Performance enhancers and war go hand in hand
The use of performance-enhancing drugs has a long history in war, both as a product of state-sanctioned programs and illicit use by participants.
Aggression, energy and alertness have always been critical to any warfighter, but artificial means of achieving and maintaining a state of combat readiness have evolved—or devolved, as the case may be—and possibly spread in recent decades:
Child soldiers fighting for Sierra Leone’s Revolutionary United Front consumed a mixture of marijuana, cocaine and hallucinogenic drugs, including “brown-brown,” a snorted blend of cocaine and gunpowder.
Some ISIS fighters reportedly use a methamphetamine-like psychostimulant in their brutal quest to create a global caliphate; steroids were found at an ISIS training centre in Mosul in 2016.
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