HISTORY: AMPHETAMINE OVERDOSE IN HEAT OF COMBAT

Many of today's illegal drugs were used in Finland well before the
hippie era - the country was full of them during the war

The day is March 18, 1944.

A Finnish ski patrol in the terrain of Kantalahti in Finnish Lapland
is on the third day of its mission behind enemy lines when the group
is ambushed by Soviet forces at the foot of Kaitatunturi fell. During
an intense firefight, the men manage to slip past the enemy who are
trying to encircle them.

What ensues is a wild pursuit on skis.

Aimo Koivunen, who opens the track in the virgin snow, feels his
energy slipping away. The Russians are gaining on them until Koivunen
remembers that he has the group's entire supply of Pervitin in his
breast pocket.

Before that he has taken a suspicious view of the strong stimulant
that was given out to commando forces operating behind enemy lines,
but now the situation is serious.

The men have to ski fast and it is not easy to dig out just one pill,
so he dumps the whole supply - 30 pills - into his mitten.

Soon Koivunen's skiing gets a new boost, and the whole patrol moves
forward at a much faster pace.

This lasts for just a short time. Soon Koivunen notices distortions
in his field of vision, and his consciousness begins to fade. The
overdose of methamphetamine contained in the pills puts Koivunen into
a state of delirium lasting several days, with alternating phases of
wakefulness, sleep, and hallucinations.

His next recollection is from the next morning. He is 100 kilometres
away. He has lost his patrol, and has no more ammunition, or food.
Now he faces a real ordeal just to survive.

During the days that follow, Koivunen successfully flees Russian
partisan forces, is injured by a land mine, and lies for a week in a
pit in the snow waiting for help to arrive. He skis for more than 400
kilometres in temperatures of -20 C. During two weeks the only food
he has are pine buds and a Siberian jay that he catches and eats raw.

When he is finally rescued and taken to a hospital his pulse rate is
nearly 200 beats per minute and his weight has dropped to 43 kilos.

Aimo Koivunen's adventure story is part of the history of Finland's
wartime commando forces. But it is historical in another sense as
well: Koivunen became one of the first Finns to overdose on speed.

The arrival of mind-altering drugs in Finland is generally seen to
have taken place in the mid-1960s when psychedelic substances -
especially cannabis - first came into the country along with the
hippie movement.

However, drugs were by no means unknown in Finland before the 1960s.
Already in 1922 the first statute was given in which opium, morphine,
cocaine, and heroin were declared intoxicant drugs.

The reason for the move was not an out-of-control drug problem, but
rather an international treaty signed in The Hague in 1912. Alcohol
was still Finland's main intoxicant - in spite of prohibition.

However, the use of narcotics was increasing. In the 1920s and 1930s,
drugs were used mainly by those who had access to them. Many doctors,
nurses, and pharmacists could not resist the temptation to try their
substances in their free time. One in four abusers were doctors.

Not all substances were even perceived to be dangerous. There was
plenty of legal morphine and heroin in Finland, which was used in the
manufacture of cough medicine.

In fact, in the 1930s Finland was the number-two country in the per
capita use of heroin - right after Japan. The consumption rate was
about seven kilos per one million inhabitants. Because of this
Finland got a number of warnings from the international opium control
monitors.

As a result of the incautious dispensing of opiates, addiction often
began from what seemed like innocent medication. For instance, the
18-year morphine habit of composer Aarre Merikanto started with opium
that he took for a stomach disorder.

As the drugs were easily available, there was little crime connected with them.

The dangers of the chemicals were apparent, though: in the 1930s
hospitals regularly treated opiate addicts, although the number of
new cases in a year could be counted on the fingers of a single hand.

Drugs were mainly a problem of the higher social classes; two thirds
of habitual users were among the well-to-do, and opiate addiction was
actually referred to as upper class morphine dependency.

There were not many drug references in the Finnish literature of the
time. One of the few that did appear was in The Great Illusion, the
first novel of writer Mika Waltari. In it the main character and his
academically educated friend Hellas try to get some cocaine from a
German ship at a pier in Katajanokka in central Helsinki. "It is pure
reason, concentrated sunshine and the gleam of steel", Hellas says
enthusiastically.

