How did America's amphetamine problem become a political issue?
At the end of the 60's there is a political issue now that the pharmaceutical industry is producing all this Speed, there's a general kind of concern about drug abuse with the Heroin epidemic that appears to be growing. Of course the children of the middle class are experimenting with drugs and college campuses in the late 60's and drugs have become much more, not just a stigmatized outsider thing that was the urban poor's problem, it had become sort of our main stream problem in the US. So new drug control legislation was introduced at several points in the 60's. In three cases with the express intent of controlling amphetamines. All three times really failed to control pharmaceutical amphetamines. But the third try, the 1970 Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention Act had created the modern drug regulation framework with schedules, one for the most prohibited, Heroin, and LSD was put on it straightaway, down to the most harmless ones. Schedule two was for the most dangerous and strictly regulated substances that could still be prescribed by medicine. And the advocates for amphetamine control wanted to have amphetamines, methamphetamine and also methylphenidate, brand name Ritalin which was popular with certain injection abusers at the time; again, in blind tastings experienced users couldn't tell the difference.
