Feeling My Age

My first encounter with amphetamines was in 1973 when my friend H slipped me a small tablet which I stowed in my wallet for later investigation then promptly forgot. Two weeks later an ill-advised night on the town left me feeling like death at work next morning. Having crawled into the office at 9:29am I put in what felt like five hours’ gruelling work before realising it was still only 9:35. Another eight hours later the 10am tea trolley arrived – and then I remembered the little pill in my wallet. Washed it down with my morning cuppa and two minutes later it was lunchtime. Result!

The next was in the late 70s when a kindly private doctor prescribed me a particularly pure form of medicinal amphetamine  designed, he told me,  to help airpline pilots stay awake on longhaul flights. It was brilliant stuff – no gabbled speech, racing pulse or grinding teeth – in fact no noticeable side effects at all. You just stayed alert and awake for eight hours. Result!

With my thirties came a cocaine habit. Coke was pretty much the reverse of the Pilot Pills. All side effect and no noticeable benefit. Since so many people around me were doing it socially, we all kind of took it for granted that we were having fun. It was a buzz of course but bascially a waste of the little spare cash I had. After stopping in 1986, I’ve never felt the urge to take it again. A result of sorts…

But over the last three decades any pharmaceutical drug with even a hint of recreational possibilities has become minutely regulated. No doctor, however amenable, will risk getting struck off for the sake of helping a patient stay illicitly awake when tired. Now I have a freedom pass, keeping awake and focussed at work – or even when out in company – requires copious cups of high octane espresso plus more cans of Red Bull than can be good for anyone… And that’s no result at all.

Like most people who grew up in the 60s, I take a lot of drugs. It’s only when you chat with friends that you realise how many others are doing it. I wonder how much R&D cash at the pharmaceutical companies gets diverted from malaria and Aids these days into treatments for the acid reflux, insomnia and dodgy prostates of gents in the affluent West. That and trying to break Pfizer’s lucrative Viagra monopoly. A hard man is still good to find.

West End Central police station in Savile Row. In the late 60s some of the guys who turned up at the Priory had been habitutués of The Dilly – either as rent boys – or as purveyors and consumers of hash, acid, methedrine and heroin. Or both. In any case any teenager regularly loitering around Picadilly Circus was pretty much certain to end up sooner or later at West End Central. My friends reserved a particular fear and loathing for the building and its officers. Once inside you were utterly at their mercy which – by their account – was in short supply.

My late cousin with his family in the late sixties, looking cheeky, bright-eyed and full of promise. When he died in his early forties of an HIV-related illness his mother set up an award scheme in his memory at a London university. “Having had a drug problem in his early life, he devoted the last drug-free part of his life to helping addicts free themselves from their habits and stay drug free.” she wrote. “I want to enable his work to continue: this scholarship provides an opportunity for students accepted onto the course but who can’t afford to fund it themselves.”