#2183 - Norman Ohler

[0] Joe Rogan podcast, check it out.

[1] The Joe Rogan Experience.

[2] Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day.

[3] Pleasure to meet you.

[4] I'm very happy to be here.

[5] I'm actually quite thrilled.

[6] I'm quite thrilled to have you here.

[7] This is your book.

[8] It's called Tripped, Nazi Germany, the CIA, and the dawn of the psychedelic age.

[9] First of all, how did you get involved in studying this?

[10] Well, this had a lot to do with my previous book, which is called Blitz, drugs in the Third Reich, and I mean, the Nazis were really into meth, basically.

[11] They were the first ones to understand that methamphetamine can be, can change the war effort.

[12] They basically doped their soldiers.

[13] So that was an interesting story that I told in Blitz, and also I spoke about Hitler's consumption, which is quite outrageous, actually.

[14] And while I was doing the research, I was in many archives, because I'm not a historian.

[15] I usually write novels.

[16] I started out writing three novels and then suddenly it became a nonfiction writer.

[17] I was trying to understand what does that mean.

[18] And I thought it meant to do historical writing to actually go into archives and look at original documents and not just lean on other books, which is what many historians actually do, which I found out later.

[19] They just read books from colleagues and then make up their own shit.

[20] To actually go into the archive is very time -consuming, but I thought everyone does that.

[21] Actually, no one does that.

[22] So I was looking at all the archives, and at one point I was in the archive of the memorial of the concentration camp of Dachau, so a very serious archive, because they host like all the documents, what the SS did in Dachau.

[23] And so it's an intense experience to go to that archive and actually look at, because they wrote down everything, like every experiment the Nazis did in concentration camps was like written down because it was like pseudoscience.

[24] So I found documents while I was researching blitz relating to tests with psychoactive substances.

[25] And that was like, that was not what I expected because the Nazis had been, you know, enthusiastic about methamphetamine, but I'd never, that was the first time I saw like something that related Nazis and psychedelics.

[26] And I thought that's quite strange.

[27] That's quite interesting, obviously.

[28] I need to get to the bottom of this.

[29] So I asked the archivist, can I see like all the.

[30] all the documents, what did the SS actually do with psychedelics, which ones did they use?

[31] Why did they test them?

[32] What were they looking for?

[33] And he said, well, I'm very sorry, but all documents are in America because when American military liberated Dachau, one of the things they do is they take a lot of documents and they took all the psychedelic research done by the Nazis with them.

[34] So I knew I had to go to America, probably to the National Archives in in college park close to Washington, biggest archive in the world, find it there.

[35] But I didn't have time while I was doing Blitz.

[36] And Blitz was also already a complete story.

[37] So I thought, I saved that, that psychedelic theme for another book.

[38] And this other book is now being published as Tripped.

[39] Wow.

[40] So before this, you'd had no understanding that the Nazis had used psychedelics.

[41] You only knew that they, we all know that the meth thing, and we've seen Hitler at the 36 Olympics where he's rocking back and forth.

[42] He's looking jacked out of his mind.

[43] I mean, the joke about Blitz is that I was actually the first one to write about this.

[44] I mean, now we all know about it.

[45] But before that, no one knew about it.

[46] Before 2015, when this book was published in Germany, the Nazis were still seen globally and also in Germany as this, like, pure movement that was...

[47] Like, I spoke to my grandfather when I was a teenager, and I was, you know, obviously criticizing him for his involvement.

[48] to know what did he do and he did some shit and then you always said under hitler everything was in order like he praised that law and order aspect and that law and order aspect of the nazis obviously doesn't correspond to like a drug using society so no one knew that the nazis were taking drugs until i found out until i found documents for blitz so um but this so i was not surprised to to find more and more stuff what what they were doing with drugs.

[49] But then I was surprised that they actually also used psychedelics because psychedelics totally knew, you know.

[50] Forty -three LSD was invented.

[51] So it was kind of, I really was wondering whether Nazis already getting their hands on LSD, which was just so new that partly anyone in the world knew about this.

