http://www.nctimes.com/articles/2007/09/09//news/top_stories/23_53_259_8_07.txt
Kamikaze pilots, Beats and Hells Angels all part of meth crisis
history
By: GARY WARTH - Staff Writer
Most of the nation was oblivious to methamphetamine as it slowly
became the drug of choice in Southern California, quietly replacing
crack cocaine and phencyclidine, or PCP, in the 1980s.
Then one day in March 1989, a raid on dozens of homes in San Diego
County revealed a surprisingly robust methamphetamine industry.
Hundreds of local, state and federal officers shut down 29 meth labs,
arrested almost 100 manufacturers and seized 830 pounds of ephedrine,
the drug's main precursor, in what a Drug Enforcement Agency spokesman
called the single biggest roundup of meth manufacturers in the
nation's history.
San Diegans woke up to the news that they were living in the meth
capital of the nation. That distinction is no longer consider valid 18
years later, but the problem has not gone away. In 2006, San Diego
County had 174 meth-related deaths, 5,811 admissions to meth-treatment
facilities and 7,370 people were arrested on suspicion of possession
or selling meth. About 39 percent of adults and 10 percent of
juveniles arrested last year tested positive for meth.
Warnings aplenty
The drug's road to prominence in San Diego County was long and
winding, and began four decades ago in San Francisco, which
experienced the first meth epidemic in 1967.
"We've lived with it for so long, but I've heard lots of people say,
'I thought methamphetamine was a new problem,' " said Dr. David Smith,
a physician who has lived in the drug-affected San Francisco
neighborhood of Haight-Ashbury for 47 years.
"The first urban speed epidemic seems to have been forgotten," he
said.
Smith opened the first Haight-Ashbury free clinic 40 years ago in
response to a wave of drug-using young people who were moving to the
city as part of the 1967 Summer of Love, when thousands of young
people moved to San Francisco at the height of the hippie
counterculture movement.
A drug culture
Marijuana and LSD, a so-called mind-expanding drug, were a large part
of the culture that was loosely united by music, art and opposition to
the Vietnam War.
But by the end of that summer, Smith said his clinic was treating more
and more young people for the effects of another drug:
methamphetamine, made at the time by members of the Hells Angels
motorcycle club and known on the street as speed.
Unlike the peace-loving hippies high on pot, speed freaks could be so
violent that Smith had to treat them in rooms separate from his other
patients. The clinic began the "Speed Kills" campaign that summer to
discourage people from using the drug, a stimulant closely related to
amphetamine.
While many look back nostalgically at the 40th anniversary of the
Summer of Love, Smith remembers it ending with heartache and violent
disillusionment.
The mouse cage
Methamphetamine's violent effects were no surprise to Smith, who began
his research into methamphetamine after hearing re****ts of the violent
effects of diet-pill abuse in the so-called bohemian culture or Beat
Generation.
Smith focused on the drug in his 1965 thesis, in which he studied the
effects of meth on caged mice, which normally are peaceful enough to
groom one another. A mouse on meth, he discovered, interpreted
grooming as a violent attack, usually prompting a fatal fight.
"When all the violence hit, I thought, 'That's just like my mouse
cage,' " Smith said about San Francisco in late 1967.
Methamphetamine itself dates back long before bohemians first started
popping diet pills, and its abuse has a direct lineage with the
country's hunger for stimulants.
The drug wasn't invented by outlaw biker gangs, but by scientists.
Meth and amphetamines weren't always sold by pushers on the street,
but by pharmacists filling prescriptions from doctors who believed
them to be a cure-all.
The Asian connection
Humanity's attraction to the drug may in fact date back 5,000 years,
when the Chinese first started to use the plant ma huang as a
stimulant and a remedy for a variety of ailments. In 1885, Japanese
chemist Nagayo**** Nagai extracted the source of the plant's power: a
chemical called ephedrine.
The plant itself was too scarce to make widespread use of the chemical
practical, but a synthetic alternative came two years later when
German scientist Lazar Edeleano created the chemical stimulant
phenylisopropylamine, a compound related to ephedrine. In 1919,
Japanese scientist A. Ogata added an extra set of methyl molecules to
Edeleano's formula, creating methamphetamine.
It would be an additional eight years before a commercial use of
Edeleano's formula was finally realized. In 1927, UCLA researcher
Gordon Alles resynthesized Edeleano's chemical, tested it on himself
and found it gave an energy boost and a sense of euphoria. He called
it alpha-phenyl-ethyimine, now better known as amphetamine, a drug
that would see the nation through the Depression, energize troops in
World War II, fuel the imagination of the Beat Generation and keep
cross-country truckers on the road.
