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by Charles Carreon
Warrior Tweakers, Good! Citizen Tweakers,
Bad!
They’re tweaking again. The military, I mean. It’s not just the throttle
jocks, I’m sure, who are popping Dexedrine to stay alert. It’s a war on,
man, and if you can’t sacrifice a little sleep to the war effort, then
what kind of patriot are you? That’s speed thinking. Compelling, so
compelling of course that virtually all of the pilots flying combat
missions in Iraq are in an altered state.
An altered state, may I remind you, that in an ordinary citizen is
considered illegal in the extreme, a dangerous self-indulgence in a
forbidden psychic kick that renders you outré. You’re a meth-head, a
dangerous, child neglecting, spouse-abusing, larcenous scab on the body of
society, in need of treatment and scorn. As a former prosecutor and
criminal defender, I know the depictions are not far-fetched, either.
Cranksters can be vile creatures, and meth induces a callousness of
character that is definitively anti-social. Delusions of grandeur can feed
notions of gangster mystique, and facilitate violence. I once had a client
tell me in jail about how he brutally broke the kneecaps on a total
stranger after taping him to a chair in his garage, because he had
mistaken the poor fellow for some guy who ripped him off. After another
tweaker friend came home and informed my client that the fellow was not
the ripoff, they put him in the back of a pickup and threw him out in
front of the emergency room and sped off. Of course, some meth users
merely become weasely thieves, and do not commit mayhem. At all events, it
has a corrosive effect on character.
So why do the military rate? Eliminate from your mind first the notion
that the drugs are not the same. Dextroamphetamine is what the Air Force
hands out to pilots, and they take extras along in the jet to
self-administer as desired. Dextro just means the molecule “turns to the
right” instead of to the left, but to your brain it’s all the same – left
turn, right turn, speed on. To fight fatigue is said to be the reason. But
a great side effect is the creation of the callous, anti-social character
necessary to drop weapons of mass destruction on fellow humans. It takes a
certain distance to do this sort of thing. Speed helps.
It makes me think of the lyrics from “Lucretia,” by the Sisters of Mercy:
“I hear the roar of a thin machine,
Hot metal and methedrine.
Love lost, fire at will,
Dum-dum bullets and shoot to kill,
I hear a dive bomber …
Empire Down …
Empire Down …”
Returning to the question – why do the military get to take speed? Because
they need to, we are told. The Iraqis are probably doing speed, too.
They’re not stupid. It gives them a little bit of advantage, what with
having to stay up all night soldering together bomb-timers, and repairing
assault rifles, not to mention keeping a prayer schedule. Speed helps.
Where’s The Money?
The origins of amphetamine are recent. Discovered just before the turn of
the century, methamphetamine was synthesized by Smith, Kline & French in
1929. The company filed two trademarks on the trade-name “Benzedrine” in
1936, one as a tablet “medicine for the stimulation of the nervous
system,” and another as a decongestant inhaler, citing first use in
commerce in 1933. Glaxo, Smith Kline is still the big distributor of
Dextroamphetamine for the military, and related stimulants like Adderall,
for obnoxious little boys who won't sit still in school. Merck developed a
simplified synthesis during the second world war to fuel the Blitzkrieg. I
assume we aren’t holding back from giving infantry their share of the
crank. After all, the infantryman and mechanized armor guys have the
hardest work. So they’re speedin’ legally, driving humvees, tanks, fuckin’
rockin’ and rollin’ for real, and their commanders don’t mind that they’re
listening to death metal with titles like “Cook Your Balls and Eat ‘Em,”
‘cause it’s a new crankin’ Army muthafucka.
War Is Hell, But Peace Is Sooooo Boring!
Our little cranksterized killers are going to have a hard time adjusting
to civilian life. Death metal they’ll still have, but speed will be dearly
bought with social ostracism. And they may begin to reflect on the horrors
that they committed when the tunes were crankin’ and their reflexes were
cleanly, smoothly distributing ammunition among the Iraqis. It seemed like
a video game, but after the smoke and heroics are blown away, there is a
terrible wound that the heart does not know how to heal. I knew that wound
in some of my uncles who were in the infantry during world war two. They
drank a lot.
Of course, the speed experience is not all exhilaration. There’s depletion
and exhaustion and paranoia. No amount of speed will move the weariness
out of bones that have been worked sore, and the business of dispensing
ammunition is terribly wearying. I like to shoot my daughter’s .44 magnum
lever-action gun, but it doesn’t have a cushion on the butt, and I’ve
never shot a whole box of 50 rounds at a time. My shoulder just gets too
sore. I’d hate to have to use that rifle in a war. They’d win just because
my shoulder would get sore. Speed might help.
This Shit Works!
I wonder if it’s just possible that the policy makers, munitions makers
and pharmaceutical makers might have realized how beneficial it would be
for them to encourage the use of a drug that makes people more productive,
less sensitive, more able to commit mayhem, less concerned with how they
feel about what they are doing. Alfred Nobel created dynamite, some
nameless chemist created speed. Who did the more powerful deed? Well,
certainly their inventions worked hand in hand to make the world a far
more detonated place.
