Tripped Nazi Germany, the CIA, and the dawn of the psychedelic age

The author of Blitzed (2017), which argued that Nazi Germany was awash in methamphetamine, here turns to the origins of LSD and argues for its therapeutic use. Here, too, the Nazis were involved. Extracting "ergotamine" at industrial scale from fungus-infested wheat in the Emmental Valley, Swiss pharmaceutical company Sandoz (later subsumed into today's Novartis) envisioned medical applications and healthy profits. But the Third Reich was eager to develop a truth serum, and Sandoz executive Arthur Stoll collaborated eagerly and extensively with Third Reich biochemist Arthur Kuhn. Their research into weaponized psychedelics eventually fell into the hands of the U.S. government, leading to a terrifying moment in the 1950s during which intelligence agents, exuberant about the possibilities for spycraft, began surreptitiously dosing each other at CIA headquarters. Recreational use followed, and the rest--Timothy Leary, Owsley Stanley, Ken Kesey--is history. Connecting the dots between Switzerland and Schedule I criminalization is illuminating, and Ohler's gonzo-style visits to the Novartis archives are entertaining. But Ohler is ultimately less concerned with making sensational historical claims than he is in advocating for decriminalization.

Bestseller Ohler follows up Blitzed, his exploration of Nazi drug use, with a fleet-footed and propulsive account of how the U.S. government picked up where the Nazis left off when it came to drugs. Concisely recapping the mid-century birth of psychedelics, he shows that the Nazis' approach to drugs--punitive regulation coupled with extensive utilization for military purposes--was adopted by the U.S. after WWII. (Juicing up the troops was the Nazi goal, achieved via amphetamines; interrogation and mind control became the American military aims for LSD.) So too the Nazi penchant for unethical drug testing was taken up by the U.S.--the sordid history of MKULTRA is elegantly laid out, including a Greenwich Village CIA safe house where beatniks unwittingly dosed with LSD were recorded and observed. Ohler laments this history while tracking it (mainly through scientists and officials who over time had a foot in both the Nazi and U.S. government orbit), pointing to the promising medicinal uses of LSD (especially for Alzheimer's, from which his mother suffers) that were quashed by American officials, who imagined the drug to be a powerful weapon. (LSD was powerful, but in a different way, according to Ohler, who argues the 1960s' cultural upheaval stemmed from widespread psychedelics use; he even insinuates that JFK's 1963 speech calling for world peace resulted from an acid trip.) Brilliantly sifting a massive history for its ideological through lines, this is a must-read. (Apr.)

An idiosyncratic trip through the annals of LSD. German author Ohler, author of Blitzed, took on the study of the history of lysergic acid, he recounts, when his father began to give Ohler's mother microdoses to help mediate her Alzheimer's disease. Indeed, he writes, legalization looms largely because "more and more governments are beginning to rely on scientific knowledge rather than bow to the ideological demands of the Cold War," with promising results in the treatment of dementia, addiction, and other maladies. The Cold War is an instrumental part of the history of psychedelic drugs, which stretches back into the annals of the Third Reich, developed by Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann and experimentally used in Nazi camps to break down prisoners under interrogation. American investigators puzzling through the experimenter's records on "Chemical Methods for Neutralization of the Will" divined the possibilities such a drug might hold. Meanwhile, Ohler writes, postwar Germany was witnessing a narcotics boom as "more and more people took recourse to substances to help them get through the day--or the night." The reluctance of the Soviets to enforce anti-drug laws led to the suspicion that they might possess Nazi secrets related to LSD; soon, CIA agents were at pharmaceutical giant Sandoz's door buying up as much acid as they could. Enter the Ford Foundation, then Timothy Leary, the Beatles, and the psychedelic era. Ohler's travels in search of information take him from archives to the inner recesses of the mind, thanks to a little dosing of his own, and they're often entertaining. Jesse Jarnow's Heads covers a lot of the same ground, but the interweaving of Cold War spy-versus-spy yarns, as well as the speculation that the Nazis were racing to make new psychotropic drugs as much as new rockets, lends considerable drama to the tale. A winning addition to the literature of psychedelia. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.