So LSD is like the intelligence service Gestapo's dream, except that it doesn't work. I mean, it is a truth drug in a way that you come closer to your own truth. But...
Hoffman was a very normal Swiss chemist, and his job was to create more medicines from ergot. And he had this LSD-25, and they gave it to mice like they always do at Sandoz, and the mice — they didn't feel anything. And that's what I wrote in my book, and it's actually wrong, because maybe they did feel something, but no one saw it. Like, the mice were taking LSD and they were just — I mean, one was sitting cross-legged. Then they should have — they should have seen that, but they just — they just thought it's a crazy mouse. You know, one mouse was jumping out of the window, and they also thought it's not related to LSD. So they kind of shelved LSD in 1938. It was — LSD was dead in 1938. No one thought about it anymore. But then Hoffman, five years later, for reasons he could never explain, did it again, because really they had harvested so much ergot, and he kind of had in his mind maybe the mice did feel something. I don't know. He did it again in '43, and when he synthesized it again — very, very sober Swiss chemist — somehow, and he also couldn't explain how somehow something got into his system, like maybe into the — because LSD...
The weird thing about LSD is it's potent in very, very small quantities, microgram quantities. You can take the most dangerous toxin in the world, which I think is cobra toxin — it's a toxin from the cobra. If you take it in microgram dosages, you don't feel anything. But if you take LSD in microgram dosages, you feel something. So he suddenly felt like he was in the lab and it's like — and he thought, something's working on me, but I didn't even take anything. How did this — maybe fumes came into my eyes, or maybe I had a cut. I mean, he was a properly working chemist, so he became curious. And three days — this was on a Friday, and on a Monday, which is April 19th, 1943, the famous day, which today is Bicycle Day. Yes, today LSD enthusiasts all over the world on that day ride bicycles on LSD.
Why do they do that? They do it because Hoffman took 250 micrograms, which is a quarter of a milligram. He thought, I'm not going to feel anything. And I studied his lab book — like he had a book like this — and he wrote, like, 4 p.m., 250 micrograms. And at 4:30 he's like, no, no, no effect, and he wanted to take more. And then at 4:50 he wrote, like — and then I can see that his writing becomes a bit, you know — and then the effect started, and he got a bit scared because he didn't know what it was. And he came with a bicycle that day. He had come with a bicycle. So they went to the bicycle stand, and he got on the bike, and the trip got quite strong. And this is the famous bicycle ride home. You know, he just wanted to get home, and it was a very strong trip. 250 micrograms — I don't know if you have LSD experience — is a strong trip. And if you've never taken LSD, and if you don't even know what LSD is, like he didn't know, you know, it's very strong.
You know, because what happens in the brain is that — and he didn't know this, of course, actually it took several decades until we know now what happened to his brain or what happened to everyone who takes LSD. LSD changes the neurochemistry while you're on it in a way that it decreases the energy flow to the command center. There's a command center in each of our brains which, for example, tells me now that — my God, we have to come to the Q&A soon, but I haven't even — okay, the command center tells me it's important that I finish up the story and wrap it up, and there's still like at least 10, 15 minutes until we — so — and you have a command center, you're sitting there, you're at the festival, everything is okay, and the command center receives less energy, which means that other parts of the brain have the ability to be more active. You could say like — you can measure this. It has been measured since the early '90s in brain scanners with people on LSD that peripheral sections of the brain start interacting, and there's a lot less judgment, because the command center judges, like, I see you, you're a bit skeptical or whatever, you're very — like, that's also judgment. But if that is removed, then you just let it, you know, you just accept what's around you. So...
That if you don't know that you're taking LSD and suddenly you can't really make those judgments anymore, then maybe it gets scary. That's why it's very bad to give LSD to people without telling them, which is exactly what the CIA did, and we come to the CIA in a second. So Hoffman goes home and he has the trip, and he talks to his CEO that this is very potent and I don't know what this is, and of course became very interested in it because this seemed to be something that works on the brain in a very interesting way. Today we know it because of these effects that I just explained. It increases neuroplasticity. What is neuroplasticity? That's basically the ability of our brain to be fluid, flexible, create new neuronal connections. And our brain is not like a bone. You know, our brain is a living, fluid, soft organ. And today we know that actually new neuronal connections are being formed under LSD. That's why some researchers call it a brain food, or it's even healthy to take LSD in small dosages if the effect is not overwhelming. Even now there's research for the so-called non-psychedelic psychedelic, like an LSD type where you don't have a trip, you just have the neuronal enhancement effect.
