From Nazis to Breaking Bad

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 08/06/2013 (4688 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Crystal meth is notorious for being highly addictive and ravaging countless communities. But few know the drug can be traced back to Nazi Germany, where it first became popular as a way to keep pilots and soldiers alert in battle during the Second World War.

“Alertness aid” read the packaging, to be taken “to maintain wakefulness.” But “only from time to time,” it warned, followed by a large exclamation point.

One young soldier, though, needed more of the drug, much more. He was exhausted by the war, becoming “cold and apathetic, completely without interests,” as he himself observed.

He found just one pill was as effective for staying alert as litres of strong coffee. And when he took the drug, all his worries seemed to disappear. For a couple of hours, he felt happy.

This 22-year-old, who wrote numerous letters home begging for more Pervitin, was not just any soldier — he was Heinrich Bll, who would go on to become one of Germany’s leading postwar writers and win a Nobel Prize for literature in 1972.

We now know the drug as crystal meth.

Many TV fans are familiar with the drug primarily from the hit American series Breaking Bad, in which a chemistry teacher with financial troubles teams up with a former student to produce meth by the pound.

It was in Germany, though, that the drug first became popular. When the drug maker Temmler Werke launched its methamphetamine compound onto the market in 1938, high-ranking army physiologist Otto Ranke saw in it a true miracle drug that could keep tired pilots alert and an entire army euphoric. It was the ideal war drug.

The Wehrmacht, Germany’s Second World War army, distributed millions of the tablets to soldiers on the front, who soon dubbed the stimulant “Panzerschokolade” (“tank chocolate”). British newspapers reported German soldiers were using a “miracle pill.” But for many soldiers, the miracle became a nightmare.

As enticing as the drug was, its long-term effects on the human body were just as devastating. Short rest periods weren’t enough to make up for long stretches of wakefulness, and the soldiers quickly became addicted to the stimulant. And with addiction came sweating, dizziness, depression and hallucinations. Some soldiers shot themselves during psychotic phases.

After the war, numerous athletes found Pervitin decreased their sensitivity to pain, while simultaneously increasing performance and endurance. In 1968, boxer Joseph “Jupp” Elze, 28, failed to wake again after a knockout in the ring following some 150 blows to the head. Without methamphetamine, he would have collapsed much sooner and might not have died. Elze became Germany’s first known victim of doping. Yet the drug remained on the market until the 1980s.

The drug’s new career came thanks to an American cookbook.

A mad-scientist type named Steve Preisler, alias “Uncle Fester,” a chemist in Wisconsin in the mid-1980s, published a drug “cookbook” titled Secrets of Methamphetamine Manufacture.

In this controversial book, now in its eighth edition, Preisler presented six different recipes for preparing the drug. All called for only legal ingredients, using a simple chemical reaction to extract the drug’s principal component from cough medicine, then combining it with liquids that increased its effectiveness, such as drain cleaner, battery acid or antifreeze.

Illegal meth labs proliferated; 11,000 were discovered in the U.S. in 2010.

Addicts today consume 1,000 times the dose once taken by Wehrmacht soldiers during the Second World War. The side-effects are alarming. Before and after pictures of meth addicts show they come to look like living corpses within an extremely short span of time.

Despite this, it seems the drug has lost none of the appeal to which Heinrich Bll succumbed.

— Der Spiege