The Speed of Hypocrisy: How America Got Hooked on Legal Meth

[n2doc]

A terrible number of words have been written about Breaking Bad, yet none have struck upon the irony at its core. For all of the cult hit’s vaunted fine-brush realism and sly cultural references, the show never even winked at the real world “blue” that grew up alongside it.

During the five years Heisenberg spent as a blue-meth cook, the nation experienced a nonfictional explosion in the manufacture and sale of sapphire pills and azure capsules containing amphetamine. This other “blue,” known by its trade names Adderall and Vyvanse, found its biggest market in classrooms like Walter White’s. As this blue speed is made and sold in anodyne corporate environments, the drama understandably focused on blue meth and its buyers, usually depicted as jittery tweakers picking at lesions and wearing rags on loan from the cannibal gangs of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.

For presenting such a compelling one-sided cartoon of speed in America, Breaking Bad deserves recognition as a modern day Reefer Madness. That 1937 film immortalized the selective attentions of the first drug war, in which hysteria was stoked over Mexican marijuana but nothing was said about that era’s brisk drugstore trade in Benzedrine, the patented speed of the Great Depression.

To understand why the “edgy” AMC drama fits so snug in the Reefer Madness mold, it helps to see the show from the perspective of pharmaceutical executives, whom I suspect held some rowdy Breaking Bad viewing parties.

Because here’s the thing about hide-the-children caricatures of street speed and the class stigmas they weave: Without them, the needle starts to skip on pharma’s marketing lullabies about the safety and expanding therapeutic application of their purer product. Take away Goofus and Gallant-style contrasts between backwoods Crank Zombies and suburban Adderall Aspirationals, and suddenly we’re having some very awkward conversations about the periodic table, addiction, and the experience of getting high.

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http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-speed-of-hypocrisy-how-america-got-hooked-on-legal-meth

[bemildred]

1. The most addictive stuff there is, after nicotine.

But not attractive to everyone.

One time in the 70s I snorted some crank. At that time, I was working in a sawmill pulling wet lumber off a conveyer thing called a "green chain", weight up to 400 lbs or so moved on rollers, the smaller stuff you had to pick up. Anyway, it was like the first Star Wars movie, when the stars go all mushy into hyperdrive? Like that. I thought I was going to pull all of the wood myself. Took most of a day to slow down, and that felt bad, but I was still not tempted to try it again. You burn out. We had a bunch of bands flame out using crank back in the 70s, it was a matter of a couple years, two three albums and done.

But yeah, they've been selling it legal right along, despite all the blather about the illegal pushers, and most of the world thinks we are a little nuts about drugs.

And then there is Paul Erdos, a prolific mathematician, and his crank habit:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Erd%C5%91s

[Stuart G]

2. Speed is extremely dangerous

Big Pharma is no better than the Cigarette Pushers. So many examples of this. This is one of many. If there is money to be made in a pill, they will sell it at as high a price as possible. More is always better and there are so many supporters who are fake doctors, like the cigarette companies and lead gas industries paraded for all to hear and listened to.