Amphetamine Kicks

"I was involved in a lot of burglaries," the pretty blonde told Kansas City police, "and I couldn't have done it without a shot. When you're on that stuff, you just don't care. I was even a prostitute for three months." The "stuff," explained Sharon Pollard, 21, and now in jail for smuggling a revolver to her jailed boy friend and partner in crime, comes from a 75-c- inhaler intended only for clearing stuffy noses. But if its active chemical ingredient, amphetamine, is dissolved and injected into a vein, it packs a wallop. Last week the abuse of amphetamine was growing so fast that it had the Kansas City police, Missouri legislators, federal officials, even the U.S. Congress seriously concerned.

Society's troubles with amphetamine go back almost 20 years to a time when the most popular inhaler contained Benzedrine (Smith, Kline, & French Laboratories' trade name for one form of amphetamine). Prison wardens complained that accordion-pleated paper fillers loaded with 250 mg. of amphetamine (15 times the average daily dose a doctor would prescribe for reducing or lethargic patients) were being smuggled to convicts, who chewed them and went on violent rampages. Then S.K.F. chemists found a better decongestant, propylhexedrine (not an amphetamine or a stimulant), to put in inhalers, and changed the name to Benze-drex. The problem died down until five years ago, when St. Louis' Pfeiffer Co. began marketing a 200-mg. inhaler called Valo, once again containing amphetamine. It sold well, and the old problem of misuse soon recurred.

Hypos & Photos. The current Missouri flurry got its impetus two football seasons ago, when eight Kansas City high-school students piled into two jalopies and roared off to see a game in Oklahoma City. Local teen-agers showed them how to extract the amphetamine from a Valo inhaler and inject it with a hypodermic needle. (Oldfashioned ways of getting the kick by chewing the cartridge or drinking beer in which it had been swished around were no longer popular, because Pfeiffer had added a bitter, nauseating chemical.) The venturesome eight had a ball -and spread the craze back home.

Each week, recently, at least ten users of amphetamine for kicks have been questioned at Kansas City police headquarters. Virtually all, says Lieut. John Flavin of the narcotics bureau, have admitted robberies, holdups and muggings, committed while they were hopped up. Adds Flavin: "There are at least 200 known users in the city, and at least twice as many that we don't know about. The men range from 18 up, with most in their early 20s. The women are mainly from 14 to 25. They come from the most expensive neighborhoods and the poorest, and some are in the city's best high schools."

In one case Flavin had the best selfincriminating evidence imaginable. Gary A. Hamilton, 22, ordered tea at a drugstore lunch counter, poured the hot water into an inhaler, and while still in the store went into an automatic photo booth and took six pictures of himself injecting the soup into his arm. Why the pictures? Said Hamilton: to impress his friends, and also to show them the technique. Sentence: 60 days.

Prescription & Records. With Valo sales running 1,000 a week above normal, thanks to the kick trade, the city council has already banned their sale without prescription in Kansas City. When the ban was proved unenforceable, Missouri's Thomas C. Hennings Jr. introduced a bill in the U.S. Senate to put sales of amphetamine inhalers on prescription only,* require druggists to keep records of sales. Now the Food and Drug Administration has decided to issue an order, under its present legal powers, to accomplish the same result. As for the Pfeiffer Co., it has resolved to drop amphetamine and, like S.K.F., put a nonstimulating product in its inhalers.

* As amphetamines to be taken internally already are.

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