0:03

Hi, this is Andrew

0:06

and this is Kynon, the

0:09

daily Now.tv chat show

0:12

with some of the world's leading thinkers

0:14

and writers. Hello

0:20

everybody, it is Tuesday, April the 3rd, 2024. Regular

0:25

viewers, listeners of Kynon know that

0:28

we've been doing quite a lot of shows on the

0:32

increasingly fashionable

0:34

role of psychedelics in people's lifestyles

0:36

and thinking. We did a show

0:39

a couple

0:42

of months ago with Andy Mitchell, UK-based

0:45

writer. He has a new

0:47

book out, Ten Tricks, The

0:50

New Reality of Psychedelics. He also did

0:52

a show last year with a

0:55

California-based novelist, William Brewer,

0:58

who has a new novel about

1:00

the red arrow about the use

1:02

of psychedelics. So we're back on

1:04

that subject again today with

1:07

a book appropriately named,

1:10

Tripped, Nazi Germany,

1:12

The CIA and the Dawn of the

1:14

Psychedelic Age by Norman Oler. Many of

1:16

you will be familiar with Oler. He

1:19

wrote a book a few years ago,

1:21

Blitz, drugged in the Third Reich.

1:23

It came out in 2017. It's

1:25

hugely successful, quite controversial too.

1:28

Not all historians agreed with

1:30

his conclusions, but it certainly had a

1:32

big impact. And Norman

1:34

Oler is joining us from three bridges

1:37

in Germany. I'm not going to try

1:39

Norman with the German pronunciation because I

1:41

will embarrass myself. Before

1:45

we get on to Tripped,

1:47

your new book, are you surprised with

1:50

this new, the new

1:52

fashion of psychedelics? It's becoming

1:55

increasingly mainstream. I know actually

1:57

a few German artists. entrepreneurs,

2:00

for example, who have startup

2:03

companies built around psychedelics?

2:07

I mean, the

2:09

interest in psychedelics

2:11

is not really surprising because these compounds

2:13

are actually quite interesting. So

2:17

for many reasons, natural that people are trying

2:20

to examine how they could be used.

2:23

What is surprising is that research

2:25

was actually prohibited for many decades

2:29

for example, LSD became illegal in the mid

2:31

60s. So that

2:34

is actually surprising. Now the laws are

2:36

softening some states within

2:38

the United States, legalized

2:40

certain compounds, Europe is going

2:42

the same way, Germany just

2:44

legalized nationwide cannabis two days

2:46

ago. That

2:48

is actually not surprising because

2:52

the prohibition laws are not

2:54

based on scientific findings,

2:57

but are based on ideological

3:00

reasoning. And this slowly

3:03

comes out of style and scientists are now

3:05

actually looking from an

3:07

objective point of view at these substances.

3:09

So that is not surprising to me,

3:11

actually quite a natural development. Yeah,

3:15

and I think judging from your

3:17

book, Tripped, it's out next

3:19

week, Nazi Germany, the

3:21

CIA and the dawn of the psychedelic

3:23

age. Would it be fair

3:26

that you play psychedelics or

3:28

the history of psychedelics in the context

3:30

of the origins of

3:32

the Cold War and the various

3:35

paranoia driving the Cold

3:37

War, particularly in the United States? Absolutely.

3:42

If we think of psychedelic compounds, we usually

3:44

think of the 60s and how people

3:46

in hundreds of thousands of people were

3:48

just using them and intimately there is

3:51

just taking enough LSD and then you'll

3:53

be against the Vietnam War and the

3:55

world would be perfect. I mean, that's

3:57

our first, you know, that's our first

3:59

association. association with these drugs, but

4:02

actually they have a longer history. LSD

4:04

was discovered in 1943 and the company

4:06

who discovered it, the Swiss pharmaceutical company

4:08

put great hopes into, um, and

4:12

the see as a molecule, they thought

4:14

they could, you know, develop a medicine

4:16

against mental illnesses, against neuroses, against trauma

4:18

to against dementia. All of

4:21

these problems that we are facing today, we

4:23

were also facing mankind was also

4:25

especially modern mankind was also facing back then.

4:28

So I was looking in tripped at what

4:30

actually happened in those very early years of

4:32

LSD. Why was the Swiss pharmaceutical

4:34

company not able to

4:37

bring it out as a medicine

4:39

and turn it into, you know, a big hit,

4:41

which is what they believed it would be. To

4:45

what extent, as I said, there are many, many

4:48

of our viewers and listeners will be familiar with

4:50

your remarkable book,

4:52

Blitz drugs in the

4:54

Third Reich, which was enormously successful.

4:57

To what extent is this

4:59

new book tripped the second volume?

