Dont fight sober
Like many of the stimulants to which it is closely related, Captagon has made a gradual transition from pharmaceutical miracle to social menace. It’s a brand name for fenethylline, a compound synthesised in Germany in the early 1960s and originally marketed as a treatment for hyperactivity, narcolepsy and depression. Fenethylline is broken down by the body to produce amphetamine and theophylline, a caffeine-like stimulant, and because it is metabolised more slowly than pure amphetamine it was presented as a safer alternative to it, with milder effects on blood pressure and lower potential for abuse. The brand name Captagon was arrived at by combining ‘captain’ and ‘pentagon’, words chosen for their association with potency and their transcendence of language barriers. In the 1970s it circulated among Left Bank intellectuals, including Sartre and Bernard-Henri Lévy, as an aid to productive writing. In 1981 it was listed as a controlled substance in the US and in 1986, after it was scheduled under the WHO Convention on Psychotropic Substances, it was removed from prescription sale. After 1989 its manufacture shifted to the former Soviet bloc, Bulgaria in particular, where it was produced illicitly in the form of multicoloured pills, the fenethylline often combined with or replaced by other amphetamines.
Captagon (or whatever was now in the pills) was popular with Eastern European youths but its most lucrative market turned out to be the Gulf states, where, as with similar drugs in many other times and places, it found an overlapping set of cultural niches. Young Saudis adopted it as a recreational substitute for alcohol: energising and euphoric, and easy to take in public without tell-tale signs of intoxication. Other demographics used it as an aid to weight loss, a remedy for depression or an aphrodisiac reputedly superior to Viagra. Pills were commonly embossed with two crossed Cs, echoing the crescent moon of Islam. When Bulgaria joined the EU in 2007, production shifted to Turkey, Syria and Lebanon, typically in mobile laboratories with chemical precursors sourced online from India and China. In September 2011 the Saudi Ministry of the Interior announced that it had shot down a drone loaded with 700,000 pills, a quantity which it estimated was by then being consumed in the kingdom daily.
By 2014 it was clear that Captagon had become a significant source of funding for all sides in Syria’s civil war. It was less clear how extensively it was being used in combat, particularly by the jihadi forces. When Islamic State militants took control of areas of Aleppo province in August 2014 it was rumoured that a number of drug labs fell into their hands, and the UN Office on Drugs and Crime subsequently identified IS as traffickers. But the rumours of drug-fuelled militias proved hard to substantiate. Marc Trévidic, a terrorism expert and former high court magistrate in Paris, interviewed dozens of returning jihadists who insisted that drugs were strictly forbidden: this was, after all, a regime which handed down public lashings merely for smoking cigarettes. They dismissed the stories of zombie killers on the battlefield as lurid fabrications of the Syrian state media designed to discredit their motives. ‘Even my mother thinks I’m on Captagon!’ one jihadi lamented on Twitter. But other eyewitnesses maintained that Captagon was widely available to jihadi fighters, connived at because it kept them awake during shifts and night operations. Among themselves they referred to the pill euphemistically as farawla, ‘a strawberry’.
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v39/n01/mike-jay/dont-fight-sober
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Bozvotros
(785 posts)Thanks for posting.
Initech
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Judi Lynn
(160,530 posts)The Drugs That Built a Super Soldier
During the Vietnam War, the U.S. military plied its servicemen with speed, steroids, and painkillers to help them handle extended combat.
Soldiers in Vietnam in 1966 U.S. Army / Wikimedia
Lukasz Kamienski
| Apr 8, 2016
Some historians call Vietnam the “last modern war,” others the “first postmodern war.” Either way, it was irregular: Vietnam was not a conventional war with the frontlines, rears, enemy mobilizing its forces for an attack, or a territory to be conquered and occupied. Instead, it was a formless conflict in which former strategic and tactical principles did not apply. The Vietcong were fighting in an unexpected, surprising, and deceptive way to negate Americans’ strengths and exploit their weaknesses, making the Vietnam War perhaps the best example of asymmetrical warfare of the 20th century.
The conflict was distinct in another way, too—over time, it came to be known as the first “pharmacological war,” so called because the level of consumption of psychoactive substances by military personnel was unprecedented in American history. The British philosopher Nick Land aptly described the Vietnam War as “a decisive point of intersection between pharmacology and the technology of violence.”
Since World War II, little research had determined whether amphetamine had a positive impact on soldiers’ performance, yet the American military readily supplied its troops in Vietnam with speed. “Pep pills” were usually distributed to men leaving for long-range reconnaissance missions and ambushes. The standard army instruction (20 milligrams of dextroamphetamine for 48 hours of combat readiness) was rarely followed; doses of amphetamine were issued, as one veteran put it, “like candies,” with no attention given to recommended dose or frequency of administration. In 1971, a report by the House Select Committee on Crime revealed that 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.
More:
http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2016/04/the-drugs-that-built-a-super-soldier/477183/
