8. Olympics Doping Led to the Discovery of Crystal Meth
During the 1936 Berlin Olympics, German scientists observed that American athletes’ performance was enhanced by Benzedrine, then rushed to come up with their own performance-enhancing drug. A year later, a Dr. Fritz Hauschild discovered methamphetamines, or crystal meth. In 1938 Temmler, a pharmaceutical company, began to sell crystal meth over the counter under the brand name Pervitin. It became so ubiquitous that it was marketed to German women in boxes of chocolate, with the recommendation that they take two to three a day to breeze through house chores and lose weight – the drug also suppressed appetite. With Pervitin such a huge hit with the German public, Germany’s military decided that it wanted a hit as well.
After hurried testing, Pervitin was approved for issue to the military and ordered into mass production. That took place in the context of a tolerant German official policy towards drugs. Before World War I, Germany was the world’s leading chemical giant, and the country’s chemical industry effectively had a global monopoly on drugs whose production required advanced (for that era) chemical expertise and industrial capacity. Germany’s chemical dominance was fueled by collaboration between researchers in German universities and industry – an approach pioneered in nineteenth century Germany, that has since become common in other countries around the world.
