This week I finished:
Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich, by Norman Ohler: I heard of this book and its premise a while ago, then heard it mentioned a couple times recently. Before reading it, I figured it would document some drug use. I thought of Nazis as rigid and clean.
It turns out that the Nazis used a lot of methamphetamines and it helped them win battles more than I expected. The drugs changed a lot of the outcome of the war. It helped them win short battles and campaigns at the beginning, contributing to blitzkrieg strategies, but didn’t help in the long run.
I also figured that Hitler wouldn’t use drugs. He seemed pretty amped up without them and I understood he didn’t drink. It turns out he used a lot of drugs, especially opiates toward the end. He seems to have become a drugged-out, nonfunctional wreck.
Partway through I wondered how accurate the book could be. It seemed to imply way more drug use than could have been missed in all this time. There are plenty of reviews including by historians that support how it could have been missed. Even if overstated, the amount of use of meth mostly and other drugs too must have been significant. The book doesn’t cover use by the Allied Powers or Germany’s allies, but apparently they used plenty, if not as much.
The writer was formerly a novelist, maybe still, and the book is almost fun to read.
Here are some links for more background.
- Blitzed: Drugs in Nazi Germany by Norman Ohler review – a crass and dangerously inaccurate account in the Guardian
- Was Nazi Germany a ‘land of drugs’? — Blitzed by Norman Ohler review in Financial Times
- ‘I had an intimate knowledge of Hitler’s drug habit that no one else possessed’ in the Guardian
Any book about drugs by an author happy to talk about it will be invited by Joe Rogan. Here are episodes of the author with him and Lex Friedman. I put the Friedman one first since it focuses more on just this book. Rogan’s conversation only gets to the book about halfway through, after talking an hour or so about drugs more generally.
As a side note, given Rogan’s lengthy consistent talk of the benefits of psychedelics (meth not being one), it seems to me that all he says in support of them applies double for solitude in nature, which I would promote more.
Joe Rogan:
Seymour: An Introduction, produced by Ethan Hawke, starring Seymour Bernstein: I watched this video before but saw the dvd at the library and thought it would help inspire me similarly to what I’ve read lately about Springsteen, by Springsteen, about Led Zeppelin, and other performance artists. so borrowed it to watch again.
It didn’t disappoint, but didn’t resonate at much. It turns out Bernstein died recently. Here is a piece about him in the New York Times: Seymour Bernstein Dies at 99; Stage Fright Cut Short His Piano Career
Privilege: A Reader, edited by Michael Kimmel and Abby Ferber: I happened to see this book in a thrift store and skimmed a few pages. I’ve written about several books that misunderstand race, such as by Kendi, Wilkerson, Di Angelo, and more.
This book outdoes them all. I think I can safely say that none of the essays in it understand what race and privilege are. Most of the contributors are academics using big words like intersectionality and tons of passive voice. They act as if racism is something inherent to white people, sexism is something men do, homophobia something straight people do, and so on. White people can’t help having privilege. They don’t know what power is. They just act like white people, men, straight people, and others have it.
They don’t understand how dominance hierarchies form so they don’t know what causes the effects they describe. They act as if they’re talking about a predictive theory based on cause and effect, but they’re just describing what they see phenomenologically. Since they are operating within a dominance hierarchy themselves, protected by tenure and access to peer-reviewed journals, they are self-righteous and smug, which would be annoying if they were right. They aren’t, so it makes them evoke pity, except for the power they wield.
I’ll write more about this community after my next book. In the meantime, here’s a quote that illustrates the book:
One of the best ways you can help in this movement is by educating your fellow White people on how to be an effective “ally.” Aka: Teach other White folks how not to be so racist (both intentionally and completely unintentionally) so that Black people don’t have to keep spending their time trying to teach their oppressors how to set them free.
And if a Black person happens to be so gracious and patient as to take the
time to explain to you . . .SHUT THE HECK UP AND LISTEN.
No explanation needed. Just listen, reflect, and internalize.
How the Planet-Altering Disaster of “Forever Chemicals” Was Kept Secret, from ProPublica’s podcast Paper Trail, by hosted by Jessica Lussenhop, with reporting by Sharon Lerner: I follow ProPublica in part because sometimes they uncover incredible stories, also because longtime friend, podcast guest, and Pulitzer Prize winner Jesse Eisinger works there.
