German author and novelist Norman Ohler Q&A at the Oxford Union

How drug use in Nazi Germany — how common it was, you know, for housewives, for soldiers, all this — but also how breaking down barriers to drug research, and I'm not sure if you're also saying breaking barriers for drug use in modern society can avoid us falling into more extremism, fascism, all these. And I was wondering, in Nazi Germany, if you think it was a significant contributing factor, this drug use that you speak of.

Thank you.

Hi, thanks for a great talk. I study an area called metabolic psychiatry. So this idea that mental health symptoms come from our metabolism being broken — you know, how we make energy in the body being broken. And it's somehow in opposition to this idea, which I suppose more mainstream psychiatry sometimes embodies, that we can be somehow fundamentally broken, that humans can just get broken and that we need to be fixed from the outside. And I guess when I first heard you talk about Blitzed, I thought that chimed, right? That, you know, the Nazis and others were using methamphetamine, but it wasn't helping them, right? It was hurting them. And then I was super interested to hear about, you know, Stoned Apes, this idea — you know, I've heard of the stoned ape theory before — and this idea that it wasn't just something that fixed us from the outside, it's something that actually helped us or forced us to evolve. So where do you fall in all of that? Because I haven't heard you be super specific about psychiatry in all of this.

Do you think that humans get broken and need fixed by something from the outside, or that a relationship with drugs is more around a co-evolution?

Thanks. It's a shame the Oxford Union couldn't have supplied a bit of psilocybin for us all to enjoy the lecture even more. Thanks.

Hello. So thank you for the talk. It's very interesting. I wanted to ask — so you mentioned how drugs played a large role in the Blitzkrieg and in general in the German war machine, but it's not very well known, at least until your book came out. So do you think this is the case because it fit the nation-building narrative of Germany after the war, or is there some other reason for why it was kind of ignored?