Free The Ice Age by Luke Williams Page B

make because it had to be extracted from cow glands. Attention turned to the Ephedra plant, an unremarkable-looking organism that grows in sandy soils in sun-drenched environments, and that had been used for centuries in Chinese medicine. Its purported energy- and mood-enhancing effects came to be seen as a potential base for a new adrenaline-like product, as scientists believed it held the secrets to human fatigue and the common cold.
    Dr Nagai Nagayoshi commenced work on his study of ephedra after returning from Berlin University in 1883. Nagayoshi was wide-eyed and impeccably dressed, and his lab at the Tokyo Imperial University consisted of wooden tables, with chemicals held in bottles like old-fashioned lolly jars. Like all lab researchers at the time, he did not wear lab coats or masks to work, but dressed as if he were working in an office.
    Nagayoshi spent two years studying the plant, eventually finding the active alkaloid, ephedrine. Amphetamine sulphate (not meth, but similar) was actually the first compound to be developed, a few years earlier. It was made accidentally by the Romanian chemist Lazăr Edeleanu when he was trying to synthesise the world’s first amphetamine (speed, not meth) while making new fabric dyes. Eventually, Dr Nagayoshi used Edeleanu’s formula to synthesise amphetamine from ephedrine, creating a more powerful formula: methamphetamine (powdered meth).
    Today ephedrine and pseudoephedrine are the two most common precursor chemicals used in making crystal meth.
    Professor Nicolas Rasmussen from the University of New South Wales writes in his book On Speed: the many lives of amphetamine that methamphetamines and amphetamines developed in the tradition of ‘old human fantasies of magical cures and elixirs of youth’. He writes that in ‘the age of science-based pharmaceuticals … we expect new triumphs of science that, in our lifetime, will eliminate mankind’s most ancient enemies — the illnesses that bring pain, sorrow, frailty, and ultimately death’.
    Intrigued by this observation, I decided to ring Professor Rasmussen — who has earned, by the way, no less than a PhD from Stanford and a Masters from Cambridge — to find out a bit more about his studious work on the history of the drug. I found him to be a fast-talking, fastidiously helpful American who stops every now and then to ask — as a matter of genuine courtesy — ‘Are you following?’
    Rasmussen’s history lesson taught me a few things — first, unlike cocaine or heroin, meth is a purely synthetic substance. Second, methamphetamine differs from amphetamine only in the addition of a methyl group on the chemical chain; the difference of just one extra carbon — ‘meth’ (actually methyl) — is what makes taking meth feel as if you’re taking off in aeroplane, and makes taking speed feel as if you’re ‘merely’ travelling in a V8. Third, that perhaps it is no accident that methamphetamine was born in the age of scientific advances, the rise of the corporation, and the rise of a liberal society in which there is a perpetual promise that hard work will pay off.
    In April 1981, Rob Smith was seven years old. Waking up one morning in his cosy three-bedroom brick house, on the foothills of the Melbourne’s tree fern-covered Dandenong Ranges, his ears fixed on a strange howl coming from somewhere inside the house.
    He followed the sound. His feet tapped along the cold floorboards, past a picture of a little English cottage surrounded by autumn trees. The path took him to his mother’s room. The door was half-open, and his mother was sobbing on the end of her bed, her head resting on her left hand. Feeling his stare, she sat up, wiping her face with her hands. She smiled at her son, saying in her soft voice: ‘Hello, darling, how ya feelin’ this morning? You’re awake very early, mate.’
    He trotted up to her and