Lex Fridman: commitment

Transcript context

…Yeah. We’re still in the context phase. Context phase. And for the next 10 hours, and maybe for the rest of our lives, we will be continuing just setting the context. But let us dare return to the original question of Pervitin. How did that come about? Take me to 1930s Nazi Germany. The Munich and the Berlin tension that we all laid out beautifully. How did Pervitin come into the picture? Well, the Nazis managed to grab power on January 30th, 1933, and they immediately became an anti-drug regime. That is important to them because the only intoxication they allowed from now on in Germany is the Nazi intoxication, it’s the ideological intoxication. So they quickly installed concentration camps, which were at the time run by the SA, not the SS, which takes over later and turns the concentration camps into an industry. The first SA concentration camps were in cellars in Berlin or in the countryside. And some of the first people that landed in these cellars and were disciplined were drug users. Also, anti-Semitic policies which were very important from day one for the Nazis. Anti-Semitism is the defining pillar of national socialism. The core of it, really. They quickly connected anti-drug policies with anti-Semitic policies. They claimed the German Jews were taking more drugs than the non-Jewish Germans. And National Socialism’s goal was to purify the German body. So they saw the whole Volk, the country, the people, as one body, and that has to be purified so all Jews are poison. But not only Jews, everyone who thinks differently. Communists are also poison. Jews are the worst poison, but, you know, a lot of, you know… Yeah, and then you create this clean body. And obviously drugs have no position in that. If you’re addicted to drugs, that’s weak, you know, you’re a morphinist. You use cocaine, that’s all degenerate, that’s Jewish, that’s… Jewish doctors are all morphinists, you know? So Nazi Germany and Hitler were the shining examples of a person who doesn’t take drugs. He didn’t have a private life, he didn’t even have a body. He just led the Volksbody, you know? So Hitler was not putting any poisons into him. He stopped smoking cigarettes in the ’20s already. He never touched alcohol.…

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