[52] So this is the story of Tripped.

[53] So Hoffman, he synthesized LSD in 43.

[54] Correct.

[55] Right.

[56] So was there any evidence of anyone using something similar to LSD?

[57] before that?

[58] I know they've studied some of ancient pottery from Greece and they've found ergot in it, an ergot which contains a very similar compound to LSD.

[59] Well, ergot is the alkaloid of the fungus which grows on rye and so LSD LSD like this from ergod LSD is made basically so actually LSD is not a synthetic drug, as many people believe, but it actually is based on a fungus extract, which grows on rye.

[60] And the Swiss company, Sandus, they produced only ergot -based medicines.

[61] Like, they started after the First World War.

[62] It was like a startup.

[63] Sandus was a color manufacturing company, and they made a lot of money after the war because everything had to be rebuilt in Europe.

[64] Stuff had to be repainted.

[65] So companies that made paint made a lot of money, so they invested in a pharmaceutical branch and they hired one guy to kind of come up with an idea how to make money in the pharmaceutical world this guy was Artur Stoll he later became the CEO of Sandoz and Artur Stoll was the first one to crack Urgot because this fungus is quite poisonous actually in the Middle Ages this created mass hallucinations in Europe unwittingly people were eating like contaminated bread we're having horrific visions actually limbs fell off because this ergoat is a very, very poisonous alkaloid.

[66] But as we know from Parcellus, the dosage makes the poison.

[67] So if you, that was Stol's idea.

[68] You take a very poisonous thing, the ergot, and you extract, like you're still able to use the force that's within it as a medicine.

[69] This is how biochemistry, that's basically the foundation of biochemistry.

[70] So Stoy was able to crack the ergot, and the first medicine he made was a migraine medicine, which came out, I think, in 1923 by Sondos, very successful, so he immediately hit the jackpot.

[71] He became like the Ergot god of the pharmaceutical world.

[72] So he developed more and more medicines with Ergot.

[73] One of them, for example, is still used today when in childbirth.

[74] It contracts the blood vessels after the birth so you can stop a bleeding.

[75] Otherwise, I guess bleeding would go on much longer in childbirth.

[76] So Sondos made the first effective medicine because Ergot kind of.

[77] kind of makes you, makes the blood vessels contract.

[78] Weren't they trying to develop a drug to induce labor when they initially created LSD?

[79] Yeah, this is all the Ergot kind of research.

[80] I mean, the whole company was just doing Ergot.

[81] So they were looking at all kinds of things that Ergot could be good for, just to, you know, have new products on the market.

[82] So an Ergot before, I mean, this is a company based in Switzerland, which is now Novartis, something like the...

[83] fourth biggest pharmaceutical company in the world or something.

[84] I mean, a very successful company still.

[85] They bought Sandoz and now it's Novartis, but it's kind of the same thing.

[86] So Sandoz at one point needed so much ergod that they started manufacturing it in Switzerland.

[87] Like they went into a specific region called the Emmental, which was famous for its cheese.

[88] And it's also famous for its bad weather.

[89] So mold grows on rye anyhow.

[90] So they thought this is the right area to industrialize the ergot manufacturing, like the growth of ergot and the farmers were like we're always trying to get away from the ergo.

[91] The ergot is poisonous and suddenly they had to make it and the Swiss company paid 20 francs I think a kilo, 20 francs a kilo and rye was only like seven francs a kilo so the farmers switched to basically producing poison and then I mean not poison but a very poisonous mushroom you could say like a fungus you don't want to eat this thing you know you don't want to That was the problem.

[92] You harvest rye, you make bread out of it.

[93] And then there's like a little bit of ergot because on some of the rye, ergot grows.

[94] And then the bread is poisonous.

[95] That was the problem in the Middle Ages.

[96] So farmers don't like it.

[97] Now they had to produce it.

[98] And suddenly, Sondos in Basel, Switzerland, had huge amounts of ergot in their storage.

[99] And they needed to make more and more products to use the raw materials that they had so expensively produced.

