Psychoactive Substances' Presence In Narcissistic Nationalist Politicians
"Psychoactive Substances' Presence In Narcissistic Nationalist Politicians"
Rant #11(Opinion)
Originally March 13, 2020
Today, the president declared a national emergency in response to the spreading coronavirus, COVID-19. During the announcement, Trump gave his usual brash presentation. And yet, the way he spoke sounded a lot lower and slower than the way he usually speaks. Perhaps my observation here is a bit slanted: I only heard the address on the radio, so I don't know what he actually looked like during this. Also, I may be uniquely keen on noticing the effects of drugs on someone. So, was Trump on drugs?
The slurring, that weird draggy low voice: I don't know if you could go so far to say that there exists an 'opioid accent,' but the way he sounded reminded me of how many men tend to talk while on dope. Stringing together words has never been a challenge for this president. Those words might not make any sense at all, but he still says it--but not this time. He paused more often than in other speeches. Sure, he did the standard attacking Obama, blaming the Democrats, telling several flat-out lies...
One theory might be that President Trump has the coronavirus (COVID-19) himself, having contracted it during his meeting with Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, who has since tested positive for the contagious disease. Reporters asked the president if he intended to quarantine himself and if not then why; he managed to make noise come out of his mouth for a length of time in which nothing remotely related to the question came up. Nobody asked if he himself had it...nonetheless, barring an illness like that, the other major cause of the behavior I noticed comes from drugs.
This issue has come up before, given the "stable genius's" erratic behavior. Some have made accusations, while many other simply theorized that Trump may currently use a whole slew of drugs from uppers to downers, inners and outters--maybe not all at once, maybe not all of them, but something has to explain the enigma that is Donald John Trump.
Of course, the man clearly has a host of psychological abnormalities. Narcissistic types like Trump tend to also exhibit paranoia, distrust, and both a poor and a magnified self-image simultaneously. These traits, coupled with the stresses of running a country, can create a situation ripe for drug abuse to develop in. A lot of thuggish world leaders have fallen into spirals of drug abuse, especially towards the termini of their reigns.
To name a few:
Richard Nixon started drinking (more) heavily after his re-election, mixing in sleeping pills and for some reason an anti-seizure drug called Dilantin, which he took off-label for depression. Ironically, the first politician to launch a formal 'War on Drugs' actually had a pretty dangerous habit himself, seeing as physical dependence on alcohol, barbiturates, benzodiazepines, and similar sedatives can kill somebody during acute withdrawal. Neurons accustomed to the drug rapidly fire without that chemical input. This spike in the brain's electrical activity can, among many other things, induce potentially fatal seizures. It seems like the drugs which Nixon declared "public enemy number one" all have extremely safe profiles, in contrast with harder drugs or even just alcohol. Ramping up a campaign against marijuana, mushrooms and LSD was almost exclusively a political calculation by him. Former Nixon policy adviser John Ehrlichman has said that going after these drugs would target Blacks and White anti-war protester/hippies--two constituencies which fundamentally opposed Nixon's agenda and stood in his way. If Nixon couldn't squash these groups like a bug, then he'd have to burn them out like a roach.
So while his administration began sending people to jail for acid or really crappy 1960s weed, Nixon himself began to consume more and more pills--presumably barbiturates, or possibly the somewhat newly debuted Valium. It led to a vicious cycle where he'd wake up groggy and kind of hungover, muddle through his day, then dose up and drink at night to experience a comfortable high that also left him kind of disoriented. Apparently, the president was taking so much of these sedatives that by the end of his presidency, two glasses of scotch combined with the pills' effects would leave him practically unable to speak cogently--certainly slurring his words.
With alcohol and many sedatives, which work in extremely similar ways, another signature effect is altered judgment and discretion. At times, those surrounding Nixon quietly discussed activating the 25th Amendment, which allowed for the replacement of a president in the circumstance of disabilities. Which disabilities counted as legitimate? Nobody knew. Like other parts of the Constitution, its writers likely left it intentionally vague so as to serve the unique needs of the situation. The Amendment had only passed in 1967--one year before Nixon's election as president--so part of the calculus of not using it had to do with not immediately making the removal of a sitting president a mainstay in American politics. Given all this talk, not to mention the whole Watergate scandal and God knows what other shady activity that the tentacles of Richard Millhouse Nixon extended into, it gave the man a fairly credible reason to become deeply suspicious of even those he trusted the most. Ultimately, he was taken down partly by individuals who he placed a lot of trust in, trusting them enough to perpetrate serious crimes with one another. He may not have been totally crazy--but he definitely did have a depressant problem.
