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the 1969 event when the Rolling Stones hired Hells Angels as security guards. The bikies, revved up on speed, let loose their contempt for spaced-out hippies and attacked some of the musicians from the Jefferson Airplane before murdering an eighteen-year-old man, Meredith Hunter, while the Stones were playing ‘Under My Thumb’. (Hunter, it has to be said, drew a gun on the bouncers and was believed to have been high on methamphetamine himself.)
    American law enforcement was already responding. The 1965 Drug Abuse Control Act restricted access to amphetamines, and the Drug Abuse Regulation and Control Act (the so-called Controlled Substances Act ) five years later established five different ‘schedules’ classifying drugs according to their harmfulness and appropriate use. Schedule I substances—illegal drugs with no medicinal value—were deemed the hardest, while Schedule V drugs were the least controlled. Heroin and mescaline were among the Schedule I drugs. Amphetamines, along with cocaine and codeine, fell into Schedule II, defined as dangerous drugs that did have medicinal value but only under prescribed guidelines. By this stage, more than 12 billion amphetamine-containing pills were produced legally in America each year. Their wholesale cost was as little as 75 cents per thousand tablets.
    Under the 1970 Act, injectable liquid methamphetamine was virtually prohibited. Like previous prohibitions, this gave rise to underground improvisation, with bikie-backed labs springing up in northern California to produce P2P, or phenyl-2-propanone, an easily cooked methamphetamine variant. Now that amphetamines were restricted in pharmacies, over-the-counter cold medications containing ephedrine were bought in large amounts and cooked with other ingredients to produce street speed, an altogether more toxic and harmful substance.
    Australian amphetamine use up to the 1990s might be best described as a weak echo of what was happening in America. Truck drivers, students and some returned servicemen were, in small numbers, the amphetamine-using subcultures, while doctors also prescribed the drug for obesity, depression and attention disorders. A recreational drug subculture sprang up in the 1960s but, as in America, speed bore the stigma of a cheap, bikie-favoured pill.
    Dr Nicolas Rasmussen, a University of NSW academic who has written about the history of amphetamines, says that there was a ‘quiet epidemic’ of amphetamine use here in the late 1960s and early 1970s. ‘As early as 1967, the Medical Journal of Australia had reported on addiction to stimulants prescribed under the brand names Methedrine and Desoxyn,’ he says. ‘Doctors who had been prescribing it were seeing addiction and psychosis.’
    In 1971, Australia and the United States were signatories to the United Nations Convention on Psychotropics, which led to a crackdown on amphetamines. The signatory nations enacted laws to regulate the sale of the drug by ‘scheduling’ it, making it available only under strict medical conditions. In the signatory countries, however, Dr Rasmussen says that ‘scheduling created the market’ for criminal manufacturers. Overall amphetamine use in the population fell, but a new black market was born.
    The rise of cocaine in the 1980s—again, nowhere near as prevalent in Australia as in the United States—did have a rejuvenating effect on amphetamine use, if only as a by-product. Cocaine was mostly snorted off a flat shiny surface, often a mirror, via a straw, metal tube or rolled-up paper money. Dealers of speed, the old unglamorous pill, captured some of cocaine’s reflected glory by grinding it up and selling it as a powder. If you could not afford cocaine, speed was about a quarter of the price and produced a rough copy of the effect.
    On the other hand, the marketing of speed in powder form only entrenched the ‘brand’ differentiation between the two