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"We [science fiction writers] always wanted to believe in "private sector" space -- hucksters make better characters than a government does."
- Larry Niven

Stimtab  
  A drug designed to keep the user awake and alert for long periods.  

We were each allowed one stimtab. Without it, no one could have marched an hour. A second pill would have been welcome after the edge had started to wear off, but the mathematics of the situation forbade it; we were still thirty klicks from the enemy base, fifteen hours marching at the least. And though you could stay awake and energetic for a hundred hours on the tabs, aberrations of judgment and perception snowballed after the second one, until in extremis the most bizarre hallucinations would be taken at face value, and a person could fidget for hours deciding whether to have breakfast.
Technovelgy from The Forever War, by Joe Haldeman.
Published by Not Known in 1974
Additional resources -

Haldeman is obviously not the first person to think about this. The Nazis blitzkrieg into France and Poland was accomplished in part with the use of Pervitin, an amphetamine.

Haldeman uses the idea of stimtabs to describe and extend this idea; the U.S. Army used amphetamines in Vietnam.

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Additional resources:
  More Ideas and Technology from The Forever War
  More Ideas and Technology by Joe Haldeman
  Tech news articles related to The Forever War
  Tech news articles related to works by Joe Haldeman

Stimtab-related news articles:
  - Hacking The Mind Of The Soldier

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