Speed has tripped the light fantastic in America for more than 85 years. From Ritalin and Adderall to the twice-methylated Breaking Bad stuff, speed seduces both overbright founders and scurvy garage-dwellers. But it’s not the drug for right now. Speed is not only deadly; it’s defeatist.

It’s been two sobering years. We’d do well to take stock of what we were blind to in the raciest days of Silicon Valley and the government-as-usual Obama years. When the writer Casey Schwartz gave up Adderall after having it define her youth, she identified deep regrets: “I had spent years of my life in a state of false intensity, always wondering if I should be somewhere else, working harder, achieving more.” America is plenty intense—and it requires more freethinking from its citizens now than ever. It’s time for a reckoning with reality, reflection and reform, principled action. It’s also a time for civil disobedience. As grandiose as Adderall makes some people feel, the history of amphetamine as a drug of subjugation—used to compel obedience in soldiers, dieters, and unruly kids—haunts it.

In 1933, 46 years after Lazăr Edeleanu, a Romanian chemist, fatefully synthesized amphetamine—a mix of mirror-image molecules, levoamphetamine and dextroamphetamine—Smith, Kline & French picked it up and sold it as Benzedrine. Wouldn’t you know, enterprising hacker-tweakers soon prised open the inhalers, liberated the speed-soaked cotton strips, and swallowed them.

Benzedrine as an “alertness aid” then shipped out to war. Months after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the drug was, quite literally, weaponized. Military commanders, writes Nicolas Rasmussen in On Speed: From Benzedrine to Adderall, greatly feared another humiliating epidemic of “shell shock” like the one that had crippled the Allied armies of World War I. To keep soldiers looking on the bright side of war, armies began provisioning the men with amphetamines. Psychiatrists on the battlefield rechristened shell shock “operational fatigue,” and soldiers were relieved to hear they had a manly sounding physical ailment, eminently treatable with more Benzedrine. Get back out there, Private.

Combat itself was changed by speed. Speedfreak servicemen of the 1940s made for gung-ho, wild-eyed fighters as the drug supplied them with fool’s courage. They hurled themselves into battle where they might otherwise have been held back by less thrilling but more adaptive human traits: anxiety, prudence, conscience. Commanders liked what they saw, and kept their men dosed.

When the soldiers came home, many were addicted, and their wives were the nation’s next good soldiers. They reproduced the logic of the battlefields: They sucked down amphetamines to wage war on bodies—their own. The postwar obsession with thinness developed in tandem with the speed trade. By the end of the ’60s, 9.7 million Americans used prescription amphetamines. Of those, hundreds of thousands were addicted. The everyday tweakers jittered along, subduing their fears and hungers with the pep pills that were now dyed and looked like candy.

In 1968, after speed killed a dieting woman, an investigative journalist for Life magazine, Susanna McBee, published a bombshell exposé about the overprescription of pills for weight loss. McBee made a tour of doctors’ offices, and—after cursory interviews—was able to cop bags and bags of darling little tablets. Of course McBee had no weight to lose. But the drug trade now battened on the styling of female flesh as a disease.

From soldiers to dieters to children. After McBee’s article, and more deaths traced to diet pills, weight-loss speed became more tightly regulated. But speed changed shape. Just as “operational fatigue” and “flesh” had been styled as pathologies, distractibility got a pharmaworld makeover—and became ADHD. Ritalin prescriptions for kids took off in the 1990s. By 2011, 3.5 million children in the US were on stimulants. A recent formulation, Adzenys, is aimed at first graders and up: It’s orange-­flavored and melts in your mouth.