Robin Hyde, aka Iris Wilkinson, the NZ novelist who overdosed on amphetamines

Robin Hyde, aka, Iris Wilkinson. Photo / Alexander Turnbull Library

It wasn’t that long ago that amphetamines and methamphetamine were legal in New Zealand, commonly used to manage weight loss, taken by athletes or night shift workers to help them get through the night. In this extract from his new book, Benedict Collins, details the country’s early drug use and the tragic consequences.

In 1939, amphetamine’s potential for abuse was highlighted. The novelist, poet, journalist and unofficial Press Gallery reporter Iris Wilkinson, who wrote under various noms de plume including Robin Hyde, was found dead in her London apartment. Her family had set sail for New Zealand shortly after Iris was born in Cape Town in 1906, and settled in the suburb of Northland in Wellington.

At just 17, Iris began working for the Dominion newspaper and soon gained her own column, Parliamentary Peeps, in which she covered Parliament’s sittings from the Ladies’ Gallery.

She became close friends with numerous politicians. Throughout her short career, she worked for multiple publications around the country, along the way scandalising several small towns with her high-octane and rather public love affairs. But it was a knee injury in her late teens and a prescription for morphine to help deal with the post-surgery pain that led to a lifelong on-again off-again habit of abusing opiates like heroin.

New Zealand historian and writer Redmer Yska wrote that after the death of her newborn son, Wilkinson was getting wasted day in and day out. Or, as she herself said: “I began to drug in so indiscriminate a way that you’d have laughed at it. I didn’t know the names of anything, every night I thought, ‘I won’t wake up tomorrow’.”

As a journalist at The Observer in Auckland in the early 1930s, Wilkinson covered the rise in the number of overdoses and murders that were being attributed to the barbiturate Veronal, and commented on why people were choosing to abuse drugs: “The crushing wheels of the twentieth century – overstrain, overwork, financial worry, noise, bustle – have brought about the reign of narcotic poisons.”

By the late 1930s, Wilkinson had travelled to London to try and make her fortune. Instead, she wound up depressed and poverty-stricken and liberally began using Benzedrine, hailed at the time for its ability to relieve anxiety and clear the mind. With war in Europe about to break, the New Zealand High Commissioner helped arrange a fare to get her back home, but when he visited her Kensington accommodation he found her dead. Iris Wilkinson had overdosed on Benzedrine on 23 August 1939. She was 33.

Robin Hyde and her son Derek Challis at Palmerston North in 1931.

Drugs not yet a big deal

But while there were isolated incidents of harm, amphetamines just weren’t considered to be that big a deal and the public hardly batted an eye at their use. In 1951, for example, newspapers reported that the colourful and controversial marathon pianist, New Zealander Jim Montecino, who held the world record for the most hours of continuous play, was still playing strongly and still appeared quite fresh after 84 hours straight at the keys, helped by constant cigarette smoking and two Benzedrine tablets.

Yet it was also clear that amphetamines didn’t always enhance the user’s performance. In the mid-1950s, a group of Wellington taxi drivers chased and boxed-in a vehicle whose driver had crashed into one of theirs and then promptly driven off. Behind the wheel was a local doctor who had just completed the night shift at Wellington Hospital and who had taken two Benzedrine tablets to help keep him awake.

When the doctor appeared in front of a judge, he said he hadn’t predicted how the amphetamine would interact with the two whiskies he’d also consumed and he’d found himself highly intoxicated. He was duly fined 50 pounds and lost his licence for a year. In addition to Benzedrine, methamphetamine tablets were also being sold to the public under the brand name Methedrine. By the early 1960s, reports of Methedrine misadventures began to emerge.

There was the 18-year-old tourist from California, David Miller, who was convicted after getting caught trying to sell 100 Methedrine tablets to locals. “They will pick you up,” he promised a customer in an Auckland coffee lounge, who promptly dobbed him in and got him locked up. In Wellington in 1965, Civil Aviation warned New Zealand pilots against taking too many pep pills before flying, which it said was not only habit-forming but could make them dangerously over-confident in the cockpit. Another Wellington doctor was put on probation and ordered to undergo psychiatric evaluation in 1968 after pleading guilty to obtaining Methedrine using false pretences. He’d been travelling around the lower North Island visiting other doctors, where he would use false identities and claim to have epilepsy in order to obtain dozens of Methedrine pills that the court was told he was hooked on.

And 19-year-old fireman David Pope no doubt will have rued the day back in 1970 when he hooked a buddy up with six of his mum’s Methedrine tablets. His mate took them all at once and spent most of the next two days awake, his behaviour drawing the attention of the Christchurch Drug Squad. When interviewed, he promptly ratted his source out and Pope soon found himself in custody. Meanwhile the chemists that sold pep pills were sporadically being rolled for their supplies.

In November 1957, 1500 Benzedrine pills were stolen from a chemist on Auckland’s Dominion Road, the third time the chemist had been hit since June. In 1967, a chemist in Auckland’s Three Kings was burgled and more than 4000 vials, tablets and capsules of Benzedrine, Dexedrine and Methedrine were stolen. The shop owner told the press he couldn’t think of any possible reason at all why anyone would want such a large quantity of drugs, before adding that the thieves would probably try to sell them.

The main manufacturer of Methedrine in New Zealand, Burroughs Wellcome, stopped selling the product, and another stimulant, Dexamphoid, in 1970, over addiction concerns. In a letter to The Press the following year, the company’s medical adviser, Dr Wilson, wrote that he had followed with interest the publicity concerning the indiscriminate prescribing of the product.

