Amphetamines fall into two broad categories: CNS stimulants, and hallucinogens. For those of you who are into alphabet soups, CNS stands for Central Nervous System. (Aren’t you glad you asked?). The hallucinogens are all Schedule I, having no medical use. Amphetamine and Methamphetamine are both Schedule II’s. This short treatise will deal mainly with methamphetamine.
Amphetamine and methamphetamine are usually found as sulfate salts. The free bases of both of them are not suitable for ingestion. Further, both amphetamine and “meth” (aka speed, crank and too many other argot terms to list) contain in their structure an “asymmetric carbon”, which is a carbon atom bonded to four different substituents (sorry you asked?). This results in two distinct compounds, different in their ability to rotate polarized light (so what) and profound differences in their effects on the human body (very important). Depending on the synthetic procedure used to prepare them, the final product will be the right hand product (designated by the prefix dextro), or the left handed (levo) form. Or a mixture of the two; chemists refer to this as a racemic mixture. In the case of amphetamines, the dextro form is CNS active, while the levo form is, for the most part, inactive.
These compounds have effects similar to cocaine, which is to say, they’re CNS stimulants. Their popularity stems from their ease of manufacture. You don’t have to import them from South America, but you can easily synthesize them from readily available chemicals, with rudimentary equipment found in your local Lowes or Home Depot. No laboratory is needed; folks make meth in motel bathrooms. No, I’m not about to tell you how to make meth. You can get recipes on the Internet. The only pitfalls involve safety, which most stoneheads could care less about anyway.
During my career with DEA, numerous attempts were made to track shipments of precursor chemicals to lead agents to clandestine labs. Cold and sinus remedies containing drugs like ephedrine and pseudoephedrine, for example, can easily be coverted to meth if you have a recipe (again, readily found on the Web). The stuff is so easily synthesized in small batches that enforcement often seems like a Whack-a-Mole proposition. Words on a T-shirt I have probably sums it up best: Chemistry is like cooking….Just don’t lick the spoon.
You can feel on top of the world, so to speak, without need of sleep – until you don’t. Long distance truckers used them to drive for days at a time. Unfortunately, many got into serious, often fatal, crashes following an encounter with a hallucination. Was Adolf Hitler a user? We can never know for sure, but the Nazi German military supplied amphetamines to the Wehrmacht (we probably did, too, to our own troops).
As an old saying goes, there’s no such thing as a free lunch. Meth chronic users suffer numerous serious health conditions, usually caused by neglect of nutrition, personal hygiene and eventually mental stability. In short, speed kills.
Rogernarc 