Bennie nation
Alles sold the drug to the pharmaceutical company Smith, Kline and
French, which in 1932 brought it to market as Benzedrine, an over-the-
counter inhaler to treat asthma and congestion.
A pill form introduced five years later was used to treat narcolepsy,
depression, obesity, epilepsy, schizophrenia, cerebral palsy and
hypertension. The drug was even used to calm hyperactive children and
cure hiccups, and one researcher catalogued 39 different clinical uses
for it, journalist Frank Owen wrote in his book, "No Speed Limit."
The honeymoon was over by the mid-1930s, when several colleges were
noticing students passing out after staying up for several nights
cramming on Benzedrine, and one university conducted a study on the
drug's psychological effects.
Wartime applications
Despite signs of the drug's abuse, the military in World War II
realized the potential for a pill that would help troops stay awake
for days during battles and keep pilots alert on long bombing
missions. American GIs may have consumed up to 200 million amphetamine
tablets, including many made at a San Diego naval base, Owen wrote.
Meanwhile, German blitzkrieg strikes and suicidal Japanese kamikaze
and banzai attacks may have been inspired by something more than
fearless nationalism; those nations supplied their forces with
Pervitin and Isophan, brand names for methamphetamine.
Benzedrine continued to be a popular diet pill and pick-me-up in
postwar America, but signs that people were abusing "bennies," as they
came to be called on the street, led the federal government to make
them a prescription drug in 1951.
An inspired writer
The restriction did little to deter their use among cross-country
truckers and the counterculture, however; Beat Generation writer Jack
Kerouac said he wrote his classic "On the Road" over three weeks while
fueled by bennies and coffee.
Pharmaceutical companies began producing even more powerful versions
of the drug: Dexedrine was twice as powerful as Benzedrine while
Norodin, Methedrine, Desoxyn and Syndrox were brand names for
methamphetamine.
Amphetamine inhalers were federally banned in 1959, and Congress
passed the Drug Abuse Control Amendments in 1965, which placed strict
control over amphetamines and other drugs.
By then, however, illicit methamphetamine use already had begun,
having been introduced in a most ironic way.
Doctors, meth and bikers
In the late 1950s, doctors in the Bay Area prescribed methamphetamine
in the form of Methedrine and Desoxyn to Korean War veterans addicted
to heroin, which itself had once been used as a cure for opium and
morphine addiction. Some doctors interested in making a fast buck
wrote meth prescriptions to whoever came to their clinics, however,
flooding the street with the drug.
Dr. Roger Smith, a physician who helped head the Amphetamine Research
Project at the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic, wrote about the
unscrupulous doctors in "The Marketplace of Speed: Violence and
Compulsive Methamphetamine Behavior."
At the time, meth users largely were veterans who had picked up the
habit in Korea and postwar Japan, which had a serious problem with
civilians using the military-made drug left over from the war.
A 1962 crackdown on Bay Area doctors who had supplied meth to local
addicts led to California pharmacies withdrawing Methedrine and
Desoxyn.
The outcome
But the withdrawal, along with later laws aimed at amphetamines,
inadvertently led to the first illicit meth labs in California.
Members of the Hells Angels motorcycle club in Oakland, who re****tedly
had been distributing the drug in the Bay Area, began making their own
methamphetamine after it was pulled from the pharmacies. The bikers
were among the first to make methamphetamine using phenyl acetone
(P2P), a chemical mainly used to clean swimming pools.
The drug culture changed in the 1970s, when downers such as Quaaludes
gained popularity over meth. Meanwhile, speed freaks switched from
methamphetamine to cocaine and heroin.
Methamphetamine continued to be used by a certain population, but was
not considered as big a problem as cocaine or heroin. Still, federal
authorities were active in fighting it, and in 1980 the government
classified P2P as a controlled substance in an attempt to stop its
production. The new restriction had unintentional and unfortunate
consequences.
Methamphetamine makers began substituting P2P with ephedrine, a legal
chemical without the restrictions of P2P. Producing meth with
ephedrine was easier and cheaper than the P2P method, and the drug
also was more powerful, making it more addictive.
San Diego County found itself in between two reliable suppliers of the
more-powerful drug: San Bernardino outlaw bikers to the north and
illicit Mexican labs to the south. And as demand for methamphetamine
grew, more people began making it themselves.
Chemical firms opened to sell ephedrine and other precursors directly
to meth makers, and before law enforcement agencies were able to crack
down on them, tons of methamphetamine had been distributed throughout
the county.
A new era of meth production had begun, and San Diego was in the
forefront.
Editor's note: Next week, the history of methamphetamine continues
with why the drug became popular in San Diego County and how law
enforcement orchestrated the biggest single-day meth-lab bust in
history.
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