Pervitin Outland
Pervitin was the brand name under which the Berlin pharmaceutical firm Temmler sold methamphetamine in Nazi Germany from 1938 onward. It was issued in enormous quantities to Wehrmacht troops before the 1940 invasion of France, and it was also marketed to German civilians — office workers, housewives, students — as a general-purpose stimulant, at one point in the form of methamphetamine-laced chocolates. It is the cleanest historical analogue for the conceit of Polydichloric Euthimal: a state-sanctioned amphetamine whose purpose was to extract more labor and more fight from a population than that population could otherwise give. (history hit)
Temmler shipped 35 million tablets to the troops in the lead-up to France
Norman Ohler, whose 2016 book Blitzed put the Pervitin story into general circulation, describes the scale of the distribution before the Ardennes offensive:
"Between the issue of that stimulant decree and the attack on France, 35 million dosages of crystal meth were being distributed, in a very orderly fashion, to the troops." — Norman Ohler, History Hit Podcast (2018)
The psychopharmacologist who tested the drug on soldiers, Otto Friedrich Ranke, recorded in his own diary what his subjects reported feeling:
"It distinctly revives concentration. It's a feeling of relief with regard to approaching difficult tasks." — Otto Friedrich Ranke, diary entry, quoted in Norman Ohler, Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich (2016)
That phrase — "relief with regard to approaching difficult tasks" — is the whole labor-extraction argument in one sentence. The drug does not make the task easier; it makes the worker willing to begin it.
Civilian Pervitin was sold as a consumer productivity aid
Pervitin was not restricted to the military. Ohler notes that in the late 1930s Temmler pushed it directly at the civilian market:
"Chocolates laced with methamphetamine hit the market, and they were pretty popular. One piece of chocolate had 15 milligrams of pure methamphetamine in it." — Norman Ohler, History Hit Podcast (2018)
Civilian Pervitin was advertised to the kind of worker Outland's Con-Amalgamate would have recognized instantly: someone whose output needed to rise and whose complaints needed to fall. The drug did both jobs at once.
Pervitin is Outland's argument, set in 1940 instead of 2046
The structural point the Outland script makes about Polydichloric Euthimal — that a sufficiently cold institution will treat a worker's nervous system as a capital input and budget for its destruction — is not science-fictional. It is a description of what the Third Reich actually did to its own army and its own factories six years before Peter Hyams was born. The film did not have to invent the moral shape of PDE; it only had to name it.
A caveat worth keeping in mind: Ohler's Blitzed is the popular account, and it has been criticized by academic historians — Nicolas Rasmussen among them — for overstating how causally important Pervitin was to specific Wehrmacht operations. The distribution numbers are real and the consumer-marketing is real; the strong claim that methamphetamine "won" the Battle of France is contested.