Blitzted: The Third Reich as a Society on Drugs
harrowell.org.uk
harrowell.org.uk
"While consumption levels among each of the particular services remains elusive, I have been able crudely to calculate the (previously undisclosed) overall U.S. mil- itary consumption of amphetamine from the $877,000 worth of Benzedrine purchased from SKF by the government in the course of the war years. Applying the most conservative assumptions in the calculations, for instance, that the government paid regular bulk wholesale price for 10 mg pills, yields an estimate that the American military must have bought at least 250 million Benzedrine Sulfate tablets. The true figure is most likely double that number, around 500 million tab- lets in the course of the war, allowing for procurement pricing and the fact that the military mostly used 5 mg tablets rather than the stan- dard 10 mg prescription tablets (and it could easily be higher still if other conservative assumptions are relaxed).63 This estimate of 250–500 million tablets in total corresponds very roughly to a consumption rate of 10–20 government-supplied amphetamine tablets per year per American serving in combat theaters for the years 1942–45. Although well below the scandalous 30–40 tablets per serviceman per year con- sumption rate in the Vietnam conflict, it is still several (two to four) times the comparable British figure of about 5 tablets per serviceman per year, and roughly equivalent to the German methamphetamine consumption rate at its peak, the Blitz year of 1940."
Quoted from "On Speed, the many lives of Amphetamine" by Nicholas Rasmussen.
In short: If this drug is bad for you, it's only slightly bad. And it's far safer than the drug it substitutes for: amphetamines.
So I went looking to see if it was being studied with ADHD. Despite showing effectiveness in several studies, it wasn't FDA licensed for ADHD because of "serious dermatological toxicity" {1]. That seems a bit odd.
Humans are much smarter today (about substance abuse) and we are slowly walking down the list eliminating over-use of less damaging substances like sugar, caffeine. Products like coca cola are facing a huge consumption gap in certain, very developed areas.
No jitters but if I take all 4 at once I get a pretty unpleasant "coming up" feeling for about 15 minutes. I usually just have 2 a day, and I'd recommend people start with 1 just in the morning.
From persona experience i either have to go a few days without or drink my third cup (drip brewed) of the day to get anything noticeable.
On the other hand, spiders DO build web 'sites' and await food delivery...
there are many good side of sugar as well, as there are bad ones. let's stop being religious with food. it's a question of education, and measure. The same could be said with fats, caffeine and so on.
What about the rise of prescription drug use, supplements, and synthetic designer drugs?
What are the safe alternatives to those, if you crave the taste?
I personally never drink soda anymore except for diet ginger ale. The acidity is still there but in my opinion it's worth satisfying that type of sweet carbonation craving. No sugar and no caffeine, also moves your taste away from the sickly sweetness of standard colas.
An even more mild option is sparkling water, which to me is sometimes the most refreshing thing on earth and sometimes so bland that I can't stomach it.
I just can't imagine tricking the body into perpetual pregnancy is without side effects. I can't imagine drugs that purposely alter the chemistry of the brain and that are used (abused?) by tens of millions each day is without dangerous side effects. I hope I'm wrong.
Your broad strokes include any and all kinds of psychoactive substances, though.
But to your point: wouldn't any dangerous side effects of SSRIs be pretty obvious by now?
So I gave up trying "natural way" and start taking very small dose of benzo and boom and I have never been happier or productive in any other points in my life. Yes, I know benzo is highly addictive and has numerous side-effects, but for me, it was a gamble that was worth taking. I am still taking a very small dose (.5mg once a day) and I am a bit addicted to it, I can tell the difference when I missed a day, but for me (and countless other people who also suffered), its worthed. I have looked into SSRI and MAOIs and they seem to have much worse side effect so I didn't bother with them.
* https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/undergoing-fertil...
* https://toxtown.nlm.nih.gov/text_version/chemicals.php?id=24
* https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/feb/10/phthala...
But it probably does have some general overall affect leading to users being a bit more driven.
beyond that, there are tons of people on strong antiaxiety and antidepression drugs, 100% of the time. that's pretty crazy imo.
& we give lots of kids amphetamine. which is extra-special-crazy.
