BOOK REVIEW: Norman Ohler has taken a fancy to short, catchy book titles. His earlier work Blitzed dealt with drug use in Nazi Germany and The Infiltrators concerned star-crossed couples who led the resistance against Hitler’s regime. This suggested his new book might be a sensationalised airport-potboiler featuring crazed, acid-fuelled chemists, Nazi stormtroopers on speed and sweaty, safari-suited CIA mavericks experimenting with brainwashing. It is. The twist is that Ohler thinks we may have overlooked the benefits of psychedelic drugs. This, then, is a history of how we got LSD wrong.
Having a mother whose mental health is in rapid decline from Alzheimer’s is not a pretty thing and Ohler, who comes from a very strait-laced family (his father was a retired judge), is willing to give anything a go to help her. Discovering a clinical study that suggests LSD, lysergic acid diethylamide in full, could be rehabilitated to treat her condition, Ohler wonders why it took so long.
So he starts a journey that takes him to the laboratory in which LSD was discovered and to the alpine retreat of a reclusive 1960s drug-dealer figure, who tells him how the US drug enforcement authorities feared the social impacts of LSD. They emulated the Nazis in closing down access and simultaneously seeing it as a possible truth serum and weapon in the coming Cold War.
The CIA’s MK-Ultra experiments were amateur and resulted in tragedy: a human guinea pig threw himself out of the window of the Statler Hotel in New York. The agency wanted to know how useful LSD would be as a truth-extractor, and also whether it could be used to discredit political opponents around the world by having them behave erratically. The CIA team also quite freely tested it on themselves and unsuspecting work associates, as well as army guinea pigs. But this was much the way such trials were undertaken. In a scene that reminds us of the cult horror film The Fly, Albert Hoffman – the chemist who discovered LSD – tries it out on himself, too. If you want to understand human behaviour, white mice on dope will not tell you much.
In April 1953, CIA director Allen Dulles gave a speech to a Princeton University audience on the “Horrors of Brain Warfare”. Ohler uses this to set up his chapter on the CIA’s experiments with LSD, and presents this speech as the forerunner to a psychedelic arms race, but Dulles appears to be talking about a quite distinct (although related) phenomenon: the more prosaically Brave New World (1931) concept of conditioning, or Nineteen Eighty-Four’s (1949) thought police.
These ideas are fundamentally psychological in nature, not chemical, although there are crossovers. We can be guilty of presentism if we scoff at the fear that the mid-century had of “mind control” and “brain washing”; Dulles was not exaggerating the fears of totalitarianism and technology that existed then.
The same probably applies to the optimism that surrounded the discovery of mescaline, LSD, and then magic mushrooms (psilocybin). Aldous Huxley, who wrote of mescaline in his 1954 book The Doors of Perception, believed 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 increased energy levels and enhanced performance. It was Pervitin that kept Nazi soldiers blitzkrieging, as it was Benzedrine that Allied commandos took on their sabotage missions. Some of LSD’s cousins marketed by Sandoz included treatments for birthcare, headaches, neuralgia, sleeplessness, shingles, Parkinson’s and impaired brain function.
Harvard psychologist and psychedelic wunderkind Timothy Leary did LSD’s clinical programme no end of harm, we learn, and helped establish the drug’s outlaw status. Frustrated that it was not getting the attention of the US Food and Drug Administration, Leary placed an order with Sandoz for 100g of LSD and 25g of psilocybin – enough, Ohler says, to send two million Americans on a trip. This eventually got him fired by Harvard. Allen Ginsberg took it at Leary’s house and ran naked through the streets. Jack Kerouac claimed it took him on a magic carpet, “goofing at clouds watching the movie of existence”.
Leary’s Harvard associate, Professor Max Rinkel, claimed that LSD “occasionally causes psychotic reactions in people who have not taken it”, and that women could have “several hundred orgasms” under its influence. To this, Huxley warned him, “We’ve stirred up enough trouble suggesting the drugs can stimulate aesthetic and religious experiences. I strongly 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 stack up in its favour. The timing of his book may be spot on: the US FDA gave the go-ahead for MM120, a form of LSD, to treat anxiety, depression and PTSD in March this year.
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.