[100] in the Ementhal.

[101] So Stoll hired further chemists.

[102] One of them was Albert Hoffman, the famous discoverer of LSD.

[103] So he was not looking for a mind -blowing drug or anything.

[104] He was looking for actually a stimulant because this was late 30s in Germany, Nazi Germany, a stimulant that was made from the nicotine acid, nicotine acid diathlon.

[105] No, it was actually a Swiss product, but from another company, Nicotine acid diathlomide was, I don't know the brand name, it had a brand name, it was quite successful medicine, and he thought, if I take lysurgic acid diathlomide, lycergic acid being the acid within the ergod, maybe we'll also have a potent stimulant.

[106] But they weren't looking for a stimulant actually for the mind.

[107] They were looking for a physical stimulant, something like pervitin, like meth, like something that keeps you going.

[108] I mean, this was at a time when stimulants were sought after.

[109] They didn't have coffee like we have today.

[110] We just drink a coffee in the morning.

[111] They didn't really have that.

[112] That's why methamphetamine was so successful in Germany because you could just, you know, buy it anywhere and you take a tablet in the morning.

[113] And it's like drinking, like being on coffee the whole time, you know.

[114] So the stimulant was what he was looking for.

[115] And then, like, something came into his bloodstream.

[116] It's a bit, you know, he tries later, he tried to make it a bit mythical sounding, like somehow the substance, got into his bloodstream, and he felt like weird sensations and different, he saw different color.

[117] So he thought, this is actually a very different type of thing.

[118] Like, what is this lysergic acid, diethlomite, LSD?

[119] What is it?

[120] So he did then the first self -experiment, which was kind of normal at the time.

[121] He took a very, very low dose, what he thought, 250 micrograms.

[122] But as we know today, that's actually quite a high dose of LSD.

[123] So he had an an extremely strong experience.

[124] And he told this to Stolzzi.

[125] Oh, he said, I just took this like 250 micrograms.

[126] I mean, this is a Swiss chemist in a Swiss lab and suddenly he's like full on tripping.

[127] He tried to get home somehow.

[128] His assistant brought him home on a bicycle.

[129] He was at his house and the wall started collapsing onto him and the doctor came and he said to his doctor, I think I'm going mad.

[130] I poisoned myself.

[131] I don't know what's going on.

[132] The doctor was like feeling his pulse, pulse normal, like eyes normal.

[133] Like on LSD, you don't have a strong physical reaction, but you have a very strong mental reaction.

[134] So he had this, and the doctors just couldn't see it.

[135] And before, actually, Hoffman had tested LSD on mice at Sondos, and the mice also didn't show anything because you can't, they didn't like run around excitedly.

[136] Like if you give mice cocaine, they're like, you can see the difference.

[137] But if you give them LSD, you can't see it because you can't get into their mind.

[138] And maybe they don't even have a trip because they don't have a conscious like us.

[139] But certainly on humans, it works very potently.

[140] And so he communicated this with his CEO.

[141] And the CEO was like, I don't believe you.

[142] I think you made a mistake with the dosage.

[143] Then they repeated it.

[144] And then they actually created at Sundance.

[145] And I think this is kind of funny.

[146] If you picture like a concert of pharmaceutical Swiss company in the late 40s in Basel, they created an intoxication room.

[147] like they made a nice room within the company.

[148] They didn't, they called it Rauschraum, Raus, meaning intoxication in German.

[149] And Hoffman said, I had a very strong rausch with this stuff.

[150] I don't know what this is.

[151] So they invited like secretaries and bookkeepers and chemists and people working in the cafeteria.

[152] They all could come into this room and take LSD.

[153] Like the secretary is actually sitting there typing, what they would relate.

[154] And they all had a great experience.

[155] That's a funny thing.

[156] because they had never had any bad.

[157] Today when we take LSD, we have so much discourse about LSD in our mind automatically.

[158] They didn't have that.

[159] They just took a strangely named substance like LSD 25.

[160] They took like 50 micrograms.

