Dr. Feelgood (7 page)

Max Jacobson and his new bride, Alice Lowner, set up their first apartment in a fashionable part of Berlin near a park surrounding the Chateau Belle Vue. Jacobson also opened his private practice while he continued to work as a member of a medical research team at the Charité Hospital, where he investigated the changes in blood chemistry. He worked with doctors who, in addition to experimenting on animals, also experimented on themselves to obtain insight as to the effects of new drugs, a practice that Jacobson would also adopt, which ultimately got him addicted to methamphetamines. Jacobson also tried to develop a clientele of patients across the range of economic classes. He had wealthy patients as well as humble ones from working-class backgrounds. But as much as his fascination was with his general practice, he also developed an interest in the new field of psychiatry. He made the acquaintance of the three greatest psychiatrists of the time: Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and Alfred Adler. Max met Freud, who was suffering from a cancer of his tongue. Mouth, tongue, throat, and esophageal cancers are among the types of cancers usually associated with heavy cigar and pipe smoking. Although Freud had become famous all across the world by the 1920s, his life had been plagued by financial problems. Despite those, his research flourished. Early on in his studies of brain anatomy, he discovered the cerebral location that caused speech disturbance in children. He was one of the early researchers on the biology of the brain that demystified the operation of the human neurological system at a time well before modern brain imaging studies. He faced great resistance from the medical profession when he articulated his concept of psychoanalysis. There was much derision from his colleagues when Freud presented his ideas about the unconscious mind, the influence of the human sex drive on the development of personality, and the methods a doctor should use in trying to ascertain the root causes of psychological disturbances. Most people believe, Max once said, that for Freud, psychoanalysis was an end in itself. But that was not true. Freud believed that medical research would ultimately reveal the biological workings of the brain and would result in the development of medications that would treat pathological mental illness.

Max also consulted on cases with Professor Carl Jung. In one particular instance, a wealthy patient suffering from a neurosis had contacted Max for help. Max contacted Jung, and the two talked not only about the case, but also at length about Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious and the archetypal symbols of human beliefs. It was while studying under these psychiatrists that Jacobson began to experiment with methamphetamines as mood enhancers and emotional stimulants and applied his skills in the science of organic and biochemistry to the study of psychology. His research under the tutelage of Carl Jung led him to first experiment with early psychotropic, or mood and mind-altering, drugs that would by the latter part of the twentieth century result in pharmaceuticals such as Paxil, Ritalin, and even LSD. Jacobson noted that Jung himself foresaw the development of drugs that would normalize aberrant brain behavior. Jacobson looked for ways he could mix these early mind-altering drugs with vitamins, enzymes, animal placentas, and small amounts of hormones to remedy illnesses stemming from malnutrition or the abuse of alcohol or drugs such as tranquilizers.
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Jacobson experimented on animals, patients, and himself with these drug cocktails. He became fascinated with the effects of the drugs he concocted and came to believe he could effect remedies on a cellular level through his own types of biological elixirs.

