AMPHETAMINE

If you are still waking up from being hit on the head with a baseball bat by a speed freak -- congratulations! The blitzkrieg against our ease, led by Trump & Co, has a clear explanation: amphetamine. The nazis used the same drug to drive a world war, from which it took Germany decades to wake up. Amphetamine, invented, I'm sorry, by a Romanian chemist, Lazar Edeleanu, had the effect of instant optimism, propelling every thought, no matter how stupid, into action. Amphetamine gave wings to thought at a cost: compassion and feeling for others. Feeling like supermen, the speed freaks of the world freed their id on the powerless, the sick, and the poor. High on speed one births an optimistic inner Nietzsche Ubermensch, ready for war.

I know wherefrom I speak. At the end of the 1960s, the Summer of Love, fueled by marijuana and psychedelics, gave way to a Season of Hate, fueled by speed. The gentle and slow were bullied by fast and violent criminals. Bicycles and car stereos were ripped from chains and cars on the battlegrounds of the streets. There were guns and murders. The body politic followed the street: the police tear-gassed and murdered peaceful demonstrators against war. That was the first triumph of amphetamine in America. Class-distinct varieties followed: cocaine for the rich, dexedrine for the middle class, home-cooked speed for the poor. Supermen, and they were mostly men, found victims everywhere, especially women. This is where, in the 90s, you will find Trump and Epstein feeding their demented appetites at the vast Studio 54 of the millennium’s end.

Normalized by ADD and ADHD diagnoses, everyone in America, from school children to professionals, found their "best" self in an Ayn Rand world of greed and competition. If I mentioned "thought" before, forget it: like compassion, "thought" was discarded by most people. Where it survived, it was technically helped by amphetamine to invent the internet, a utopia that was a beloved sheep at first, before it revealed itself as a wolf. True believers mixed psychedelics with speed, and fooled themselves for a time, like my friend John Perry Barlow, founder of the Electronic Frontiers Foundation, who envisioned an equitable borderless world of shared information. That didn't happen: the libertarian Right seized that utopia and stripped it of the "weakness" of compassion. The drug that enabled the killing machine of the Third Reich was once again the winner.

All utopias lead to fascism. America itself, sorry to say, is the victim of compulsory optimism. You must look for happiness! Good luck! The illusion of amphetamine-fueled omnipotence did eventually find its perfect expression in trumpism. If you are just now waking up from the blows to the head we suffered in the last few years and months, be ready for a fight.

For the ubiquity of drugs in the first decade of the 21st century, see my 2008 survey below.

Taking the 'High' Road

April 18, 2008 All Things Considered

The entire population of the U.S., with the possible exception of Tom Cruise, is on drugs. Like everything else in American life that used to be optional, like cars, cell phones, computers, GPS, IDs, drugs are no longer an indulgence. They are a part of our body, the brain regulators.

Capitalism triumphed over our bodies not over any ideologies. The chief U.S. problem in the world is the soon-to-be-remedied fact that most foreigners are not on drugs yet. This will change as national states wither.

Our military objectives have been achieved, there is a bumper opium crop in Afghanistan, the Saudis will be in rehab as soon as they run out of oil, and Eastern Europe will turn into Las Vegas. This is Utopia, and it didn't take eons to get there. We are there. Earth to Karl Marx, the state withers under capitalism not socialism. It is your oxycodone happy script.