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Drugs have long played a role in wartime strategy, but the Nazis took chemical dependency to another level, the author of "Blitzed" told Insider.
Drugs have long played a role in wartime strategy, but the Nazis took chemical dependency to another level, the author of "Blitzed" told Insider.
Before the First World War, the collaborative research efforts of the German university system and German corporations enabled the German corporate sector as a whole to obtain a virtual worldwide monopoly on drugs whose production required chemical expertise and industrial capacity. This research was fueled by revenues from the sale of morphine, an alkaloid found in opium, first identified by a German chemist in the early 19th century and patented by Merck soon afterward. German pharmaceutical companies’ work with morphine and its derivatives found particular success in using them as...