Amphetamine prescribing.

BRITISH Correspondence Letters to the Editor should not exceed 500 words. Amphetamine Prescribing SIR,-Scarcely a day passes without news of another drug haul from a chemist's shop. Thousands of tablets are stolen, and the majority are probably amphetamines. A glance at the Proprietary Drug Lists will show there are at least twenty-two preparations containing amphetamine alone or in combination with other drugs. Many are virtually identical and some preparations appear both as central nervous system stimulants and sedatives and tranquillizers. The chemist is obliged to keep a fairly large stock in order to meet all requirements. It is not necessary to reiterate the undesirability of these drugs being self-administered nor the consequent dangers of addiction, of toxic effects, and of antisocial behaviour, and yet the illegal use of amphetamines is increasing and constitutes a serious problem, and the stocks available in the chemists are one important source of supply. How much do we contribute to this problem by continuing to prescribe the drug when its use is unnecessary or outdated ? It is my belief that all these preparations could be scrapped with very little loss to the medical armamentarium. For mild depression there is now a very good range of antidepressants, more effective than temporary mood elevation , which is the way amphetamines work. For obesity there is a series of appetite suppressants claimed not to have central stimulating action, and for those patients who demand a tonic a pep talk might be more useful and certainly less potentially harmful than a pep pill (assuming, of course, there is no physical cause for debility). My experience in general practice convinced me there were far too many women habituated, if not actually addicted, to amphetamines ostensibly for the treatment of obesity. As a psychiatrist I have found it possible to avoid medication with amphet-amine, except for abreaction purposes and the occasional rare case of narcolepsy. If we all tried to cut down our use of these drugs as much as possible smaller stocks would be needed, and one source of supply would be SIR,-During the war years 1939-45 the high-temperature short-time (H.T.S.T.) process of pasteurization rapidly replaced the holder process, and this new process was officially recognized in 1941 by the issue of provisional regulations. The minimum time/temperature condition of this new process was at first 15 seconds at 1620 F. (72.2° C.), but in 1949 this minimum temperature was …