The description cannot be attributed to pure imagination. Young
bohemians felt a certain amount of interest in the new intoxicants,
and for instance, the young author Olavi Paavolainen experimented
extensively with opium in the early 1920s.

The war changed everything. Large amounts of stimulant and narcotic
drugs became available - especially in the trenches. Opiates were
used to alleviate the pain of the wounded, and stimulants helped keep
soldiers awake.

For instance, the Pervitin used by Aimo Koivunen was developed in
Germany, and was used to keep soldiers alert during battle. The same
substance was also popular among the military command and medical
personnel; doctors needed more than just coffee to get through
stretches of almost uninterrupted surgery lasting up to three weeks.

Nevertheless, Pervitin did not cause any serious problems in Finland,
and its use was limited to the applications for which it was
intended. The pills had such a good reputation that after the war the
name Pervitin was used to market a cold remedy, which nevertheless
did not contain any amphetamine.

Morphine and heroin used as analgesics helped establish Finland's
first generation of opiate addicts. People bought the drugs far
beyond medical necessity, and wartime heroin pills were to be found
on the black market as late as the end of the 1960s.

Addiction usually set in after a war injury during convalescence.
Getting hooked on opiates in the midst of war was seen as something
of a routine event in the heat of war.

In a book on his wartime experiences, writer Jouko Teperi recalls
once when the front lines were stable, how he went to see a film
along with a second lieutenant from a neighbouring dugout. During the
film Teperi's companion kept popping what appeared to be sweets. When
Teperi asked if he could have some, the lieutenant apologised and
said that he probably wouldn't like them, because they were heroin
pills.

The war led to an increase in the use of drugs. It is estimated that
there were about 500 addicts in Finland immediately after the war,
most of them living in Helsinki. They would get their drugs with
prescriptions, both genuine and forged. Gradually a black market
arose. Heroin was sold at Finnish pharmacies until 1957.

In the trenches this vice of the upper classes had spread to other
social classes. Soon more than two thirds of those seeking treatment
for their addiction had a working class background. The drug addicts
gradually began to form a separate subculture.

In May 1949 Helsingin Sanomat printed a story about a "ring of
morphine addicts" in Helsinki. The paper interviewed one of the
group's more prominent members, an academically educated woman about
30 years of age.

In the interview the woman said that the group included 115 morphine
users, ten of whom were women. The roots of the addictions of most of
them were in field hospitals during the war, but other types of users
were also infiltrating the group.

"Unfortunately we have been getting real criminal elements among us",
she said regretfully.

When tighter controls were imposed on Finnish pharmacies in the 1950s
it became increasingly difficult to get hold of heroin and morphine.
Opiates affecting the central nervous system no longer spread among
the younger generation, and a shrinking older generation of wartime
drug addicts were left to haunt the country's health statistics.

The number of "traditional" drug addicts is believed to have dropped
to less than 100 by the early 1960s. However, a completely new class
of users soon arose.

After the Second World War the pharmaceutical industry brought plenty
of new substances onto the market, and many of them had effects that
were not very well understood. For instance the diet pills favoured
by housewives in the 1950s and 1960s contained large amounts of
amphetamine derivatives.

These new pharmaceutical innovations were met with much hope. LSD was
welcomed as a potential treatment for mental disorders. Even in
Finland medical students experimented with the substance under the
supervision of Dr. Asser Huttunen at the Lapinlahti mental hospital,
but these experiments were discontinued in the mid-1960s.

In any case, the decreased use of opiates suggested that the drug
problem was under control. This proved to be the calm before the
storm. People soon learned about cannabis and the even stronger
mind-expanders favoured by bohemians and jazz musicians of different
countries.

The final moments of innocence were reflected in a Moomintroll comic
strip in the newspaper Ilta-Sanomat in 1968. The strip, drawn and
written by Lars Jansson, was entitled The Moomins in Torrelorca.

In it, the Moomintroll family are on a southern holiday when they
happen to pop half a kilo of "LBJ pills" at a party thrown by young
artists. As a result the whole family end up staring at the moon for
a week.