I mean, when the Swiss pharmaceutical company Sandoz developed LSD in 1943, they were having to solve the big question, "What is it good for?" Albert Hofmann, the chemist, he found it basically involuntarily, and he reported to the CEO, "I had very strong reactions, basically, in the brain." So they set up an intoxication room. I found the documents about this intoxication room in the Novartis archive when I researched Tripped, because Novartis bought Sandoz in the '90s, so all the LSD stuff is in the Novartis archive. And this intoxication room, I always think is kind of interesting to imagine. This was 1943; there's a World War going on everywhere in Europe, except in Switzerland, which is a neutral country. But Basel, where the LSD was found, is like a stone's throw from the German border, so you actually hear the war going on. And so they created a nice room within the company, and then all the employees voluntarily could go and take LSD. So they were the first people to take LSD, and they had no idea that there was, at one point, MKUltra. You know, they were just trying out something that one of their guys had developed.
And I read through all these reports, and they all had a great experience, like sitting in a nice chair, and they looked outside the window, and they were reporting stuff like, "I just had to laugh the whole time. I felt so good. I realized about my life." Or it kind of created in them the feeling like a heightened sense of sensitivity and a feeling that this is the life, this is how life should feel, kind of. So the CEO, Arthur Stoll, he was really trying to figure out what he could market it for, because he thought maybe this is a game changer in mental health. Because this was before antidepressants, before antipsychotics, and it was in the middle of World War II, which had already created millions of traumatized people. "How do you treat these people?" So they thought LSD could be really a big, big, big thing.
And I mean, I came... I just told you when I first took LSD, and I somehow was interested in LSD, but I never thought I would write a book about it. I just used it once in a while when I wanted to understand something about my life or just enjoy a day in the ocean. But I read a study that microdoses of LSD at one point help against Alzheimer's, and my mother has Alzheimer's. So I discussed this with my father, who takes care of my mother, and this was an academic study. I discussed this also with a leading Alzheimer's expert that I interviewed for Tripped, and he's like, "Wow, this is amazing." Because LSD interacts with the very same receptors, the 5-HT2A receptors in the brain — that LSD interacts with those receptors, and Alzheimer destroys those receptors. So LSD basically does the opposite of what Alzheimer does. And I discussed this with my father, and he said, "So why can't I buy LSD in the pharmacy if it's so good?" You know? He was a judge before. He actually put people in prison for drugs. So he said, "You better bring me the story." So I did a kind of a research loop.
This is the book Tripped. Then I came back to him in the end with the true story of why LSD has been made illegal, and that is quite fascinating because the Swiss CEO, Stoll, he had learned biochemistry. This is very nerdy, but I think it's quite interesting. He had learned biochemistry from the Jewish German god of biochemistry, Willstätter. Richard Willstätter was a Nobel Prize winner for chemistry, and his work was he would extract the potent alkaloids from so-called poisonous plants and make, you know, poison. Paracelsus taught us it's the dosage that makes the poison, you know? If you take too much of a potent alkaloid, maybe it's a poison, but if you extract a potent alkaloid, maybe you could turn it into a medicine. So Stoll learned this from Willstätter, and there was another guy that was learning from Willstätter, Richard Kuhn. So it was Kuhn and Stoll. Those were the two students of Willstätter, and they...
...Stoll left and became the CEO of Sandoz and developed the pharmaceutical branch of Sandoz. And Kuhn became Hitler's leading biochemist and was responsible for finding a truth drug and also developing nerve gas. But the two guys, Kuhn and Stoll, stayed friends also when the Nazis took power. I researched the papers of Stoll in the archive, and in the '20s he would communicate all the ergot research — LSD is an ergot product; ergot is a fungus that grows on rye. He would communicate all this with Kuhn, and Kuhn would come to the Sandoz lab, and they did experiments together. And then in '43, Kuhn was, you know, a hardcore Nazi scientist, and especially looking for the truth drug at the time. I was looking through the archive; I wanted to find the connection that Stoll also sent LSD to Kuhn, because...
When I was researching for Blitzed, in Dachau, I had found that the SS had done in the concentration camp of Dachau experiments with mescaline and another hallucinogenic substance which was not named. And mescaline has the problem... The truth drug idea is: I give you something without you noticing it, like something that doesn't smell or taste like anything. Then after half an hour, I know that something's working in your brain, and you become insecure because suddenly something's working in your brain. I can play with that situation and therefore extract all the secrets from you, because it's a power. I'm suddenly above you because I know something about you that you don't know. That was the idea. The problem with mescaline was it has a bitter taste, and it's hard to make. And LSD is very easy to make — not very easy, but it's quite easy. And LSD is odorless and tasteless.
So I was trying to... I somehow had the notion that LSD has a Nazi past, you know, which is something that no one ever thinks about. LSD is like the hippie drug, right? It's a drug of the peace people. But I wanted to see all the papers of Stoll, the CEO. And the archivist, he already knew — like, he was the Swiss archivist. This is not a public archive. In a public archive, you basically, like the National Archives of the United States, you see what's there, you have the right to see it, freedom of information. But a company archive, like the Novartis archive, the archivist can just say, "No," you know, "I can't find this right now." You know, you're basically at his mercy. So I bribed him with LSD because he didn't want to show me the Stoll papers. And I said to him, just to distract him, "Have you ever seen LSD?" And he's like, "No. Why? How would I see it?" And I said, "Well, I have some here." And I had some; I had just gotten it from a friend.
