The Unbelievable Story Of The Nazi Quest For A Real Truth Serum | Norman Ohler

A lot of different ways. The CIA also had so-called safe houses, which were the opposite of what they sound like. One in Manhattan and one in San Francisco. And in the one in Manhattan, for example, CIA agents would go out to bars in Greenwich Village and invite people home for a private party and then slip them LSD into the drink. They were trained at how to put LSD into drinks without the person noticing it. They had a course with a leading magician, Mulholland was his name, who explained to them how you do it, like you flick the attention and you put the LSD in the drink or whatever, you know.

Of course, what a pleasure. It was a great conversation last time, so let's make it great again.

Yeah, I appreciate it. I hardly remember my name, but let's go for it.

Yes.

There was a white paper by an American startup company called Eleusis, which had done phase one clinical studies with microdoses of LSD on Alzheimer patients, probably just a few. And those results were promising. Also, it's neuroscientifically established, or at least people think that's what's happening in the brain, is that LSD animates, I mean, certainly interacts with the 5-HT2A receptors, the serotonin receptors. And those are the receptors that also suffer from Alzheimer's. So, it would make sense that low dosages of LSD continuously given might help. And those phase one studies showed that it actually does help. So, I thought it might be good for my mom.

I thought it was. And my father thought as well. And we couldn't really ask her if she thought it was good, but she was certainly more animated when she took it. Whenever she took it, not only animated, but also cognitively enhanced, like, wow, she read the newspaper again, which she wasn't able to do so before for about a year. So, my father actually spoke of a miracle, a medicinal miracle. This is just anecdotal, you know, it's not a study, it's just what happened in our family, but it was quite touching, actually. So, she 100% reacted to the LSD in a positive way.

Well, I wasn't involved in that process because my father was kind of taking care of her, and that was full-on taking care of her. She's now in a home, so he's not taking care of her like that anymore, but he was in charge, and he was speaking to their doctor in the German small town, and the doctor, who had no idea what LSD basically is, a drug. But he also said there's nothing out there against dementia, so why not try it? I mean, my father had been quite kind of skeptical because he had been a judge, so he's not really a drug person. But he also read the study. I spoke to an Alzheimer expert, one of the leading Alzheimer experts in Germany, showing him the study. And he said it's quite a good study. So, we were kind of confident that it might work. And also, LSD, I mean, I don't see any danger, and we didn't see any danger, especially low dosages. I mean, we didn't give her 200 micrograms. We gave her 12.5, which is a microdose. The risk was very low, but there still was a risk because it's not properly examined. Well, what can go wrong, you know? She had Alzheimer's already. And sometimes you need to take a little risk in life.

Just a second, someone knocked on my door. I'm very sorry, I have to answer.

All right, I'm back.

Well, I mean, he was a normal Swiss chemist, and he had involuntarily taken some LSD when he synthesized it in 1943 on a Friday. I think it was April 16th. What is today? March. Well, April 16th, and he felt a bit weird. Because he was looking for a stimulant, not—I mean, he didn't know what a psychedelic was. And so, on Monday, April 19th, he decided to do like a voluntary test with the substance. And he took 250 micrograms. He thought that was a very low dosage because micrograms isn't much, you know. But for LSD, it's a very strong dosage, which we know now, which he didn't know because he was the first one ever taking LSD. And I would imagine that also the LSD that he made in the lab of the Swiss pharmaceutical company was quite good, you know, pure and strong. So, he had a very strong trip, but he didn't know what a trip was. So, he had a horror trip. Because that's a bad setting if you receive the drug without knowing that you're receiving the drug. So, he thought he was poisoned. But then he cycled home. His assistant cycled with him. That's the famous bicycle ride. That's why on April 19th every year you have people on LSD riding bicycles through towns in Europe and in America, probably too. Maybe even in Japan. Probably not in Japan. And when he got home, he called his doctor. His doctor came. His assistant called the doctor, I think, because he was so out of it. And the doctor didn't notice any worrisome signs. You know, his heart rate was fine, his blood pressure was fine. Everything seemed totally normal. Because LSD has that special quality of being very potent in very small quantities, so you basically take nothing, and your mind reacts very strongly to it. So, you don't have a lot of physical side effects at all.