[161] And they wrote down, I write about this in Trip.

[162] For the first time, I feel connected to my fellow human being.

[163] Some looked out and saw the clouds and had ideas about connectivity.

[164] and how we are part of the universe.

[165] Like these kind of hippie LSD thoughts that we classically associate with, they had them like very purely like from, they just had them so this was all noted down and then they were thinking and this was in 1943.

[166] Imagine the situation in Europe in 1943.

[167] It's at the height of the of World War II.

[168] People are dead injured, traumatized so they thought at Sondos maybe this is going to be like a blockbuster you know we give this then they tested it also on sick people in a hospital in Zurich they gave it to like a depressed patient I also studied these reports like a depressed Swiss farmer was like chronically depressed he takes LSD and he took it like three times and they released him out of the psychiatric ward because he was cured he was good he said I'm fine I'm not depressed anymore so Sandoz really thought they had a blockbuster they thought this is LSD is going to be the big thing and the big question of obviously is what went wrong that is what interested me in Tript what happened because also why I researched LSD and I had been interested in LSD for a long time but then I decided to write a book and I researched it and I found a study by a company called Yelousis which is an American company their name referring obviously to the Greek ritual and they had done low dosage tests with LSD on Alzheimer patients and they found that the very same receptors that Alzheimer degenerates and kills these receptors are being stimulated by LSD so their study which are then discussed with an leading Alzheimer researcher in Germany and he also is looking at this white paper you said, this is actually quite good.

[169] And I said, so when is it going to happen?

[170] He said, well, this is a bit more complicated than you think, you know, because LSD is illegal.

[171] It's not even, in America, I guess you have, like, universities can do research.

[172] But this is also a new thing, you know, when Nixon illegalized LSD in 1966, all the research was illegalized.

[173] So couldn't even research whether it's as dangerous as, you know, the government said, it would be.

[174] So let me just finish this thought.

[175] I bring this white paper to my father because my mother suffers from Alzheimer and as I'm saying to him I'm writing this book as you know and I found this and shouldn't we have a look at this because he takes care of my mother and he's quite frustrated that there's no potent medicine available to him that his doctor basically says sorry and he's a former judge he was quite a high judge in Germany He sent people to prison for drugs.

[176] So for him to even consider giving an illegal drug to his wife is a big leap for him.

[177] But, you know, he's a rational thinking man. So he looked at this white paper.

[178] He studied it.

[179] And he said, you know what?

[180] In court, when I was in court as a judge, I always, you don't know what is the truth.

[181] But you know what is a good story, like a credible story.

[182] That's how I determined as a judge.

[183] what I believe.

[184] If someone tells something that rings true to me and right now I'm having a study that LSD is helpful but also I'm having the law that it's illegal can you please find out the true story now?

[185] What is LSD?

[186] Why is it illegal?

[187] So from that point onward I did the research that is in Tript which was supposed to be called LSD for Mom actually that was my working title for the book and I think it's a better title.

[188] That's a good title.

[189] Yeah, it's a great title.

[190] LSD for Mom.

[191] That was my...

[192] Who picked Tripped?

[193] did the editors pick tripped?

[194] My German editor didn't want LSD for Mama, which is the German translation, which I think is the perfect title.

[195] It's even better in German, LSD for Mama.

[196] He somehow convinced me to use a different title in Germany and all the, you know, this is translated to many different countries and they always go to the German.

[197] If the Germans would have called it LSD for Mama, it would be called LSD for Mom in America, LSD for Mamma in France, but because in Germany a different title was chosen, the strongest, stuff, which is a little bit different in German.

[198] There's Stachstaff.

[199] Then every country was like thinking, how should we call it?

[200] I guess they call it trip because of the success of Blitz.

[201] They wanted to have, but I think LSD for Mom is a better title.

[202] I like it.

[203] Yeah, it's great.

[204] Because it's true, you know.

[205] I was then really researching for my father and my mother.

[206] And I came back after all this research with the Swiss company and the Nazi connection, which will come to, I guess, in a second.

