Amphetamines, barbiturates, L.S.D. and cannabis : their use and misuse / [prepared by Sir Aubrey Lewis].
- Department of Health and Social Security
- Date:
- 1970
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Amphetamines, barbiturates, L.S.D. and cannabis : their use and misuse / [prepared by Sir Aubrey Lewis]. Source: Wellcome Collection.
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![amphetamine takers. Possibly some non-takers are so isolated that they are incapable of the necessary social competence to bring them to the clubs and bars where initiation occurs.”’ There may be gradations between the sporadic user, the weekend user and the regular user. Prevalence It is impossible to obtain an exact or even an approximate measure of the extent to which amphetamine is being taken for other than therapeutic reasons in a given community or country. For example it seems that there is considerable variation among university students for, whereas an Argentine inquiry elicited that more than one-third of the first-year students took the drug on specific occasions, and that half the final year students took it to help them study longer, in an American medical school 44 per cent of the students said they had taken the drug, but of these one-fifth had done so on only one occasion. Of course data drawn from a sample of drug addicted persons tell a different story; in three detention institutions of the Department of Correction of New York City 93 per cent of the 10 per cent who were drug users were taking heroin, but 20 percent of the women and 3 per cent of the men also took amphetamine. It is not even safe to calculate from prescriptions or medical case records the number of amphetamine-dependent persons who are receiving the drug from a doctor. Criteria of dependence are hard to apply. It was stated in the report of a Newcastle-upon-Tyne inquiry that the equivalent of 200,000 5-mg tablets were being prescribed per month, and that an unknown number of patients were also obtaining extra supplies. Rather more than 20 per cent of the patients who received amphetamine on prescription were judged by the doctors to be depen- dent on the drug; they had been taking it for long periods, they resisted its withdrawal, and they craved for it. In contrast to some other data, women preponderated among the amphetamine consumers. In this inquiry they amounted to 85 per cent of the patients receiving the drug on prescription. Dependence was found most often in the 36-45 age group. The commonest preparation prescribed was ““Drinamyl” (35 per cent), the next commonest was dexamphetamine (21 per cent). Japan and Sweden have had exceptionally disturbing experience with the misuse of amphetamines, especially with phenmetrazine and methylamphetamine. At the end of the Second World War large stocks of amphetamine were made available in Japan, the military authorities having no further use for them. They were increasingly used as stimulants and euphoriants, especially after 1948. Laws were passed (see below) in 1949, 1951, 1954, and 1955 to control sale and supply but, by 1954, over ten thousand people had been found guilty of offences under them. Slightly more than half of these offenders were considered to be addicts. Responsible estimates of the number of people in Japan taking amphetamine for non-therapeutic purposes varied between half a million and a million and a half. In one town, Kurume, with a population of 90,000, there were approximately a thousand addicts; in a high school with 500 pupils, 4 per cent were thought to be addicted. Two Osaka psychiatrists had, between them, seen 599 cases by whom methylamphetamine was being used non-therapeutically during the period 1949 to 1953. Another Japanese psychiatrist reported on 492 cases of methy]l- amphetamine psychosis. The majority of persons dependent on amphetamine](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b32175061_0016.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
