Speed is pretty good at keeping people awake for days on end. It also kicks their cognitive functioning up a tick so they can get a bunch of work done and do more drugs. It’s not a total shocker then, that speed has been inside a lot of people at a lot of big moments in history. In Mick Farren’s new book, Speed-Speed-Speekfreak: A Fast History of Amphetamine, he connects amphetamine to everything from World War II to JFK to the Beatles to Hell’s Angels to the AIDS epidemic.
Recently, the drug has been in the news thanks to the extradition of the Amphetamine Queen from Colombia, and the depressingly fucked-up statistic floated by UK child psychologists that “prescriptions for amphetamines for children have increased nearly 120 fold from 1994 to 2009.”
We caught up with Mick who, in addition to being a writer of books about speed, is also a British underground publishing champion, former singer of The Deviants, and an occasional Motorhead lyricist.
Speed-Speed-Speedfreak functions as a history of speed as well as a history of the 20th century, in that you draw a lot of parallels between the drug and global events. Do you think we can chalk these events up as results of the drugs, or is that answer too simple?
It is too simple of an answer. What was it that Burroughs said? “It’s not the horse, it’s the pale rider.” From Revelation. Nobody twisted anybody’s arm to do it. Like you said, it’s an analogue of the 20th century. It’s a version of live now, pay later. Deficit spending. Kill ‘em all, let God sort it out. It is a very absolutist chemical. In a way, it is a psycho-chemical history of the 20th century.
Why do you think speed is so tied up in the history of the last hundred years?
In many respects, speed is the antithesis of the Puritan work ethic. You work, you save your money, and eventually you have enough to buy a Model T Ford and you pay cash. That was sort of Victorian. The prevailing mentality of the 20th century was “we want the world and we want it now.” And that is a way of getting it. If nothing else, the 20th century was incredibly angry. It started in Europe in World War I–a war that broke out simply because of interlocking diplomacy and keeping to the military trained tables of the Hapsburg Empire. Speed was invented and nobody knew what to do with it. It has been wandering around as a temptation, as a demon, ever since. What it does is give the youth a faux energy and an initial sense of omnipotence, both of which have matched very well with the kind of music we’ve been making and the kind of wars we’ve been having. That’s really why speed syncs into the whole narrative thread of the 20th century.
You say in the book that speed was massively promoted and consumed at certain times. World War II is probably the best example, but it was also big during economic booms and at many other times. Now amphetamines have moved very down-market, can you envision a time when they might have a resurgence and be socially acceptable again?
I don’t know. We haven’t yet seen the aftermath of a lot of things that are going on at the moment. There are all sorts of fancy pills being handed out in Afghanistan and Iraq and God knows where else next. And I’m only talking about the Brits and the Americans. As far as this country is concerned, our perception of how much crystal meth is being consumed in Middle America is almost entirely dependent on the sensationalism of CBS News. And when that ceases to be a news story and the DEA isn’t pumping it, saying look how clever we are, it tends to die down. Whether it has actually died down I would very much doubt.
We have to remember that all these kinds of things are cyclical. All drugs have a half-life. I moved to New York in the 1980s and lived around the corner from a dive bar called the Dutchess. I had one of those entrances with the double doors where you can get in the front one and then the lock is on the inside door. It was a warm place where you could smoke a rock. On Sunday mornings I’d come out to get a cup of coffee and the New York Times and the sidewalk was crunchy from vials. Then that kind of went away. Some people die, some people go home to mother, some people give it up and say, “Fuck this shit. I can’t do it anymore.” But that doesn’t mean it never comes back. It also doesn’t mean it won’t come back in a particular form. At the moment what we’re dealing with is Mexican crystal. There’s plenty of people wandering around on Sunset Boulevard who prove the shit we have at the moment is really… I tried some once, I’d never do it again because it kept me awake for three and a half days.
How did that stuff compare to the speed you took when you were younger?
When I was a serious young Who fan and in The Deviants, the pills we’d take would keep you up all night, but a couple of Valium or a couple stiff shots of whiskey and you’d get some sleep. We’re not asking ourselves what will happen with these new things emerging now. There’s already been a couple of friendly fire incidents. A particularly notable British incident where some aircrew bombed a target and they all turned out to be high on—I forget the exact name of it—but it was some kind of new twist on the molecule. Some kind of amphetamine-based drug.
I think it was the one that was originally developed as a treatment for narcolepsy and then applied elsewhere by the military.
Right, so that sort of thing is still happening in Afghanistan. And what’s happening in Moscow? I have four books out right now in Russian and it seems like the former Soviet Union is having 1967 and 1977 simultaneously as they play culture catch-up. So what’s going on there? Through Doc40 I’ve become friendly with a bunch of people from the internet, and I know young Indians who are working the customer service mills in Bangalore. They’re also discovering Jimi Hendrix, The Clash, and Jean-Luc Godard, so India may be the next fucking meta-dream freak-out for all we know. That’s the way it happens. Previously the whole post-World War II freak craze was in the U.S., it was in Britain, it was in Japan, and these were the people handing out the great quantities of bennies to their soldiers and aircrew. So it’s hard to guess what will happen. Culturally, various parts of the world move at somewhat different speeds.
