May 27, 2024 • 18 mins
Guest host George Knapp and journalist Norman Ohler discuss complicated connections between Nazi Germany, LSD and the USA.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast am on iHeartRadio,
Norman Oller.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
In your book Tripped, you tell the story of how
you acquired some LSD from a friend as part of
a not to take it, but to have it as
sort of a good luck charm, a talisman as you
went along on your journey. Can you share that part
of the story with us.
Speaker 3 (00:21):
Well, I'm a big fan of the movie Taxi Driver
and the author Paul Schrader, who wrote the screenplay. He
said once that he kept the gun in his in
the draw of his desk to feel more connected to
the story. So I thought, that's actually a good idea.
But I was since I was traveling around, I thought,
(00:44):
maybe it's a good idea to have some actual LSD
with me, like as a as a joker or as
a as a as a token of good luck, good
luck charm. Actually, so I knew a friend in Zurich
and he was also I needed some for my mom,
you know, because we had we were we were talking
(01:05):
about my father also said if I want to use
LSD against Alzheimer's microdos, how where can I get it?
So I thought, because I knew that he had his
friend had some. I asked him whether he could provide
me with some, but he brought me and then he
brought me some LSD, which then became my good lucture.
And because it was useless for my mother because it
(01:26):
was on paper, it was on on on blotting paper.
It was like a drop put on paper and then
you basically take the paper and that is how you
how you how you take LSD in this case, But
it's not it's of no use if you want to
do micro dose. Because then I asked him how how
do I do you have to cut it now and
then fifty pieces? And said, well, this is a problem.
So when you want a micro dose, you actually meet
(01:48):
the actual drops of LED and then you can it
can be dosage in a way that the micro dose
is possible. But I still had this in my pocket,
and I was at the archives of Thunders which today
no artists who had discovered LSD, which was this company
archive where I didn't they made you use it. They
(02:09):
let you use it the archive, but they don't tell
you what exactly they have. But I was interested in
finding a meeting between the CIA Operative Sydney GUARDLYB and
the CEO of sun God art Stole in the early
fifties where the CIA man wants to buy the world
(02:30):
supply of LSD and basically tells the Swiss company that
LSD cannot be marketed unregulated and certainly not at all
to the eastern side of the so called Iron Curtain.
Like the CIA was very much afraid that the Soviets
would get their hands on LSD. So I went to
(02:52):
this archive to find this document because I thought maybe
there's a memo of CIA guy. You know how long
they talk about what they taught this I never found,
but I found other interesting things.
Speaker 2 (03:05):
And as you describe in the book, you know, you
go to this archive, they seem very nice. They'll let
you ask for whatever you want, but they won't tell
you what is actually in there. If you ask for it,
they'll see if they can find it, but they won't
give you a sort of a synopsis of what else
might be in there. So that was kind of hilarious.
The second time you go back, I guess they had
(03:27):
told you no, no, no, we're not available today, we're
too busy to deal with you. But you go back anyway,
and then you had the LSD and offered it to
the archivist and it seemed to have worked right. It
helped that even though he didn't take it, it kind
of opened the door for you.
Speaker 3 (03:42):
Well, the archivist and me developed a very good working relationship.
But still I was frustrated that I wasn't able to
see the structure of the archive. I know exactly what
is there, so I always had to go through him.
So I had to develop a relationship with him, which
was nice, you know, because it's a nice guy. But
I didn't expect that you actually have to develop the
(04:03):
personal relationship in order to get better results in an archives.
It's kind of absurd. And then I'm gonna After I
had received my good luck term, I looked at it
and I told you, was like with like little papers.
It's like little squares of paper, that's what it is.
And they usually they have like an imprint on it
or like a funny a comic or something like that.
And this this one that I had received had the
(04:25):
old flag of Sundals, the original company on on on
this on this uh illegally re produced the LSD that
I received in Zurich. So I thought that was quite
funny and that I had the idea of uh, because
when I when I went to that, when I went
to the toilet of the archives, I had to go
(04:45):
through the archives itself, and I saw the old flag
of Sundals and I realized that this old flag and
the archives the very same flag that is on the
illegal LSD that I had just received from my friend,
that was also made in battle by an illegal LSD
can obviously who knows what he's or she's doing, but
it's still illegal, you know. So I showed him this,
the archivist. I said, did you ever see LSC? Have
(05:08):
you ever seen you? Ever seen how it looks? He said, no,
actually I've never seen it. It's illegal. How can I
see it? So he was very correct Swiss, and I said, well,
I happen to have them with me, which I guess
is not even illegal to carry it with you, just
like sell it and whatever. I also his friend, he
just gave it to me. He said, of course, I
don't want money for this. This is LSD for your mom.
