How America Turned into a Nation of Speedfreaks and Ritalin Patients

The following is an excerpt from Mick Farren's new book, Speed-Speed-Speedfreak: A Fast History of Amphetamine (Feral House, 2010)

In the fullness of history, all the different varieties of speed may have been products of the twentieth century, even though they are still around nearly a decade into the twenty-first, and show no sign of waning. Speed is too much of a reflection of its time. The twentieth century was an era of acceleration. Humanity went from its first powered flight to a moon landing in less than 70 years. Two atomic weapons were deliberately detonated over inhabited cities, while other cities were turned into unstoppable firestorms by tons of conventional explosives dropped from high-flying aircraft. Millions died in two devastating world wars, and millions more in smaller wars, insurrections, and ethnic cleansings. We have seen the computer grow from a mechanical adding machine to an entity so powerful and omnipresent that speculation is now possible about the likelihood of machines merging identities with humanity.

The event of rock & roll added a frenetic thrashing drive to the world's entertainment, and television warped the world's perception. The twentieth century was an era of massive overreaching that culminated in us pushing our planet to the very edge of environmental catastrophe, as melting icecaps change the course of the ocean tides. The twentieth century was also a time of scarcely believable greed and all too grandiose dreams. The developed nations of the West demanded more and more, and we grew furious if TV commercials reneged on their promises and we couldn't instantly have it all. The West grew fat even as famines decimated developing nations. We burned energy as if there was no tomorrow, and in so doing, made tomorrow considerably more problematic. And this was where speed found its place, introducing itself to greedy dreams on all levels of twentieth-century culture with seductive assurances of free additional energy, enhancing stamina that enabled users to keep going like the bunny in battery commercial, and feel a euphoric omnipotence as the need to eat, sleep, or even feel anything unwontedly profound were removed by the insulating effects of amphetamine. One could even lose radical weight with no effort of will, and become fashionably slim. Adolf Hitler's doctor shot him up with cocktails of speed and the devil only knew what else, as he designed the blitzkrieg, in his greed for the absolute power he believed would enable him to annex the entire planet for his master race, and organized the deaths of tens of millions.

Jack Kennedy's doctor shot him up with similar hellish cocktails, but during the Cuba missile crisis, Kennedy was able to steer a course through the nuclear minefield of mutually assured destruction, save the lives of hundreds of millions, and set America on the course for that first moment on the moon, and inspire aspirations to the mastery of space and the universe. The Beatles popped pills from a German pharmacy, and played endless, hour on/hour off shows to drunken sailors and their whores, in pimp-infested cellars on Hamburg's red-light Reeperbahn, while dreaming of the kind of rock & roll fame only achieved by Elvis Presley, who had swallowed his mother's diet pills while attempting to understand why fate had dealt him such a bizarre hand of cards, and why so many millions of people wanted a part of him. Hugh Hefner popped pills and turned the airbrushed nudity of invitingly contorted although he supposedly rarely slept in his heyday, he ran a quasi-erotic empire from his circular bed. The honeymoon promises of speed became part of the underpinnings of many of the grand illusions and monstrous debacles of the time. The way in which both the Nazi and Imperial Japanese war machines placed a major reliance on the drug to provide them with indefatigable storm troopers, and kamikazes who didn't fear death. Amphetamines have woven a hidden but ubiquitous thread through the entire history of the twentieth century and have been a factor in some of its most chaotic episodes.