Julie Lomoe: The Creative Crone

Novelist, Poet, Painter, and more...

  • Home
  • Novels
    • Eldercide
      • About the Book
      • Eldercide: Chapter 1
    • Mood Swing: The Bipolar Murders
      • About the Book
      • Mood Swing: Chapter 1
    • Hope Dawns Eternal
      • About the Book
      • Hope Dawns Eternal Prologue
      • Hope Dawns Eternal Chapter 1
    • Reviews
  • About
    • About Julie Lomoe
    • The Creative Crone
    • Julie’s Poetry
    • Julie’s Painting
  • Blog
  • Events
  • Connect
    • Get in Touch with Julie
    • Facebook
    • Twitter
    • Pinterest
  • Store

My Quaalude Confessions, Part One

April 29, 2018 By Julie Lomoe 1 Comment

Reading about Bill Cosby’s fondness for using Quaaludes to drug women he wanted to assault sexually brought back vivid memories of my life in Manhattan in the late Sixties and early Seventies. The bottom drawer of my dresser was crammed full of pharmaceutical samples, including Quaaludes, and one night at Max’s Kansas City, a movie star sitting next to me offered me one from his stash, saying what a marvelous drug it was, then promptly conked out and fell to the floor unconscious.

About those drug samples: in one of the many part-time secretarial jobs I took to sustain myself while seeking fame and fortune as an artist, I worked for a physician in a prestigious group practice at the corner of Park Avenue and 79th Street. He and his colleagues had an upscale clientele, including several Rockefellers. A couple of nights a week after regular office hours, I came in to transcribe the case notes he recorded on an old-fashioned Dictaphone. I quickly picked up the medical terminology and abbreviations, and I got a vicarious thrill from all the intimate details—who was a heart attack waiting to happen, who had terminal cancer, who was on the verge of a breakdown. Even the mundane details of physical examinations and blood tests fascinated me.*

The doctors occupied a rambling corner suite on the second floor that had once been a luxurious apartment for some Park Avenue dowager. Down the hall from my office was a spacious bathroom with white porcelain fixtures and walls clad in white tile. An enormous old claw-footed bathtub dominated the room, and it was always overflowing with packets of pharmaceuticals dropped off by the sales reps from the drug companies. The drugs were tossed helter skelter into the tub with no attempt at organization, and the supply never diminished. On the contrary, it kept on growing.

Even at the height of the Sixties, I was never heavily into drugs—alcohol was and still is my preferred vice. But I hated to see all those pills and capsules go to waste. I figured some of my friends might enjoy them. Besides, some of the uppers might come in handy when I was scrambling to finish paintings in time for a show, and the downers could help me sleep. I began smuggling out a few samples when I’d finished my transcriptions, and before long I was bringing them out in tote bags. No one seemed to miss them.

I focused on Dexamyl, Dexedrine and Eskatrol, all manufactured by SmithKline & French, all featuring amphetamine as the primary ingredient and all touted as weight-loss drugs. Dexamyl also included amobarbital, a barbiturate to moderate the effects of the speed, and was marketed as an antidepressant. The triangular purple pills became wildly popular street drugs, known as “purple hearts.” The FDA and the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, the predecessor of today’s Drug Enforcement Agency or DEA, began cracking down on weight-loss drugs that contained amphetamine, and they were all banned by 1973.

I gleaned the information above from Wikipedia. Back in the day, I barely knew what amphetamine was. Like the doctors prescribing the stuff, I knew only what I read on the inserts in the sample packets. But I was inherently cautious, and I took the drugs seldom, in small doses, and only when I needed to paint late into the wee small hours.

In the late 60’s, six-packs of Quaaludes began showing up among the other goodies in the bathtub, and I began taking them home to stash in my bottom drawer. But that’s another story, and this post is turning out to be longer than I expected, so I’ll save my Quaalude experiences for the next post. If you haven’t yet subscribed, please do so now by clicking in the menu on the right. That way you’ll get an email notification, so you won’t miss the next exciting installment.

*This was my first job in the medical field, and there were many more to follow. For a couple of years I was the office manager for an urologist in another Park Avenue office. I wore a white nurse’s uniform, and for the sake of propriety I stood watch in the exam room when he examined women and stuck stainless steel rods up their urethras. Years later, I picked up an M.A. in art therapy and embarked on a genuine professional career, working in a psychiatric hospital and founding my own home care agency, but that’s another story.

Filed Under: Memoir, Mental health and illness, Pop culture Tagged With: Bill Cosby, drug abuse, drug samples, Julie Lomoe, Max's Kansas City, Quaaludes

Comments

  1. Kimberly says

    March 11, 2019 at 3:36 pm

    Could you inform me what theme are you utilizing on your
    site? It looks good.

    Reply

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Recent Posts

  • Bela and the Rats–A Poem for International Women’s Day
  • Building My Brand and Begging for Help!
  • My Woodstock Prints Make Perfect Presents!
  • My 1969 Woodstock paintings are on display at Bethel Woods Museum!
  • Going public with my abortion story

Subscribe

Join our mailing list to receive the latest news and updates from The Creative Crone.

You have Successfully Subscribed!

Facebook

Julie Lomoe, Author

Categories

  • ABC Soaps
  • Art of Aging
  • Art of Blogging
  • Art of Marketing
  • Art of Publishing
  • Art of Writing
  • Bipolar mood swings
  • Block Busting Workshop
  • Colorado Chronicles
  • Community of Authors
  • Creative Crone
  • Creativity
  • Current Affairs
  • Eldercide
  • Giclee prints of Julie's paintings
  • Guest bloggers
  • HOPE DAWNS ETERNAL
  • Jazz
  • Julie's Poetry
  • Julie's Paintings
  • Julie's Poetry
  • Marketing Tactics
  • Memoir
  • Mental health and illness
  • Miscellaneous Musings
  • Music
  • Nature and gardening
  • Politics
  • Pop culture
  • Procrastination
  • Social Action
  • Subdural
  • Transcending technophobia
  • Uncategorized
  • Vignettes from my life
  • Woodstock Festival 1969

About Julie Lomoe

Julie Lomoe brings a wealth of mental health and home health care experience to her mystery novels, Mood Swing: The Bipolar Murders and Eldercide.

Read more

Twitter

Tweets by julielomoe

Recent Blog Posts

  • Bela and the Rats–A Poem for International Women’s Day
  • Building My Brand and Begging for Help!
  • My Woodstock Prints Make Perfect Presents!
  • My 1969 Woodstock paintings are on display at Bethel Woods Museum!
  • Going public with my abortion story

Copyright © 2023 · Julie Lomoe - All Rights Reserved · Site by Upstate Arts