(05:28):
How could I know ask money for this. LSC is
not really a very commercial drug. It's more like a
I don't know, it's a different kind of currency somehow.
So I told him about this and he was. He
became kind of interesting. He said, yes, I would like
to see LSD, but I don't know where I would
see it. So I told him I have them, and
I showed it to him and he was quite amazing.
But this has the old logo of our company on it.
(05:49):
How is this possible? And I said, it's like a
joke of the guy who made it, you know, an homage,
you know. Because chemist they have like they have like
a god. And this god is called Albert Hoffmann, and
he was the chemist of Standards. He was the one
who developed, let's say, discovered LSD in forty three. While
he was he was working, he was trying to find
(06:10):
a stimulant. And the company Thunders was developing medicines from
er good, which is the fund fundus that grows on
rise parasitical fungus and it has one very potent alkaloid.
And Thunders was trying to make medicines out of this.
Only out of this they focused. They focused on this ergod.
So they had like a Migraine medicine from this ergod.
(06:32):
They had something against for contraction of of of blood vessels,
which was which was a big hit. So Thunders made
medicines from Ergod and then in forty three suddenly they
had this LSD compound which did not work on the
body but on the mind. So the company also you know,
didn't really they didn't really know at the time what
to do with it. And this confusion of LSD can
(06:54):
still be still be felt today in the company archives,
like they know, we created LSD, but we never went
ever able to profit from it. It was taken out
of our hands and turned into an illegal drug. And
only now the psychedelic research is starting, so that the
company has a very strange relationship to it. So when
he saw the archivist, when he saw the LSD in
(07:15):
front of him, he was like, he was very interested
in and then I said you can have some. I
give you one trip as a gift because you're helping
me so much here in the archives. It was kind
of like a joke, and he thought it also. It
was that he thought it was very generous or funny
of me to offer this, which he had to decline
because of his position, But that kind of created a bond,
like we were talking, you know, we became like we
(07:36):
created a relationship through this NSD. So the LSD was
the good luck term actually, because then he went back
into the archives and he had told me before he
doesn't have time this day because he's so busy. He
was a little bit annoyed by me, and I think
every by everyone who always looks for LSD in these archives,
like you just look, we have a big company with
(07:58):
everyone who comes to the archives it his own, always
interested in LSD because LC is such a spectacular It
is the most spectacular development and the one that they
let go out of you know, out of hand and
out of their control. So I was actually trying to
find out why what went wrong? Why was the company
not able to put it on the market. Why this
is obviously because the CIA was so interested in it,
(08:18):
and as we talked before, this is THEA was so
interested in it because the Nazis were so interested in it.
The Nazis were working with psychedelics for interrogation techniques. So
the question is, how did the Nazis know. I wanted
to see the connection between Sunders, the Swiss company, and
the Nazis in forty three because forty three LSD was discovered,
(08:39):
and forty three, you know, the World War two was
at its height, you know, it was like raging, so
potential and and and some those finds something that is
so potent on the mind because LSD is the most
potent substance for the on the human mind. That's in German.
The title is the most potent substance. Must have been interesting.
(09:02):
But how did they know about it? And the archive
is after I gave him the LSD, went back into
the archives and brought me all the papers of the
CEO because that's what I wanted to see. I wanted
to see what decisions were taken by the CEO of
Thunders in forty three. So I studied his correspondence, which
probably no one had ever looked at it before, you know,
because it's kind of boring, just because the letters of
(09:24):
the CEO of a company in forty three. But he
communicates with one person very intensely, that is Richard Kuhn.
And Richard Kuhn later was Nobel Prize winner for chemistry.
At the time in forty three, he was Hitler's favorite biochemist.
He had developed serene, a deadly nerve poison for Hitler,
and he was a very good friend of Arthro Style,
(09:46):
which is the Swiss CEO. The CEO of Thunders. They
had been friends because they had learned biochemistry from the
same from the same person, which was Professor Villistetter, also
Nobel Prize winner of Chemi Jewish German Maverick of the
early century, who was then you know, persecuted because he
(10:09):
was Jewish, but he was, you know, in the teens
and twentieth of the century. He was the leading biochemist.
