I recently wrote about the new book Blitzed, which look at drugs by the Nazis and how the ideology of National Socialism– and the increasingly desperate needs of the German military during World War II– pushed people to heavy use of drugs like methamphetamine. Today I saw that Leigh Alexander recently flagged another study, on the U.S. Army in Vietnam:

from 1966 to 1969, the armed forces had used 225 million tablets of stimulants, mostly Dexedrine (dextroamphetamine), an amphetamine derivative that is nearly twice as strong as the Benzedrine used in the Second World War. The annual consumption of Dexedrine per person was 21.1 pills in the navy, 17.5 in the air force, and 13.8 in the army.

“We had the best amphetamines available and they were supplied by the U.S. government,” said Elton Manzione, a member of a long-range reconnaissance platoon (or Lurp). He recalled a description he’d heard from a navy commando, who said that the drugs “gave you a sense of bravado as well as keeping you awake. Every sight and sound was heightened. You were wired into it all and at times you felt really invulnerable.” Soldiers in units infiltrating Laos for a four-day mission received a medical kit that contained, among other items, 12 tablets of Darvon (a mild painkiller), 24 tablets of codeine (an opioid analgesic), and six pills of Dexedrine. Before leaving for a long and demanding expedition, members of special units were also administered steroid injections.

One of the interesting and tragic consequences of this use of drugs in the combat zone is that it suppressed combat trauma, but probably made post-traumatic stress disorders worse:

The massive use of psychopharmacology and the deployment of a large number of military psychiatrists help explain the unprecedentedly low rate of combat trauma recorded in wartime: Whereas the rate of mental breakdowns among American soldiers was 10 percent during the Second World War (101 cases per 1,000 troops) and 4 percent in the Korean War (37 cases per 1,000 troops), in Vietnam it fell to just 1 percent (12 cases per 1,000 troops)….

[But drugs] do not eliminate the causes of stress. Instead, observes [author David[ Grossman, they do “what insulin does for a diabetic: They treat the symptoms, but the disease is still there.”… In her book Flashback, Penny Coleman quotes a military psychologist who says that if drugs are given while the stressor is still being experienced, they will arrest or supercede the development of effective coping mechanisms, resulting in an increase in the long-term trauma from the stress. What happened in Vietnam is the moral equivalent of giving a soldier a local anesthetic for a gunshot wound and then sending him back into combat.

If you’re interested in the book-length version, it’s Lukasz Kamienski’s Shooting Up: A Short History of Drugs and War.