i always wondered about this one: i saw a documentary about kamikaze pilots and it turned out they were drugged for their "last deployment" with crystal meth (so that they felt invincible etc).
Just read a book about kamikaze pilots and it did not mention drugging them at all (excluding a cup of sake upon departure). "Only" indoctrination, religious brainwashing, and intense social pressure in addition to a completely different cultural background. Both positive feedback (better meals than rank-and-file, heavy implication of sexual services) and negative feedback (beatings, drills), with their entire lifes transformed into a religious ritual culminating in the "deployment".
Many (if not most) of them were "volunteers", once one pilot from a squadron had genuinely volunteered, the rest couldn't back out without losing face and/or being branded as cowards. Towards the end of the war, volunteers were not really even needed anymore, because they started to conscript students to become kamikazes with minimal training in order to save real pilots for proper missions. So they sometimes had to be coerced into the planes and many kept turning back from missions (well the introduction of the Ohka got rid of this problem), being "unable to find a suitable target". Sometimes they were assigned back to regular squadrons, sometimes shot, but eventually most would give in to peer pressure and find a target (or die trying, which was still infinitely more likely).
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As for Pervitin, the
höökipulveri (literally: "assault powder", even though the wartime doses were tablets, powderized form was only sold post-war), as it was known in Finland, became a real problem post-war because during the war it had been given out generously (many soldiers had stocks of it upon homecoming), and on top of that, it remained for quite some time an
over-the-counter medicine. (Pervitin was eventually reformulated to contain aspirin and caffeine instead of meth, until even the trade name was withdrawn.) Doping tests being not invented yet, it became commonplace in skiing contests to mix Pervitin in blueberry soup (eating pills might have seemed unsportmanship, drinking juice wouldn't), with the result being that functionaries had to keep guiding the skiers back on course, because they were too high to notice where the track went anymore.
Of course, heroin was also legal and available in pharmacies in Finland until 1957. It was
supposedly used as cough syrup. Finland had been chastised by the League of Nations already before the war for this practice, but during the war, heroin pretty much displaced the other cough medicines because it was cheaper and easier to produce, and could be used as a replacement for morphine when necessary. Even after heroin was banned, opiates did not vanish overnight, a diarrhea medicine containing opium was sold as an
over-the-counter medicine until completely withdrawn in
2008.
