TweakLand

Through the years I've seen several people fall to amphetamine addiction, including friends and a family member.  The intent here is not to condone, nor condemn, amphetamines, but to consider a subject that I'm all too familiar with.

According to reliable sources, Hitler used amphetamines daily, his personal physician giving him a couple of injections daily while Adolph supplemented these with pills.  A drug called Pervatin, which is chemically similar to methamphetamine, was used by German troops during WWII.  Knowing this as a person watches films of Hitler's speeches provides a different insight for the viewer as it becomes apparent that there's much more at work in the man's mind than just fanaticism.

The professional manual used to diagnose mental illnesses lists amphetamine psychosis, describing symptoms very similar to paranoid schizophrenia, delusions, hallucinations and such.  My interest in amphetamines is due, partially, to personal experiences, including a close relative who fell to the addiction.  While in school during the early Eighties I visited my beloved relative who had returned from yet another attempt to treat his affliction.  Although he initially denied it, his demeanor clearly  exhibited the traits associated with amphetamine.  Finally he looked at me and said, “I just don't feel whole without it.”  Therein lies the heart of many addictions as we consider the changes in brain chemistry that typically accompany drug abuse.

Although it didn't culminate in addiction, I experimented with, and used, ampetamines during the course of my  youth.  Beginning in the early 70's, while an adolescent, I would abuse the benzedrine tablets popular with truckers, bikers and some counterculture folk, such as myself.  My older brother had been convicted of possession of less than an ounce of marijuana.  Before beginning his sentence he had asked friends to look out for my welfare during his absence.  Looking after someone's welfare is subjective enough to allow many ideas to enter the minds of well-meaning folk.  At the time I didn't share the inclination of my brother's friends to prepare the tablets before injecting them.  Instead I would either inhale them through my nasal passages, or simply swallow the small tablets commonly referred to as bennies, crosstops, or whites.

The town we lived in was a small timber-dependent community nestled in the foothills of Oregon's Coast Range.  The majority of the town's residents there didn't appreciate counterculture values and lifestyles that seemed to be drifting north from San Francisco. My brother's friends and I, on the other hand, warmly embraced hippie ideals and – being close to the Interstate Five corridor – had little trouble acquiring the substances associated with this new lifestyle.

The era of the muscle cars was in full swing – especially in our little timber town where most nights the main drag hosted a bunch of young guys trying to impress young women and everybody else.  One of my brother's friends was a one-eyed fellow who had lost the eye while working on a car.  A wrench had fallen onto the running vehicle's fan, throwing it back up into his eye.  Like many of the folk around there, the man worked for a lumber mill making what was then a good wage.  He owned a 1965 Pontiac GTO sporting the enhanced performance common of the time.  A regular group of us would snort, ingest and inject a few ot the ten cent whites that we bought by the thousand (a “jar”) for $100.00, then take off in the GTO for an all night road trip that usually included more amphetamine and certainly plenty of marijuana. 

A fellow from a town closer to the coast that was really more like a logging camp would usually accompany us.  He had this wild head of long dark loose curls that framed a friendly face normally sporting a couple days worth of stubbly beard.  His teeth were a haphazard mess that must have been aggravated by all the stressed tooth grinding typically associated with amphetamine abuse.  Having no normal appetite after constantly injecting whites, the man was thin very thin, exhibiting stereotypical traits most people associate with hillbillies:  jeans with holes, grubby white t-shirts, old boots and a battered hall cap with some chainsaw logo on it.  Despite his shortcomings the fellow was about as amiable as a person might be with a hillbilly heart of gold.  He always spoke in that calm, quiet, slow way country people tend toward, seldom criticizing anyone other than himself.  Like many of the people in our group, he died young.

Between our mill town and the college town a half dozen miles east fifty-third street ran a couple of miles north and south.  By today's standards it might have been considered rural with a couple of mills and farm fields along the way.  A railroad trestle ran over fifty-third, undoubtedly the bane of taller vehicles, but for us it was good sport.  Heading north the road was flat, then dipped underneath the trestle with a slightly lower continuation on the north side.  At around 80 or 90 mph the GTO would launch off the south side, then land past the trestle and the support beams that stood on the white line.  Through the years we made that jump many times, only once coming too close to the supports that, if hit. would have certainly killed us all.

There were typically five of us in the vehicle – a couple in the bucket seats up front and three on the bench seat in the back.  We'd crush whites into a fine powder at One-eye's house, throw some beer, marijuana and some more whites into the GTO, then head out for a night of amphetamine fueled hot-rodding, often making the jump on fifty-third.  A young woman frequently sat between two guys in the back seat.  Forty-odd years later I still remember her lovely face and the deep sorrow in her eyes and voice.  At about thirteen the raging torrent of hormones that would torment me later had not been produced or released yet.  Sometimes the sad gird, who was about twenty, would fall asleep if the run had been long, we were short of whites, or the alcohol and weed overwhelmed the stimulant.  Feeling her head resting on my shoulder I'd watch the night race by, feeling some kind of peaceful contentment that may have been  something that, somehow, replaced a child's relationship with mother.  There was nothing sexual, just the warmth of touch and a sensuous serenity that filled my mind with the calmness the sea sometimes instills in us.  The sleeping girl was always especially kind to me during her waking hours; almost nurturing.

