CONFESSIONS OF A GOOF BALL ADDICT.

Abstract

Among the cognoscenti, a proper goof ball is a green heart and a red bullet. The green heart is a triangular tablet containing dextro-amphetamine and amobarbital. The red bullet is a capsule of secobarbital. This is the story of an intelligent, verbal, 37-year-old woman addicted to goof balls. Neither her first nor her last name begins with 0, so I will call her that. You might think-at least I thought-that if you mix a sedative and stimulant, you will get a mildly stimulating or a mildly depressing effect depending on which drug is dominant. If they are pharmacologically balanced, you ought to get no effect. They should neutralize each other. So I thought. I was wrong. And so is much of the current literature which generally gives only a cursory look at this curious addiction. Some use the phrase “goof ball” to identify only the barbiturate. Most texts simplify it this way. If a patient takes barbiturates to sleep, then he’ll soon depend on them. He will develop anxiety and keep clamoring for barbiturates. If he takes amphetamine for that tired feeling, he’ll soon need it to stay awake. If he takes it to overcome the effects of barbiturates, he will be clamped on the circumference of a vicious cyclehe must have barbiturates to sleep; he must have amphetamine to prevent excessive sleepiness resulting from the barbiturates; then the amphetamine makes him tense so he needs barbiturates and so on. Nyswander( 1) wrote in 1959 that “addiction to Benzedrine and Dexedrine seems to have considerably lessened in the past 5 years.” The standard Noyes-Kolb text (2), on the other hand, says that in the last few years there has been a great increase in barbiturate addiction. The popular writer, R. S. de Ropp(3), tells us that: “Barbiturates are obtained in the black market under such names as red birds or yellow jackets, known collectively as goof balls. Those who become addicted to barbiturates are worse off than the mor-