"I can describe the effects of those white tablets, he wrote in a confessional memoir. He said he couldn't sleep after taking HH's pills. The hallucinations left him like a fish thrown up on the bank of a river. I was shaking all over. I looked like an epileptic. I was scared. Also, the effect lasted for days and was followed by a sudden, tremendous tiredness."
"Taking advice from senior players, they hid them under their tongues and spat them out in the toilet. But it was hard to dupe HH. Herrera didn't let himself be played so easily: he dissolved them into coffee, checking as much as possible in person that we took the medicine before the game. It was almost impossible for a youth-team player to refuse the juice. It wasn't the done thing to question HH's authority."
"Herrera encouraged us to take [amphetamines], to use sugar, said Egidio Morbello, a first-team player. HH was the boss. It would have been fatal for a young player's career prospects to go against him. They were like bombs. They gave you a real kick, said Pierluigi Gambogi, a youth-team player at the time. We knocked them back. We wanted to get noticed to get into the big leagues."
Inter's club in the early 1960s contained a large supply of drugs and functioned like a small hospital for doping. Coach Helenio Herrera administered stimulants to youth players and treated them as subjects for drug experiments. Youth players experienced inability to sleep, violent hallucinations, shaking, feelings of fear, and days of subsequent exhaustion. Many players tried to hide pills or spit them out, but Herrera dissolved drugs into coffee and supervised ingestion, making refusal nearly impossible due to the risk to career prospects. Players described amphetamines as powerful, addictive boosts with brutal side-effects.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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