Celebrity Cranksters, Celebrity Killers
Genies have a habit of getting out of the bottle, and the meth genie has
been out of the bottle for about seventy-plus years now, fueling an
expansion of manic energy that has probably resulted in the unnecessary
damming of rivers, cutting down of forests, annihilation of entire tribes,
species and ecosystems. And the toxic mentality has spread from the top
down. Both Adolf Hitler and John F. Kennedy had “Dr. Feelgoods” who
injected them with methamphetamine daily. Dr. Theodor Morell was Hitler’s
psychiatric physician and constant companion, just as Dr. Max Jacobson was
always present to serve as Kennedy’s pharmaceutical nursemaid. Both
doctors supplemented the stimulant regimen with downers to moderate the
manic effects of speed. It has been observed that Hitler’s mania for
annihilating the Jews developed in intensity during the period of Morell’s
influence.
Dirty Deeds, Done Dirt Cheap
Hitler’s allies, the Japanese, were also tweaking freely throughout the
second world war, as the Imperial government doled out speed to the
military and civilian populace alike, to keep up the “war effort.” The
Rape of Nanking, a horrific war crime perpetrated by Japanese soldiers
against no fewer than 369,366 Chinese men, women and children during
1937-38, was a murderous orgy that continued for months, during which the
Japanese troops raped no less than 80,000 women of all ages. Reliable
historical reports indicate that the Japanese killed many millions of
Chinese during the second world war, although this Sino-Japanese holocaust
has received little attention or commemoration. This type of lethal
productivity has the feel of a meth-fueled murder nightmare. The suicide
pilots of the Japanese air force were given amphetamines to overcome the
desire to survive. The Japanese reversed course on their people after the
war, made meth illegal in 1952, and arrested over 50,000 people. The
country still has a serious problem with intravenous methamphetamine
users, who comprise a large proportion of the 2 million meth users in the
land of the Rising Sun.
African Children Turned Into Killing Machines
Many of the approximately 100,000 children under arms in the world are
manipulated with amphetamines. For example, in Sierra Leone, Rwanda,
Burma, and other war-torn nations, children are taken captive, raped,
starved, brutalized, and then injected crudely with amphetamines, cocaine,
and other drugs, and directed to commit murderous rampages. A Washington
Post article by Douglas Farah, published April 8, 2000, quoted
international aid sources as follows: “In Sierra Leone, said social
workers and the child combatants, taking drugs-especially amphetamines and
cocaine-was a regular part of ‘military training.’ Human Rights Watch
found in a 1999 report that ‘child combatants armed with pistols, rifles
and machetes actively participated in killings and massacres, [and]
severed the arms of other children. . . . Often under the influence of
drugs, they were known and feared for their impetuosity, lack of control
and brutality.’”
American Children Turned Into Substance Abusers
That’s one way to get folks into drugs young, but we are more subtle in
the USA, and we use what is called “treatment.” Under the guise of
treating ADD and ADHD, two “diseases” that seem to afflict little boys who
eat junk food and watch a lot of TV, our little preschool punk rockers are
“treated” by school nurses who dole out speed from a jar. Of course, first
they started out using “methylphenidate,” aka Ritalin which supposedly
“wasn’t an amphetamine.” This label-switching was ordained by the pharma
marketing geniuses who started this project to turn kids into cranksters
back in the fifties, because the diet pill craze was winding down, and
amphetamines, bennies, white crosses, pink hearts, and black beauties had
all got a bit of a bad name at the courthouse and in popular literature.
The Rolling Stones helped break the bad news about diet pills in their
song, “Mother’s Little Helper,” with its pleading refrain “Doctor please,
some more of these!” and its jabbing rejoinder, “Outside the door, she
took four more!” But the pharma hacks are always good at finding another
use for powerful substances, and now, it turns out that Dextroamphetamine,
mixed with meth, in a formulation called “Adderall,” is even better than
silly old Ritalin. So what good is it to give speed to kids who are
speedy?
Thanks for asking. To answer, I must introduce the vaunted “paradoxical
effect” of amphetamines on children under some uncertain age. Marvelously,
the pharma hacks explain, speed slows down speedy kids! And you know, with
proper medical care and monitoring, maybe it is helpful in extreme cases.
But in the USA, what’s good can get force-fed down your throat, whether
you need it or not. Think lobotomies for excitable mental patients. The
same thing has happened to children. Researcher Nadine Lambert recently
presented data at the Consensus Development Conference indicating that
prescribed consumption of stimulants during childhood predisposed young
adults to cocaine abuse. This sort of obvious connection occurred to me
when I heard that one of my nephews, a longtime Ritalin-kid, was doing
hard time in the penitentiary because he couldn’t stop using meth. Soon,
some criminal defense attorneys are going to wake up and realize that when
the state gets you addicted to a controlled substance, that should be a
defense to criminal possession.
Houston, We Have A Problem!
Meth has crept into our lives very quietly, and will not leave easily. It
may very well explain the extreme bellicosity and hardheadedness of many
white American males, who develop a strong loyalty to the drug because of
its association with productivity, the work ethic, and a positive, can-do
attitude. There is a great false optimism that is brimming over among the
nation’s military leaders. We are going to export democracy, uproot
tyranny, and kill all the bad guys. With a little crank, it’s all in a
day’s work, because speed helps. On speed, we can do more. Somewhere
Hitler is smiling.
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