And he had two kind of sons, and one was
Arthur Stole this with the O, and the other was
Richard Richard Kuhn. Richard Kuhn, the Nazi later Nazi biochemist,
so Stolen Kuhn had always exchanged information like they were
like best research bodies. So Kuhn, the Nazi knew everything
(10:33):
about the ergot research in Switzerland, and then knew also
everything about LSD and then became very interested in LSD.
And then I found a letter where the Nazi scientists
thanks the Swiss THEO for having delivered him the material
out of which you make LSD with one more simple
chemical step, so like the base of LSD was sent
to Heidelberg in nineteen forty three, and that's when the
(10:56):
Nazis really became interested in psychoelic research where they really
did psychedelic research, because their program starts forty three and
goes until forty five when the Americans discover the experiments
at Daho when they liberate the camp. So there's a
straight line from the Swiss COO to the Nazis and
then to America, which leads to this very complicated history
(11:18):
of LSC becoming this object of desire first of the
Nazis and then of the American intelligence, and that certainly
didn't help the compound to get onto the market. Actually
for him, it is. So that's the story of Tripp.
Speaker 2 (11:33):
There's a really interesting book called The Immortality Key by
Brian Murr Rescue. We had him on this program years ago.
If you have not read that, I know you'd be
interested in Norman. It traces the likely history of ergot,
the fungus that produces these effects and these mental effects,
way way back to the ancient Greeks and then the
(11:54):
early Christians who took their stuff and basically, you know,
they founded Western civilization based on ideas they had while
tripping on these substances. But that'd be a resource for
you as you continue your research. Let me ask you this.
Speaker 3 (12:12):
Go ahead. I know, I know this book, and I
mean what's interesting is the ritual of Eleusis, which is,
you know, he didn't discover this in this book is
actually I mean, he writes about it, but what actually
happens that the discovery of LSD Albert Hoffmann, which I
just told you about the chemists from Sunder. He later
(12:33):
had this theory that in eleuses where was the defining
ritual of Western culture, of Greek culture. Greek culture at
least out of which then came Western culture, was based
on this ergot based drink. There has no evidence, there's
no evidence for it, but it seems likely like there's
(12:53):
there's a lot of a lot of it looks like
because his idea was that the evolution of humankind has
often been stimulated by substances, so that basically drug use
is a historical thing, it's part of our culture, it
even forms our culture, so that that's the claim behind it,
(13:14):
which is I think quite interesting to discuss.
Speaker 2 (13:18):
Yeah, to give us the broad strokes about the C
I A. What the CIA did with LSD. This guy
gets appointed to be sort of the head of mk Ultra,
doctor Gottlieb, and and then goes to Switzerland with a
great big pile of money and buys a gigantic stock
pile of LSD and the way they use it in
(13:40):
different kinds of experiments on unwinning people, including their own
agents and personnel. You detail a lot of that. It's
a great part of the story. Can you share some
of that with us. Gottlieb, what he did and how
much he acquired, Well, that.
Speaker 3 (14:00):
Was actually that was the reason why I went to
the archives because I wanted to get the records on
that meeting, because I think it must have been such
a desire meeting when the Americans intelligence officer Sydney Godlieb
sits in the Swiss the old Room and buys the
world supply of LSD like the Americans, the Intelligence Service
thought they had a lot more like the American attache
(14:24):
and ban he had he had tabled to Washington that, uh,
the Soviet Union just bought like twenty million units of
LSD from Tom Sunders, which was actually a false information.
But it was very nervous that Thunders, which was you know,
this company can sell LSB to everybody, and this is
(14:46):
they could also sell like million, They could sell a
lot to the Soviet Union and the Soviet Union could
make these programs the brainwash Americans, I mean that was
that was the big scare because that was also the
time time of Korean War where suddenly American.
Speaker 4 (15:00):
UH Americans who had been caught captives UH prisoners of
war were saying into like Chinese cameras that America was
using illegal ammunition, biochemical ammunition and stuff like that.
