Funny that it doesn't mention the Allied use of amphetamine, which was far greater, and the subsequent prescription blitz in the US, where 1 in 10 people were t

Funny that it doesn't mention the Allied use of amphetamine, which was far greater, and the subsequent prescription blitz in the US, where 1 in 10 people were taking amphetamines by the 1960's. Now there was a society on drugs. "While consumption levels among each of the particular services remains elusive, I have been able crudely to calculate the (previously undisclosed) overall U.S. mil- itary consumption of amphetamine from the $877,000 worth of Benzedrine purchased from SKF by the government in the course of the war years. Applying the most conservative assumptions in the calculations, for instance, that the government paid regular bulk wholesale price for 10 mg pills, yields an estimate that the American military must have bought at least 250 million Benzedrine Sulfate tablets. The true figure is most likely double that number, around 500 million tab- lets in the course of the war, allowing for procurement pricing and the fact that the military mostly used 5 mg tablets rather than the stan- dard 10 mg prescription tablets (and it could easily be higher still if other conservative assumptions are relaxed).63 This estimate of 250–500 million tablets in total corresponds very roughly to a consumption rate of 10–20 government-supplied amphetamine tablets per year per American serving in combat theaters for the years 1942–45. Although well below the scandalous 30–40 tablets per serviceman per year con- sumption rate in the Vietnam conflict, it is still several (two to four) times the comparable British figure of about 5 tablets per serviceman per year, and roughly equivalent to the German methamphetamine consumption rate at its peak, the Blitz year of 1940." Quoted from "On Speed, the many lives of Amphetamine" by Nicholas Rasmussen.