My fellow Millennials, Gen Xers, and well, fuck it, everyone too young to have been a housewife in the 1950s, this one’s for you. Because there’s this one relative who can’t stop going on about how clean their house always has been and, tsk tsk, you’re just not living up. Aunt Fussydusting can’t stop expounding on how she raised thirty-seven kids uphill both ways in the winter back in the day, and somehow she had more energy and her house was cleaner than yours.
Kids, our grandparents and great-grandparents weren’t better people than us, no no. They had better drugs.
Today’s Moment of Science… Momma’s little helpers.
Amphetamine is sometimes confused with its crankier cousin, crystal meth. It’s not entirely wrong to compare the two but the details matter. Yes, they’re both powerful stimulants, but so is your morning coffee, you goddamn addict. Taking amphetamine in a pill as prescribed by a doctor is a far cry from the generally more, uh, creative ways we envision crystal meth being put to use.
Amphetamine was first synthesized by Romanian chemist Lazăr Edeleanu in 1887. Nobody knew it was quite the picker-upper until forty years later, a discovery which I’m sure was followed by two days of being wide awake and annoyingly focused on writing a screenplay.
In 1933 amphetamine hit shelves for the first time in an inhaler branded Benzedrine. The first prescription stimulant to come along since someone figured out cocaine was fun and that had to stop, stimulant inhalers are still used as an effective part of asthma management.
Amphetamine and other stimulants cause a release of dopamine (the “pleasure” chemical) in your brain. Given that, it’s somewhat unsurprising that Benzedrine pills were initially approved as a treatment for mild depression when they came out in the late 1930s. Ubiquitous in WWII, they fueled both Allied and Axis soldiers. It wasn’t just given to soldiers to help them stay awake until the war was over; it was to keep their spirits up. If you’re in a war, a hit of dopamine will make you less prone to admit to yourself how fucking stupid this mess is.
Lots of groups used Benzedrine for energy, focus, and depression. But somewhat famously, one of the main users of the drug? Housewives.
Along with being advertised to help with such depression symptoms as ‘cheerfulness’ and ‘optimism,’ people experienced a loss of appetite while on stimulants. And so amphetamines were doled out to fuel the American dream, one skinny, peppy 1950s housewife trying to skip dessert at a time. And because sometimes uppers just make you feel way too… up? There was a formulation combined with a barbiturate by the mid-1950s.
Barbiturates AND amphetamines in one pill, huh Grandma?
Awareness was starting to grow that these drugs could be addictive by the sixties, but it took a while for doctors to move away from prescribing them. For one, they weren’t so sure about these newfangled tricyclic antidepressants, and amphetamines showed much more immediate results. For another, the patients who would suddenly be classified as ‘addicts’ or ‘abusers’ just didn’t seem to fit the bill. A sizable percentage of those being prescribed amphetamine were “middle aged, middle class” people on a low dose, and doctors didn’t see an issue yet.
The problems with people abusing and injecting the drug had been around and steadily increasing for years. In fact, it’s hard to see how the potential for abuse wasn’t known earlier. Soldiers who came home from WWII had significantly increased rates of addiction, in some cases even abusing Benzedrine inhalers. Even though the vast majority of the amphetamines seized by the DEA were legally prescribed pills, throw the phrase ‘speed freak’ around once or twice and it was enough to scare up some legislation.
Amphetamines became schedule II in 1971, in the same category with the other legally prescribable baddies. Even with legal status, amphetamine is strictly controlled today and is used for the management of ADHD and narcolepsy.
This has been your Moment of Science, just a bit surprised to find out today that methamphetamine is also available by prescription in the US.
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Hi, is there any chance you could send me some articles you read to write this post? I’m looking to do my masters thesis on this and I’m struggling 🙂
Obviously you don’t know anyone from then. It wasn’t that everyone was taking drugs FFS. And humans have abused drugs either intentionally or unintentionally since forever. Or you never heard of Coca-Cola. And guess what YES kids, our grandparents and great-grandparents were better people than us. But I get it. Ever since “feminism” the BIG LIE was spread that nobody was required to operate a house, or raise kids. The magic unicorn would do it all. (reality women got to do BOTH. WORK and RUN THE HOUSE/KIDS)
“Obviously you don’t know anyone from then” Bitch I know my own mother. Extrapolating this article to mean that I thought everyone was on speed when… it clearly does not state that… seems a little defensive on your part. I also don’t think you’re talking about your grandparents here, I think you’re talking about you, boomer.