[207] I came back to my father and I presented him.

[208] this story and then he decided to actually try it because he said I understand now that LSD is not illegal because it's dangerous that there are different reasons why it's illegal and these different reasons I explained in Tript so we gave we spoke obviously to my mother also because you have to get consent so she gave her consent and she started using LSD once in a while not not chronically obviously but like twice a week or maybe the next week only once only low dosages and my father also took them he never felt anything because in microdose you're not supposed to feel a trip or an intoxication it just works in your brain but my mother actually did feel it because her brain is attacked by Alzheimer so for her that was like her cheeks became redder she would look at us one time we also then did mushrooms which is a very similar molecule actually psilocybin is very similar to the LSD molecule.

[209] On Mother's Day we gave her a little piece of mushroom chocolate and she took it and there was a newspaper on the table and she hadn't even looked at newspaper as an object of desire for her for about a year my father then later told me and she picked up the newspaper when the chocolate was working and started reading the headlines and my father was like this is a medicinal miracle And my father's really like a rational, skeptical guy, you know, but it was, it was amazing.

[210] So that is also what I what I write about in Tripped AK LSD for Mom.

[211] But it's so fascinating there are so many people suffering from Alzheimer's in the world.

[212] And it's illegal basically everywhere except for countries like Portugal that have decriminalized everything.

[213] But yet...

[214] I mean, dementia is like the pandemic of the future, if I want to use that ugly word pandemic.

[215] to not allow our scientists to examine this properly for example in the pandemic a lot of during the pandemic like regulations in regards to developing medicines, a vaccine especially were lowered because we wanted the government society wanted a vaccine quick but so this is what has to happen with psychedelics now because we are moving like in 2050 I read the numbers there also in the book like a lot of people will have dementia like we will all know someone or we will have it ourselves or it's going to grow exponentially or at least a lot so I think our society should actually shift its focus towards preventing that because when I spoke to the Alzheimer expert he said yeah of course this could you could prevent Alzheimer if you would know like how to stimulate the brain and so far by 2050 153 million people are expected to be living with dementia worldwide up from 57 million in 2013 2019 rather largely due to population growth and population aging don't they believe that Alzheimer's has something to do with diet as well isn't that what they're calling type 3 diabetes yeah and I think it could be true.

[216] I mean the reason for Alzheimer is, you know, we have to see it separately from the cure, you know.

[217] The reason I think I have come actually to the conclusion that sugar is quite bad for you and I was quite a sugar addict.

[218] I really was.

[219] Like, I could not put down a bar of chocolate.

[220] I could not eat one piece.

[221] I just couldn't because I love it so much.

[222] But then I just realized it's not good and I stopped it and it's actually possible to stop.

[223] I eat now like a little bit and it's actually no problem.

[224] So I think, well, there's a few reasons for dementia.

[225] One is also the so -called neuroinflammation of the brain.

[226] And that could be caused obviously by sugar, by, you know, by imbalances in the sugar diet, I think.

[227] And the inflammation of the brain, and that is scientifically proven, is being decreased if you take psychedelics.

[228] So if you take psychedelics, every time you take psychedelics, your neuroinflammation goes down.

[229] So that is something that needs to be examined.

[230] Like maybe we should all take maybe once a week a low dosage of, let's say, LSD or psilocybin.

[231] Maybe we could prevent like 50 % of dementia.

[232] I mean, I think it's quite plausible, and I think not to look into it is not very smart by a society because the costs of dementia, I mean, the human costs, my father suffers quite a bit.

[233] My mother, obviously, she has the disease.

[234] She suffers.

[235] The family suffers.

[236] If someone in the family has Alzheimer, the whole family suffers.

[237] and of course our medical system is very expensive to treat dementia like put them in homes whatever so i think we're making a a big mistake by not examining this absolutely well it's just a stunning amount of ignorance on our part with all the at least anecdotal evidence of the positive benefits of some of these things particularly in micro dose usage well it's just not a focus of politicians, like to legalize drugs, has not become a very popular meme among politicians in the 20th century.