Another notoriously whacked-out historical figure: Adolf Hitler. Everybody has heard something or other about Nazis doing meth, often told in a way that sounds like an urban legend or exaggeration. Well, it really isn't: methamphetamine fueled the German Wehrmacht ("War Machine"). Nazi soldiers were blitzed during the blitzkrieg. At the time, it was a seemingly magical new drug that allowed people to skip sleeping and eating while maintaining a high level of energy, concentration and confidence. It was "National Socialism in pill form," according to a writer who delved into the topic. To be fair, other armies used similar substances. The United States and Britain preferred Benzedrine. Rather than using methamphetamine, they fed their troops a drug equal parts levoamphetamine and dextroamphetamine. The distinction drawn between the two sets of very similar drugs has persisted up until now: the United States prescribes drugs like Adderall, a mix of dextro- and levo-amphetaine. With the exception of methylphenidate (Ritalin, Concerta), almost all stimulants used for ADHD medication contain some ratio of the same amphetamines that the Allies preferred in the Second World War. Meanwhile, methamphetamine mainly exists on the black market: crystal meth, ice, crank, and many other terms describe the same drug. Americans tend to look at the dextro- and levo-amphetamine formulations as something that college students take to cram for exams, or at worst a medication over-prescribed to children. Meth, on the other hand, is icky. Meth users have no teeth, they've lost touch with reality. Technically, a medication made of methamphetamine does exist, yet the stigma associated with it has trickled down through the generations and as a result, only gets prescribed in extremely stubborn cases of obesity, and even then only as a short-term regimen. Most pharmacies don't even carry it because it has become so obscure.
Cocaine and opioids also had their own roles in the Third Reich: for example, methadone was first synthesized during the war because the Allies had cut off Germany's supply line to countries that produced opium. Up to that point, it required the poppy plant in order to create any opiate. Aside from the Nazi's unique drug culture, any war will ethically necessitate access to painkillers. When you have people getting limbs blown off, bullet wounds, and things of that nature, it becomes crucial to have something that turns off or at least muffles that excruciating pain. Sure, wars were fought before the widespread availability of anything like opiates. In a total war scenario, guaranteeing that those in pain don't feel it is of utmost importance. On top of the ethics involved, when you have citizens visibly injured and expressing the terrible pain that they feel, it chips away at morale. And to win a total war, the leaders must harness any and all morale they can extract from the populace, lest they lose the will to fight and all is for naught.
Thus it became vital to find something to use as a substitute for drugs that either came from the opium poppy or that chemists could synthesize from the plant. As it turns out, years earlier some German scientists had discovered a drug in the ever-elusive quest to find an opioid that worked as an opioid without working to addict users like an opioid. That didn't work out. It happens again and again and again: using morphine with a needle supposedly circumvented addiction, because addiction occurred in the stomach, early 19th century doctors thought. Then heroin supposedly provided pain relief without the addiction of morphine. Methadone, pethidine, even up into the late 1990s with the debut of OxyContin, a time-release formula of oxycodone that apparently produced only very few cases of dependence, because its time-release structure didn't provide a rush of effects all at once, thought to contribute to the addictiveness of any drug.
Speaking of oxycodone, the conversation can return to Hitler. The Fuhrer found himself receiving regular shots of Eukodal (the brand name for oxycodone in Nazi-era Germany). Now, Hitler presented himself as a sober figure, perfect and clean, never smoking or eating meat. While he perhaps skipped out on a juicy steak, his personal doctor--Theodor Morell--made sure he had plenty of juice, flowing into his body through a needle. Initially, this doctor offered a surefire cure for the Fuhrer's horrible hypochondria: bogus concoctions. According to one source, Hitler sought out the doctor's alternative treatments for "colossal flatulence," among other issues. The alternative-style medicine offered by the doctor attracted Hitler further, who began to get vitamin shots from him. Despite not eating meat, some of the injections eventually incorporated animal parts as an ingredient--we're talking about animal sex hormones, extractions from seminal vesicles of pigs and the prostates of young bulls...in addition to that, the doctor then also gave the Fuhrer other more normal vitamins, glucose, things like that.