5:02

How is it connected with Blitz

5:06

or are they separate narratives, separate

5:08

stories? They

5:11

are separate stories. So you don't need to be

5:13

familiar with Blitz in order to read tripped, but

5:16

they are also connected because while I

5:19

was researching for Blitz, I visited many

5:21

archives and one of them was the

5:23

archive of the

5:25

former concentration camp of Dachau, which is now

5:27

like a memorial kind of a museum that

5:29

people can visit to get informed about what

5:31

was actually happening in the camp. And

5:34

the archivist told me because

5:37

I was interested in Nazis and drugs, that's the

5:39

topic of Blitz, the first book, not

5:42

that the archivist told me

5:44

that actually the

5:46

SS conducted psychedelic research

5:48

at the camp. And this was

5:51

totally new to me. This had

5:53

actually never been properly examined before.

5:56

So I became interested in it. I thought it would be a

5:58

chapter on Blitz and actually is a very small chapter in

6:00

Blitz, but there was a lot more to the

6:02

story, which I was not able

6:04

to properly research at the time, but I thought

6:07

this has to be a separate book. I want

6:09

to, because archivists said, I don't know where the

6:11

reports are, the American, American forces,

6:13

when they liberated the camp, took

6:15

the report about the psychedelic research

6:17

with them. So we don't have

6:20

it. We don't have it. So

6:22

I was searching for, for, you

6:24

know, what actually why they

6:26

did psychedelic research and why America got

6:28

so interested in it. That was not

6:31

possible during the research of Blitz because it

6:33

just took longer. This is now the new

6:35

book trip. So yes, they are connected. You

6:38

know, adds to that very

6:40

troubling narrative of the United

6:42

States and its security agencies

6:45

somehow succeeding the

6:47

Nazis, borrowing their technology from

6:51

Oppenheimer and other movies about the

6:53

American invention of nuclear weapons. We

6:56

know that the Americans borrowed technology

6:58

and scientists from the Nazis. Is

7:02

there a parallel there, this odd

7:05

continuity between Nazi Germany

7:07

and Cold War America?

7:12

It basically starts with a guy called

7:14

Harry J. Ansinger, who was the head

7:17

of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. And

7:19

he was very interested in

7:21

the Nazis anti-drug laws because the Nazis

7:23

were the first really

7:26

anti-drug government, you could say, even though

7:28

they abused drugs, methamphetamine for their army

7:30

later on. When they started in 1933,

7:33

they proclaimed themselves to be a

7:35

government that will rid society of all

7:38

drugs. And they were quite, you know,

7:40

harsh about it. Drug

7:42

users were sent to concentration camps.

7:44

They used the anti-drug laws against

7:46

morphine, heroin, cocaine, these

7:48

kind of drugs. They used these

7:50

laws to persecute

7:53

Jews from early on,

7:56

because in the beginning, they didn't have laws against

7:58

Jews. They just had anti-drugs. law. So

8:01

they concluded they could just to racial

8:03

profiling, you know, attack that

8:05

part of the German population. And

8:08

weirdly enough, this approach appealed to

8:10

Harry J. Anslinger, who was basically

8:13

the drug star of

8:15

America was responsible for the prohibition, he

8:17

had basically invented the anti

8:19

drug policies in the United States, because he

8:21

was trying to fight

8:23

the jazz scene in Harlem,

8:26

and he knew he

8:28

couldn't arrest Afro Americans just because

8:30

they're Afro American, but if he

8:32

made marijuana illegal, which he did,

8:34

and then he

8:36

could arrest, you know, jazz players who use

8:38

a lot of marijuana, and he was actually

8:40

able to, you know, have quite a lot

8:42

of people, Billy Holiday, he

8:46

tried to ruin the career of Billy Holiday. So

8:48

he was really using

8:51

this, these racist foundations

8:53

on which the Nazi drug anti

8:55

drug policies were built, he imported

8:57

them to the United States. And

9:01

no one really no one really stopped him.

9:04

Republican president supported his anti drug policies,

9:07

Democratic president supported his anti drug policies.

9:09

So he was actually in office for

9:12

decades, only only Hoover, the

9:14

FBI director was longer in

9:17

office. Yeah, and that raises

9:19

the complicated and controversial subject

9:21

of J. Edgar Hoover, who

9:24

was also an

9:26

aggressive anti communist, and

9:29

a racist, very supportive

9:31

of a lot of the the

9:34

Jim Crow laws, or it seems

9:36

controversial figure. So are you

9:38

suggesting, Norman, that there

9:40

is this off symmetry between US

9:42

state policy and Nazi German policy?