This story is no less shocking than that of podcast guest Robert Bilott, also about PFAS and forever chemicals. This story reveals how much 3M knew. It’s disgusting.
It also reveals the human pattern of being induced by culture to violate our values. We can all learn not to keep doing what the people in 3M kept doing: keeping their heads down.
From the podcast episode notes:
3M knew that harmful “forever chemicals” had seeped into people’s blood decades ago and continued making them. A former company scientist helped reporter Sharon Lerner understand how a global environmental crisis was kept under wraps.
Description
We now know harmful “forever chemicals” are likely in the bodies of most people on earth. Decades ago, 3M knew that these chemicals had seeped into the public’s blood, but they kept that a secret. One 3M scientist helped reporter Sharon Lerner understand how they kept it quiet for so long.
The full article is long, I recommend. You can skim some parts that the podcast episode covers. Other parts give details beyond what the podcast did. Some quotes I may use:
At the time, Johnson said, he didn’t think PFOS caused significant health problems. Still, he told me, “it was obviously bad,” because man-made compounds from household products didn’t belong in the human body. He said that he argued against using fluorochemicals in toothpaste and diapers. Contractors working for 3M had shaved rabbits, he said, and smeared them with the company’s fluorochemicals to see if PFOS showed up in their bodies. “They’d send me the livers and, yup, there it was,” he told me. “I killed a lot of rabbits.” But he considered his efforts largely futile. “These idiots were already putting it in food packaging,” he said.
Johnson told me, with seeming pride, that one reason he didn’t do more was that he was a “loyal soldier,” committed to protecting 3M from liability. Some of his assignments had come directly from company lawyers, he added, and he couldn’t discuss them with me. “I didn’t even report it to my boss, or anybody,” he said. “There are some things you take to your grave.”
…
In Johnson’s telling, a tacit rule prevailed at 3M: Not all questions needed to be asked, or answered. His realization that PFOS was in the general public’s blood “wasn’t something anyone cared to hear,” he said. He wasn’t, for instance, putting his research on posters and expecting a warm reception. Over the years, he tried to convince several executives to stop making PFOS altogether, he told me, but they had good reason not to. “These people were selling fluorochemicals,” he said. He retired as the second-highest-ranked scientist in his division, but he claimed that important business decisions were out of his control. “It wasn’t for me to jump up and start saying, ‘This is bullshit!’” he said, and he was “not really too interested in getting my butt fired.” And so his portion of 3M’s secret stayed in a compartment, both known and not known.
…
When I called Hansen about my conversation with Johnson, she grew angrier than I’d ever heard her. “He knew the whole time!” she said.
…
Between 1951 and 2000, 3M produced at least 100 million pounds of PFOS and chemicals that degrade into PFOS. This is roughly the weight of the Titanic. After the late ’70s, when 3M scientists established that the chemical was toxic in animals and was accumulating in humans, it produced millions of pounds per year. Scientists are still struggling to grasp all the biological consequences. They have learned, just as Johnson did decades ago, that proteins in the body bind to PFOS. It enters our cells and organs, where even tiny amounts can cause stress and interfere with basic biological functions. It contributes to diseases that take many years to develop; at the time of a diagnosis, one’s PFOS level may have fallen, making it difficult to establish causation with any certainty.
…
Philippe Grandjean, a physician who helped discover that PFAS harm the immune system, believes that anyone exposed to these chemicals — essentially everyone — may have an elevated risk of cancer. Our immune systems often find and kill abnormal cells before they turn into tumors. “PFAS interfere with the immune system, and likely also this critical function,” he told me. Grandjean, who served as an expert witness in the Minnesota AG’s case, has studied many environmental contaminants, including mercury. The impact of PFAS was so much more extreme, he said, that one of his colleagues initially thought it was the result of nuclear radiation.
…
In April, the EPA took two historic steps to reduce exposure to PFAS. It said that PFOS and PFOA are “likely to cause cancer” and that no level of either chemical is considered safe; it deemed them hazardous substances under the Superfund law, increasing the government’s power to force polluters to clean them up. The agency also set limits for six PFAS in drinking water. In a few years, when the EPA begins enforcing the new regulations, local utilities will be required to test their water and remove any amount of PFOS or PFOA which exceeds four parts per trillion — the equivalent of one drop dissolved in several Olympic swimming pools. 3M has produced enough PFOS and chemicals that degrade into PFOS to exceed this level in all of the freshwater on earth.