In a 1994 interview first published in 2016, John Ehrlichman, formerly President Richard Nixon’s top adviser on domestic politics, made a jaw-dropping admission about the administration’s declared “War on Drugs.”
“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the anti-war left and Black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or Black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and Blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
Tripped: Nazi Germany, the CIA, and the Dawn of the Psychedelic Age
By Norman Ohler
Mariner Books, 240 pages
Release date: April 9, 2024
Norman Ohler mentions this admission in his new book, Tripped: Nazi Germany, the CIA, and the Dawn of the Psychedelic Age, which looks into how and why governments have stalled research into LSD and other drugs that seem to have the power to rewire the brain, offering hope to millions of people suffering from ailments including depression, anxiety, addiction, and post-traumatic stress disorder.
As Ohler puts it, “We must understand the flawed logic that limited therapeutic uses for psychedelics in the first place, because understanding the roots of that logic may, at long last, allow us to embrace fully the benefits of these drugs.” (Another book that came out earlier this year, Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science by Benjamin Breen plows similar ground.)
LSD was first synthesized in 1938 at a Swiss pharmaceutical company called Sandoz. The drug’s psychotropic potential was discovered by accident five years later, when a scientist working with the compound somehow ingested a miniscule amount and, in his account, “sank into a not unpleasant, intoxication-like state that was characterized by an extremely stimulated imagination.”
Mariner Books
Ohler, the bestselling author of Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich, digs into Sandoz’s archives, garnering evidence that suggests the discovery of LSD’s psychotropic qualities may have been shared with Hitler’s minions, who were interested in “Chemical Methods for the Neutralization of the Will,” to quote the name of the experiments conducted at the Dachau concentration camp. He also tracks how the CIA picked up where the Nazis left off in exploring LSD’s potential use as a tool of mind control, often through shockingly unethical experiments involving unwitting subjects.
As Ohler relates, “It was a race between researchers on the one hand, who were studying LSD as a medication for treating illnesses of the mind, and on the other hand agents of the American military, who wanted to deploy it as a pharmacological weapon in the Cold War.”
But LSD ultimately proved ineffective at turning a person who took it into “a living puppet,” as CIA Director Allen Dulles had hoped. And promising research into the therapeutic potential of mind-bending substances including LSD and psilocybin was waylaid by people like Harry Anslinger, head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, an early and ardent proponent of draconian drug laws.
In 1945, writes Ohler, Anslinger “praised the old Nazi drug laws as a model for America.” (Anslinger also testified before Congress that marijuana “makes darkies think they’re as good as white men.”) The crackdown intensified after LSD became associated with the counterculture (thank you very much, Timothy Leary), which in the minds of people like Nixon was the enemy.
It is only during the past two decades that serious research has resumed into the use of psychedelics, as recounted in Michael Pollan’s excellent 2018 book, How to Change Your Mind. In 2020, Oregon became the first state to legalize the use of psilocybin, the main active ingredient in “magic mushrooms,” to treat mental health disorders in supervised settings.
Tripped is a rollicking read, lively and engaging. Ohler seems to have read everything there is to read about the history of psychedelics, blended with his own research. He confesses from the start to his ardent hope that LSD might alleviate his aging mother’s Alzheimer’s disease. The book’s final chapter recounts his own unauthorized exploration of this possibility. He thinks it worked. Stranger things have happened.