9:48

Certainly, the United States is a

9:50

different system than Nazi Germany, it's

9:52

not a totalitarian dictatorship. But

9:55

we can see that certain, you know,

9:58

the Nazis were kind of Obviously

10:01

infamous, but also in America, there

10:03

was the belief that they had

10:05

quite a vast

10:07

knowledge, for example, in developing a nuclear

10:09

weapon and

10:11

that they had knowledge that

10:14

could be useful in the emerging Cold

10:16

War, which the United States suddenly found

10:18

itself in against the Soviet Union. It

10:21

was all about, who's on my side? Who's

10:23

on the other side? Who's a traitor? How

10:25

could we extract secrets? It was a time

10:27

of suspicion of paranoia. So

10:29

when the Americans found out that

10:32

the Germans were actively researching LSD

10:34

and masculine doing psychedelic research

10:36

in the concentration camp of Dachau, when

10:38

they found this out, when they liberated

10:40

Dachau and found all the reports, this

10:43

became very interesting to the American first

10:45

military and then American intelligence servants. Like

10:47

they were wondering, can we

10:49

now use LSD as a

10:52

weapon? Obviously this doesn't make the Americans

10:54

the same as the Nazis, but

10:56

there are certain behaviors

10:59

or policies that

11:01

the US was actually quite happy to

11:04

adopt. And I think it's very important

11:06

to shed light on this and understand

11:08

what actually happens within that

11:10

pressure cooker of the Cold War

11:12

and how that might actually

11:14

have even damaged

11:16

possibly the democracy, the democratic

11:20

evolvement of the American society. Remind

11:23

us Norman, you touched

11:25

on this earlier in our conversation, how

11:27

was LSD used at Dachau? In

11:30

specifically, what did Nazi

11:32

scientists or quote unquote

11:34

Nazi scientists researchers use

11:36

LSD for in death

11:39

camps, industrial death camps like Dachau?

11:46

The pipe dream or

11:48

the wet dream of the Nazis,

11:50

especially of the Gestapo and of

11:52

the SS was to

11:55

find the so-called truth serum, especially

11:58

after the... attempt on

12:00

Hitler's life on July 20th, 1944, Operation Valkyrie. Which

12:05

you just wrote a novel about, right? Or

12:08

something new? You're all too

12:10

familiar with that too. Well,

12:12

I describe it in detail

12:14

in bliss. After

12:16

this event, paranoia was everywhere within

12:19

the state system, like the SS

12:22

and the Nazi Party, obviously, who

12:24

is a traitor, because that was the army going

12:26

against Hitler. So that was for

12:29

the Nazis, this was treason. So they had to find out

12:32

who are the traitors in the

12:35

German army, who still works for us

12:37

and who is actually has to be

12:39

eliminated. So the search for

12:41

the truth through truth serum was

12:45

quite an important search and researchers were

12:47

involved in that. And

12:49

there was one SS officer involved in

12:51

that Plutner was his name and he

12:53

carried out these tests, these

12:56

tests, tests in Dachau on inmates

12:58

without telling them like he invited

13:00

them to a barrack, gave

13:03

them a cup of coffee, which was a luxury in the

13:05

camp and put, you know, something spiked

13:08

the coffee. And then when

13:10

the effects of the psychedelic drugs

13:12

and these effects are quite strong.

13:15

That's why in Germany, the books called the

13:17

strongest stuff because LSD, for example, is the

13:19

strongest substance we know working on the on

13:21

the human mind. So when these

13:23

effects were taking place, he has a guy which kind

13:25

of like, I imagine

13:28

like kind of smiling, I mean, using,

13:30

you know, using his knowledge that he

13:32

has given something to the inmate that

13:34

the inmate doesn't know about to start,

13:36

you know, becoming overpowering

13:38

in the interview and maybe being able

13:41

to subtract any

13:43

needs basically. It's

13:49

a, I mean, the camps

13:51

in themselves, obviously, are profoundly chilling, but it adds to

13:53

the chilling quality of the Nazis using what you call

13:55

the ideal of truth serum. to

14:00

find out more about

14:02

the inmates. I

14:05

mean, what would the inmates have

14:07

said that the Nazis didn't already know? Well,

14:11

these were tests, these

14:13

were tests just trying to figure out

14:15

whether it's possible to manipulate a person

14:18

through the use of psychedelic drugs. Like they

14:20

were not interested in the test subjects, but

14:23

they wanted to find like

14:25

a protocol for interrogation, using

14:28

drugs to enhance the results of the

14:30

interrogation. And this is something that then

14:32

the Americans were also happy to further

14:35

develop because this is

14:38

interesting basically to any intelligence

14:40

service. How can we get better in

14:42

interrogating someone? Because through torture, you

14:44

can only get so far that

14:47

the Nazis realized they could torture

14:49

people. They tortured like

14:51

Polish resistance fighters, especially

14:54

seemed to have been a problem. They

14:57

just wouldn't talk, no matter

14:59

what cruelty was administered onto them.

15:02

So the idea was maybe we give them LSD

15:04

and we kind of break their minds. And

15:07

then we actually achieve better results.

15:10

That was, those

15:12

were the obviously highly unethical

15:15

human experiments that this SS

15:18

officer Plutner did

15:20

in Dachau. Yeah,

15:22

it's a chilling narrative,

15:25

more than chilling. It's

15:28

a surreally chilling narrative. What

15:30

about you wrote in blitzed

15:33

about Nazi use of drugs. Did

15:38

the Nazi officers, the Nazi hierarchy,

15:40

did they experiment with LSD? I

15:46

didn't find any records of that. And I

15:48

highly doubt it. I mean, LSD was not

15:50

really known at the time. And that is

15:52

the interesting story I

15:54

was able to uncover and tripped, I think.

