This is Later with Lee Matthews the Lee Matthews Podcast. More what You Hear
Weekday Afternoon's on the Drive, Okay. Norman Ohler is an award winning novelist,
screenwriter, and journalist. He's the author of the New York Times bestseller
Blitzed, But his newest creation, soon to be a best seller, has
me intrigued. It's called Tripped. Nazi Germany, the CIA, and the
dawn of the psychedelic Age, Norman Ohler, all of those things don't seem
to have any connection. Yes, that's probably that's probably the joke of the
book. I mean, I was interested in the early history of psychedelics,
which we are all talking about now so intensely, like I was wondering whether
these substances actually come from. And I discovered that LSD to my big surprise,
actually I discovered that LSP has a Nazi pass because the see all of
the Swiss company company who developed LSD, he had his best friend was a
Nazi biochemist, so he told him about LSD in nineteen forty three, and
the Nazi biochemists that he had Coon was his name, got very interested in
the Nazis set up the psychedelic test series in the concentration camp of Dakau,
and that again interested the Americans when they liberated Dakhal, first the American military
and then the American Intelligence Service. So that is why LSD has a very
problematic path, which then also contributed to it's also problematic you know total history.
Well, we're now knowing some of the things that the Nazis did do,
and were they trying to experiment with some sort of chemical they could use
in chemical warfare or that they could lace their enemies water with. The Nazis
were actually basically all paranoid, so they were always interrogating everyone, and in
interrogations they wanted to know all the secrets of the other person, and that
actually didn't work even under torture. So they wondered, how can we act
actually find a so called truth zoreum. So they thought maybe a drug that
is acting so intentionally in the mind like LSD. Because when Sunder's, the
Swiss company, they discovered LSD, they soon realized that they had the strongest
acting agent that ever exists on the planet, on the human mind. So
the Nazis thought, maybe we give our prisoners LSD and then we can extract
all kinds of secrets from them, we can control their minds. So this
was kind of the pipe dream of the Gestapo and also of the ss because
it didn't work in the end, but they tried to find the so called
truth theoreum. Well, we now know what the Nazis motivation was. What
was the Swiss company's motivation. Well, the Swiss were just developing medicines out
of ergod, which is a fungus that grows on rye, and they had
developed a very successful migraine medicine. They had something to give a medicine,
very successful medicine for women during childbirth, which is still on the market actually
to so Sunders was making a lot of money with this herb with ergot medicines.
And one of the ergot compounds that they isolated to test whether it could
be a new medicine was lsd uh and but this one did not did not
act on the on the body, but it actually it acted on the mind.
So it was the first substance that was really that could kind of give
you an insight into the human mind. And they didn't really know what to
do with this pharmaceutical company. They made like they made an so called intoxication
room within the company where bookkeepers, chemists, workers for the company could go
and get LSD and then they would just write down what they experienced. And
they all experienced a tremendous increase in moods, They had new thoughts, they
were happy, and so that thunders the company thought maybe this is this is
good. This was towards the end of World War two, so there were
a lot of people in Europe and in the world with traumas and very bad
were very bad minds. So they thought made LSD could be the perfect post
war drug that actually that somehow gets everyone, you know, back back on
the ground and back on rebuilding the continent and the world. So that that
was the hope that Sanders had with LSD. It would be this was before
psycho you know, this was before antidepressants and anti psychotics and all that kind
of stuff. It was really the first medicine that could heal people's minds,
and so they thought they would have a huge hit on their hands. We're
talking to Norman Ouro I'm sorry Ohler, who is the author of Tripped Nazi
Germany, the CIA and the Dawn of the Psychedelic age. So the war
wraps up, the Allies free Dachau and they find all these substances immediately,
what do they do well, they, first of all, they were overwhelmed.
They didn't really know what it was. I mean, they read that
they used the nas used mescaline and some other psychedelic hallucinogenic stops, which was
ordorless and tasteless. So they and they was totally unknown at the time that
these the people who liberated that. How they kind of passed the report on
to Washington, and in Washington, the report was given to a Harvard professor.
His name was Beecher, and he was an expert on drugs. He
had been in the war examining like how the Nazis used and abused drugs.
So he studied it and then he did some tests at Harvard University, kind
of similar tests actually than the estes. He didn't do it in the concentration,
commit did at Harvard University. And what he found is that yet maybe
you could use LSD as a weapon, for example, to poison the water
supply of his Soviet battleship, or even you know, poisoned water supply of
a whole Russian town because this was the beginning we have to remember of the
Cold War. So suddenly the Cold War being this war of ideologies, this
brain warfare, as the CIA director Dallas called it, This called for you
know, all kinds of you know behavior, you know, tactic and and
weaponry. So that the rest thought, well, the Nazis thought LSD is
so strong it could be used as a weapon. Maybe we should perfect this
research and actually try to do what the Nazis failed in. And it's all
in his new book Tripped Nazi Germany, The CIA and the Dawn of the
Psychedelic Age, Norman Ohler is with us at one point, did it get
out of the CIA and onto the street? Well, John Lannon once said
that we have to thank the CIA because they gave us LSD. I mean
in fact that the CIA did give LSD to quite a lot of people,
because they included a lot of people in tests. One of these persons,
for example, was Ken Keithye, the writer who then wrote he Imagined on
LSD. That he got in Menlo Park, close to San Francisco, in
a psychiatric ward where he was working. He suddenly had the idea of one
flew over the Cuckoo's nest On LSD so a lot, and he later call
it the revolt of the guinea pigs, meaning smart people or creative people who
got into the program who got LSD's suddenly realized that this is not a mind
control drug. This is rather the opposite. So LSD became kind of famous
in underground circles in America. And then when sun Loss Swiss Company was not
allowed to manufacture it anymore because it became illegal, underground LSD chemists were making
LSD and that LSD became hugely popular, especially in the anti Vietnam War movement.
So this is kind of basically the CIA opened Pandora's box and made LSD
available to quite a lot of people in America unwittingly. And more of the
details of all of this are spelled out in Tripped Nazi Germany, the CIA
and the Dawn of the Psychedelic Age. Norman Owler. I could talk to
you all day about this, but I thank you for joining us, Thanks
not for having me with the pleasure, have a good day. Thanks for
listening to Later with Lee Matthew the Lee Matthews Podcast, and remember to listen
to The Drive Live weekday afternoons from five to seven and iHeartMedia Presentation