purple heart

See also: Purple Heart and purpleheart

English

Etymology

From the color of the pills.

Noun

purple heart (plural purple hearts)

1. The drug phenobarbitone when taken recreationally.
2. (slang, historical) A drinamyl tablet when taken recreationally, popular in the 1960s.
   • 1963 March 27, “Drug pills eaten like sweets, says detective”, in The Guardian‎^[1]:

     Detective Peter Goodall said the source of the tablets had not been traced. "Purple heart" or drinamyl tablets, were a stimulant drug and habit-forming.

   • 1972, Ray Davies (lyrics and music), “Big Black Smoke”, performed by The Kinks:

     And every penny she had / Was spent on purple hearts and cigarettes

   • 2012, Pete Townshend, Who I Am, HarperCollins, →ISBN, page 245:

     We were all coming down from taking purple hearts, the fashionable uppers of the period.

Further reading

• Jonathon Green (2024) “purple hearts n.”, in Green’s Dictionary of Slang