15:57

How did the Nazis actually hear about LSD? I

16:00

mean, LSD was a bizarre molecule

16:02

that the Swiss company, not a

16:04

German company, a Swiss company in

16:07

a neutral Switzerland discovered in 1943.

16:10

So how did it travel? That's what

16:13

I wanted. And it is a company

16:15

called Sandoz, which now is a

16:17

part of Novartis. So it's very

16:19

much a kosher,

16:21

so to speak, pharmaceutical company.

16:24

Yeah. I

16:26

mean, Sandoz was one of the

16:28

biggest companies in the world. One of the biggest

16:30

pharmaceutical companies in Europe and now Novartis. It's one

16:32

of the biggest pharmaceutical companies in the world. Their

16:37

wealth or their power or their status

16:39

is based on ergot, which is a

16:41

fungus that grows on rye. And Sandoz

16:44

was able in the 20s to develop

16:46

medicines out of this ergot

16:48

fungus, like migraine

16:50

had medicine, something

16:54

against migraine, something that was

16:56

given to women who gave birth

16:58

to make the blood

17:00

vessels contract again after the birth was given.

17:02

So the bleeding stops. So they made

17:04

a lot of profit

17:08

with ergot medicines. And then LSD

17:10

was also an ergot. It's

17:12

also made from ergot. But

17:15

it works on the mind. It doesn't work on the body. The

17:18

first time Albert Hofmann, the chemist who discovered it,

17:21

took it. He thought it was going

17:23

insane. And he called his doctor. And

17:25

he was telling him, he's seeing like his perceptions

17:27

completely changed. His doctor examined his body and didn't

17:30

find anything at all. So

17:32

this was a completely new type of

17:35

medicine. And the interesting

17:37

thing that I researched is that

17:40

the CEO of Sandoz communicated

17:43

this invention with

17:45

his best buddy Richard Kuhn, who was

17:47

the leading Nazi biochemist living in Heidelberg

17:49

and doing research on this very on

17:51

the very truth serum. And he talked

17:53

about for the Nazis and then

17:55

suddenly stole his friend. They knew each other

17:57

from the 20s. So they were old buddies.

18:00

share, always sharing their research. He

18:02

suddenly hears that in Bahr they discovered

18:04

this strange thing called LSD, it works

18:07

potently on the mind. I need

18:09

to examine this and then Stoll actually sent

18:12

him half a gram of agro-tamine, which is

18:14

the precursor to LSD from

18:16

Bahr to Switzerland to Heidelberg, Germany,

18:18

and then the Nazi biochemist

18:21

had this potent substance in his

18:23

hand and then the tests in

18:26

Dachau were designed. So it

18:28

was actually a mistake in a way by

18:30

the CEO of the company to share this

18:32

information with the wrong people because at the

18:35

time, we probably didn't even judge

18:37

the Nazis, you know, in 43 the Switzerland

18:39

was, you know, at the one hand,

18:41

they were dealing with Nazi Germany, on the other hand, they

18:43

were dealing with the Western Allies, they were neutral, they were

18:45

not on, they were not on either side. And

18:49

this proved to have, you know, this proof

18:51

to bring LSD on the wrong track because

18:53

now it was examined

18:56

as a weapon and Sander has great problems

18:58

in the future to bring it out as

19:00

a medicine as they

19:02

intend it as they

19:04

first had intended. Astonishing

19:07

story. We're speaking with Norman Ola,

19:09

distinguished German writer, New York Times

19:11

bestselling writer, and he would be

19:13

familiar with his book Blitz. He

19:15

has a new book out, Tripped

19:18

Nazi Germany, the CIA, and

19:20

the dawn of the psychedelic age. We're

19:22

going to talk more about the

19:24

CIA and the dawn of the psychedelic

19:26

age after the break. But I want

19:29

to remind everyone that guys like Norman

19:31

Ola brought to us because

19:33

of our friends at liberties and excellent

19:35

new quarterly journal Culture and Politics going

19:37

to run a short feature on liberties.

19:39

And then we'll be back with Norman

19:41

to talk more about LSD

19:44

and the Cold War. Don't go away

19:46

anyone. The

19:49

news, the noise, there is nuance,

19:51

insight. Liberties, it's not just

19:53

a journal of ideas. It's a meteor

19:55

of intelligence substance. It's the place to

19:58

be for engaged citizens. politics,

20:00

opinion, substance. Liberties is a

20:02

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a quarterly of urgency, of

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20:13

invaluable. Subscribe now or find

20:15

Liberties at your favorite bookseller.

20:18

And you can subscribe to Liberties

20:20

at libertiesjournal.com. We're speaking with Norman

20:22

Oler, the German-based author

20:24

of Tripped

20:26

Fascinating New History, a

20:29

follow-up to Blit, Tripped

20:32

Nazi Germany, the CIA, and the Dawn

20:34

of the Psychedelic Age. So,

20:36

Norman, 1945, the Nazis are defeated.