The oxycodone injections didn't really take off until after the war began, although not necessarily due to the war. Hitler fell ill, and didn't trust his generals to run things in his absence. Micromanaging because of a controlling ego, paranoia--any number of personality traits can help illustrate why the leader of Germany felt he couldn't have a sick day to recuperate from a high fever. Instead, Hitler pushed Dr. Morell to do something for him. For whatever reason, he chose to inject Hitler with Eukodal (oxycodone) on top of some more animal hormones.
The oxycodone injections didn't stop after the fever had passed. Whether or not Hitler knew that he had gotten addicted to an opioid is up for debate: on the one hand, somebody would have to know that they continue to receive a drug in their system day after day. So you have to parse out if you think he knew that he consumed a powerful drug like that daily but did not believe himself to be addicted, or if you believe that maybe he simply didn't fully realize that he even did this drug at all. Although the former argument seems more plausible (every addict ever says "I can stop when I want to stop" until they realize that they can't), documents from Morell show that he administered more than 1,000 different injections in less than a 4 year period. While this description focuses heavily on a few compounds, particularly the most frequently used ones, some of the other chemicals recorded include things from caffeine and chamomile to barbiturates, testosterone, adrenaline, a bunch of chemicals nobody has ever heard of, more of those animal parts including bull semen, and yes, of course, the methamphetamine.
Keep in mind that the doctor did not give him every single drug all in one needle and all at one time: some of these substances he used for a few weeks, or once; others remained one of his daily doses for years.
After an assassination attempt at Wolf's Lair in 1944, doctors now added cocaine to his daily regimen. By the time 1945 came around, the Allies had bombed out all the German pharmaceutical plants producing key compounds--including the oxycodone, which the Fuhrer severely needed at this point. Some historians and experts, such as author Norman Ohler who did a deep dive into the drug use of the Third Reich, will argue that the final days of Hitler's life and the war were heavily influenced by the fact that he no longer had the drugs he needed to function. Videos from the final days of the Reich show Hitler shaking. Terribly uncomfortable withdrawal symptoms come after stopping oxycodone consumption. Suicide seems like an out to many going through the throes of that condition.
It should be noted that other top members of the Nazi Party tried to get rid of Dr. Morell toward the end of the war, seeing what kind of effect this quack doctor had inflicted upon the leader of their emerging empire. However, Hitler interjected and repelled these calls to dismiss Morell. Much of that has to do with the fact that Morell got him the stuff and gave him the stuff and essentially validated this ridiculously immense amount of substance use by Hitler.
Morell meant more than just the drug plug though. In an environment of potential traitors and people to remain skeptical about constantly, Hitler seriously trusted his doctor, to the extent that he did Eva Braun. This actually illustrates a throughline to Nixon and also to Trump, as well as surely many others. With Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani had never stopped serving as a close confidante and somebody that he has endlessly defended despite all of the disgraceful conduct he has engaged in. While Giuliani doesn't inject Trump with chemicals, he does so with another toxic item: lies. Conspiracy theories.
As late as early 1945, Hitler appeared in propaganda videos with Hitler Youth members. Visible tremors shake his hand. And you have to think--that is the best take that gets put in the actual film. For all we know, they could have filmed him shaking hands with a kid or kids 5, 15, or 50 times in a row, and taken the best version which still exposes a decrepit and rapidly deteriorating Fuhrer.
It seems as though as these special formula of narcissistic, paranoid, fame-seeking people who occasionally make it into the halls of power start to break down mentally in a predictable way. Like Icarus soaring too high, these men as leaders overextend their already enormous roles; they keep pressing the limits until the limits press back. The Nazis could have simply stopped after conquering everything west of Poland, yet attacking Russia happened. Hubris. Nixon kept pushing on in Vietnam, authorizing brutal, brutal bombing runs that massacred innocent people. He coordinated a burglary to steal his political opponent's files. And he got caught...it could just be par for the course in politics, yet the exposure of something like that has only happened twice: in 1972-74 with Watergate, and 2019-20 with the impeachment proceedings of President Trump over the Ukraine scandal.