Speaker 3 (15:15):
So the idea was that they these soldiers had been drugged,
like the Eastern Side was already working on this brain
warfare and on brainwashing. This was a big scare. And
I'm not examining this. I mean there has there is
evidence actually that the Eastern Bloc was experimenting with LSD.
There was an LSD factory in Czechoslovakia, but I haven't
(15:37):
researched this in depth. I don't know whether this was
Moscow sponsored or whether this was just a Czech check thing,
because the LSD didn't travel in the Eastern Bloc, a
state in that in the in Czechoslovakia around the capital Prague.
So what the what the CIA did was basically they
tried to convince Thunders to only sell to Western people,
(16:03):
only to researchers like LST. Was not on the market yet,
but researchers could acquire it from universities with a certificate.
So the CIA wanted to have like they wanted to
have an overview of who gets it because they they
they were really interested in trying to develop it into
a truth drug. That was the big That was the
big idea behind np ultru to develop a truth drug.
(16:26):
Why did they think less could be a truth drug? Well,
because the Nazis thought that, and we talked already about
these as reports from the concentration camp of Dachau. They
were evaluated by Henry K. Beecher, a Harvard professor. He
was the drug advisor to the American military. Someone has
to say, like what does it mean? Like they give
(16:47):
mescaline this milligram and then they know someone has to
evaluate it. This was this Harvard, this Harvard guy. He
wrote reports on what he called ego depressant drugs, which
is actually quite quite quite accurate. These drugs are ego
depressed depressant, as we had talked about before. And these
reports landed on the desk of Sydney, god believe, and
(17:09):
there he read things like it might be possible that
the Soviet Union would buy a whole American battleship with
LSD like into the water and into the drinking supply,
and that battleship would be incapable of action. Or it
might even be possible that a big city, big American
city like San Francisco, LSD would be brought into the
(17:31):
water supply of New York and then the whole city
would not function anymore for a couple of hours, which
might give you a a dement an advantages during an attack.
So like, this was serious stuff. You know, this was
the early fifties. So God, you read this. So he decided,
we have to be prepared. We have to get on
top of this. We have to know, we have to
control LSD, and then we have to also investigate what
(17:54):
is LSD.
Speaker 1 (17:57):
Listen to more Coast to Coast AM every weeknight at
one am Eastern and go to Coast to coastam dot
com for more
Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast am on iHeartRadio,
Norman Oller.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
In your book Tripped, you tell the story of how
you acquired some LSD from a friend as part of
a not to take it, but to have it as
sort of a good luck charm, a talisman as you
went along on your journey. Can you share that part
of the story with us.
Speaker 3 (00:21):
Well, I'm a big fan of the movie Taxi Driver
and the author Paul Schrader, who wrote the screenplay. He
said once that he kept the gun in his in
the draw of his desk to feel more connected to
the story. So I thought, that's actually a good idea.
But I was since I was traveling around, I thought,
(00:44):
maybe it's a good idea to have some actual LSD
with me, like as a as a joker or as
a as a as a token of good luck, good
luck charm. Actually, so I knew a friend in Zurich
and he was also I needed some for my mom,
you know, because we had we were we were talking
(01:05):
about my father also said if I want to use
LSD against Alzheimer's microdos, how where can I get it?
So I thought, because I knew that he had his
friend had some. I asked him whether he could provide
me with some, but he brought me and then he
brought me some LSD, which then became my good lucture.
And because it was useless for my mother because it
(01:26):
was on paper, it was on on on blotting paper.
It was like a drop put on paper and then
you basically take the paper and that is how you
how you how you take LSD in this case, But
it's not it's of no use if you want to
do micro dose. Because then I asked him how how
do I do you have to cut it now and
then fifty pieces? And said, well, this is a problem.
So when you want a micro dose, you actually meet
(01:48):
the actual drops of LED and then you can it
can be dosage in a way that the micro dose
is possible. But I still had this in my pocket,
and I was at the archives of Thunders which today
no artists who had discovered LSD, which was this company
archive where I didn't they made you use it. They
(02:09):
let you use it the archive, but they don't tell
you what exactly they have. But I was interested in
finding a meeting between the CIA Operative Sydney GUARDLYB and
the CEO of sun God art Stole in the early
fifties where the CIA man wants to buy the world
(02:30):
supply of LSD and basically tells the Swiss company that
LSD cannot be marketed unregulated and certainly not at all
to the eastern side of the so called Iron Curtain.
