...But with the Nazi seizure of power, Ohler tells us, “[d]rugs were made taboo […] ‘Seductive poisons’ had no place in a system in which only the Führer was supposed to do the seducing.” Already during the Weimar era, the Nazi party, in all its upright, uptight, right-wing righteousness, adopted an official anti-drug stance in opposition to the licentious atmosphere of 1920s Germany, with its loosey-goosey, pansexual nightlife and its pervasive atmosphere of gayness, prostitution, and, of course, drugs. “For [the Nazis] there could be only one legitimate form of inebriation: the swastika,”
Ohler writes.But gradually, as a wound-up society needed more and more winding up to keep functioning, drugs did in fact become popular among the German public. A popular product, invented in Nazi Germany and widely marketed therein, was an over-the-counter pill called Pervitin, and its active ingredient was what we now commonly call meth...