Even without any kind of psychoactive drug in the equation, Trump has already crossed the Maginot Line, so to speak. Impeachment was his invasion of France, so to speak. By that I mean this: the rise of Hitler didn't seem likely in 1930, and yet with a mix of smart, manipulative messaging, striking a cord within the German population and harnessing the zeitgeist, and some luck, the Nazis managed to rise to power. Similarly, Donald Trump came out as a joke announcing that he'd run for president. Beating all odds, he locked in the nomination and then went on to win. The Mueller Report happened, he did just about 1,000 things that would've gotten any preceding president into extreme trouble, and then he got impeached yet managed to dodge that bullet. When the Germans pressed through and invaded France, nobody realistically expected that they could push past supposedly the most heavily defended territory on earth. They did the impossible--and this only emboldened them more to take even larger risks of enormous gravity and immense consequence by invading the Soviet Union, while also still fighting the British.
Nobody thought that Trump could go on the phone with a foreign leader and ask him to investigate his opponent-to-be in the next election, have him request this directly of the other president rather than go through the Justice or State Department, have a transcript of that call, bring that up directly after talks about US military aid and arms deals are mentioned, insinuate that the money is on hold unless the Ukrainians investigate a totally non-illegal situation with Hunter Biden and an absurd conspiracy theory about the 2016 election that only a very old person whose understanding of the internet is suspended in 1997 can understand, then get exposed, tell about 50 excuses that a week or two later get debunked thoroughly, have the president say on camera that he thinks Ukraine should investigate Hunter Biden and China should, have the acting Chief of Staff admit that they did a quid pro quo here and to "deal with it," then have over a dozen witnesses come and corroborate pretty much all the pieces of the same exact story, Republicans say they can't vote to impeach because they didn't hear from anyone who spoke directly to the president (even though Gordon Sondland did), then have the National Security Advisor John Bolton say that he spoke directly to the president and has documentation of it, but then have the Republicans in the Senate refuse to call him as a witness, meaning that nothing he says can count (technically) when weighing the decision of the impeachment trial--which already had a substantial mound of evidence that any 5th grader who just learned the very basics of how our government works would say "wait, what? He can't do that? Why'd they let him do that? I thought they made this great system to stop something like that from happening (or happening without consequences)."
Apprentice staffer Noel Casler and Tom Arnold have both made the claim that Donald Trump does Adderall. The man is like Fascism Lite; he uses the slightly less methylated amphetamine...
However, this Adderall claim totally contradicts the slurring and slowed speech that I heard today. It sounded more like a person on dope or some dumb-down meds (Xanax, Ativan, any benzo)...if Trump realistically did have ADHD and he took Adderall, it wouldn't calm him down to the point of sedation, so that lacks validity...
And any debate over which drug(s) President Trump takes is restrained by one very important piece: it is all total speculation. What troubles me more here than the prospect that perhaps Trump has gotten on some anti-anxiety medications he has before big speeches or takes Adderall because it makes him think he is doing his job better, the fact that it is believable that Trump might be regularly taking drugs that are uppers, downers, or anywhere in between...that poses a very real problem. When we can't tell what the hell is going on inside the mind of our country's top leader. Nothing that comes out of his mouth has veracity in a way that genuinely disturbs me...of course politicians give partisan spin, of course on matters of the utmost important national security concerns, he won't go on national TV and say "yeah, we know this top terrorist leader is in this village right here and in 6 hours, we strike." But the transparency for this administration and what it stands for has created some kind of weird reflection...instead of people seeing through to what really goes on, they see a reflection of themselves in Trump's empty rhetoric. The political Rorschach test: what does this inkblot look like to you? 'Make America Great Again' can literally mean anything to anyone. It has no details. American greatness to one guy might mean more segregation, another's greatness may imply religion playing a bigger role and a reversal of Roe v. Wade. Another person's greatness might mean the US has factory jobs that pay $75,000 a year with benefits and PTO. Another guy envisions PC culture eliminated, #MeToo revoked, and you can pick on gay people, grope women and nothing happens because that person belongs to the group that maintains all the power. By saying that he will make it great 'again,' it is actually in that itself an ingenious appeal to a broad conservative coalition who all want to return to different pieces of the past, albeit an anachronistic, sloppy and/or romanticized vision. There will be so much winning' doesn't actually explain how to get anything done, or even what is to be done in the first place!