Yeah. So it's a very interesting medication. And Stoll, being the CEO of Sandoz, he sensed that there's something going on. This is maybe a big bestseller, you know, a big hit. And he communicated this — and now we come to the Nazis. He communicated this to this guy. You probably can't read it, but I'll explain it to you. Professor Dr. — who was this guy? He was the best friend of the Swiss CEO, because they had had the same mentor when they were learning chemistry, which was a Jewish German biochemist who received a Nobel Prize. Richard Willstätter had these two great students. One was Stoll, the CEO of Sandoz, and the other one was — and was a German. And when the Nazis took power, he didn't leave Germany. He continued his research, his work. And if you did that as a scientist in Nazi Germany, you had to become complicit. You basically had to become a Nazi, otherwise you left, you know, you can't. And actually he seemed to have liked the Nazis, like he would start his lectures at university with the Hitler salute. And so he was a Nazi. But this was not a problem really. They had been exchanging knowledge since the early '20s. They had been best friends, research buddies. So in '43, Stoll also said to him, we have this crazy thing that works on the mind. And also he knew about, you know, the ergot research. Like, yeah, show it to me, send it to me. And I found in the Novartis archive, I found this letter where he states in November '43 that he received — you know, he talks about his daughter. He has a daughter with the name Linda, which is not so important, except for the daughter and for the family. But what is important for world history is that he received five times 0.1 grams of ergotamine tartrate, which is a precursor to LSD. If you have that, it's just very easy for a chemist to change that into LSD. Maybe it was even LSD, because they didn't have a real name for it then. So he had the material, and that's basically the smoking gun, because that thing — because Stoll was not only developing — I think it's Tabun, which was the deadly and still is the most deadly nerve poison or nerve gas in the world. Like, he was working for Hitler's war machine. So he developed a nerve gas, and one of his jobs was to develop a so-called truth drug, because the Nazis were always paranoid. Like, they were — enemies always everywhere, like especially Hitler — there were a lot of attempts on his life, so he was always like, who's against us, who's for us, who is like — so the truth drug, that was a German idea, Gestapo, SS idea. We're going to find a truth drug, because they had been frustrated with especially Polish resistance fighters. You could torture them, they wouldn't talk. So that for the Gestapo was like, this is not — this we need something else. We need to be able to make people talk even if they don't want to talk. Even if we torture them, they don't want to talk, we need something. This was the truth drug idea, and Stoll was responsible for finding the truth drug. So that's why Stoll was very interested in this LSD. The idea was, can we, you know, use that in interrogations and so overpower someone's mind and then extract all the secrets. That's exactly what they did in Dachau. So I could, you know, then make the connection in Tibet. That's exactly what they were attempting to do with mescaline and with LSD. And LSD is much better than mescaline, because mescaline, another psychedelic compound, has a bitter taste. And it's much more expensive to make it. So you can't really give it into someone's coffee. Someone will drink the coffee and immediately sense that there was something in the coffee. But LSD doesn't taste. It's odorless, tasteless, easy to manufacture in huge quantities. So LSD is like the intelligence service Gestapo's dream. Except that it doesn't work. I mean, it is a truth drug in the way that you come closer to your own truth. But it works in a way that if you give someone LSD without telling that person, you can really make that person lose his or her stability, or you know, you can — someone up with giving — sorry, my language — I was looking for a different word — like you can abuse LSD by giving it to someone, but you can't really then make that person tell all the secrets. It just doesn't work. But they didn't know that, so they started with these experiments in Dachau.
And then Dachau was liberated — these experiments were done — I mean, he received this in late '43, so they did this in '44. The war was already going very bad for Nazi Germany, so there was a lot of chaos, and it was hard to do science. I mean, science in the concentration camp is ridiculous anyhow, because it's often just torture. They did a lot of science — I mean, you all know Dr. Mengele and all these, you know, creeps. And this was also a human experiment done in Dachau on people, giving them LSD. And when the Americans liberated the camp, they took all the findings. And the Americans always thought that what the Nazis are interested in, that could be interesting for us, because right after World War II the Cold War started, and suddenly the Americans are looking for a truth drug. And the Americans are creating in 1947 the CIA. They didn't have a central intelligence agency before. It was just the intelligence was with the military. Suddenly they have a central intelligence agency, and they take over the LSD research that the US military had somehow started, like a little bit, but they weren't really going for it. But then the CIA really went for it. They created a program called MKUltra. There was a guy called Sidney Gottlieb who was responsible, and he did human experiments in America, basically continuing the Nazi LSD experiments in America.
This is not so important. This was the SS guy that did it in Dachau. The Americans captured him and wrote about him. This basically — because of this guy, LSD then later became illegal, because the CIA then tried it out. The CIA did a lot of LSD illegal, unethical, horrible experiments with American citizens. They even set up an apartment, for example, in San Francisco. This is a CIA agent. This — she is a sex worker. She gave her clients LSD without telling them. And then this was all recorded, like, do people react differently? Does the intimate life change? These are just two questions out of like 20,000 questions that the CIA was examining. Can we manipulate people with and through LSD? And because of this program, the Sandoz CEO also received a visit from Gottlieb in his office in Basel, where he was basically told, LSD, you're not going to sell this. This is not going to be a medicine for everybody. This is very — this is of national interest to the United States, and if you want to sell your other products in the United States, you better comply with us. I mean, it's okay, right, this LSD. Why don't you develop like antipsychotics and antidepressants? People have to take them every day, you make much more money. You know, this LSD, you know, you just take it once and you understand your problems and you were healthy. It's not good for a pharmaceutical company. He understood that in a second, so he was like, okay, let's do it. It was really — it's really as sad as I just presented it. And then the CIA also involved artists in the '60s. John Lennon at one point said, 'We have to thank the CIA. They gave us LSD.' One of the guinea pigs that was involved in these unethical experiments, for example, was a colleague of mine, Ken Kesey. He got $75 for taking LSD. So he knew he was taking LSD — like some people didn't know, he knew. Then he had to write a report. What he actually did, he wrote One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, because he was working in a psychiatric ward in Menlo Park, California, and he suddenly understood, like, on LSD, what is madness and what is normal and what is, you know. So he wrote this amazing book and became one of the LSD gurus, basically. So LSD spilled over from the CIA into the counterculture, and then when it was too much in the mid-'60s, when millions of Americans were taking it and going out on the streets demonstrating against the Vietnam War, at one point US President Lyndon B. Johnson pulled the plug and made LSD illegal in 1966. And since then, all the also legit research on LSD, which had always kind of continued in universities worldwide, had to be stopped. And we basically lost — because it picks up now again slowly, as I mentioned in the beginning — we have lost 50 crucial years for developing something like a medicine against dementia, something like a good medicine against depression. And, okay, we leave it at that, because it's a nice picture.
