The Totally Wired Twenties (or, earlier amphetamines)

So, amphetamines.

OTL they were discovered in the 1880s... but then, bizarrely, they just sat around for the next 40 years, a laboratory curiosity with no known use. Their pharmacological significance wasn't appreciated until the 1920s!

Now, once this /was/ understood, America's young pharmaceutical industry promptly began marketing cheap amphetamines to the masses. Smith Kline French (ancestor of today's GlaxoSmithKline) led the way with the introduction of "Benzedrine", conveniently available as a pill or in an inhaler. Benzedrine was an over-the-counter drug that could be purchased without a prescription. For a few glorious years, it was a dime a dose in any drugstore in America. Good times, good times.


This of course led to to America's first mass outbreak of amphetamine addiction in the 1930s. By 1938, hundreds of thousands of Americans were hopelessly hooked on uppers, unable to get through the day without their Benzedrine tablets or a few snorts from the inhaler. But this first golden age of amphetamines came to a sudden end that same year, when the freedom-hating socialists in Roosevelt's Food and Drug Administration declared amphetamines a Substance of Special Interest and moved it to the prescription-only category. (Over, let it be noted, the vigorous protests of Smith Kline, who insisted that Benzedrine was not only completely harmless but a positive lifesaver to small children and the elderly.)



So, the POD: WI the pharmacological effects of amphetamines had been realized 20 years earlier?


There's really no reason this couldn't have happened. Amphetamines aren't particularly hard to synthesize, and mass production was well within the capabilities of Edwardian-era chemistry. OTL the issue seems to have been that they were originally a plant derivative (from the ephedra bush) and those were just out of style for a generation or so as the first great wave of synthetic drugs came online. But all it would really take is one researcher zigging this way instead of that. So let's say it happens [handwave]. Amphetamines are rediscovered around 1908, and Benzedrine gets marketed commercially in 1912.


Now what?



1) By the latter years of WWI, you have mass deployment of amphetamines for airmen and soldiers. Amphetamine highs and crashes make life in the trenches even more interesting than iOTL. And then after the war, the returning veterans can add withdrawal symptoms to PTSD and general alienation! Organizational meetings of the American Legion should be extra fun in this TL.



2) OTL the nosy-parker nanny-state do-gooders of the New Deal made amphetamine a controlled substance. TTL, woo, the roaring 20s! I think that the federal government of Harding, Coolidge and Hoover is going to be very slow to respond to amphetamines as a social issue -- especially since, with doughboys as the vector, it's going to be disproportionately a vice of middle class white folks. And, hey, Prohibition has left a void. So I think we could see a long decade in which alcohol is illegal but speed can be purchased like chewing gum.



3) So, the Roaring Twenties. (Maybe more like the Shrieking Twenties in this TL?) Who gets hooked?


(One likely candidate: young Ayn Rand. OTL she got hooked on prescription Benzedrine in 1942, was on and off it for over a decade, and then was just a full-blown no-holds-barred addict for the last dozen years of her life. TTL that probably gets accelerated. So, whatever else you can say about this TL, it's probably a world without _Atlas Shrugged_.)


Thoughts?




Doug M.
 
This reminds me of the situation of Finland in the first post-WW2 years:
http://www.hs.fi/english/article/Fi...oin+from+the+1930s+to+the+1950s/1135245022270

The country consumed and produced more heroin and amphetamines per capita than other members of the UN did in 25 years. Then again back then heroin was a common indigrient in Finnish cough medicines, and heroin and Pervitin tablets were in wide distribution due the fact that they had been platoon-level stuff that medics had distributed to soldiers suffering from reumatic and other types of pain.

The most amazing feature of this phenomenon was the fact that it slowly faded to obscurity without any fuss, and went on through the Cold War decades as a society where only a remarkably small minority were opiate addicts - and most of them were WW2 invalids who had gotten hooked on opiates which were used as pain relievers during their treatment.

Back to topic:
The medical industry in Germany is going to exploit this eventuality like there's no tomorrow. Speaking of which I'd assume they'd be the first country to start feeding their troops with Pervitin and equivalent stuff due their desperate situation and advanced pharmaseutical industries of the time. A world where the angry veterans of the Weimar Republic have a steady supply of Pervitin available for them is an "interesting" scenario :rolleyes:
 
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Yay! Go me!

Anywho, I agree LSD and amphetamines would be different. Amphetamines may have a user ceiling sort of built in and has never had the major cultural changes that come with it when compared to other drugs.

Still, there could be more On the Road situations. But the more likely changes are addictions after people begin taking it for practical purposes, like night shifts and pilots. Maybe the cross atlantic flight attempts are assisted by their use?
 
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