[238] This is also what I examined in Tript.

[239] I kind of looked at where did it actually start?

[240] Where does this prohibitionist approach come from?

[241] Because it's kind of weird.

[242] As a child, I watched Star Trek.

[243] It was a TV, an American TV show even on German television.

[244] It was called Raumship Enterprise in German, like Spaceship Enterprise.

[245] And I was always very touched by the beginning when they say boldly go where no man has gone before.

[246] Like that was for me the American, like the Western philosophy, to always transcend where you are.

[247] And that is, that totally contradicts our prohibition as possible.

[248] policies.

[249] It's like a chemical wall that the government is setting up in our brain, saying like, you can go this much with stimulating your brain, but you're not allowed to go further.

[250] Like, you're not allowed to use LSD, which does stimulate the H2TA receptors.

[251] You're not, you know, I think it contradicts the Western philosophy.

[252] And actually also, I think it contradicts the idea of democracy, which I, I Which I always, you know, was hot for, you know.

[253] I was always, I grew up in a small town in West Germany, which was actually occupied by American forces.

[254] So I was very much connecting with American culture early on.

[255] And I always, like, associated Western culture with freedom and transcendence and boldly going where no man has gone before.

[256] That is for me the strength of the West.

[257] And that is, you know, this is, for example, not what Islam offers.

[258] Islam says you're not allowed to intoxicate.

[259] You can only believe in this.

[260] You cannot go further.

[261] This is actually the problem of all monotheistic religions.

[262] But for me, the West was always going beyond that.

[263] So I was curious, how did this happen, this prohibition?

[264] Like, was there one person that decided, no, people cannot use this anymore?

[265] And there actually is one person, and his name is Harry J. Ansling.

[266] I'm sure you're familiar with the guy.

[267] So I, for this trip, I also went to the Harry J. Anslinger Archives at Penn State University, which was quite interesting because you can see in the archive and in the way like it smells and what he collected and the letters he wrote and the language he used.

[268] You can, it's a very closed mindset.

[269] And he was actually able to convince Democratic and Republican president.

[270] He was like serving under, he was bipartisan basically.

[271] So his anti -drug regime that he was able to create, and he created it because the alcohol prohibition failed, and his federal bureau of narcotics was about to be extinct because he had completely failed with the alcohol prohibition.

[272] And then he thought, I have to find a new enemy, and the new enemy for him was actually cannabis.

[273] And he coined the word marijuana, because marijuana sounds foreign, it sounds Mexican, it sounds something that we don't want in our clean.

[274] white American society.

[275] Well, it was a Mexican wild tobacco.

[276] It was a slang for a Mexican wild tobacco.

[277] It wasn't cannabis.

[278] Yeah, right.

[279] Yeah.

[280] So that is...

[281] So basically what we could say is that...

[282] And unfortunately, Anzinger was quite a racist.

[283] He was, like, he openly used words to describe Afro -American colleagues that shouldn't be used by white men I guess in like memos this went all the way up to the president but they always kept him because he was the man that defends America from the scourge of foreign influences which is drugs in this case from China the opium from Mexico the marijuana so he was he was very good politician basically like an anti -drug lobbyist that everyone in Washington loved and so the reasons for the prohibition in America is not that this Anslinger was actually studying LSD and finding out that this is actually dangerous or marijuana is dangerous.

[284] That's, we really, even though we're free in our society, we have to, you know, we have to curb this.

[285] We have, like, this is not how it went.

[286] It's like, he wanted to attack the jazz scene and he knew that the jazz musicians were smoking a lot of weed.

[287] So he's, you know, it's very hard to make it illegal to play jazz, but you can make marijuana illegal and then you can you know target jazz musicians so it's got racial profiling why were they going after jazz musician he hated jazz he thought that he thought that uh uh i think he had a i think i think it's a sexual thing actually he because he actually said once when black men smoke reefer they think they're as good as white men and they're going to sleep with our women or something like that like that was kind of the world that he was so was it because the jazz As musicians were on stage and people loved them.

