Hamas activists were drugged up as they launched the horrific attack on Israel last month. According to the Jerusalem Post, Israeli forces found Captagon pills on several Hamas terrorists after they were killed.

Captagon is an amphetamine, widely called “cocaine for the poor.” It gained notoriety when Islamic State terrorists used it in 2015 to suppress fear and gain “courage” to carry out their heinous acts. Today, it is a popular export around the Middle East, commonly used by the Syrian Army, Hezbollah and Hamas.

Hamas terrorists were high on Captagon as they invaded people’s homes, raped and killed civilians, and brutally butchered Israeli babies.

As Rep. French Hill told the Washington Post: “Captagon is supporting terrorism financially, providing the money to expand the reach of terrorists, and also fueling the terrorists themselves to go out and commit brutal atrocities like we witnessed in Israel.”

The History of War and Drugs

The use of drugs and stimulants in war is common but not widely known. From ancient Greece to Nazi Germany, drugs have been behind some of the most heinous activities in man’s history.

During World War ii, the German company Temmler produced and sold Pervitin as an over-the-counter pick-me-up. This drug is basically crystal meth. For the Nazi Army, it was the ideal drug to combat fatigue.

Just as Greek hoplites and Roman legionnaires ran into battle fueled by alcohol, the Nazis’ blitzkrieg warfare was inflamed by the use of methamphetamines.

Drugs played a crucial part in both of Israel’s most recent holocausts.

Pervitin was “issued to German troops and airmen like candy,” says Geoffrey Warri, professor of military history at the University of North Texas. The effects were dramatic.

“For the first time in military history, an army did not have to rest at night, but could go on for three days and three nights,” writes Norman Ohler, author of Blitzed: Drugs in Nazi Germany. “It really helps a person to become a fighting robot. Imagine this on the scale of a couple of hundred thousand people, heavily armed, storming into an enemy territory. It just becomes a completely crazy situation.”

The Two Holocausts

That’s what happened on October 7. Not only do amphetamines curb appetite and allow people to stay awake for days on end, they also dull feelings of empathy and can make people feel invincible.

That’s exactly what a genocidal regime would want for its soldiers who invade and commit brutal crimes against civilians, women and children.

Some soldiers would rather take Pervitin or Captagon than admit failure or face the fear of being killed in action.

“There are many reports that just before [Germany attacked France], there were a lot of soldiers who were depressed, who didn’t want to fight, who remembered the First World War. So the morale of the Germans was quite low. But once you take methamphetamines, your morale actually becomes quite high,” Ohler writes.

Soldiers experience some of the greatest stress imaginable. They have to fight for their country and cope with death all around them, while mobilizing their own obligation to kill the enemy.

In such circumstances, popping a pill to quiet fears and letting the drugs take the wheel is almost irresistible—especially when one’s mind is conditioned to romanticize the horrific.

It’s the same situation with violence on a smaller scale. According to specialists at Finland’s Kylmäkoski prison, drugs or alcohol are “almost always behind violent criminal offenders.”

One inmate serving a life sentence for murdering two people believes he did so because he “used to use many heavy drugs in the past.” Only when he got clean did he desire reform and make progress with the prison’s violence counselor.

Drugs play an irrefutable part in stimulating acts of violence. But the problem goes much deeper than most realize.

The Real Danger

The way society depicts them, drugs facilitate harmless fun in a dreamlike state or, at worst, cause the user to enter into a self-destructive binge.

Our society disregards and even mocks the idea that the spirit world is real. Even among Christians, approximately half don’t believe Satan and the demons are real.

Yet the Bible says Satan the devil is real and he is the god of this world (2 Corinthians 4:4). It says his demons are real and they can possess human beings (Matthew 8:28; Luke 8:30). Jesus Christ Himself battled Satan and his demons (Matthew 4:1-11; Mark 1:32).

Satan and the demons are real. Their influence on human beings is real. It is perhaps strongest on those who addle their minds with drug use.

“Under normal circumstance,” wrote Herbert W. Armstrong, “no one need fear a demon may take possession” of their minds, unless “you open your mind by letting it be blank, or under control of another, or you lose your mind in an emotional angry rage.”

In the April 2023 Trumpet, we wrote:

[F]ar more common today are mind-altering drugs that break down the mind’s defenses and can allow in demons. In 2021, over 100,000 people died of drug overdoses in the United States. The 2017 National Survey on Drug Use and Health estimated that 20 million Americans age 12 and over had a substance disorder. There have been some well-publicized examples of addicts having their whole personality change—and they have gone on to violently attack others. One such individual videoed himself attacking and then eating his homosexual partner. “There is such things as monsters, demons and ghosts,” he wrote on his Facebook page. “They live inside of us, and sometimes they win.”

The footage of Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7 is horrific. The fact that the terrorists themselves filmed the atrocities as they committed them is even more disturbing.

But the fact that they were under the influence of drugs, just as Nazi soldiers were in World War ii when they killed 6 million Jews, shows there is a spiritual dimension at play.

The same Bible that proves Satan and his demons are real also says he is determined to “blot out the name of Israel from under heaven” (2 Kings 14:27).

What is going to happen in World War iii? Will nations suddenly abandon the use of amphetamines? Will they suddenly want their soldiers to have consciences and fight with integrity? Or will they use even more drugs and commit the worst atrocities mankind has ever seen?

That’s what the Bible says will happen. The demonic influence on mankind is going to get much worse. Only God’s protection will keep anyone safe. Read America Under Attack to learn how to receive this protection.