(no value judgements here if any drug at all works for a person, but i don't buy at all the "correcting a chemical imbalance" explanation for the drugs. it's just being on drugs, for better or for worse.)
i think where people tend to get into trouble with drugs is that since it is an external effect changing the brain's chemical balances contrary to its self-regularted levels, the brain tries to adapt, leading to tolerance – the user tries to counter-adapt, upping the dosages, "chasing the high", & often ending up in a no-fun place of dependence, addiction, side-effects...
(obviously more true w/ some drugs & some people than others...)
That's very strange
But a chocolate chip cookie, still warm from the oven... Uuuh, later dudes.
I wonder if I would have eventually died like a horse if I kept going? ;)
For that matter I would be totally unsurprised if many of our political candidates had some chemical augmentation on the campaign trail as well.
Smoking will also be seen as a stupendously bad idea. I'm sure nicotine and marijuana will still be around. But they will be packaged and vaporized.
The idea of putting a raw leaf into a funnel and lighting it on fire will seem entirely barbaric.
The content reminds me of the documentary film 'Spin':
* Using the 1992 presidential election as his springboard, Springer captures the behind-the-scenes maneuverings of politicians and newscasters in the early 1990s. Pat Robertson banters about "homos," Al Gore learns how to avoid abortion questions, George H. W. Bush talks to Larry King about Halcion—all presuming they are off camera. Composed of 100% unauthorized satellite footage, Spin is a surreal expose of media-constructed reality.*
Yep, H W Bush was on Halcion, not good!!!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spin_(1995_film)
A highly recommended film given the election season and on youtube too:
"See, everyone watches"
Benzodiazepines are the very least of the drugs US presidents have taken over the years, and they're fine if you don't abuse them.
http://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/246755...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/11/16/women-and-prescript...
Imperial Japan also made use of meths, called "ヒロポン" at the time.
Wikipedia says it was "first synthesized in 1887 in Germany" by a Romanian scientist and then "in 1893 by Japanese chemist Nagai Nagayoshi".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methamphetamine#History.2C_soc...
Maybe the Germans learned the synthesis that they ended up using from Japanese research, despite being familiar with the substance before?
There's a separate wiki page for "history and culture of substituted amphetamines" that gives a bit more detail than the main article, though not on this particular point.
Rings a bell.
All vaguely steaming from looking at British, French and Spanish colonies were large numbers of their ethnic groups had taken hold.
Also in the '30s Italy invaded Ethiopia and Japan invaded Manchuria to create belated empires though with less overtly genocidal intentions.
(However dry the above description, I personally do not want to suggest that the Nazi project is equivalent to those other nation's actions)
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reichskommissariat_Ukraine [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lebensraum
Given the number of people the Japanese killed at Nanking[1] alone, I don't think this is a true statement. This site[2] (at and edu) puts it around 6 million total.
Nanking was massacred as punitive action for resistance, not as a means of creating space for the Japanese. They Japanese did have "colonists" in Manchuria, but if you know any geography that's nowhere close to Nanking.
The Germans (or at least, the Nazis) had a plan, on paper, to kill everyone in the east and replace them with Germans. Hitler was a Malthusian who believed populations would grow until resources were exhausted, he viewed non-Germans as competition for those resources, and he thought birth control and abortion would reduce genetic competition and make the German race weak (like the French...). So the only solution was to kill everyone who wasn't German.
Here's a quote from Himmler's wiki page: "It is a question of existence, thus it will be a racial struggle of pitiless severity, in the course of which 20 to 30 million Slavs and Jews will perish through military actions and crises of food supply." This was all planned out, and it was going to be on top of the deaths that actually occurred.
I regard it as a distinction without a difference. Six million people are dead because of Japan's actions. Without intervention, that number would have continued to climb.
But I think it is very productive to look very closely at the exact rhetoric that caused murderous excesses of WWII with a view toward prevention.
After all, both Germany and Japan were not very unusual in the generations before the war. And are today among the most charmingly pacifist countries on the planet.
But somewhere in the 1930s their leadership whipped their people into a murderous frenzy using what looks like different rhetoric (and with absurdly primitive media technology too). It would be informative to know exactly how and that I suggest requires looking closely at the details of the propaganda.
The Nazis were planning to kill hundreds of millions of people. It's not a distinction without a difference. The difference is enormous.
Incidentally, what do you think was going to happen as the Germans conquered China from the West? The Germans and Japanese were destined to come to blows even if they'd destroyed the allies.