BOOK REVIEW: Norman Ohler has a penchant for short, catchy book titles. His previous work Crushed had to do with drug use in Nazi Germany and The Infiltrators concerned unhappy couples who resist
Hitler’s regime. This suggested that his new book might be a sensational airport potboiler featuring deranged, acid-fueled chemists, Nazi stormtroopers on speed, and sweaty, safari-suit-wearing CIA mavericks experimenting with brainwashing. It is. The twist is that Ohler thinks we’ve been overlooking the benefits of psychedelic drugs. This, then, is a history of how we misunderstood LSD.

Having a mother whose mental health is rapidly deteriorating from Alzheimer’s is no picnic, and Ohler, who comes from a very prudish family (his father was a retired judge), is willing to do anything to help her. When he came across a clinical study suggesting that LSD, short for lysergic acid diethylamide, could be rehabilitated to treat her condition, Ohler wondered why it was taking so long.

So he embarks on a journey that takes him to the laboratory where LSD was discovered and to the alpine retreat of a reclusive 1960s drug dealer, who tells him how American drug enforcement authorities feared the social consequences of LSD. They emulated the Nazis by closing access while simultaneously viewing it as a potential truth serum and weapon in the coming Cold War.

The CIA’s MK-Ultra experiments were amateurish and resulted in tragedy: a human guinea pig jumped out of the window of the Statler Hotel in New York. The agency wanted to know how useful LSD would be as a truth-denier, and also whether it could be used to discredit political opponents around the world by making them behave erratically. The CIA team also tested it freely on themselves and unsuspecting colleagues, as well as on military guinea pigs. But this was pretty much how such experiments were conducted. In a scene reminiscent of the cult horror film The flyAlbert Hoffman – the chemist who discovered LSD – also tries it on himself. If you want to understand human behavior, white mice on dope won’t tell you much.

In April 1953, CIA Director Allen Dulles gave a speech to an audience at Princeton University on the “horrors of brain warfare.” Ohler uses this to set up his chapter on the CIA’s experiments with LSD, presenting this speech as a precursor to a psychedelic arms race, but Dulles seems to be talking about a very different (though related) phenomenon: the more prosaic Brave New World (1931) concept of conditioning, or Nineteen hundred and eighty-four (1949) thought police.

These ideas are fundamentally psychological, not chemical, although there are crossovers. We may be guilty of presentism if we scoff at the fears of the mid-century about “mind control” and “brain washing”; Dulles did not exaggerate the fears of totalitarianism and technology that existed then.

The same is probably true of the optimism that surrounded the discovery of mescaline, LSD and then magic mushrooms (psilocybin). Aldous Huxley, who wrote about mescaline in his 1954 book The doors of perceptionbelieved that LSD would be useful in psychotherapy and self-discovery.

Albert Hoffman at Sandoz (more recently Novartis after a merger with Ciba-Geigy) initially believed his discovery was close to Pervitin, a methamphetamine-based drug that boosted energy levels and improved performance. It was Pervitin that kept Nazi soldiers on blitzkriegs, while it was Benzedrine that Allied commandos carried on their sabotage missions. Some of LSD’s cousins ​​marketed by Sandoz included treatments for maternity, headaches, neuralgia, insomnia, shingles, Parkinson’s disease, and impaired brain function.

Harvard psychologist and psychedelic prodigy Timothy Leary did enormous damage to LSD’s clinical program, we learn, and helped cement the drug’s status as an illegal substance. Frustrated that it wasn’t getting the attention of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, Leary placed an order with Sandoz for 100 grams of LSD and 25 grams of psilocybin—enough, Ohler says, to send two million Americans on a trip. This eventually got him fired from Harvard. Allen Ginsberg took it to Leary’s home and ran naked through the streets. Jack Kerouac claimed it took him on a magic carpet ride, “crazy in clouds as he watched the movie of existence.”

Leary’s Harvard colleague, Professor Max Rinkel, claimed that LSD “sometimes produces psychotic reactions in people who have not taken it”, and that women can have “several hundred orgasms” while on LSD. Huxley warned him of this: “We have caused enough trouble by suggesting that the drug can stimulate aesthetic and religious experiences. I urge you not to let the sexual cat out of the bag.”

The book is a worthwhile and easy read. Ohler is more than emotionally invested in the success of his story: he wants his mother to respond to the LSD treatment, and he wants the facts to be in his favor. The timing of his book may be just right: in March of this year, the US FDA gave the green light to MM120, a form of LSD, for treating anxiety, depression and PTSD.

Tripped: Nazi Germany, the CIA, and the Dawn of the Psychedelic Age by Norman Ohler is out now.

Peter Grace teaches international security and is working on a history of the CIA.