20:41

Is this the dawn of the Psychedelic

20:43

Age for you when

20:45

the Nazis fall, and the Americans

20:48

move in to Berlin? I

20:52

mean, it could be the dawn of the Psychedelic Age. They

20:56

installed kind of a

20:59

tripping room within the company, which

21:01

is kind of unusual for a

21:03

Swiss pharmaceutical company. But they

21:05

wanted to know what LSD can actually do,

21:08

and they invited people from the company, chemists,

21:10

but also like bookkeepers, secretaries, to

21:12

just come in the room and take

21:14

LSD, and then describe what they were

21:16

experiencing. And the secretary was typing it

21:18

all up, and people were only experiencing

21:21

amazing, only had amazing experiences, like

21:23

they said. I never felt

21:26

so good. I can finally think clearly about

21:28

my life. I'm so happy I'm taking this. I

21:30

understand what it means to be human. I've seen,

21:32

like they looked out the window, I see nature

21:34

with different eyes. So,

21:36

Sanders really thought, this is going

21:38

to be a big hit. And then the

21:41

next step was to test it on patients.

21:43

And the son of the CEO,

21:45

he was a professor at

21:48

a university clinic in Zurich. He

21:50

tested it on depressed patients, on

21:53

traumatized people from the war,

21:56

and also the results were very

21:58

good. So in a way, that was... the

22:00

dawn of the psychedelic age. But

22:04

then this dawn actually was

22:06

a very slow dawn and a dusk

22:08

actually followed because LST kind of got

22:11

under the wings of the CIA

22:14

eventually, research was painted,

22:16

then it was made

22:18

illegal by the Nixon administration. LST

22:21

was included in the infamous war on

22:23

drugs. So the psychedelic age officially

22:26

was over. People were using it

22:29

more than ever. This is

22:31

when LST became illegal and became this kind

22:33

of street drug or

22:35

party drug or drug for gatherings

22:37

and for the anti-Vietnam war movement.

22:40

This is not what Hoffman and the Sandro

22:42

company thought would happen with LST. They were

22:45

completely surprised that now suddenly they couldn't make

22:47

it anymore for the market. And

22:49

illegal LST chemists

22:52

were making it illegally, distributing it

22:54

millions of people and

22:57

they were using LST in our field today, using LST. But

23:01

since the early 90s, it was

23:03

for the first time possibly again to do clinical

23:05

research. This was done in Switzerland by

23:07

a professor named Paulen Weider. Like he gave

23:10

people LST and psilocybin, then did brain scans

23:12

with them and examined what actually happens in

23:14

the brain, which is quite interesting, what

23:17

happens in the brain. And

23:19

then a professor in America at Johns

23:21

Hopkins in Baltimore, Griffith, he for the

23:24

first time was able to prove that

23:27

psilocybin, proven in

23:29

clinical tests that psilocybin works against severe

23:31

depression, works for

23:35

cancer patients to work with the fear

23:39

and to work with the

23:42

problem of dying, basically. He

23:44

used this with patients who

23:47

were terminally ill and he got

23:49

good results, good responses. So

23:51

this is Griffith, a professor

23:53

together with the Swiss professor. They kind

23:56

of started what

23:58

is now occurrence. like

24:00

Renaissance with startups coming up

24:03

everywhere trying to develop medicine.

24:05

Like it could be

24:07

like a new boom, like similar like to

24:09

the internet boom a few decades ago.

24:12

Pharmaceutical companies can

24:14

be very helpful to develop

24:16

medicine, psychedelic medicines against illnesses

24:20

that have no other cure or like

24:22

dementia, which is a growing disease. Some

24:25

people call it the pandemic of our near future.

24:29

Like traumas, the

24:33

amount of people that are traumatizing that

24:35

needs medication is

24:37

vast. A lot of

24:39

people take psychotics,

24:41

antidepressants, a lot of

24:44

these people could probably just

24:46

take LSD for a few times in

24:48

their life and change

24:51

their disease. So the

24:54

psychedelic dawn is I

24:56

would say it's now, but technically speaking

24:58

it's already a few decades old. But

25:00

I still think we're at the very

25:02

beginning of understanding these compounds and especially

25:05

understanding how we can utilize

25:07

them to the

25:09

best for our society and for

25:11

the people. And

25:14

like many people you have a personal

25:16

agenda here. I know you

25:19

write in the book about your mother who

25:21

you think might

25:23

also benefited from

25:25

LSD. Explain, I

25:27

don't really understand Norman,

25:30

why Sandos didn't develop it. I mean whether

25:33

or not it was made illegal in the

25:35

United States, why was LSD made

25:37

illegal in Switzerland

25:40

or Germany after the war? Albert

25:44

Hochmann, I found a

25:46

note of him. He was chief chemist

25:48

of Sandos and he wrote a note

25:52

to the CEO Arthur Stoyle describing

25:54

how he would like to expand the

25:56

research on LSD to better understand

25:58

the disease. basically

26:00

all compounds, all

26:03

kinds of psychedelic compounds. Like you

26:05

can change the molecule of

26:07

LSD. You can, LSD is

26:10

not the only molecule that's interesting.

