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York City's Park Avenue in the fifties. The Swedes are convinced
that they have today the worst amphetamine problem of any country
on earth - and they are almost certainly right.
The outcome of Swedish efforts to suppress amphetamine misuse
between 1942 and 1970 can now be objectively evaluated. Prior to
the repression, 240,000 Swedes received amphetamines legally on
prescription from their physicians and used them occasionally and
sensibly to help meet the minor crises of life - chiefly overtime
work and feeling out of sorts or depressed. This occasional legal
use of amphetamines has now ended. Yet the "abusers" - 200 in
1944 - had by 1970 become an army estimated at more than 10,000 -
and many had become mainlining speed freaks. The question inevitably
arises whether Sweden might not have been wiser in 1944 to try,
quietly and without publicity or publicized warnings, to reduce the
number of its "serious" misusers from 200 to 150 or perhaps even
100, rather than trying to "stamp out amphetamine abuse."
One more parallel between the Swedish and American experience -
and between heroin and the amphetamines - deserves mention. Because
the United States has by far the largest heroin problem on earth,
Americans also have the greatest number of heroin experts; at
meetings of the United Nations, the World Health Organization, and
other international agencies, the United States urges other
countries to follow its lead in repressing the traffic in heroin.
Other countries, looking at the results in the United States,
are naturally loath to comply. The same is true of Sweden and
the amphetamines. Through the years Swedish delegates to
international conferences have urged that other countries also
launch nationwide drives against the amphetamines, place them
under the same controls as heroin and morphine, and curb
international smuggling. Since the Swedish experts have had the
longest and most extensive experience with amphetamine abuse,
they consider themselves the best-informed experts. Other
countries, however, have proved understandably reluctant to set
off down the path that, beginning as early as 1944, led Sweden
to its current amphetamine situation.
But if the facts are as here presented, what of the story,
circulated in the United States for several years, that the
Swedes have been tolerant of the amphetamines, have given them
away free to addicts, and are suffering an amphetamine disaster
as a direct result of this toleration?
The facts are quite simple and uncontroversial. In 1965, after
Sweden had exhausted all repressive approaches to the
amphetamines and amphetamine substitutes, a group of physicians
applied for permission to supply modest numbers of amphetamine
users with amphetamines as a research project. Permission was
granted, subject to the condition that no physician supply more
than 10 users. Two physicians exceeded the limit, so that as many
as 250 or 300 users may have been supplied with amphetamines in
the course of the project - 250 or 300 out of an estimated 10,000
amphetamine abusers at the time the project was launched. The
project gave added reason to conclude that an amphetamine
maintenance program has little or nothing to recommend it, and
it was abandoned after two years.
Thus, Sweden's amphetamine problem has been blamed in the United
States on the experimental prescription of amphetamines to a few
hundred users in a dispensing project that *followed* rather than
preceded Sweden's amphetamine explosion.
Japan, like Sweden, experienced an epidemic of excessive amphetamine
use after World War II. According to reports by Japanese and
American observers, [11] Japan successfully curbed this epidemic
by law-enforcement methods - sweeping arrests, stiff prison
sentences and curtailing supplies. If true, this marks one of the
few victories of law enforcement over drugs in the history of drug
use. No on-site review of the Japanese experience was made, however,
in the course of research for this Consumers Union Report; and no
objective evaluation of the Japanese experience was found in the
medical literature available in English. Nor have we found any
cogent explanation of why law-enforcement methods that proved
counterproductive in the United States, in Sweden, and in other
countries - against other drugs as well as the amphetamines -
proved so successful in Japan. Whether, on closer scrutiny, the
Japanese amphetamine stories circulating in the United States
might prove as misleading as the stories emanating from Sweden,
is an issue of considerable importance which warrants further inquiry.
[End of Chapter 39]
* It is used in the United States as a "diet drug."
** According to another Swedish source, however, clandestine
speed labs had operated in Sweden for some time; they simply
escaped official attention until 1968. [9]
Notes [pp. 563-564]
1. Gunnar Inghe, "The Present State of Abuse and Addiction to
Stimulant Drugs in Sweden," in _Abuse of Central Stimulants_, 
ed. Folke Sjöqvist and Malcolm Tottie (Stockholm: Almqvist
and Wiksell, 1969), p. 187.
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