Norman Ohler

These are molecules, you know.

So the methamphetamine molecule was found in a Berlin-based company called the Temmler Company.

And the head of Temmler, he was very upset with the Olympics in 1936 because an Afro-American athlete, Jesse Owens,

was running faster than German superheroes with the best genes.

How can this be?

So they thought that he was on something.

Because he won, I think, five gold medals.

It was ridiculous.

This was supposed to be Germany's games.

And then the Afro-American runs better than the Aryan Übermensch.

So the only explanation is he took a drug.

He took probably...

benzadrine which was a legal amphetamine and also there were no doping checks at the olympics and if you take an amphetamine of course you can run a bit faster maybe that you know when it kicks in that this has to do with the immense release of um of dopamine in the brain um

But it was never proven that Owens used any type of drugs.

But the head of the Temna company, he said, we have to prevent this.

We have to invent a better amphetamine.

We have to make a German amphetamine that is stronger than the American Benzedrine.

So his main chemist, Hauschild,

Fritz Hauschild, he did research and he found that in 1917 in Tokyo, a Japanese chemist had made methamphetamine and he remade that methamphetamine and they tested it among themselves, the chemists in the Berlin pharmaceutical lab, and they loved it.

They made pure methamphetamine and, you know, they...