Like the CIA was very much afraid that the Soviets
would get their hands on LSD. So I went to
(02:52):
this archive to find this document because I thought maybe
there's a memo of CIA guy. You know how long
they talk about what they taught this I never found,
but I found other interesting things.
Speaker 2 (03:05):
And as you describe in the book, you know, you
go to this archive, they seem very nice. They'll let
you ask for whatever you want, but they won't tell
you what is actually in there. If you ask for it,
they'll see if they can find it, but they won't
give you a sort of a synopsis of what else
might be in there. So that was kind of hilarious.
The second time you go back, I guess they had
(03:27):
told you no, no, no, we're not available today, we're
too busy to deal with you. But you go back anyway,
and then you had the LSD and offered it to
the archivist and it seemed to have worked right. It
helped that even though he didn't take it, it kind
of opened the door for you.
Speaker 3 (03:42):
Well, the archivist and me developed a very good working relationship.
But still I was frustrated that I wasn't able to
see the structure of the archive. I know exactly what
is there, so I always had to go through him.
So I had to develop a relationship with him, which
was nice, you know, because it's a nice guy. But
I didn't expect that you actually have to develop the
(04:03):
personal relationship in order to get better results in an archives.
It's kind of absurd. And then I'm gonna After I
had received my good luck term, I looked at it
and I told you, was like with like little papers.
It's like little squares of paper, that's what it is.
And they usually they have like an imprint on it
or like a funny a comic or something like that.
And this this one that I had received had the
(04:25):
old flag of Sundals, the original company on on on
this on this uh illegally re produced the LSD that
I received in Zurich. So I thought that was quite
funny and that I had the idea of uh, because
when I when I went to that, when I went
to the toilet of the archives, I had to go
(04:45):
through the archives itself, and I saw the old flag
of Sundals and I realized that this old flag and
the archives the very same flag that is on the
illegal LSD that I had just received from my friend,
that was also made in battle by an illegal LSD
can obviously who knows what he's or she's doing, but
it's still illegal, you know. So I showed him this,
the archivist. I said, did you ever see LSC? Have
(05:08):
you ever seen you? Ever seen how it looks? He said, no,
actually I've never seen it. It's illegal. How can I
see it? So he was very correct Swiss, and I said, well,
I happen to have them with me, which I guess
is not even illegal to carry it with you, just
like sell it and whatever. I also his friend, he
just gave it to me. He said, of course, I
don't want money for this. This is LSD for your mom.
(05:28):
How could I know ask money for this. LSC is
not really a very commercial drug. It's more like a
I don't know, it's a different kind of currency somehow.
So I told him about this and he was. He
became kind of interesting. He said, yes, I would like
to see LSD, but I don't know where I would
see it. So I told him I have them, and
I showed it to him and he was quite amazing.
But this has the old logo of our company on it.
(05:49):
How is this possible? And I said, it's like a
joke of the guy who made it, you know, an homage,
you know. Because chemist they have like they have like
a god. And this god is called Albert Hoffmann, and
he was the chemist of Standards. He was the one
who developed, let's say, discovered LSD in forty three. While
he was he was working, he was trying to find
(06:10):
a stimulant. And the company Thunders was developing medicines from
er good, which is the fund fundus that grows on
rise parasitical fungus and it has one very potent alkaloid.
And Thunders was trying to make medicines out of this.
Only out of this they focused. They focused on this ergod.
So they had like a Migraine medicine from this ergod.
(06:32):
They had something against for contraction of of of blood vessels,
which was which was a big hit. So Thunders made
medicines from Ergod and then in forty three suddenly they
had this LSD compound which did not work on the
body but on the mind. So the company also you know,
didn't really they didn't really know at the time what
to do with it. And this confusion of LSD can
(06:54):
still be still be felt today in the company archives,
like they know, we created LSD, but we never went
ever able to profit from it. It was taken out
of our hands and turned into an illegal drug. And
only now the psychedelic research is starting, so that the
company has a very strange relationship to it. So when
he saw the archivist, when he saw the LSD in
(07:15):
front of him, he was like, he was very interested
in and then I said you can have some. I
give you one trip as a gift because you're helping
me so much here in the archives. It was kind
of like a joke, and he thought it also. It
was that he thought it was very generous or funny
of me to offer this, which he had to decline
because of his position, But that kind of created a bond,
like we were talking, you know, we became like we
(07:36):
created a relationship through this NSD. So the LSD was
the good luck term actually, because then he went back
into the archives and he had told me before he
doesn't have time this day because he's so busy. He
was a little bit annoyed by me, and I think
every by everyone who always looks for LSD in these archives,
like you just look, we have a big company with
(07:58):
everyone who comes to the archives it his own, always
interested in LSD because LC is such a spectacular It
is the most spectacular development and the one that they
let go out of you know, out of hand and
out of their control. So I was actually trying to
find out why what went wrong? Why was the company
not able to put it on the market. Why this
is obviously because the CIA was so interested in it,
(08:18):
and as we talked before, this is THEA was so
interested in it because the Nazis were so interested in it.