Hitler also had no real substantive or detailed plans himself. In a sense, the Trumpian and the Nazi model have many commonalities, with perhaps one stark difference in their foreign policy styles. Theoretically, Trump (unintentionally) takes on a paleoconservative kind of isolationist view of America's role, even though he has carried out controversial drone strikes and puled out of agreements that actually insure our sovereignty in the long run rather than give us a short-term sugar high for nothing in the years to come. The Nazi foreign policy game sort of had the same short-term checkers mentality (when geopolitics really only operates on a chessboard). They take a territory, tell Britain and France that they won't do it again. Then do the exact same thing again: Rhineland, Austria, then Sudeteland, until finally the West gets triggered and a war breaks out. Donald Trump sort of employs that same technique, only it gets internally focused to a large degree. The way he bargains with foreign leaders clearly has no merit and nothing worth discussing. His ambitions involve America being the greatest, strongest, richest, and running things, while also not paying more than Germany does for NATO or mistreating immigrants from another major trading partner. The possibilities could go on...
Nonetheless, Trump tries to basically push the left at will until something snaps, all in an attempt to just see how high he can jump. How much can he really get away with? What else can he do to cheat in order to win the election, knowing that the current Senate won't vote to convict him on virtually any egregious act regardless of what he does, and if he uses swampy tricks to just make it over the finish line and maintain that power...then imagine how much damage he could do. Try to envision the level of vindication he'd have at that point: he dodged impeachment twice, and then the people (or Electoral College) gives the ultimate jury decision in which he now has basically a blank check from just enough people in this country to really sully what left we have of American politics; how dark will the White House become? It remained a glowing and pure building until the day Obama left, at which point it began to turn a sickly pale. The multitude of colors in which a white surface contains, the bright light reflecting to share what it has with everything in reach, the empty canvas that has always occupied the center of the American soul, at least in my mind--that will have formally all been charred into an unrecognizable lump under which a troll lives. Except the troll prevents it from actually forming a bridge. One term of Trump, one Senate that botches an extremely textbook case of what impeachment should address: this country has some flaws, momentary lapses of judgment. We have endured so much collectively as a people and I like to think that sometimes, we have a fluke, sometimes, some people want to try something new, so we do, and we don't like it and move on to the next. Voting for Trump again and seeing him getting inaugurated again will feel like some nauseating deja vu. The character of this country will have its development arrested for a generation or more--and we've already fallen behind. Barring some sort of larges-scale tragedy or some unforeseeable source of awakening, a second term of Trump will mean far right federal judges, environmental regulation rollbacks approved, voter suppression approved, LGBTQ discrimination approved, immigration restrictions approved, abortion bans approved...meanwhile, places like Europe move forward into a much brighter society. Although even they see the rise of far right dissenters (often funded or supported vis-a-vis bots by Russia). We can once again be trend setters in the world: the United Nations really came together under our initiative, and if we signal our willingness to retreat into our own selfish corners, then fragments of people all across the globe will do so, an we will forfeit what we have gained: the fact that we today live in the safest, healthiest, wealthiest, and most peaceful time in human history, despite what it may seem like sometimes.
Trump didn't just walk into the White House by himself, though: he had 63 million grown adults who live in this country that helped him through the door. Getting rid of a Trump might not be a remedy for whatever illness produced Trump as a symptom--but it's a start. Our alternative is to let Trump own the Oval Office but spend his time golfing in Mar-a-Lago, as he gets totally drunk on perhaps the most substance of all: power.
Works Cited
Vox, Nixon's targeted war on drugs.
Politico, decline of Nixon.
All That Is Interesting, Hitler's "colossal flatulence" problem, and other info on Dr. Morell.
History.com, Info on Hitler's drug use.
New Republic, even more review of Ohler's findings and Nazi/Hitler drug use.
The Guardian, MORE Nazi drug stuff!
Time, Hitler's drug use.
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