It Might Get Messy

Have drugs saved the world? There’s little doubt that they will, someday, maybe someday soon. The emergence and host transference of hemorrhagic fevers like Lassa and Ebola, highly evolved immune system nightmares like HIV, and the reservoirs of Yersinia pestis, cause of black or bubonic plague, all argue for the near-future probability of some massive contagion requiring heroic pharmaceutical intervention (see, among most recent examples, epidemic epic and Laurence Fishburne vehicle “Contagion”). Hell, there’s apparently still enough smallpox on ice in Russia, the U.S., and Ukraine to trigger such an event via a power outage and some careless cleanup of some messy old freezers.

But I’m thinking of this another way. One place I’m amazed drugs didn’t alter the world for the worse was the brain of Charles Darwin. On the Beagle as a young man, probably somewhere in South America, Darwin contracted a persistent tropical infection. He was plagued, so to speak, for the rest of his life by abdominal pains and other complaints. He was treated with increasingly frequent and massive doses of mercury-based medicines. Mercury, therapeutically useless, is in fact a powerful nerve toxin, and impairment of brain and other nervous system functions inevitable outcomes of chronic dosing. Yet Darwin created, thought through, and finished his most brilliant and prolific work in the throes of mercury poisoning. Of course, he was very slow to get the Origin of Species into print, and he actually meant for it to be the abstract or précis of a much larger and more seriously scholarly work. Maybe some of that was an outcome of his mercury intoxication. But if so, on the scale of the lives of us normal human schleps, you’d be hard-pressed to clearly label that a negative impact.

No, I’m going the other way with this line of inquiry. Consider. Through the 1930s, Adolph Hitler was smart, rigorous, and systematic. He manipulated first the Germans, then the Europeans and Britons, then the Soviets, in succession until he’d taken the European continent on a pretty casual basis. If he’d retained that systematic rigor through the 1940s, there’s no telling what the hell the world would be like today. Let’s say Hitler retained the peace treaty with the Soviets (who were nowhere near ready to defend themselves) and gone ahead and taken Britain instead. Oh, that wouldn’t have been easy. But it would have been doable. Then, without a hostile pipeline for American wrath at his back, he could have turned his sole attention to the Soviets. Given how fine a line there was between success and failure at Moscow, Leningrad, Stalingrad, and in the resource-rich southern Ukraine, it seems like the Germans might have made a real run at it. And we know from recently discovered research documents that German engineers were already thinking ahead to the Western Hemisphere. Ambitious weapon systems like 8 engine intercontinental bombers, huge transport submarines, and nuclear fission weaponry were all on people’s drawing boards. 

What we have to thank for the way things actually worked out is a string of oddly piss-poor decisions made personally by Hitler himself. He insisted the Messerschmidt 262, a stunningly advanced jet fighter that could have be in production by the early 1940s, be configured inappropriately as a bomber. He discounted jet and rocket technology and strategic bombing following the tactical success of continental blitzkrieg. He gave up on invading Britain after a long hard year of strictly aerial combat. He halted the units that were moving in to capture the allied forces the heroic Britons pulled off the beaches at Dunkirk. He signed on with Italy, putting a political and military albatross squarely on his chest. He insisted on mistreating Ukrainian and other non-Russian Soviets who initially treated the Germans as liberators. And most stupidly, he opened the second front with the Soviets, and in the process of dividing his limited resources shitcanned a succession of competent and professional military leaders and appointed himself, amateurish, petulant, irresponsible, and, basically, clueless, as top commander. 

And what might account for Hitler’s transition from unlikely but disciplined and successful political leadership to incompetent and untenable insanity? Well, historians generally do NOT blame his physicians [1].  But as the 30s became the 40s, Hitler met a mystical, semi-competent, marginally ethical doctor named Theodor Morell. As a fellow wack-job, Morell and Hitler hit it off right away. Especially since Morell immediately began administering cocaine eyedrops, amphetamine breakfast injects, morphine bedtime injections, a weird patent-medicine supplement product that contained a considerable concentration of nicotine, and other, even odder substances (possibly none quite as toxic as the nicotine, though). And he Morell gave him this stuff in increasing frequency and quantity right through to Hitler’s suicide in the Berlin bunker in the late spring of 1945. I think it’s likely that Hitler crossed that fine line between evil genius and evil idiot as a result of Morell’s ministrations. Morell—and his drugs—may well have saved the world. 

And why do I bring up this rant of historic esoterica in the context of a cancer recovery diary? Because I have my own drug problems. As I’ve told you several times in the past couple of years, I’ve had to wean myself off of addiction to powerful sedative Xanax (actually the generic equivalent Alprazolam). Like quitting daily alcohol when my cancer was diagnosed, I don’t seem to have a lot of trouble attenuating then breaking the inevitable addiction to the sedative. It’s just odd to go through it repeatedly. Last time I saw my GP, he loaded me up with blood pressure and anti-depressant meds, and started to renew the scrip for Xanax. I told him not to bother—that with the cancer over, I was sleeping just fine and didn’t need it. Two days later, we found that scary tumor-looking blob on my throat. I faxed a note back to Dr. K, explaining that I had been too cocky, that I’d probably need that sedative to sleep effectively for a while. He renewed, no problem. As you can see here:

Xanax generic equivalent ready for use.

So I’ve been sleeping well on a milligram, milligram-and-a-half of Xanax. Got a couple more weeks of that, then the scrip will start to run down and I’ll wean myself back off it. I apparently inherited my father’s awesome control over his physiology. Dad was a serious alcoholic for decades, not having a night in maybe 30 years that he didn’t go to be at least pleasantly drunk and often further into it than that. Then his doctor told him alcohol was poisoning him and his liver and heart were going to fail very soon if he kept it up. That night he stopped drinking. No problems, no physiological issues. I read somewhere that you can’t die from heroine withdrawal, but you can die from alcohol withdrawal. I wonder about Xanax? 

Notes

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodor_Morell

[2] http://www.fpp.co.uk/books/Morell/Morell.pdf