The Nazis were working with psychedelics for interrogation techniques. So
the question is, how did the Nazis know. I wanted
to see the connection between Sunders, the Swiss company, and
the Nazis in forty three because forty three LSD was discovered,
(08:39):
and forty three, you know, the World War two was
at its height, you know, it was like raging, so
potential and and and some those finds something that is
so potent on the mind because LSD is the most
potent substance for the on the human mind. That's in German.
The title is the most potent substance. Must have been interesting.
(09:02):
But how did they know about it? And the archive
is after I gave him the LSD, went back into
the archives and brought me all the papers of the
CEO because that's what I wanted to see. I wanted
to see what decisions were taken by the CEO of
Thunders in forty three. So I studied his correspondence, which
probably no one had ever looked at it before, you know,
because it's kind of boring, just because the letters of
(09:24):
the CEO of a company in forty three. But he
communicates with one person very intensely, that is Richard Kuhn.
And Richard Kuhn later was Nobel Prize winner for chemistry.
At the time in forty three, he was Hitler's favorite biochemist.
He had developed serene, a deadly nerve poison for Hitler,
and he was a very good friend of Arthro Style,
(09:46):
which is the Swiss CEO. The CEO of Thunders. They
had been friends because they had learned biochemistry from the
same from the same person, which was Professor Villistetter, also
Nobel Prize winner of Chemi Jewish German Maverick of the
early century, who was then you know, persecuted because he
(10:09):
was Jewish, but he was, you know, in the teens
and twentieth of the century. He was the leading biochemist.
And he had two kind of sons, and one was
Arthur Stole this with the O, and the other was
Richard Richard Kuhn. Richard Kuhn, the Nazi later Nazi biochemist,
so Stolen Kuhn had always exchanged information like they were
like best research bodies. So Kuhn, the Nazi knew everything
(10:33):
about the ergot research in Switzerland, and then knew also
everything about LSD and then became very interested in LSD.
And then I found a letter where the Nazi scientists
thanks the Swiss THEO for having delivered him the material
out of which you make LSD with one more simple
chemical step, so like the base of LSD was sent
to Heidelberg in nineteen forty three, and that's when the
(10:56):
Nazis really became interested in psychoelic research where they really
did psychedelic research, because their program starts forty three and
goes until forty five when the Americans discover the experiments
at Daho when they liberate the camp. So there's a
straight line from the Swiss COO to the Nazis and
then to America, which leads to this very complicated history
(11:18):
of LSC becoming this object of desire first of the
Nazis and then of the American intelligence, and that certainly
didn't help the compound to get onto the market. Actually
for him, it is. So that's the story of Tripp.
Speaker 2 (11:33):
There's a really interesting book called The Immortality Key by
Brian Murr Rescue. We had him on this program years ago.
If you have not read that, I know you'd be
interested in Norman. It traces the likely history of ergot,
the fungus that produces these effects and these mental effects,
way way back to the ancient Greeks and then the
(11:54):
early Christians who took their stuff and basically, you know,
they founded Western civilization based on ideas they had while
tripping on these substances. But that'd be a resource for
you as you continue your research. Let me ask you this.
