>>I'm guessing, though, that not too many grunts in WW2 did drugs and
>>shot their commanding officers.
>
>I an not aware of any dependable studies.
A good scholarly history of collective mutinies and individual acts of insubordination in armed forces -- a military equivalent of Herbert Aptheker's _American Negro Slave Revolts_ -- has yet to be written.
Drug use in the military has a long history, continuing to the present, but this, too, can only be glimpsed.
* The Civil War
"Morphine was used during the American Civil War as a surgical anesthetic and was sent home with many wounded soldiers for relief of pain. At the end of the war, over 400,000 people had the 'army disease,' morphine addiction. The Franco-Prussian War in Europe had a similar effect" ("Morphine," The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition, <http://www.bartleby.com/65/mo/morphine.html>, 2001).
Why was morphine addiction called "army disease"? Because morphine as well as other opiates were liberally dispensed as part of battlefield medicines:
<blockquote>During the Civil War, and at least until 1914, opiates were considered the best medicine for controlling dysentery and diarrhea and for containing the pain from war wounds. The Surgeon General's history of the just ended Civil War was often lavish in its praise of opium.
"Opium -- this medicine merits first place among these remedies. It was used almost universally in all cases of severe wounds, and was particularly useful in penetrating wounds of the chest, in quieting the nervous system and, indirectly in moderating hemmorhage.
(US Surgeon General, 1870 :645)
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Official records from the Civil War show more incidents of severe illness for which opiates were the main remedy than there were wounds. More died from disease than were killed in battle or succumbed to wounds (For Union troops, 62% "disease," 19% "battle," and 12% "Wounds" of 360,000 deaths among Union troops). (Duncan, 1912:397) Union medical records (for medical problems, not deaths) show approximately 1,400,000 acute and 200,000 chronic cases of diarrhea or dysentery, 250,000 wounds, and 300,000 cases, combined, of typhoid, typhus, continued fever, venereal disease, scurvy, delerium tremens, insanity and paralysis. (Brooks, 1966:127) There were 30,000 amputations reported performed by the Union's doctors. (US Surgeon General, 1883) Among Confederate prisoners, 32% of the almost 19,000 who died in captivity in the north succumbed to diarrhea or dysentery. (Brooks, 1966:126) In Andersonville prison from February 1864 to April 1865, of 12,541 recorded Union soldier captives who died, 45% did so from diarrhea or dysentery, and only 7% from wounds, gangrene or "debility." (US Surgeon General, 1879:32) There was obviously a great need for opiates.
Civil War physicians frequently dispensed opiates. The Secretary of War just after 1865 stated the Union Army was issued 10 million opium pills, over 2,840,000 ounces of other opiate preparations (such as laudunum or paregoric which, by weight, were well under half opium), and almost 30,000 ounces of morphine sulphate. (Courtwright, 1978:106-7 and 1982) (Jerry Mandel, "The Mythical Roots of U.S. Drug Policy: Soldier's Disease and Addicts in the Civil War," <http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/History/soldis.htm>)</blockquote>
<blockquote>Soon after the Civil War, several factors combined to force the drug habit out from the shadows and to recast it as a pressing social problem. First, the medical knowledge and use of narcotics had grown throughout the nineteenth century, especially after the hypodermic syringe came into broad use during the 1860s and 1870s. Though the popular belief that Civil War battlefield medicine was the chief cause of subsequent narcotic use has been disproved, a general increase in the prescription of narcotics during the Civil War era created a taste for them. The actual number of narcotic addicts during this period is notoriously difficult to establish, but the most reliable estimate is that the rate of addiction probably peaked in the mid-1890s at about 4.59 per thousand and then began to decline. (Timothy A. Hickman, "'Mania Americana': Narcotic Addiction and Modernity in the United States, 1870-1920," Journal of American History 90.4, <http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/jah/90.4/hickman.html>, March 2004)</blockquote>
* The Philippines Insurrection
<blockquote>In 1898 the United States acquired control of the Philippines. The following year it began a brutal fight to suppress a guerrilla uprising. It is basic to guerrilla war that combatants will be mingled with the civilian population. Social behaviors flow one to the other. Soon after their arrival American soldiers learned to smoke opium. This practice became sufficiently common that U.S. Opium Commissioner Hamilton Wright felt compelled to deny it, claiming in a report to the 1909 Shanghai Opium Commission that "among the personnel of our Army and Navy [in the Philippines] there is not the slightest evidence that the use of opium or its derivatives has been introduced...."[1]
In reality, the drug habit among U.S. military personnel was "alarmingly increasing," so much so that its occurrence was an agenda item at the 1903 meeting of the American Pharmaceutical Association. There the Report of the Committee on Acquirement of Drug Habits noted that soldiers acquired the practice from Chinese and native Filipinos and that a number of enlisted men had been discharged for being habitual drug users. The discharge rate was several hundred percent higher during the previous five years than for any ten years before that.[2] (Peter Brush, "Higher and Higher: Drug Use among U.S. Forces in Vietnam," <http://www.library.vanderbilt.edu/central/brush/DrugUseVN.htm>)</blockquote>
* World War 2
"During World War II, amphetamines were widely distributed to soldiers to combat fatigue and improve both mood and endurance, and after the war physicians began to prescribe amphetamines to fight depression" ("A Social History of America's Most Popular Drugs," <http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/drugs/buyers/socialhistory.html>).
* The Korean War
"During the Korean War era, the earliest intravenous use of amphetamines by United States servicemen was reported. Some soldiers stationed in Korea and Japan during the early 1950s had the habit of mixing heroin with amphetamine and injecting the combination (Brecher, 1972). (This was a variation of the traditional 'speedball,' which combined heroin and cocaine.) A number of returning service men brought the custom back to the United States" (Elaine Casey, "History of Drug Use and Drug Users in the United States," <http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/History/CASEY1.htm>).
* The Iraq War
"Some members of the Iowa Army National Guard were sent to the Middle East despite failing drug tests, Army officials acknowledged" (Associated Press, "Soldiers Sent to Iraq Despite Failing Drug Tests," November 13, 2003, <http://www.armytimes.com/story.php?f=1-213101-2394774.php>).
"There is a lot of drug use and prostitution. Drugs, especially Valium and other sedatives, are readily available throughout the urban centers. Prostitution is rampant because women are hungry, women are widowed, and there is a type of lawlessness that encourages it. Most of the prostitution caters to Iraqi men, but it also involves many U.S. soldiers" (Christian Parenti, qtd. Tucker Foehl, "What Kind of Freedom? An Interview with Christian Parenti," MotherJones, <http://www.motherjones.com/news/qa/2005/01/parenti.html>, January 26, 2005).
<blockquote>American soldiers traumatised by fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan are to be offered the drug ecstasy to help free them of flashbacks and recurring nightmares.
The US food and drug administration has given the go-ahead for the soldiers to be included in an experiment to see if MDMA, the active ingredient in ecstasy, can treat post-traumatic stress disorder.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
The existing drug-assisted therapy sessions last up to eight hours, during music is played. The patients swallow a capsule containing a placebo or 125mg of MDMA -- about the same or a little more than a typical ecstasy tablet.
(David Adam, "Ecstasy Trials for Combat Stress," The Guardian, <http://society.guardian.co.uk/drugsandalcohol/story/0,8150,1416150,00.html>, February 17, 2005)</blockquote> -- Yoshie
* Critical Montages: <http://montages.blogspot.com/> * Greens for Nader: <http://greensfornader.net/> * Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * OSU-GESO: <http://www.osu-geso.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>