—used to compel obedience in soldiers, dieters, and unruly kids—haunts it.
In 1933, 46 years after Lazăr Edeleanu, a Romanian chemist, fatefully synthesized amphetamine—a mix of mirror-image molecules, levoamphetamine and dextroamphetamine—Smith, Kline & French picked it up and sold it as Benzedrine. Wouldn’t you know, enterprising hacker-tweakers soon prised open the inhalers, liberated the speed-soaked cotton strips, and swallowed them.
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