Dynamite Dreams
With the railway industry as large as it was in America, someone was bound to try and claim dynamite as a narcotic.
They would put a pills worth of dynamite grain in a alcohol drink to ingest it. The claim was sleep and dreams to follow…
“As the stuff went down the last time I heard a sharp explosion as if the top of a hill had been blown off. I thought my head had exploded. I only thought this one instant, for the next moment I was deep in the bosom of Morpheus. I was asleep so soundly that a drop off a fifty meter bridge would not have woke me up.
Dreams began to pull off their game like the last performance when the actors have to catch a midnight train to leave town. The first impression I received was that I was a locomotive engineer and fireman, also doing the work of conductors and brakemen, on four express trains running side by side, pulled by double-headers and pushed behind with extra locomotives, all running on a fourtrack railroad line. I tied back the whistles, drove in wedges to hold the throttles wide open and began to shovel coal with one hand and punch passenger tickets with the other. We were riding for our lives.”
Evening star, May 29, 1909
soldiers armed with molotov cocktails and sticky grenades — a sock filled with dynamite and then dipped in a bucket of tar with a 30-second fuse attached. 1942