As with so many dangerous illegal drugs, methamphetamine was once a harmless, over-the-counter remedy; a nice little pick-me-up. It was first synthesised in the late 1800s from ephedrine, the active ingredient of a natural remedy that the Chinese had been using for hundreds of years. By the 1930s, the Americans were using it in their nasal decongestants and bronchial inhalers, and as a treatment for narcolepsy. However grotty or groggy you were, a good sniff of methamphetamine, or "meth", would soon buck you up. In the second world war, it was dished out to soldiers to keep them pepped up during the worst moments.
Later, though, some of these soldiers displayed rather disturbing symptoms, because meth has some rotten side-effects. These include depression, anxiety, fatigue and paranoia. Not to mention convulsions, massive rushes of aggression and strokes. And it is addictive - in a laboratory, animals will self-administer meth until it kills them.
In 1970, the killjoys that be decided that over-the-counter meth wasn't such a brilliant idea, and it became a controlled substance in the US. Today methamphetamine - known as "ice" in its crystal, smokeable form - is not used in cold remedies. It is still used in medicine - to treat obesity, for example - but is strictly controlled. You are more likely to come across home-made versions, knocked up in an illegal factory or someone's bath tub.
Bluntly put, if you are caught with methamphetamine in your system, as the Olympic bronze-medallist Alain Baxter has learned, you are going to have some explaining to do.
"Any half-decent laboratory would be able to detect methamphetamine and distinguish it from related compounds such as ephedrine," a source at a regional NHS drug-testing laboratory said yesterday. The first test on a urine sample will simply flag up an amphetamine-related drug - which could be meth, he said. More complicated follow-up tests then reveal exactly which compound has been used. "It's not difficult," he added.
There is one massive proviso to all this, however - and one good explanation for why you might, innocently, test positive. In America - but not here - some over-the-counter medicines, including Vicks nasal inhalers, contain a chemical that is called levmetamfetamine, also known as l-desoxyephedrine or l-methamphetamine.
All chemicals come in two forms - a d-isomer and an l-isomer. They are mirror images of each other, but may have wildly different effects on the human body. With meth, the d-isomer is an enormously powerful stimulant. It's the one the druggies want. The l-isomer, as found in Vicks inhalers (according to www.vicks.com," is a very mild stimulant. But the drug-testing companies report that if used heavily enough, it will lead to a positive test for meth.
In fact, until Vicks recently changed its formulation, meth fans claimed to be able to manufacture the highly active form from the inhalers, and bought them by the armful.
If Alain Baxter is claiming, as has been reported, that his positive result is down to a nasal inhaler or something similar, then that's highly credible. Far more so than the idea that he would be such a moron as to take the illegal, street version of the drug.
Meth is a performance enhancing drug, rather than a training one, which means it must be taken within a day of the big race. But it's not exactly a secret that the International Olympic Committee (IOC) tests for drugs during competition, or that meth can sit in your system for up to four days.
Besides, while a few pundits have been on telly talking about how meth would make a downhill skier more alert and responsive, several skiers have expressed incredulity at the idea that it would enhance performance. Meanwhile Professor Gary Wadler of the New York University school of medicine, and author of the book Drugs and the Athlete, says amphetamines do not create extra physical and mental energy. Writing on the sporting website ESPN.com, he says the drugs are known for distorting the user's perception of reality and impairing judgment, which may cause an athlete to participate while injured, possibly leading to worse injuries and putting others at risk.
However, even if Baxter was using a nasal inhaler, it may not help much in his defence. Yesterday the director of the IOC's medical commission, Dr Patrick Schamasch, was uncompromising. He said that methamphetamine was a banned stimulant, and the IOC would not be doing further tests to distinguish between "this isomer or that isomer". "It's a stimulant and it's prohibited," he told the Guardian. "We have only one substance on our list: methamphetamine."
He added that although further tests may be carried out on the "b" sample of Baxter's urine (taken at the same time as the first one, the "a" sample, in which meth was found), this will only be to confirm that the stimulant is present - not to distinguish between its subtly different forms.
This may all be bad news for Baxter and his career, but it is at least good news that some people's assumption that he had been dallying with illegal drugs seems highly unlikely.
If he had ingested the "bad kind" of meth - perhaps because it had been slipped to him - then that would be a serious thing indeed. Most people in this country don't know much about meth, or confuse it with its better-known sister chemical amphetamine (generally known as speed). But in America, it's treated as a major problem - in dance clubs, in poverty-ridden rural areas, and, of course, in sport. They call it "the devil's drug", or "poor man's cocaine". While schoolkids here take ecstasy, American high-schoolers take meth (also known, in its varying forms, as chalk, crystal, glass, crank and speed).
Clubbers like it because it's a central nervous-system stimulant. Like cocaine, it makes you alert and elated. Unlike cocaine, the effects last - you can bank on between two and 36 hours of stimulation. And it's cheap: £30 will buy you hours of fun.
This is also why it's such a problem in poverty-stricken rural areas. This week a headline in Oregon's Statesman Journal read: "Meth's Path of Destruction Tears Through Oregon." "Hardcore users rot like fruit left in a sack," the author wrote. "Bodies shrivel from lack of food and sleep. Minds reel with paranoia and hallucinations. Teeth fall out as gums break down."
Regardless of what the IOC decides about Baxter, one thing is for certain: he is at least guilty of being very silly. Competitors sign forms agreeing to abide by the IOC's drug code, and they're obliged to be very careful about any medicines they take, in case they contain a banned substance. "It's something we do warn our athletes about," Fiona McNeilly, operations director for the British Ski and Snowboard Federation said yesterday. "If in doubt, ask - that's our general message. Because accidents do happen."
