What did Scott Adams eat here?

Factual Questions
1

In this entry of his blog, Scott Adams (of Dilbert fame) mentions eating a certain black pill.

relevant part:

Being clueless about drugs I’m curious, did/does such a thing exist and if so what could it have been?

2

It sounds like one of the amphetomines such as speed and yes, they existed. They can increase alertness and short-term productivity and they are still exploited for that purpose by students and workers like truck drivers.

3

The effects sound like classic amphetamines. However, I’ve never seen or even heard of a black speed pill. The most common ones when Adams was in college were red and yellow.

4

Make that Amphetamine.

5

Black beauties. Indeed, a popular form of speed at one time.

6

Really? Well, color my ignorance fought. :smack:

7

Also called “Black Mollies.”

8

Sounds like a Black Beauty to me. My college amphetamine experience was limited to one instance, where I bought and took one pill to stay up working on papers before a final and promptly fell deeply asleep. This suggests a certain degree of ADHD (though I self-assess it as sub-clinical).

9

Black Beauties or Cadillacs. Both forms of speed I encountered in the 70’s and 80’s.

However, most of them really had very high caffeine and/or ephedrine contents rather than actual amphetemine.

10

Black Beauties were the street name of the diet pill Dextroamphetamine, brand name, Dexedrine.

11

Yes.

But the majority of them did not really contain amphetamine.

Unfortunately some people learned this the hard way.

They would be used to taking 2-4 caps of what they thought was “real” speed [amphetamine] but what was actually a high dose of caffeine and/or ephedrine.

Then one day they would get some that actually WAS pharmaceutical amphetamine. Only they didn’t know it was different on the inside.

When I first got into police work in the early 80’s the emergency rooms were full of people that this happened to. It very rarely killed them, but it did mess them up for a while. And confused the hell out of them as they had been used to taking the same dose in the past and not having THAT:eek: happen to them.