He acknowledged Methedrine had enjoyed widespread popularity in New Zealand for the treatment of obesity but announced the company had destroyed all of its remaining stock of the drug, which he said would have been worth $1 million on the black market, or around $17 million worth of meth today. This showed, he said, how Burroughs Wellcome put people before profit. Why the black-market costs were given for completely legal drugs that were destroyed wasn’t explained. Another company with ample supplies of methamphetamine in the country at the time was the drug wholesaler HF Stevens, and in March 1971, thieves broke into their warehouse in Wainoni, Christchurch. After climbing in through a window and breaking several padlocks, they used an oxy-acetylene welder’s torch to burn an 18-inch hole in the security room wall and escape with more than $460 worth of drugs, the equivalent of thieving around $8000 of drugs today.

Christchurch detectives would not reveal to the media exactly which drugs were taken, but said they would be worth many thousands of dollars on the black market. The report noted that HF Stevens was known to hold substantial quantities of both methamphetamine and opium, which it used in cough medicines.

In 1963, a former casual employee of HF Stevens, 19-year-old Russell Moffitt, who had admitted pilfering chemicals from the company, found himself standing in the dock of the Christchurch Magistrate’s Court charged with the murder of 22-year-old Alison Harper, a first-year arts student at Canterbury University. Harper had accepted an impromptu invitation from Moffitt to go to the pictures on 22 August and had swung by his flat for a coffee on the way there, but not long after finishing the coffee, she began to feel ill and noticed there had been crystals in the bottom of the cup and that it tasted unusually bitter. Harper soon collapsed and was rushed to Christchurch Hospital, where it was found she’d been poisoned.

Moffitt admitted he had been mixing chemicals in the coffee cup in his flat earlier that day. When he was sent home to collect the coffee cup he took the opportunity to throw most of the chemicals in his flat into the Avon River. Alison Harper died the following morning, and when Moffitt was interviewed later that day, multiple Methedrine pills that had been found in Moffitt’s wallet and handed over.

“I gathered he had some dozens of them but he was very reluctant to say where he had got them from or to whom he had subsequently given them,” a government analyst told the court during the murder trial. Moffitt admitted he’d been experimenting at home with a range of chemicals known to be aphrodisiacs, including Cantharidin, a toxic chemical excreted by varieties of blister beetles, but denied trying to drug Alison so he could have sex with her. Moffitt was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to five years in prison.

Former MP for New Lynn Jonathan Hunt. Photo / Mark Mitchell

With pep pills being used globally at the time, and in large quantities, in the 1940s the US jazz musician Harry “The Hipster” Gibson wrote a song that was a commentary on the widespread use of Benzedrine. And while Who put the Benzedrine in Mrs Murphy’s Ovaltine? was wildly popular, the lyrics – describing Mrs Murphy’s dramatic weight loss as a result of the drug – saw The Hipster get blacklisted by radio stations across America. It wasn’t just Benzedrine and Methedrine used for weight loss. Another very available amphetamine product here, Dexedrine, proved so immensely popular that the “jump in sales” had the health department worried as far back as 1950. Officials began urging New Zealanders to only take it in accordance with medical advice.

Minister of Health Jack Watts was questioned in Parliament about the rampant Dexedrine use by the public, but MPs across the House burst into laughter when he was asked if the booming trade in Dexedrine, with its appetite-suppressing attributes, might be connected to a recent surge in food prices. By the 1970s, politicians were raising concerns about the abuse of pep pills, particularly by students and rally car drivers.

In discussing the Narcotics Amendment Bill in August 1970, which toughened penalties for illegal drugs, including doubling the maximum penalty for dope peddlers from 7 to 14 years in prison, the MP for New Lynn, Jonathan Hunt, spoke about the impact legal amphetamines were having on society. He discussed the “tragic case” of a gifted young student who took Benzedrine so he could study for 72 hours non-stop in the run-up to an important exam. In that exam, however, Hunt told Parliament, the student wrote the same one word over and over again, for three hours straight! While he was doing nothing against the law, he was experimenting with drugs, which was becoming “a serious social problem” according to Hunt, who voted for tougher new laws – while at the same time predicting it wouldn’t have any impact on drug trafficking or offending. The real solution to drug abuse, he said, was through educational and social means.

Former Labour MP for Sydenham, Mabel Howard. Photo / Herald Archive

Fifty years on Hunt’s prediction that tougher penalties wouldn’t actually deter drug use looks to have stood the test of time and yet that reality hasn’t stopped countless politicians from voting for harsher drug punishments, just as he did. A year before Hunt spoke of the case of the tragic student, the National MP for Rangiora, Herbert Lorrie Pickering, took a different view on stimulants, telling Parliament that as long as they were in the right hands, they could be hugely beneficial: “We know, too, that amphetamine, correctly used to promote alertness in an emergency, can be a boon to mankind.”

In an earlier parliamentary debate on forcibly detaining alcoholics, the Labour MP for Sydenham, Mabel Howard, listed amphetamines as among the drugs New Zealanders were growing increasingly worried about, noting that pep pills like Methedrine and Benzedrine “have become almost as easy to buy as aspirin.”

Of primary concern for Howard, though, was marijuana and the emerging drug LSD, “now famous as the drug which gives you a trip to heaven or to hell”. While the overuse of pep pills was being raised in Parliament, domestic drug abuse wasn’t really on the public’s radar to any great extent until the late 1960s. In the 1930s it was estimated that the number of drug abusers in New Zealand did not exceed 40 or 50 individuals, and nearly all enforcement to date had been focused on catching and punishing Chinese people who were consuming opium.

Mad on Meth: How New Zealand got hooked on P, by Benedict Collins. Published by HarperCollins Publishers New Zealand. Out November 15. RRP, $39.99.