Blue Meds

In the mornings, I swallow pills that cover nearly every hue in the color spectrum: there are oyster shell calcium tablets (green), fish oil supplements (yellow), a multivitamin/multimineral (indigo), a probiotic acidophilus capsule with “14 billion good bacteria” (speckled white, like an egg from a free-range hen).

And let’s not forget the meds: one half-tab of Adderall (cyan blue) and one half-tab of the antidepressant Citalopram (coral pink). The blue meds are a mixture of four amphetamine salts, which I take for attention deficit disorder. (I can be as hyper as a horse that’s been left in the barn all winter, as distractible as a two-year-old motoring from block to block.) ADD is probably the reason I haven’t been able to settle on a career—one week, I contemplate starting a dog-walking business (I’d call it “Who Let the Dogs Out”), and the next I fantasize about working as a clown in a hospital.

But ever since I started taking my precious blue meds (about a year ago), I’ve made steady progress in my off-again-on-again career as a writer. I haven’t earned a dime recently, which makes me worry that I will end up with no teeth living under a bridge, but until then, I’m a happy graphophiliac, writing for my local paper on topics ranging from AIG (where I used to work in corporate communications, years before AIG was called a P.I.G. by the New York Daily News) to the inauguration of Barack Obama to the 123rd anniversary of Emily Dickinson’s death (which, if you’re dying to know, is May 15th, 2009).

I looked up Amphetamine on Wikipedia and found that it was first synthesized by a Romanian, Lazar Edeleannu, in Berlin, Germany in 1887. He called it phenylisopropylamine (don’t ask how to pronounce that); apparently, it was one of a series of compounds from the plant derivative ephedrine, which the Chinese had been using for five millennia to treat a host of ailments. (I always knew that the Chinese were smarter than us westerners.) Amphetamines didn’t come into common use until 1929 when American pharmacologist Gordon Alles was searching for an artificial replacement for ephedrine, and tested it on himself. Then the drug company, Smith, Kline and French, got into the game in the mid-1930s and made a bundle marketing it under the trade name Benzedrine.

Amphetamines were the drug of choice for the military during World War II (both the Allies and the Germans liked how the drug lessened combat fatigue as well as increased alertness). It was also the favorite substance of Adolph Hitler, who received daily shots from his doctor of “vitamultine” a combination of methamphetamine and essential vitamins. (I was shocked to discover that der Furher and I liked the same drug; it’s creepy to think that he, too, might have had ADD…)

For nearly the past four decades, amphetamines have been a controlled substance in the United States, which means that my doctor can’t call or fax in the prescription to the pharmacy, but must sign a specially designated form which I must personally surrender to the pharmacist each time I renew the prescription, all of which makes me feel like a Nazi war criminal at Nuremberg whenever I slink into my local CVS.

Sometimes I cut the pills in quarters to make them last longer as well as to reduce their nasty side effects (tachycardia, diarrhea, dizziness, palpitations, arrhythmia--if you read everything on the print outs that accompany each orange vial, you’d be tempted to flush the pills down the toilet). But I am willing to shoulder the risks because my cyan-blue, double-scored meds make me feel, for the first time in my life, confident and hopeful. My blue meds make me believe, in the words of George Eliot (who did not have ADD), that “it’s never too late to be what you might have been.”