DID SPEED KILL OUR SOLDIERS?

Hearing Will Focus On Pilots' Amphetamine Use

A drug with the street name of "speed" goes on trial in two weeks when
lawyers for two American pilots implicated in the April 17 killing of four
Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan argue before a military court that pills
dispensed to their client rendered them overly aggressive and possibly
paranoid.

On Jan. 13, a judicial hearing in Shreveport, La., will begin proceedings
to decide if pilots Maj. William Umbach and Maj. Harry Schmidt should stand
trial on manslaughter charges.

Umbach and Schmidt have said they thought the Canadian soldiers' live-fire
exercise was actually an enemy operation meant to knock their planes from
the sky.

Prior to a mission which may have lasted 12 hours, a flight surgeon gave
the pilots Dexedrine tablets to keep them alert. The drug carries the
warning that it can affect perception and "may impair the ability of the
patient to engage in potentially hazardous activities such as operating
machinery."

In the U.S., a country which pours billions of dollars into the war on
illegal drugs, where citizens are urged to "just say no," the argument that
the judgment of the two pilots was impaired could have political as well as
medical implications. Use of those prescription drugs to boost performance
is banned by the Canadian military as well as virtually every sports body
in the world.

"If I'd ever taken drugs while flying a Cobra gunship, they would have
arrested me," says David Beck, Umbach's lawyer and a former attack
helicopter pilot in the U.S. Marines.

Yet governments have often resorted to the energy-boosting effects of the
family of drugs known as amphetamines, which includes Benzedrine and Dexedrine.

In the Second World War amphetamines were supplied to civilian defence
workers in Japan and to soldiers in the armies of Japan, Germany and Great
Britain.

Adolph Hitler received regular amphetamine injections from his doctor and
developed a dependency which some say prompted his increasingly bizarre
behaviour.

President John Kennedy took amphetamines, together with mood-altering
steroids, throughout the 13-day Cuban missile crisis. "He was a sick man
and he took these drugs not to have a high, not to go on some amphetamine
trip, but to have energy he thought he needed to be the president America
needed," says Laurence Learner, author of the best-selling book The Kennedy
Men.

One of Kennedy's own doctors feared he was a ticking time bomb, Learner says.

"It was so serious, that Dr. Eugene Cohen wrote the president that you must
stop using these amphetamines -- that the whole future of the free world is
at stake here."

And yet the U.S. Air Force argues that used properly, just like a bracing
cup of coffee, amphetamines can help a pilot stay alive.