The Crazy Crystal Meth Adventure of a Finnish Soldier
By: Giulia Montanari
Tags: Psychedelics, History, Drugs, Culture, World War II

Now, when he found himself under attack, Aimo was one of the many Finns who had continued to fight against the Red Army on the Finnish border.

In order to flee from the Russian offensive, Aimo tried to open up a ski track in the deep snow — but he was dead tired, and just couldn’t keep up the pace.

He had only eaten a piece of bread early in the morning and had not slept properly in days: he was feeling weak and shaky, and soon started to drift.

The men behind him shouted at him that he needed to move faster: “Aimo, don’t fall asleep!”, one of his buddies yelled at him.

Aimo was drained, but he had a trick up his sleeve: his lieutenant had entrusted him with the unit supply of military-grade Pervitin.

Introduced in 1938 and marketed as a magic pill for alertness, Pervitin was widely used by the German soldiers to stay awake and to perform better under punishing conditions. It was basically crystal meth in the form of small, round white pills. The German soldiers, understandably, loved it.

Aimo was not a fan of it, but he realized he had to take some if he wanted to avoid collapsing in the snow.

The pill bottle was in the front pocket of his jacket: he tried to extract one pill from the container, but his heavy mittens made his movements clumsy, and he accidentally poured the whole thing out in his palm. In a panic, and wanting to keep the maneuver hidden from the other soldiers, he just downed them all.

The safe dosage of Pervitin was one pill per day. Aimo Koivunen swallowed all 30 of them at once — without water.

Finnish soldiers moving through the arctic forest (Wikimedia Commons)

Meth-Fueled Rampage

A few minutes later, Aimo was a new man: he was no longer tired or weak. Actually, he was feeling just great.

He was now full of energy and strength and quickly picked up speed. Then, as the pills really kicked in, he started tripping out pretty badly: the surrounding landscape morphed before his eyes, he became increasingly paranoid and he started flashing in and out of consciousness while he skied.

At some point, the other guys had noticed good ol’ Aimo didn’t look all that well and took away his ammunition; his last rational thought before blacking out for good was that he had made a huge, huge mistake.

When he woke up he had no food, no ammo, and no comrades with him. He had no idea where he was, how he got there, or how much time had passed. He also had no idea if he had drifted away from his buddies or if they had, in fact, decided to leave him behind.

From that moment on, he kept blacking out and snapping back to reality, finding himself in places he did not recognize at all, doing weird things he did not remember ever setting up to do.

Germans In Sight (or maybe not)

At some point, Aimo wound up on top of a hill and he spotted a fire burning in the distance with some men standing around it: convinced it must be a German camp, he decided it would be a great idea to crash-land right in the middle of it, so they could rescue him. He merrily skied down the hill at full speed, but when he found himself near enough he realized those weren’t, in fact, German soldiers — they were Russians.

Uh-oh.

Finnish machine gun nest in Russian territory in 1940 (Wikimedia Commons)

Luckily for Aimo, they were so bewildered to see a high-as-a-kite Finnish soldier darting straight through the camp at full pelt that they just stared at him open-mouthed: he was gone before they knew what hit them.

Some of the Soviet soldiers tried to follow him, but he was in the middle of a meth-fueled frenzy, and pretty much nothing could stop him. He left them for dust.

In the following days Aimo survived on just water, pine needles… and meth. That shit was far from being done with him.

He hallucinated some more, talked with a number of absent friends, and fought an imaginary wolverine (that turned out to be a tree branch), shattering his wrist compass and losing his backpack in the process.

At some point he somehow found himself in an abandoned cabin, and he decided to start a fire — on the wooden floor, in the middle of the room. Soon the whole cabin was on fire, with Aimo curled up on the ground, trying to sleep, and just wiggling further and further away from the flames every time they got too close.

Luckily for him, his meth-induced restlessness did not allow him to fall asleep, and when the cabin finally collapsed — because of course it did — he managed to escape, put on his skis, and hit the road again.

Still high out of his skull, he then spent most of the night trying very hard to reach a distant light coming from a farm window — only to realize, at dawn, that he had chased the North Star all along.

In the morning Aimo came across an abandoned German outpost. There he almost immediately set off an explosion: the Germans, thoughtful as always, had mined the place after leaving. When he looked down at his right foot, bone splinters poked through the grated flesh and, had he been a little less high, that would have probably worried him quite a bit.

Entrance to a German dugout (Wikimedia Commons)

But, not content to have mangled his foot pretty badly, Aimo then hopped about the German camp and tried to open the door of a dugout — just to promptly set off another explosive trap.

He found himself belly-up and nearly buried in snow about 30 meters from the dugout: his clothes and shoes had been torn to shreds in the explosion and he was still holding the doorknob in his hand, like a real-life version of a Looney Tunes character.

In addition to having no weapons, no food and no compass, now he was also seriously hurt, half-naked and still tripping balls. He decided to crawl into a ditch and sleep. He dreamt of food. Lots of it.

Finns (and a Siberian Jay) To The Rescue

A few days later a group of Finnish soldiers stumbled upon him.

They were quite startled to find a stoned, half-naked fellow-countryman in an abandoned German outpost turned minefield, and they promised him to send a rescue party. He was sure they would never come back for him, and he later became convinced he actually hallucinated the whole exchange. He went back to his gourmet dreams.

While he waited — for the Russians to find and kill him, or the Finns to save him — he managed to capture a Siberian jay, which he proceeded to eat raw.

Finally, some good effing food!

To his utter surprise, a few days later the Finns actually came to rescue him. When he was finally brought to a field hospital, his heart rate was measured at 200 beats per minute, and he weighed a shocking 43 kilograms (94 pounds). The poor guy had basically turned into a hummingbird.

Aimo had been on the move for two weeks, and the distance he covered in his crystal-fueled solo trip was calculated at about 400 kilometers (250 miles).

Surprisingly enough, Aimo Koivunen not only survived the ordeal but went on to live a long and happy life, dying in 1989 at the age of 71.

A great animated video of Aimo’s story can be found here: