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This is Later with Lee Matthews the
Lee Matthews Podcast. More what You Hear

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Weekday Afternoon's on the Drive, Okay. Norman Ohler is an award winning novelist,

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screenwriter, and journalist. He's the
author of the New York Times bestseller

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Blitzed, But his newest creation,
soon to be a best seller, has

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me intrigued. It's called Tripped.
Nazi Germany, the CIA, and the

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dawn of the psychedelic Age, Norman
Ohler, all of those things don't seem

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to have any connection. Yes,
that's probably that's probably the joke of the

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book. I mean, I was
interested in the early history of psychedelics,

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which we are all talking about now
so intensely, like I was wondering whether

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these substances actually come from. And
I discovered that LSD to my big surprise,

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actually I discovered that LSP has a
Nazi pass because the see all of

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the Swiss company company who developed LSD, he had his best friend was a

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Nazi biochemist, so he told him
about LSD in nineteen forty three, and

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the Nazi biochemists that he had Coon
was his name, got very interested in

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the Nazis set up the psychedelic test
series in the concentration camp of Dakau,

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and that again interested the Americans when
they liberated Dakhal, first the American military

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and then the American Intelligence Service.
So that is why LSD has a very

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problematic path, which then also contributed
to it's also problematic you know total history.

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Well, we're now knowing some of
the things that the Nazis did do,

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and were they trying to experiment with
some sort of chemical they could use

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in chemical warfare or that they could
lace their enemies water with. The Nazis

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were actually basically all paranoid, so
they were always interrogating everyone, and in

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interrogations they wanted to know all the
secrets of the other person, and that

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actually didn't work even under torture.
So they wondered, how can we act

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actually find a so called truth zoreum. So they thought maybe a drug that

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is acting so intentionally in the mind
like LSD. Because when Sunder's, the

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Swiss company, they discovered LSD,
they soon realized that they had the strongest

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acting agent that ever exists on the
planet, on the human mind. So

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the Nazis thought, maybe we give
our prisoners LSD and then we can extract

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all kinds of secrets from them,
we can control their minds. So this

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was kind of the pipe dream of
the Gestapo and also of the ss because

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it didn't work in the end,
but they tried to find the so called

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truth theoreum. Well, we now
know what the Nazis motivation was. What

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was the Swiss company's motivation. Well, the Swiss were just developing medicines out

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of ergod, which is a fungus
that grows on rye, and they had

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developed a very successful migraine medicine.
They had something to give a medicine,

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very successful medicine for women during childbirth, which is still on the market actually

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to so Sunders was making a lot
of money with this herb with ergot medicines.

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And one of the ergot compounds that
they isolated to test whether it could

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be a new medicine was lsd uh
and but this one did not did not

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act on the on the body,
but it actually it acted on the mind.

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So it was the first substance that
was really that could kind of give

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you an insight into the human mind. And they didn't really know what to

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do with this pharmaceutical company. They
made like they made an so called intoxication

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room within the company where bookkeepers,
chemists, workers for the company could go

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and get LSD and then they would
just write down what they experienced. And

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they all experienced a tremendous increase in
moods, They had new thoughts, they

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were happy, and so that thunders
the company thought maybe this is this is

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good. This was towards the end
of World War two, so there were

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a lot of people in Europe and
in the world with traumas and very bad

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were very bad minds. So they
thought made LSD could be the perfect post

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war drug that actually that somehow gets
everyone, you know, back back on

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the ground and back on rebuilding the
continent and the world. So that that

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was the hope that Sanders had with
LSD. It would be this was before

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psycho you know, this was before
antidepressants and anti psychotics and all that kind

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of stuff. It was really the
first medicine that could heal people's minds,

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and so they thought they would have
a huge hit on their hands. We're

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talking to Norman Ouro I'm sorry Ohler, who is the author of Tripped Nazi

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Germany, the CIA and the Dawn
of the Psychedelic age. So the war

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wraps up, the Allies free Dachau
and they find all these substances immediately,

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what do they do well, they, first of all, they were overwhelmed.

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They didn't really know what it was. I mean, they read that

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they used the nas used mescaline and
some other psychedelic hallucinogenic stops, which was

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ordorless and tasteless. So they and
they was totally unknown at the time that

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these the people who liberated that.
How they kind of passed the report on

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to Washington, and in Washington,
the report was given to a Harvard professor.

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His name was Beecher, and he
was an expert on drugs. He

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had been in the war examining like
how the Nazis used and abused drugs.

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So he studied it and then he
did some tests at Harvard University, kind

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of similar tests actually than the estes. He didn't do it in the concentration,

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commit did at Harvard University. And
what he found is that yet maybe

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you could use LSD as a weapon, for example, to poison the water

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supply of his Soviet battleship, or
even you know, poisoned water supply of

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a whole Russian town because this was
the beginning we have to remember of the

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Cold War. So suddenly the Cold
War being this war of ideologies, this

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brain warfare, as the CIA director
Dallas called it, This called for you

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know, all kinds of you know
behavior, you know, tactic and and

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weaponry. So that the rest thought, well, the Nazis thought LSD is

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so strong it could be used as
a weapon. Maybe we should perfect this

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research and actually try to do what
the Nazis failed in. And it's all

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in his new book Tripped Nazi Germany, The CIA and the Dawn of the

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Psychedelic Age, Norman Ohler is with
us at one point, did it get

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out of the CIA and onto the
street? Well, John Lannon once said

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that we have to thank the CIA
because they gave us LSD. I mean

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in fact that the CIA did give
LSD to quite a lot of people,

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because they included a lot of people
in tests. One of these persons,

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for example, was Ken Keithye,
the writer who then wrote he Imagined on

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LSD. That he got in Menlo
Park, close to San Francisco, in

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a psychiatric ward where he was working. He suddenly had the idea of one

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flew over the Cuckoo's nest On LSD
so a lot, and he later call

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it the revolt of the guinea pigs, meaning smart people or creative people who

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got into the program who got LSD's
suddenly realized that this is not a mind

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control drug. This is rather the
opposite. So LSD became kind of famous

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in underground circles in America. And
then when sun Loss Swiss Company was not

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allowed to manufacture it anymore because it
became illegal, underground LSD chemists were making

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LSD and that LSD became hugely popular, especially in the anti Vietnam War movement.

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So this is kind of basically the
CIA opened Pandora's box and made LSD

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available to quite a lot of people
in America unwittingly. And more of the

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details of all of this are spelled
out in Tripped Nazi Germany, the CIA

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and the Dawn of the Psychedelic Age. Norman Owler. I could talk to

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you all day about this, but
I thank you for joining us, Thanks

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not for having me with the pleasure, have a good day. Thanks for

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listening to Later with Lee Matthew the
Lee Matthews Podcast, and remember to listen

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to The Drive Live weekday afternoons from
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