Speaker 3 (12:12):
Go ahead. I know, I know this book, and I
mean what's interesting is the ritual of Eleusis, which is,
you know, he didn't discover this in this book is
actually I mean, he writes about it, but what actually
happens that the discovery of LSD Albert Hoffmann, which I
just told you about the chemists from Sunder. He later
(12:33):
had this theory that in eleuses where was the defining
ritual of Western culture, of Greek culture. Greek culture at
least out of which then came Western culture, was based
on this ergot based drink. There has no evidence, there's
no evidence for it, but it seems likely like there's
(12:53):
there's a lot of a lot of it looks like
because his idea was that the evolution of humankind has
often been stimulated by substances, so that basically drug use
is a historical thing, it's part of our culture, it
even forms our culture, so that that's the claim behind it,
(13:14):
which is I think quite interesting to discuss.
Speaker 2 (13:18):
Yeah, to give us the broad strokes about the C
I A. What the CIA did with LSD. This guy
gets appointed to be sort of the head of mk Ultra,
doctor Gottlieb, and and then goes to Switzerland with a
great big pile of money and buys a gigantic stock
pile of LSD and the way they use it in
(13:40):
different kinds of experiments on unwinning people, including their own
agents and personnel. You detail a lot of that. It's
a great part of the story. Can you share some
of that with us. Gottlieb, what he did and how
much he acquired, Well, that.
Speaker 3 (14:00):
Was actually that was the reason why I went to
the archives because I wanted to get the records on
that meeting, because I think it must have been such
a desire meeting when the Americans intelligence officer Sydney Godlieb
sits in the Swiss the old Room and buys the
world supply of LSD like the Americans, the Intelligence Service
thought they had a lot more like the American attache
(14:24):
and ban he had he had tabled to Washington that, uh,
the Soviet Union just bought like twenty million units of
LSD from Tom Sunders, which was actually a false information.
But it was very nervous that Thunders, which was you know,
this company can sell LSB to everybody, and this is
(14:46):
they could also sell like million, They could sell a
lot to the Soviet Union and the Soviet Union could
make these programs the brainwash Americans, I mean that was
that was the big scare because that was also the
time time of Korean War where suddenly American.
Speaker 4 (15:00):
UH Americans who had been caught captives UH prisoners of
war were saying into like Chinese cameras that America was
using illegal ammunition, biochemical ammunition and stuff like that.
Speaker 3 (15:15):
So the idea was that they these soldiers had been drugged,
like the Eastern Side was already working on this brain
warfare and on brainwashing. This was a big scare. And
I'm not examining this. I mean there has there is
evidence actually that the Eastern Bloc was experimenting with LSD.
There was an LSD factory in Czechoslovakia, but I haven't
(15:37):
researched this in depth. I don't know whether this was
Moscow sponsored or whether this was just a Czech check thing,
because the LSD didn't travel in the Eastern Bloc, a
state in that in the in Czechoslovakia around the capital Prague.
So what the what the CIA did was basically they
tried to convince Thunders to only sell to Western people,
(16:03):
only to researchers like LST. Was not on the market yet,
but researchers could acquire it from universities with a certificate.
So the CIA wanted to have like they wanted to
have an overview of who gets it because they they
they were really interested in trying to develop it into
a truth drug. That was the big That was the
big idea behind np ultru to develop a truth drug.
(16:26):
Why did they think less could be a truth drug? Well,
because the Nazis thought that, and we talked already about
these as reports from the concentration camp of Dachau. They
were evaluated by Henry K. Beecher, a Harvard professor. He
was the drug advisor to the American military. Someone has
to say, like what does it mean? Like they give
(16:47):
mescaline this milligram and then they know someone has to
evaluate it. This was this Harvard, this Harvard guy. He
wrote reports on what he called ego depressant drugs, which
is actually quite quite quite accurate. These drugs are ego
depressed depressant, as we had talked about before. And these
reports landed on the desk of Sydney, god believe, and
(17:09):
there he read things like it might be possible that
the Soviet Union would buy a whole American battleship with
LSD like into the water and into the drinking supply,
and that battleship would be incapable of action. Or it
might even be possible that a big city, big American
city like San Francisco, LSD would be brought into the
(17:31):
water supply of New York and then the whole city
would not function anymore for a couple of hours, which
might give you a a dement an advantages during an attack.
So like, this was serious stuff. You know, this was
the early fifties. So God, you read this. So he decided,
we have to be prepared. We have to get on
top of this. We have to know, we have to
control LSD, and then we have to also investigate what
(17:54):
is LSD.
Speaker 1 (17:57):
Listen to more Coast to Coast AM every weeknight at
one am Eastern and go to Coast to coastam dot
com for more
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