[288] They were cool.

[289] They were cool because they smoked the weed, you know.

[290] That gave them that diabolical power like over the audience and the groove, you know.

[291] If you take the weed away from them, they're just going to be like boring people, you know.

[292] So that guy really did a lot of damage in my mind to the American society.

[293] It's just stunning that 90 years later we're still dealing with the aftermath of that.

[294] You know, and also in conjunction with his union with William Randolph Hearst.

[295] Yeah.

[296] William Randolph Hurst, who owned Hearst publications, had a vested financial interest in keeping marijuana illegal or making marijuana illegal because of hemp, right?

[297] You know the whole story about the decorticator.

[298] Yeah, are you talking about the wood now?

[299] No, decorticator was a device that was manufactured.

[300] It was created in the early 1930s.

[301] And it was on the cover of Popular Science Magazine when they called it, they said hemp, the new billion dollar crop of the future.

[302] All right.

[303] So because hemp was a very difficult plant to take the fiber and convert it into paper and converted into textiles and things like that.

[304] They used slave labor for the most part until the cotton gin came along.

[305] When the cotton gin came along, that became more effective to use cotton than to use hemp.

[306] It was easier.

[307] Then in the early 1930s, they came out with the decorticator.

[308] The decorticator was this machine.

[309] See if you could get a version of that, Jamie.

[310] So the decorticator allowed them to effectively, that's the decorticator.

[311] So this machine, they would run the hemp stalks through it, and it would break them down far more economically, much, much easier, more effectively than the way they would do it by hand previously.

[312] Oh, right.

[313] So hemp, the new billion -dollar crop.

[314] So hemp, you know, find the cover of that magazine.

[315] So hemp was a far more effective paper.

[316] It's much more durable.

[317] I'll give you, take hemp, very difficult to tear.

[318] In fact, the earliest drafts of the Declaration of Independence were on hemp.

[319] So there's a billion -dollar crop.

[320] So this was Popular Science magazine.

[321] And William Brandoff Hurst didn't just own Hearst publications.

[322] He also owned paper mills.

[323] So he had thousands and thousands of acres of trees and forests that they were converting into paper.

[324] And now all of a sudden there was this new product that was going to destabilize his industry.

[325] And so...

[326] Hemp is a disruptor, you know?

[327] So when they made marijuana illegal, a lot of the people that were voting on this didn't even understand they were making cannabis illegal.

[328] They didn't understand that it was the same thing.

[329] Yeah.

[330] They didn't understand that it was the same literal textile that created canvas, all the great works.

[331] Like if you look at, you know, Leonardo da Vinci's paintings.

[332] He's on hemp.

[333] It's on hemp.

[334] It's on canvas.

[335] It's on cannabis paper.

[336] It's on a very durable form of paper.

[337] Have you ever touched cannabis paper, like hemp paper?

[338] It's crazy.

[339] It's really hard to tear.

[340] My friend Todd McCormick, he was a early, um, grower in Los Angeles when marijuana was medically legal and he wound up going to jail because in federal court you couldn't say that it was for medical purposes.

[341] They just prosecuted him based on the fact that he was a drug dealer instead of someone who was legally in the state of California growing medical marijuana.

[342] He had a stalk on his table of hemp.

[343] I don't know if you've ever felt a hemp stock.

[344] Have you ever picked one up?

[345] No. It is crazy.

[346] It's like, Styrofoam.

[347] You pick it up.

[348] It feels like nothing.

[349] But it's hard like oak.

[350] But it's not heavy.

[351] It's very strange.

[352] It's like an alien plant.

[353] Very, very weird.

[354] So that stuff converts incredibly to clothing.

[355] You can make building materials out of it.

[356] There's a thing called hemp crete that is this incredibly effective building material that you can make houses out of at a hemp.

[357] And it's incredibly sustainable because if you have an acre of trees, if you chop down that acre of trees and make paper out of it, it takes forever to grow enough trees in that acre to grow them to the point where you could harvest them and make paper out of them.