Well, later on in life, he said the horror trip is actually the best trip because you learn most about yourself, about your fears. And then it wasn't only horror. I mean, a horror trip is not only horror. It is just overwhelming. You might get scared, but there's also, you know, because the stuff is so potent, especially when you take it the first time, you also might have very beautiful revelations and visions. And he had also very beautiful experiences. So, and then suddenly it got less. It's also very smooth. The LSD wears off, you know, very smoothly. It just kind of gets less, and then you're back to normal, kind of. A little bit exhausted, so you're a bit tired, so he took the next day off. Didn't go to work. Just wrote a report to his boss saying that they discovered something quite unusual, that he doesn't really know what it is, but it was quite interesting. So, he continued taking it, and like he then took lower dosages. He was experimenting with microdoses already back then, with mini doses of like 20 micrograms. So, yeah, he continued doing it for the rest of his life, basically. He developed like analogs of LSD, variations of it. So, he became quite interested in psychedelic medicines.

Well, that was the story that I found, you know, because when I researched for Blitzed, for meth and other normal Nazi drugs, I also went to the Dachau camp, to the archives there, and saw that the SS had done psychedelic research, which was surprising to me because the Nazis were not really a psychedelic movement. So, I wondered what actually happened, and it was connected to their search for a truth drug, which again is a very Nazi thing. The idea that you give someone a drug and then you could control his mind or her mind. But it was the first time I heard about this, and it didn't really—it didn't say LSD, it said mescaline and another odorless, tasteless substance, and this was like '43, '44. So, my suspicion, of course, was that it might have been LSD, because LSD was developed in April '43. So, I was trying to find proof for the connection. I was trying to find that this odorless, tasteless substance was actually LSD, because I thought maybe that could shed light on the later troubled history of LSD, the substance becoming illegal and being utilized first by the CIA. So, I was trying to, you know, tell that story, so I went to the archives of Sandoz in Switzerland. Basel. Sandoz is the company that developed LSD, and it is now the company of Novartis. They acquired Sandoz in the '90s. Novartis being one of the biggest pharmaceutical companies in the world. So, I was trying to look in the archive, and first the archivist just gave me the lab book of Albert Hofmann, which he was very proud of, the actual original book where Albert Hofmann had written in his handwriting, like when he took the LSD on April 19th and what happened to him. It was quite interesting to see that in the original, but it doesn't really shed light on the Nazi connection, which I didn't even know existed. You know, I just had a suspicion that it would exist. But mescaline is not really good as a truth drug. It tastes bitter usually. So, it's natural mescaline. I'm not sure about synthetic mescaline. I think it also tastes bitter. Like most drugs actually taste bitter. So, slipping mescaline into the coffee would change the taste of the coffee, so you can't really do it without the person noticing it. While LSD, because it works in such low quantities, you can put a drop of LSD in the coffee, no one will taste the difference. So, LSD is a much better truth drug than mescaline. So, I was not finding anything, and then I thought I have to actually look at the papers of the CEO of Sandoz, because it wouldn't be Hofmann, you know, he's just a chemist, you know, he's very famous for developing LSD, but he didn't really play a role in the distribution of it. That was the job of the distribution channels of the company, which was headed by a guy called Stoll, who is just the Swiss CEO of Sandoz. And his papers I wasn't able to access because the archivist didn't really want to show them to me.

Well, I don't think he knew. He kind of complained to me that all the researchers always want to look at the hidden stuff about LSD and no one ever finds anything. It was always boring to him also, like always showing the same LSD archive stuff. He said Sandoz made so many more interesting products, which is of course not true, you know. I mean, they made many more products, but they were not as interesting as LSD. So, I asked him if he had ever seen LSD, and he said, 'No. How can I see it? It's illegal.' But I had some LSD with me, and I showed it to him, and it had the old logo of Sandoz printed on it. It's like an homage by the rogue chemist who produced them. And he was kind of—I mean, not kind of, he was surprised. He was like, 'Wow, this is our old logo. How has this happened?' Like he didn't know anything about illegal LSD, basically. Like he didn't know—I mean, he probably heard of it, that people still use LSD, but it was like a cult, you know, and chemists actually print the old logo. That was kind of interesting to him.

