Wild slice of WWII history involving a Finnish solider who took an absurd amount of methamphetamine pills to escape Russian soldiers on skis in the Arctic Circle. In 1944, Finland was locked in a desperate fight for survival against the Soviet Union. The landscape of Lapland was a frozen hellscape of deep powder, sub-zero temperatures, and Red Army ambushes. It was in this brutal environment that a Finnish soldier named Aimo Koivunen accidentally became the center of a survival story involving powerful stimulants and skiing.
On March 18, 1944, Koivunen was leading a ski patrol deep behind enemy lines when the Soviet Red Army ambushed their position with a volley of gunfire. The Finns were forced to flee through waist-deep snow, and as the lead skier, Koivunen was doing the grueling work of breaking trail for his squad. Exhausted and facing certain death or capture, he remembered the emergency rations in his pocket: Pervitin. This was essentially pure methamphetamine, issued to soldiers to keep them awake and alert during the most extreme conditions.
In the heat of the chase, Koivunen struggled to shake out a single pill while wearing thick arctic mittens. Without much thought, he dumped the entire bottle into his mouth. He swallowed thirty pills, the squad’s entire supply and a dose large enough to be fatal under almost any other circumstances. The drugs hit him instantly, and while his pace exploded and allowed him to outrun the Soviets, his world soon went dark as he entered a drug-induced blackout.
When Koivunen finally regained a sense of consciousness the next day, he discovered he had crossed 100 kilometers of rugged terrain while completely unaware of his surroundings. He was now alone, separated from his squad, and out of food and ammunition. Despite the physical toll, the massive dose of Pervitin was still coursing through his system, forcing him to keep moving through the wilderness even as his body began to waste away.
The journey only grew more surreal from there. During his trek, Koivunen skied over a landmine, which exploded and left him injured and delirious. He laid in the snow for an unspecified amount of time drifting in and out of consciousness but the chemical surge in his bloodstream eventually kicked back in and he got back onto his skis and continued on his way. To survive, he gnawed on pine buds and even caught a Siberian jay, which he ate raw. Driven by a mix of survival instinct and chemical endurance, he eventually reached Finnish territory.
When he was finally rushed to a hospital, the medical staff was stunned by his condition. Over the course of his ordeal, Koivunen had covered 400 kilometers (roughly 250 miles) of frozen wilderness. His weight had plummeted to a mere 94 pounds, and his heart rate was recorded at a staggering 200 beats per minute. Against all odds, he survived the war and lived until 1989, leaving behind one of the most incredible, drug-fueled survival tales in human history.