26:12

So he wanted to transform the

26:14

Sandos company into a

26:18

pharmaceutical company specializing on psychedelic

26:20

medicine. And it

26:23

makes all the sense in the world if

26:26

we look at it from today, but

26:28

I also found a note by Stolle,

26:30

the CEO, rejecting this proposal. So it

26:32

was a conscious decision

26:34

by the CEO of

26:37

Sandos in the early 50s to not

26:39

go down this route. So it wasn't

26:41

made illegal. Sorry to interrupt

26:43

Norman. It wasn't as if LSD was

26:46

made illegal in Switzerland. It was a

26:48

decision within Sandos, a large,

26:50

the large Swiss pharmaceutical not to develop

26:52

it. Weren't there other pharmaceutical companies around

26:54

the world that could have developed it?

26:58

Well, Sandos has the patent. Oh,

27:00

I see. There's

27:03

an interesting meeting that takes place

27:05

between the CIA executives and

27:08

Atchwistol in his office in

27:10

Basel in the early 50s. And

27:13

after this meeting, Sandos

27:16

stops the development of LSD

27:18

as a medicine. And this

27:21

meeting was led by the head of

27:24

the MKUltra program within the CIA. Brian, I

27:26

wanna get to MKUltra, which is one of

27:29

the hearts of your book. A lot of

27:31

people would be familiar with the movie on

27:33

MKUltra. Tell us what this was and how

27:35

this fits into your narrative. Well,

27:40

the director of the CIA, sorry.

27:45

He was very much concerned with what he called

27:48

brain warfare. He thought that the

27:50

Cold War, the confrontation with the

27:53

Soviet Union, was

27:57

a confrontation of the minds, was a

27:59

confrontation. ideologies. So

28:01

he thought that LSD as a

28:04

potential secret weapon could

28:06

be helpful in this war. He said

28:08

this war is not

28:10

fun. This war is not

28:12

this war is serious. Like we have to fight

28:15

with everything we can. It is a sort of

28:17

propaganda war and often enough, you know, it's layered

28:19

up into a hot war, like the Korean War

28:21

was, was a part of

28:24

the Cold War. So it was a, you

28:26

know, the Cold War is a war. And

28:29

so he decided that the

28:31

CIA would create a secret

28:34

program, even secret within the

28:36

secrecy of the intelligence service

28:39

called MK Altra. This was led

28:41

by Sidney Gottlieb, who was an outsider, who

28:43

came into the CIA

28:45

to, to direct

28:48

this program. And Sidney

28:50

Gottlieb was very interested in LSD because

28:52

LSD was, there

28:55

was a Harvard professor named Beecher,

28:57

who was employed by the US

28:59

military to write about possible. Henry

29:01

Knowles Beecher, who is related to

29:04

Harriet Beecher. It's a complicated,

29:07

tangled and ironic story.

29:11

Beecher was a military man,

29:14

and he had been in the war, in the war,

29:16

in the war, in the world, in World War Two.

29:18

And then he was back in Harvard. And

29:20

he received those reports from the Dachau concentration

29:22

camp, like they landed on his desk. The

29:26

US military asked him to evaluate this. So

29:28

he became a leading expert

29:30

on LSD. And he said, LSD can be used

29:32

as a weapon. For example, you could drug

29:36

a warship of the enemy, like if you

29:39

were able to administer LSD into

29:41

the water tanks, and they would all be

29:44

incapable of operating the ship. Which is

29:46

probably true. I mean, it's a crazy

29:48

fantasy, but it was

29:50

a time of crazy fantasies, or you

29:52

could perhaps poison the water supply of

29:54

a whole city, like turn the citizens

29:56

of Moscow, like make, make them mad

29:59

by giving them. leaving them all LSD or

30:01

you could maybe put LSD in the water supply of

30:03

the Kremlin. I mean, these were all thoughts

30:05

that Beecher entertained and Sidney

30:08

Gottlieb read these Beecher reports

30:10

and he thought these Beecher reports are

30:12

interesting. And

30:14

what is not good, he thought, was

30:16

that LSD was being manufactured by a

30:18

Swiss company from a neutral country, Switzerland.

30:20

What if Sandor sells

30:23

LSD also to the Soviet Union? So he

30:25

traveled to Basel. He put Stol under pressure.

30:27

He said, you

30:30

have to basically partner up with us.