Max’s internship and assistantship in surgery with August Bier, though it introduced him to the basics of surgical procedures, nevertheless convinced him that what he really wanted to practice was internal medicine. He said that he believed he could bring about more healing that way. Surgery in the 1920s was quite dangerous because of the side effects of anesthesia and the risk of infection. Infection was so insidious that despite the best efforts of hospital operating rooms to maintain sanitary conditions, infections were rampant and difficult to prevent or control. Surgery, although preferred as a specialty by many new physicians in Europe, was limited by the conditions at hospitals. Therefore, Max Jacobson, who was fascinated by the body’s own biological chemistry, decided that his specialty would be internal medicine. Following the education he received at the feet of his first mentor, Dr. Bier, Jacobson began his own practice at the Charité University Hospital in Berlin, which is still one of the largest hospitals in the world. He assembled a specially designed laboratory in his private office, where his experiments included an investigation into the changes in blood chemistry through the use of choline, the basic component for the neuro-transmitter acetylcholine; Belafoline, a drug used in the treatment of migraines or severe headaches; and ergotomin (or gynergen), a blood constrictor also used to alleviate pain. Jacobson published his scientific study of gynergen and its use in gynecology and migraines, and in the treatment of the confusion caused by cerebral sclerosis. He also continued his lifelong practice of testing drugs on himself, because he admired doctors who did so to learn their side effects.
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Because Germany was still dealing with soldiers who’d lost limbs and whose internal organs were deteriorating from diseases they’d contracted at the front, doctors by the late 1920s were researching the methods of transplanting organs—and particularly the rejection of transplants. Skin transplants were also an issue because so many soldiers had suffered from disfiguring burns and burns that had become infected. Doctors also looked for ways to remove scar tissue without re-infecting a wound. Max was one of the early experimenters, using the blood serum from animals to prevent immune rejection to hetero-skin transplants. He injected guinea pigs with extracts of skin and feathers. He found that he was able to keep skin transplants for as much as one-third of the animal’s surface in place for months at a time. The chemicals from feathers and skin helped destroy the toxins in cells and formed the basis of Max’s later experiments with treating malignant growths that developed into tumors. Max believed that his concoctions of animal blood serum enabled him to control the symptoms of high blood pressure as well as detoxification of infections. Based on this research, Max thought he had found a way to remediate the symptoms of some types of neurosis as he experimented with the physiological basis of mental illness. These experiments, particularly experiments in refining animal blood serum and combining it with pharmaceuticals to be injected intravenously, would ultimately become the basis for Max’s injections of liquid methamphetamines mixed with goat’s and sheep’s blood for boosting his patient’s abilities to withstand stress and rise above the difficulties in their lives. In other words, Max was looking for ways to get his patients high enough to slough off whatever was troubling them, even if what was troubling them were progressive diseases that could not be cured.

Deciding to become an internist rather than a surgeon at Charité University Hospital, Jacobson began more intensely studying the effects of his methamphetamine mixtures on both himself and his patients. He worked in the laboratories at Charité to create his own special formula that would allow his patients to “feel good.” But as Dr. Leslie Iversen, the author of
Speed, Ecstasy, Ritalin: The Science of Amphetamines
,
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points out, Jacobson’s “mistake was testing the drug on himself. It distorts the senses and does not allow for a scientist to empirically study the drug.”

Jacobson focused his research on amphetamine, a drug that has been in circulation in various forms and compounds for more than one hundred years, and which is still prescribed today to treat Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) or Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). Some say the powerful amphetamine formula that is supposed to remedy these disorders is a wonder drug. Others call it a gateway drug. Either way, it can be harmful if not monitored, but it is far less harmful than its sister drug, methamphetamine, which is a psycho-stimulant drug. Because its molecules are similar in shape and size to the neurotransmitter dopamine, the pleasure-sensing neurotransmitter, it can fool the brain’s neurons into treating its presence just like dopamine. Dopamine tells the cells of the brain to feel pleasure and even euphoria. The more dopamine that’s transmitted from brain cell to brain cell, the greater and longer-lasting the pleasure high. Simply stated, methamphetamines make you feel good—really good. However, that feeling can often be followed by severe manic-depression, paranoid delusions of hypergrandiosity, schizophrenic dissociative behavior, and at its worst, a complete breakdown of logical perception. Methamphetamine can also cause a rise in the user’s blood pressure, an increased heart rate, and even a heart attack. And this is not to mention that methamphetamine is also highly addictive.

Methamphetamine was first synthesized by a Japanese scientist in 1919 and used by the Germans as well as the British in World War II. During the 1920s it was widely considered a wonder drug and was used to treat everything from asthma to nasal congestion. While amphetamines had been first approved to be sold in tablet form by the American Medical Association in 1937, methamphetamine had been first marketed over the counter as an inhaler known as Benzedrine by the drug manufacturer Smith, Kline, and French beginning in 1932. By 1940, physicians treating their patients for narcolepsy and ADHD with the tablet form that was marketed over the counter by manufacturer Burroughs Wellcome, who called it Methedrine. Widely prescribed in America and abroad in the 1950s, meth was used to treat everything from alcoholism (by simply transferring the addiction mechanism) to Parkinson’s disease.