Yeah, that would have been a trip with him in the archives, and I really go to the stuff, but I actually suggested he should take it in nature, you know, because Switzerland is beautiful. You go hiking. It's like almost as beautiful as Slovenia. And take it. And so, he became friendly, and then he actually showed me the papers of the CEO. And after looking through those papers for a few hours, I actually did find that he was communicating a lot with Richard Kuhn, who was the leading biochemist of the Hitler regime. Because coincidentally, they had been friends since the 1920s. And that of course became very interesting, you know. Was that, you know, the connection? And indeed, I found a letter from October '43 in which Kuhn thanked Stoll for sending him half a gram of ergotamine, which is like the last step before you make LSD. So, the question that I couldn't solve is did Kuhn—and Kuhn was responsible for informing these tests in Dachau. So, Kuhn knew about LSD, knew everything about LSD and received ergotamine, half a gram. So, did he really make—did he make LSD from it? I asked a friend of mine, Leonard Pickard, the once largest LSD producer in the world, illegal LSD producer in the world, how hard it is to make LSD from ergotamine, and he said it's actually quite easy. Then I asked him, 'Why didn't Stoll send pure LSD to Kuhn?' And that question is basically unanswerable. Why would he send ergotamine? I mean, Pickard said maybe Kuhn wanted to make his own LSD because it's kind of a nice thing to make your own, but to make LSD, you need ergotamine. It's hard to—like you need that precursor. So, I have a very strong case, you know, that Kuhn had LSD. I mean, he had ergotamine, and you can't really do it. You could also create a migraine headache maybe from it, because ergot is good against migraine also. But it looks like they used LSD. And also when the Americans liberated Dachau in the spring of '45, they interrogated Kuhn. And Kuhn was very forthcoming with sharing his information about LSD in general, that they used it. And that was why the American general immediately took the train down to Basel and received LSD himself from Sandoz. And then LSD became the focus of the CIA, which was founded two years later, two years after the war ended.

Well, there was a two-page report, and the longer report was taken by the Americans when they liberated the camp, and it's now in the archives of Harvard. The report was called, in German, 'Zur Ausserkraftsetzung des Willens,' which means—I mean, the report is called like chemical ways to overcome the will of a person or something like that.

I read one longer report by a guy who took LSD and actually loved it, which was like not really what the Nazis were intending, but this guy had like...

Yeah, he took it in the camp. Like he was forced to take it in the camp. He got it with coffee. And he just had like very beautiful fractal kind of visions. Like he had his eyes closed and just saw like beautiful images and was just very sad. He became very depressed when the trip ended and he was back in the concentration camp, but not in like...

Yeah, I mean, it helps against your boring or horrible everyday life, I guess. Be it the concentration camp or suburbia or whatever, you know. But it is surprising, obviously. You could also imagine someone taking it in the camp would have like a horror trip or something. But that guy had a good trip, which is not what the SS really intended, obviously. And also the SS didn't really get anywhere because it's not possible. It's not really possible to instrumentalize LSD. I don't think it works as a weapon. Because people have this more like liberating experience, which the Nazis didn't know and the CIA also didn't know. They thought give someone LSD and he becomes like totally confused and then you can kind of manipulate the brain. It doesn't really work like that, LSD. It gives a person strength, actually. It makes a person stronger in a way. It makes a person more resilient against manipulation. It's like an anti-brainwashing drug.

That was the Nazi idea. That's what the Nazis did. And the Americans just kind of copied it from the Nazis. So, I mean, there was one guy responsible for MKUltra, and I write about him in Tripped. Sidney Gottlieb, who's like the head of MKUltra. But I also don't really like MKUltra because it is kind of in that world of conspiracy theory, and I'm not really concerned with that. But still, it's of course very interesting because it was a real program that the CIA did over something like 20 years, involving thousands of Americans and also non-Americans. But mostly American. But I'm not an MKUltra specialist, and Tripped does not—Tripped tells the story of LSD, and MKUltra is part of that story because it was a very bad—LSD had a bad trip, you know, being used, abused for MKUltra. And especially scientists who were doing proper research at the time were having a bad trip because suddenly the CIA, they kind of monopolized LSD. Like there was a meeting in Basel with the CEO, with a CIA representative. Probably it was Gottlieb, but that's not proven, but it was a very high-ranking MKUltra guy. And he basically pressured the Swiss company not to sell it to the Soviet Union. And also basically not to sell it within the US, you know, the CIA wanted to have it and use it only. So, that locked a lot of research. Sandoz could never really market it properly. They gave out free samples to researchers, but even that stopped at a certain point in time because the CIA put pressure on them. So, because of the Nazis researching for the truth drug, abusing LSD in Dachau, the Americans learning about it, then thinking, oh, the Nazis think it's so great as a truth drug, we should also explore that option. That's, you know, that's the dark—that's still the history of LSD, you know, it's still illegal. Even though now researchers, you know, come out and do stuff like the Eleusis startup company that made the phase one trials with low dosages of LSD against Alzheimer's, which then helped my mom, you know. So, the story is—it's evolving. It's live. It's interesting, you know. It's totally ridiculous to have to make LSD illegal. I mean, obviously it has risks. And I wouldn't recommend a child using a huge quantity of LSD, you know, but every drug has risks. Like every drug you buy in a pharmacy has risks, you know. That's why you have a patient information leaflet. But LSD is certainly a lot less dangerous than tobacco and, I mean, obviously, or alcohol. But it has so many potential benefits. All kinds of benefits. Like it made the Beatles a better band. It made my mom read the newspaper. It improves, you know, a mountain hike in Slovenia, you know, it has like so many benefits and...