In the book you also touch on the Mexican cartels and what’s happening right now with the drug war.
Here in California it looks like terminal social breakdown totally created by the war on drugs. It’s as if prohibition had gone on until 1952 and the mob got all the money. Now the drug cartels have a paramilitary force almost equal to the government.
What effect do you think a dramatic shift in the drug policies of the U.S. would have on the Mexican cartels? How dramatic would that shift have to be?
Immediate blanket legalization would stop the whole thing dead in its tracks. Obviously there would be problems in the aftermath. If you make a pie chart of an illegal drug, something like 70 to 80 percent of the purchase price is risk factor payment. It’s the risk of getting busted. The manufacturing cost of anything from heroin to marijuana is, at the most generous, a low teen percentage. Distribution is another low teen percentage. The rest of the cost is based entirely on what the market will stand and the reward for taking that legal risk. If you remove that huge chunk of the economics of drug distribution—boom—then there is no reason to do it any longer. You’ve cut everything out from under the producers.
Without profit there’s no more motivation.
It’s a very odd thing, but if you check every major marijuana growing country, with the exception of northern California, you’ve got total chaos. Pakistan is a mess, Afghanistan is a mess, Nepal is only hanging on because of its isolation. Lebanon is a mess, Colombia is a mess. There are huge amounts of money in the hands of criminals who may also be political opponents of their government at the moment. Everything is weighted towards a complete social breakdown. All the anti-drug propaganda becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, which could be stopped overnight with legalization.
How do you think the propaganda tactics of the Montana Meth Project play in the minds of the kids who see it?
It gives them an identity. It gives them a reason to walk around in tight jeans or baggy jeans or whatever is popular at the time. It doesn’t give them hope in a hopeless situation, but it does give them an identity in a hopeless situation. It gives them an identity from being nothing, from being people that nobody fucking wants. There’s no auto industry for them to work in, there’s not even agricultural jobs anymore because it is almost entirely automated. They go from being surplus to humanity to being speed freaks, hooray! We’ve got an identity. The whole Montana Meth Project is a walking advert for punk rock. Get yourself a mohawk and tattoos and at least you’re something.
Right, being on the coasts is one thing, but if you’re a kid in Middle America, what is offered to you?
Absolutely fuck all nothing at the moment, apart from, possibly, Jesus. And unless you’re really smart and devious then that route has no economic basis. Whereas the speed network in one of those small, flat, rural towns where there is absolutely nothing going on produces a false social milieu in which kids can at least feel they’re doing something by rebelling. They want to do what is being promoted as the worst thing in the world.
Their identity comes from their connection to a community based on rebellion.
Also, it produces a self-sustaining, though not permanent, micro-economy. It can’t survive.
Do you see any progress being made in drug policy? Is the Obama administration putting a halt on DEA raids of dispensaries a sign that there is a shift happening?
In California we had Proposition 19, which is basically legalization with the weird exception that we legalize small amounts of marijuana, but those small amounts come out of large amounts that remain criminalized. So what do you do when large amounts are still criminalized? It remains illegal to possess until it goes to the medical marijuana store, and then it becomes legal. This is an irrational project which is just bullshit. I’m guessing, maybe optimistically, that legalization will eventually happen. Then all kinds of weird shit will happen. The growers up in Humboldt are extremely against legalization, because they know their profit goes out the window. So they’re tacitly working against it, because who knows what will happen to their business after it’s legalized?
Philip Morris or something similar will come in.
Right, Anheuser Busch or someone will come in and take the whole thing over. The Obama administration is doing what it has done on practically every issue, show up a dollar short and three days late. That’s just speaking about marijuana, and I think the arguments are over about that.
What about illicit amphetamines?
Well, that goes back to what we were saying about Mexican cartels, if legalization happened, then they would be immediately turned into multi-national pharmaceutical corporations. Ask me which one I would prefer and I really don’t know.
It’s hard to picture that shift into legitimacy, but it makes some sense if they already have the means of production locked down.
There is a fuck of a lot of money being invested in drug enforcement. It is an industry. It doesn’t want to be out of business, but it has outlived its usefulness. Speed is a great example, every time there is a major move to change things, to eradicate the scourge of our youth, it just gets worse! In the 30s it was Smith, Kline, & French making it, and when they stopped producing the pills the Hell’s Angels took over. They ran their mom and pop Hell’s Angels-style quality control, and after that was stamped out the field was open for the Ochoa brothers who had almost no quality control. There is always somebody waiting in the wings to do the business of the people who the DEA has just thrown in jail. Unfortunately, often times the people waiting in the wings are much worse and much more ruthless than the ones who were doing it previously.
EZRA MORRIS
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