30:32

Otherwise, you will have severe problems with

30:34

the law in the United States also

30:36

selling your other products. LSD

30:38

will not be sold freely on the

30:40

market. He kind of, that's

30:43

what he tried to enforce. And Stol,

30:45

he basically agreed to

30:47

this, I call it, I

30:49

guess devilish pact in my book. So to this

30:51

pact for sure, which enabled

30:53

then the CIA, Sidney Gottlieb, to

30:55

become kind of the godfather of

30:57

LSD and to tailor

31:00

now the research that was done on LSD

31:02

to find out how

31:04

you could manipulate someone's mind with LSD,

31:06

basically, how you could execute

31:08

mind control

31:11

through the use of LSD. Yeah,

31:13

it's ironic. The way

31:15

you talk about this, Norman, it

31:19

adds a sort of an odd narrative

31:21

to the American

31:25

paranoia and counter paranoia of

31:27

the age. When you think

31:29

of movies like Doctor Strangelove

31:32

and The Manchurian Candidate, it's

31:34

almost as if LSD

31:36

was being used in those

31:39

films without acknowledgement.

31:43

Well, I guess it was the spirit of

31:46

the times, the movies like Doctor Strangelove,

31:49

they kind of like the director or

31:51

the writer, they kind of get

31:53

the sense that something is odd, you know, and

31:55

of course, something is odd in

31:58

the 50s in the United States. I

32:00

mean, something is odd also in other countries,

32:02

but it was a time of deception, a

32:05

time of paranoia, a time of fear,

32:08

you know, the suddenly the Soviet Union

32:10

had the nuclear bomb. So

32:13

part of this paranoia is also understandable,

32:16

but it's

32:21

certainly interesting to see how LSD

32:25

also got in German, we

32:27

say, under the wheels of

32:29

this paranoia. Like it didn't

32:31

get the chance to develop as

32:34

it should have been able to develop

32:36

as a medicine because of this pressure

32:39

cooker of paranoia of the Cold

32:41

War era. And

32:45

what about the Soviets here? Were they

32:47

the grownups? Did they keep

32:49

their hands off LSD or did they have

32:51

their own research? And with

32:53

the KGB plotting to steal

32:59

it and put it in the

33:01

water supply of London or New

33:03

York? It's

33:06

an interesting question because this question kind

33:08

of tormented Sidney Gottlieb's mind because obviously

33:11

he was thinking they must have it

33:13

also. The

33:15

whole drug psychedelic

33:18

program of the CIA was always under

33:22

the idea of maybe

33:24

the Soviets are doing this so we have

33:27

to be prepared. Actually

33:30

the Soviets, it was never

33:32

proven that this research was done within

33:34

the Soviet Union, but interestingly enough, there

33:37

was quite a large research

33:39

program involving LSD in

33:42

Czechoslovakia, which was a satellite state

33:45

of the Soviet Union. There's

33:48

a lot in archives and Prague about

33:50

the psychedelic research on the other side

33:52

of the Iron Curtain. I

33:55

have not examined this data. It's

33:57

all in Czech language. which

34:00

I don't know if it was contained to

34:03

Czechoslovakia or whether people

34:06

in Moscow were getting all the

34:08

results and were actually also

34:11

plotting to use LSD as

34:14

a secret weapon. But Czechoslovakia

34:16

had their own pharmaceutical company

34:18

which produced very

34:21

good or let's say pure LSD.

34:24

And it had actually quite an

34:26

influence on the Czech cultural

34:30

development, like movies coming

34:32

out of Czechoslovakia in the 60s were

34:35

much more advanced and

34:37

dark and funny than

34:39

movies coming out of other Eastern Bloc countries.

34:42

I think this would be an interesting research in itself.

34:45

I have not done this research yet, but

34:48

Sydney Godwin experienced that there was something going

34:50

on on the other side of the Iron

34:53

Curtain. We're not

34:55

ungrounded at all. Yeah, maybe someone needs

34:57

to write a book about Milos

35:00

Forman and Love's of a Bond and A

35:02

Use of LSD. And

35:04

also, you could rename William Brewer's book,

35:09

The Red Arrow Gives It New Meaning.

35:15

You seem ambivalent about this.

35:18

What about the ambivalence of, I

35:21

mean, this is a Brave New World. And

35:23

of course the author of Brave New World,

35:25

Arthur Kursler warned about drugs

35:27

in that book, but at the same

35:29

time, he was a pioneer of LSD.

35:33

When did this become

35:36

central to the counterculture

35:39

and particularly the Californian

35:41

counterculture? Very

35:45

interesting topic. John Lennon once commented, we

35:47

have to thank the CIA because they

35:49

gave us LSD. I

35:51

mean, what the CIA did,

35:53

what Gottlieb did, was he

35:55

opened Pandora's box. He never

35:57

anticipated that LSD might... cause

36:01

a creative revolution that the Beatles would

36:03

suddenly become a different band after they've

36:05

taken LSD and make much

36:08

more sophisticated albums. You can

36:10

actually see that, for example, the Beatles have like

36:12

two phases. Before they took LSD, they were like

36:15

the nice Beatles. And suddenly

36:17

they become these psychedelic Mavericks

36:19

who kind of turn

36:21

on like very different music and engage

36:24

themselves in the peace movement and suddenly

36:26

become in a way dangerous to the

36:28

American establishment, who was doing, who

36:31

was leading war in Vietnam.

