When Meth Was Medicine: Big Pharma Amphetamine Ads from the Days of Better Living Through Chemistry

‘Methamphetamine today is widely considered a scourge, its users portrayed as toothless trailer park trash and twitchy tweakers. It’s the stuff of meth labs and drug raids, but it wasn’t always like that.
As shown in Nick Parsons’ Meth Mania: A History of Methamphetamine (2014) and Nick Rasmussen’s On Speed: The Many Lives of Amphetamine (2009), amphetamines didn’t begin as illegal drugs, but were championed as medicines that could cure what ailed Americans in mid-20th Century America. First marketed as nasal decongestants, pharmaceutical houses were quick to find other uses for the new wonder drugs, extolling their virtues for the treatment of obesity, anxiety, depression, among others.’
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