What are "whites" in Little Feat's "Willin'"?

Survival kit contents check. In them you’ll find:

- One forty-five caliber automatic
- Two boxes of ammunition
- Four days' concentrated emergency rations
- One drug issue containing antibiotics, morphine,
  vitamin pills, **pep pills**, sleeping pills, tranquilizer pills
- One miniature combination Russian phrase book and Bible
- One hundred dollars in rubles
- One hundred dollars in gold
- Nine packs of chewing gum
- One issue of prophylactics
- Three lipsticks
- Three pair of nylon stockings.

You’ll need that for the Zombie Thread Apocalypse.

Dextroamphetamine. Also known as dexedrine. We called them crosstops. It is a milder speed than.meth

I have always known Blues to be Valiums… 10 mg Valium.

since i live about 45 minutes away…

Hi @EinsteinsHund

I know I’m a tad late with this… but it looks like nobody ever nailed down “Blues”. What, with the Stones being English and all:

In Britain during the early 1960s the drug was taken by “tired housewives”, and was also abused by youths who took excessively large doses and nicknamed the triangular blue tablets “purple hearts” or “blues.” This became a celebrated part of the Mod subculture. Dexamyl was the recreational drug of choice for main character of the film Quadrophenia, who eventually suffers from amphetamine psychosis. They were widely abused.

Indeed, “Blues” was still the generic name (or at least the one I knew) for amphetamine into the early 'eighties.

j

Hey, I surely remembered this thread, it gets resurrected every few years, it seems. But it’s good when new info gets posted, so thanks @Treppenwitz! I haven’t seen Quadrophenia since first posting this thread, but I still remember the scene where they steal drugs in a pharmacy which must have been the “blues” in question, but I never knew what they really were. So it seems they were one of the several “Mother’s Little Helpers” the Stones sang about.

You know, I had always assumed that, but I just took a look at the lyric (see, I research my posts!) and it talks about “a little yellow pill” - so … I dunno. Maybe not.

j

I know it’s a Little Feat song, but I love Linda Ronstadt’s cover. Maybe because I heard her version first (on Heart LIke A Wheel). OK, back to the drugs…

There’s also a wonderful cover by Matthew Sweet and Susanna Hoffs from their “Under The Covers” trilogy, with Hoffs singing.

An amphetamine and a barbiturate in the same pill? What a comically terrible idea.

Uhhhh…you had to be there, man…

j

“Uppers and downers, either way blood flows” from 5:15.

Maybe this commercial will explain things:

Within my memory, cross tops aka whites aka bennies were generally 5mg Amphetamine Sulfate, your basic amphetamine; but there were also bootlegs, so-called Mexican bennies–which looked just the same, little white cross-scored tablets, but were usually a good bit more potent.

I always liked how Linda did it myself And I more or less lived that life in the late 70s early 80s

As soon as I discovered Google Maps, I put in “Tucson to Tucumcari, Tehachapi to Tonopah” …

… 28 hrs by car (or big rig, assuming sufficient whites).

Brown. As in New Castle - heroin, not the brew.