Through the years I've thought about drug abuse a great deal, considering motives and outcomes.  In the back of my mind I can still hear the hammering Led Zeppelin, or Black Sabbath beats pounding too loudly inside the GTO.  I still wonder what it was that troubled the sad girl and wish I knew her later story.  It's almost cliche to say that people use drugs to escape, but it's kind of true if one believes what I do: that people use drugs so they don't care anymore.  Of course, nothing is ever that simple as the motivations for drug use are probably nearly as varied as the individuals using them.  Perhaps the only difference between Hillbilly and myself is that I somehow needed to care.

Watching the destruction of the family member I mentioned earlier, I developed a keen interest in amphetamine, keeping a scrap book filled with articles about the drug and what it does to society.  Many of the most horrific crimes we hear of are a result of amphetamine psychosis.  There was the Halloween killer in Southern Oregon who stabbed people to death in a bloody fit of madness, then the young boy who watched a man beat his father to death with a golf club before nearly killing the boy too.  But it was Tesslynn O'Cull's story that touched me most deeply http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCC7yK4ymYw  And that's the most troubling thing about amphetamine, it can kill the souls of  abusers.

Hillbilly kept falling deeper into the morass.  The last time I saw him he was sitting between piles of trash in the living room of a house that should have been condemned; a deranged look on his face as he fired a 22 rifle at rats that had come to snack on the refuse.  Sadly, this was after he helped destroy a family that really didn't know what hit it.

Back in those days the social networks of people into drugs included places where we'd congregate.  A nice family in the college town east of Millville became one of those places after the mother put on some weight before asking Hillbilly to get her some amphetamine to control it.  The husband worked in a union plywood mill making enough money to fully support his family, buy a house, new car – all the while allowing his wife the freedom to be a stay-at-home mother.

Hillbilly supplied the woman with the whites that helped her lose the weight, but she, like Hillbilly, was one of the people who become addicted to at least some substances.  Before too long Hillbilly was coming over more regularly, then a friend or two of his showed up not too long before the nice little house on the nice little street began hosting a seriously dysfunctional family.  The husband worked nights, coming home to find his home invaded by degenerates – myself included – doing the DecaDance.  A lot of weed began burning in the house and it was considered cute when the little girl would emulate her mother and her company, taking a hit off one of the perpetually circulating joints circling the living room.  She'd cough and the DecaDancers would laugh at the adorable little girl taking a hit.  Before the end of the family Hillbilly was sleeping in the woman's bed with her while the husband worked.  The woman became emaciated and her once lovely child became troubled – perhaps because of the new circumstances around her, or perhaps because living in a cloud of smoke isn't too good for kids.  The marriage ended and Hillbilly became a rat hunter.  Years later I ran into the woman at a horse stable.  The scars of that period of her life remained plainly visible and one could hear the sound of remorse as an undertone of her words.

It's kind of nice to not care about anything; certainly more comfortable than the concerns we'd rather escape.  But there's a reason we tend to care about things, as it's very important that we do.

Years later, living along the North Coast, a neighbor was among those who fell to amphetamine.  One night he came to my door at about four in the morning, asking me if I could hear the people hiding in the shrubbery.  He had a gun and a handful of assorted cartridges.  After being awake for much too long, he couldn't figure out which bullets fit the gun.  As it happened there were only a couple that did, which I slipped into a pocket while he was distracted, giving him back the gun and the other cartridges.  The next day my other neighbors and I were sitting out on the porch enjoying a nice day when the gunslinger's significant other ran a bath.  The bathroom window was open, so we could plainly hear the  argument begin after she'd climbed into her bath.  Things escalated as their tired neurons misfired after too long without sleep.  Pretty soon he ducked her head under the water in the tub, the woman still  loudly criticizing her significant other.  He'd let her up for a few breaths, then duck her again as she continud her complaints.  Pretty soon she came up saying, “This is fucked up; you're trying to drown me and those fucking neighbors just sit there drinking beer and laughing!”  Of course, if we'd really believed she was in any serious danger, we'd have intervened, but those two arguing was about par for the course.

I haven't seen or heard from my relative for more than two decades.  The last I heard his spine had failed after years of substance assault and he was homeless, in a wheelchair where he kept a forty ounce beer on the seat beside himself.  Sometimes I tell myself that I don't care, but I do.  I care about my relative, the family, Tesslynn O'Cull and all of the people trying not to care.  While it's true that my experimentation with drug left me relatively unscathed, it could easily have gone another way.  Addiction is a spirit that descends in us during some of our most vulnerable moments, wreaking havoc on everything in and around us.  Granted, one person can take a few hits on occasion and function quite well, but others fall, often far too far to return.  If I decide to follow this up with the strange surreal story of Seaside, you may be able to read about the demon that is addiction and the hell it pushes some of us into before it kills us.  The thing that glares out of the Seaside experiences is what is most certainly true: there are things that we don't know or understand in this world.

It's better to care.