36:33

That's, for example, why Elvis Presley got

36:35

very worried because he was supporting the

36:38

Vietnam War and he accused the

36:40

Beatles of coming into the United

36:43

States and spreading their

36:45

peace ideas and spreading that promiscuous drug

36:47

use, which

36:50

obviously the Beatles were using

36:53

these substances, but it was not only the Beatles. So

36:55

how did it actually spill out of

36:57

the Pandora's box? It's

36:59

simply because there were more and

37:01

more test subjects. Can Keasy, the

37:04

novelist, called himself a guinea pig when he

37:07

was receiving his first dose of LSD as

37:09

part of a CIA test. He

37:12

was doing this in Menlo Park, California,

37:14

working in a psychiatric ward, taking LSD.

37:17

I think he got $75 from the

37:19

US government, from the CIA for taking

37:21

part in this experiment. And

37:24

suddenly on LSD, I like an idea for

37:27

a novel, which was one flew over the

37:29

Cuckoo's Nest, famously turned into

37:31

a movie by Minot Spelman, starring

37:34

Jack Nicholson, who was also very fond of LSD. So

37:37

suddenly this LSD spread around bohemian circles.

37:39

If you take LSD, you have different

37:41

ideas, you can write novels, you can

37:43

make crazy movies. Can

37:46

Keasy call this the revolt of

37:48

the guinea pig? So you are

37:50

a guinea pig, you take LSD,

37:52

you realize, oh my God, this is

37:55

actually great. And you're going to take it again and you're

37:57

going to spread the word. So it's got

37:59

out of hand. basically. And the problem

38:01

probably was, especially for the US

38:03

government, that there

38:05

were no regulations, that

38:08

people were using it

38:10

and using it. And it's a very potent substance,

38:12

so people were developing ideas that

38:14

were not corresponding to the official

38:17

ideas that, for example, President Nixon

38:20

had with the war in Vietnam.

38:22

So that's when... Fascinating stuff.

38:25

It reflects the

38:27

incompetence, which isn't great news, of the

38:29

American security state. And

38:31

then to sort of bring this all up

38:33

to date, you mentioned Ken Kesey. He

38:36

was a friend of Stuart Brand. We've done

38:38

some shows on Stuart Brand. He was one

38:40

of the mainstream figures

38:42

who connected the counterculture

38:45

and cyberspace. Steve

38:47

Jobs, of course, famously took LSD

38:49

and some of the early other

38:51

pioneers of technology and

38:56

computers and the internet. Did

39:00

the culture, the

39:04

revolt of the guinea pig, as

39:06

Kesey put it, has

39:09

it somehow been

39:11

incorporated into the internet and

39:14

the digital revolution? Is that

39:17

where we see the real

39:19

legacy of this countercultural

39:23

revolution today in 2024? Or

39:27

there is widespread psychedelic use among

39:29

the pioneers, for example, of the

39:31

web. The

39:34

whole earth catalog was done by someone who

39:36

was interested in... Yeah, that was Stuart Brand,

39:38

who we've done a show with John Markov,

39:41

just wrote a very interesting biography of Brand,

39:43

who was a friend of Kesey. Yeah,

39:46

and as you mentioned, Steve Jobs once said

39:48

that he was envisioning

39:51

the desktop computer while

39:53

he was on LSD. So

39:56

LSD, I mean, taking LSD

39:58

in the brain, I mean... It's interesting,

40:00

I'm coming back to the results of

40:03

Professor Feulenweider at the clinic,

40:06

University Clinic in Zurich. He

40:08

found out that on LSE the

40:10

brain has a different way of, has

40:14

a different energetic distribution.

40:17

The main, the default mode

40:20

network, the ego, that the command

40:22

center of the brain receives a

40:25

little bit less energy and that, while the

40:27

brain is on LSE and that

40:29

has the effect that other parts of

40:31

the brain, peripheral parts of

40:33

the brain can

40:36

act, like have more

40:38

space to act, can connect

40:41

amongst each other. So they're not all under

40:43

the wing

40:46

of the central command center who basically organizes

40:48

our life. And it's very important that we

40:50

have this command center in our brain, who

40:52

tells us, you know, in what situation we're

40:54

in, that's the sober,

40:57

you know, that saves us a lot

40:59

of energy if we kind of,

41:01

if a guy in our head tells us like,

41:03

what's actually going on, but if that guy kind

41:06

of is put down a little bit by LSE

41:08

and other parts of the brain, starts

41:10

becoming very creative, obviously we have new

41:13

ideas and something like connectivity

41:15

and maybe we can all connect

41:17

through computers. Like that's a typical

41:20

idea you might

41:22

have on psychedelics because it's

41:24

all about new connections and

41:26

new connectivity. So the internet

41:30

is kind of a mirror what actually work

41:32

goes on within the brain on psychedelics.