The Craziest Drug Trip of All Time
Have you ever had an experience where you took something and thought you were going to die?
The experience usually resolves itself within minutes or an hour.
But what if it didn’t. What if it lasted almost a week. What if instead of being in the comfort of your home or at a concert, you were having the experience while in the middle of the Arctic circle fighting the Russian army on skies.
This is exactly what happened to one poor Finnish soldier in March of 1944.
If there is an award for most insane drug trip – then Aimo Koivunen wins it.
But before explaining the story of Aimo – some context is needed.
Contrary to popular opinion, drugs were not invented in the 1960s.
Drugs have been around for a while and played a huge and underappreciated role in World War II.
In 1937, a chemist named Friedrich Hauschil synthesized methamphetamine. Upon invention, they thought they had discovered the drug from the movie Limitless. One dose and you could stay up for days with incredible focus.
The German pharma company he was working for, Temmler-Werke, launched a branded pill the next year called Pervitin and sold it over the counter to everyone from middle class housewives to the Nazi leadership.
Even Hitler who didn’t drink or eat meat and abhorred drug use became a zealous Pervitin addict. By the end of 1938, Temmler-Werke was making almost a million pills a day and by the following year 1939, a good portion of the country’s leadership and military was casually taking what they thought was a wonder drug.
What they didn’t realize was that whatever gains in productivity and alertness they were getting, was coming at the cost of paranoia and delusional grandeur.
What happened next in Germany obviously speaks for itself - turns out combining totalitarian ideology with meth addiction doesn’t yield much in the way of sane decision making.
But you don’t need a history lesson on World War II – instead you need the story of Aimo.
This is Aimo.
Aimo had the misfortune of being born in Finland in 1917.
The Soviets invaded Finland in 1939. It was a brutal war that the Finns eventually lost after putting up a valiant fight.
After signing a peace treaty that gave up land, the Finnish decided to have another go with the Soviets. This time they had an ally in Germany. The Germans provided economic and military aid – but more importantly – they gave Pervitin.
In Mid-March of 1944, the war was not going well and the Finnish army was being encircled in the Alakurtti sector of Northern Russia (see below).
Our protaganist Aimo was sent out on a ski patrol with his comrades to find a way out of this predicament. After skiing for two straight days in minus 30 degree Celsius weather, Aimo and his comrades found a secluded area to rest up.
But just as they dissembled, they found themselves being hit with more Soviet artillery.
Aimo was carrying the company’s supply of Pervitin. He was too tired to move so he decided to take some. He poured out the pills but they were frozen together and he couldn’t put them back in the container because he was wearing mittens.
Rather than lose the precious supply of Pervitin, Aimo downed the whole thing.
To be clear, one of these pills is enough to keep you awake for three days without feeling tired.
Aimo took 30.
Aimo’s first reaction to his massive overdose was a short burst of manic energy. Aimo rallied his comrades out of their tough spot and they applauded his newfound determination.
However, as he and his comrades got going on their skis, Aimo started to hallucinate – the surroundings morphed into different shapes and he began to go in and out of consciousness. He started speaking incoherently and his comrades took away Aimo’s gun. Aimo eventually skied off in a random direction. They thought he was a goner for sure.
He wasn’t.
Over the next several days, Aimo would go in and out of meth induced blackouts. Every time he came to, he would find himself in the most unusual spot with little idea as to how he got there.
First Aimo comes to in the middle of the Siberian forest without any weapons or food or friends. Before he can start to panic, he blacks out again.
He wakes up again to find that he had skied almost fifty miles and now stood at the top of a hill overlooking what he thought was an encampment of allied soldiers.
In his first hand telling, he describes how he skied down to join the camp with tears of joy in his eyes only to discover upon arrival in the middle of the encampment that these were actually enemy Russians. The Russians looked at this Finn skiing directly into their campfire and were too stunned to react. Aimo upon figuring out that they were Russian skied away - “damnit Aimo that was dumb” he wrote in his self account after the war.
Aimo next wakes up to find himself in an abandoned cabin. He does what one would naturally do in a cabin entirely made of wood – and starts a fire on the wooden floor. After getting his fire going, Aimo tries to sleep. As the fire consumes the cabin, Aimo doesn’t flee but simply finds different corners of the cabin to sleep in. Only after the cabin’s roof had collapsed, did Aimo figure it was time to depart.
After escaping the fire, Aimo finds a tree to sleep next to and begins to finally fall asleep – but in his sleep he dreams of a wolverine attacking him and he tries to knife it. He wakes up to find that he had stabbed himself repeatedly against the tree branches.
Aimo figures he can’t trust himself asleep anymore so he might as well just stay on his skis during the nighttime. So he starts skiing towards a light thinking it is from a farm window. He spends the next several days skiing as fast as he can towards this light only to find that the distance between him and the light never changes. After several days of this, he realizes that he was chasing the North Star. Aimo blacks out again.
The following morning, Aimo wakes up and sights an abandoned German outpost. He goes to check it out and immediately steps on a mine which shatters his right foot to the bone. Rather than avoid the mine infested area, Aimo ventures further inside. He immediately steps on another mine which tears his clothes to shreds, leaving him basically naked and buried under an avalanche of snow. He’s the Wile E. Coyote at this point just holding the door knob of the blasted outpost in his hand with no clothes.
He eventually comes to in the outpost. He can’t really move further from here and he resigns himself to death. He does manage to capture a bird which he eats raw.
At some point, he hears voices and isn’t sure if he is hallucinating. He doesn’t want to make the same mistake he made before and assumes this time the voices must be Russian and so he straps a mine to himself ready to take them out.
But just before he blows himself up, he realizes these are actually Finnish voices. He yells at them that the place is mine infested but they don’t hear him and then one of them steps on a mine and blows up and they have to transport him back instead of Aimo - but they did promise to return.
Aimo figures that he dreamt the whole thing and passes out but they did eventually come back to the half-naked Aimo and take him to a medic to treat his blasted body. The medic found that he weighed less than 100 lbs. and had a heart rate of 200 beats per minute. He had over the course of a week skied over 250 miles, the equivalent distance of New York City to Boston, while blacked out most of the time.
The most extra-ordinary thing is that Aimo not only survived this ordeal but the war itself and died in his 70s.
He would say afterwards that taking a 30X overdose was one of the dumber things he ever did - which makes one think - what other dumb stuff did Aimo do?
We will never know…
It has been said that one of the most important bombs ever dropped in World War II was the one that took out the Pervitin factory – without his meth, Hitler suffered a psychological collapse that left him shaky and unable to conjure up his mesmerizing dark charisma.
The history of drugs and the role it played in World War II is one that I would hope historians investigate more deeply especially as humans become much more adept at manipulating pharmaceuticals in the future. But will leave it to them.