Methamphetamine Chocolates

Because you and I both read that correctly.

Once, while travelling, I stumbled across Norman Ohler’s Blitzed: Drugs In Nazi Germany in a tiny airport bookstore with a ridiculously small English section. In need of something to read, I picked one of the few books which did not involve a plane being overtaken by terrorists.

Ohler’s book examines the use and abuse of drugs within the Nazi party and military. It starts in the Weimar period, with Anita Berber, an actress, who breakfasted on rose petals coated with chloroform and ether to the rise of methamphetamine usage. The use of stimulants, especially amphetamines, was so prevalent at the time a confectionary manufacturer even used them in chocolates.

Hildebrand Pralinen dosed each bonbon sold with 14 mg of methamphetamine and recommended women consume anywhere between three and nine a day to make housekeeping more enjoyable and curb hunger, according to Ohler. At the high end of the dosage recommendation this is 126 mg of methamphetamine a day!