Throughout Berlin, word spread about Jacobson’s successful treatment of some of the symptoms of Multiple Sclerosis (MS) and the tremendous boost of energy that his injections created in his patients. He attracted, as he would later in his Manhattan practice, various well-known German musicians and theater people, including the Austrian-born filmmaker Billy Wilder.
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In her worldwide best-seller
Around the World in Eleven Years
, published in 1936, American author Patience Abbe recalled meeting Dr. Max in Berlin when she was ten years old: “I had contracted the mumps and needed the assistance of a physician. We were sent to a wonderful physician named Doctor Max Jacobson. Doctor Jacobson was a magician. He put a piece of clay in my ear and it came out of my head. He was an acrobat, magician, and a Doctor and he loved us.”
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Jacobson had performed a magic trick to gain the confidence of his young patient.

The growing notoriety of Jacobson’s vitamin cocktail attracted the attention of the National Socialists, and they demanded to know the formula concocted by this Jewish doctor. Before he escaped with his family—first to Czechoslovakia and then to Vienna, Paris, and the United States—Jacobson handed over the formula, which he claimed was used by the German army. He believed that the Nazis handed his formula to the pharmaceutical company Temmler, which then manufactured the drug under the name Pervitin.
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Pervitin was in fact a methamphetamine drug introduced into the market in 1938 and was what propelled the Wehrmacht soldiers through much of the Blitzkrieg.

The German military was supplied with millions of methamphetamine tablets during the first half of 1940. The drugs were part of a plan to help pilots, sailors, and infantry troops become capable of sustained and even superhuman performance. The military leadership liberally dispensed such stimulants, as long as it believed drugging the troops could help achieve victory over the Allies. But the Nazis were less than diligent in monitoring side effects such as drug addiction, depression, violence, and a consequent decline in moral standards.
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During the short period between April and July 1940, more than thirty-five million tablets of Pervitin and Isophan, a slightly modified version produced by the Knoll pharmaceutical company, would be shipped to the German army and Luftwaffe.
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Some of the tablets, each containing three milligrams of active substance, were sent to the Wehrmacht’s medical divisions under the code name OBM, and then distributed directly to the troops. A rush order could even be placed by telephone if a shipment was urgently needed. The packages were labeled S
TIMULANT
, and the instructions recommended a dose of one to two tablets “only as needed, to maintain sleeplessness.”
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Jacobson strongly believed that both Hitler and his mistress Eva Braun were addicted to the methamphetamine formula he had created in its liquid, injected form, according to Dr. Bert E, Park in
Aging, Ailingt, and Addicted
.
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As Max’s practice flourished, he was soon the go-to doctor for all sorts of emergencies. He treated the former Kaiser’s son, who suffered a fall from a horse, and also treated a young woman named Nina Hagan whose foot was almost crushed by a horse. Max found an orthopedic surgeon, a friend of his wife, who performed a successful operation that restored the use of Ms. Hagan’s foot. Little did Max know at the time, he once said, that this young patient would ultimately become his next wife.

By 1932, life was gradually, but very perceptibly, becoming more and more dangerous for the Jewish population of Germany, particularly in Berlin. Max described to friends after he arrived in the United States that the Brown Shirts began roaming the streets of Berlin and assaulting anyone who looked Jewish. Not only were there taunts and threats, but Jews were also beaten severely. Jews were pushed off the streets when the Brown Shirts marched, singing the song “Juden Blut vom Messer spritzt” (Jewish blood drips from our knives). And then Hitler’s followers started the fire in the Reichstag, the government building, thus bringing about “kristallnacht” or the “night of the broken glass,” when mobs, blaming the Jews for the fire, destroyed Jewish-owned shops and homes. The Reichstag fire brought about Hitler’s rise to power and the enactment of the Nuremberg laws.