Is this true? Nazis used meth extensively for energy--soldiers, workers, Hitler

[Mike 03]

32. Thanks for the link.

This topic is fascinating.

Winston Churchill developed an interest in speed when he learned that the Germans were using it and British troops were supplied with hundreds of thousands of pills as well. And U.S. General Dwight Eisenhower, who would later become president, ordered at least half a million tablets for Americans fighting in North Africa.

Arguably, one of the most important takeaways from the episode isn’t just that troops were given speed to keep them awake, as we might assume. Researchers of the time discovered that it helped make their troops more confident and even more aggressive. That’s obviously useful in war, but it also has its downsides. As the episode explains, one useful thing about fear is that it keeps you from putting your body in harm’s way. Fear is a natural self-defense mechanism and people who are overly confident might achieve great things, but they also run the risk of making really dumb mistakes.

The episode also gets into the dosages that troops were using, which could run as high as 100 milligrams on some occasions. And that was before the invention of “extended release” technology that we have today that slowly introduces a drug into your bloodstream. When you took a pill in the 1940s, you were getting a swift kick of the entire dose at once.