[358] Cannabis, if you're growing hemp, rather, if you grow hemp stocks in the same field, you've got new hemp in a few months, and now you have paper again.

[359] So William Randolph -Hurst demonized cannabis for the particular interest that he had with paper, with his paper mills, and to stop the hemp industry.

[360] I mean, they were quite close allies in a way.

[361] Yeah.

[362] Enslinger and Hearst.

[363] And in his publications, the word marijuana was for the first time publicized.

[364] So they kind of...

[365] And with a racial element to it.

[366] Yeah, with a racial element.

[367] They said that blacks and Mexicans were smoking this new drug and raping white women.

[368] Right.

[369] Right.

[370] And then the Reefer Madness movies, which are fantastic.

[371] pieces of propaganda they're absolutely hilarious if you watch them today especially knowing what we know about marijuana like these people were just crazed it was more meth -like than it was what they were depicting right absolutely so Anslinger 90 years ago the propaganda that he pushed out into society the way that infected people like a mind virus the effects of that still today when people find out that you have taken marijuana or that you regularly enjoy marijuana people freak out they're like what are you doing what are you doing to yourself oh my god you're out there taking drugs meanwhile this person's on antidepressants and they drink alcohol smoke cigarettes and takes annex like there's sanctioned drugs that are far worse for you it's not a drug -free society yeah i mean i talked about this sugar thing that I start.

[372] Oh, it's a crazy drug.

[373] And that actually made me realize that we as humans take drugs every day.

[374] Like every human takes drugs every day.

[375] I'm drinking coffee.

[376] I've got these little nicotine pouches.

[377] Yeah.

[378] Which is interesting, you know, that we don't acknowledge that really.

[379] We think like, or people who are against drugs, they kind of vote, they kind of say we stand for a sober society, but it never is a sober society.

[380] No. We just have some legalized drugs and some drugs that are illegalized.

[381] My friends that are in Alcoholics Anonymous, they all drink cigarettes or drink coffee and smoke cigarettes.

[382] They're all doing a drug.

[383] They're just doing a drug that doesn't completely destroy their life.

[384] I mean, I thought about this, you know, writing, having written Blitz and Trip, both on drugs and history, I was, I'm now trying to come up with a more, with a larger narrative.

[385] and I mean in your podcast a lot has been talked about the stoned ape theory right?

[386] I think it's very interesting and I think it's time for kind of a new a new world history as you may. I think because we actually are stoned sapiens.

[387] I think that this cognitive revolution that happened in Africa it's as Damant said it's not a theory it's a what is it a a theory is when there's already proof it's a hypothesis it's a hypothesis but I think that a lot speaks for this hypothesis I think it makes sense if you see that early humans were for example depicting mushrooms in drawings that these mushrooms have some kind of relevance to them and our edge which is something that Harare writes about over other homos like the neanderthals or also just monkeys large monkeys our edge was that we that we had this cognitive revolution that we had a neocortex forming and that we suddenly had an understanding about time so we're not just living in the moment where we know there's a past and there's a future so that creates a different language and the different language are more abstract more complex language than, for example, the apes.

[388] Apes can organize up to like a hundred.

[389] Then their language kind of fails them.

[390] But humans suddenly, not suddenly, I mean, this is over long periods of time, could develop a language that enabled them to form larger groups.

[391] That's how they became dominant, also dominant over other homo species like the Neanderthals.

[392] And we know today that they had these plants.

[393] at their availability.

[394] So it makes sense to imagine that actually we found maybe it was a mushroom, maybe it was Iboga, which is something still used in African societies, and which now is again being examined as the new psychoactive hot drug.

[395] It could be a mixture or some groups could have had this, others could have had that.

[396] But it seems to be pretty clear that the founding moment of our race is actually this transcendent.

[397] like suddenly you realize this moment where I'm in is not always more like there's a future there's a past that is what transcendence is so we are basically that's why I call our species this we're stone sapiens like we were stoned from the start so drugs which transferred into language into also music into rituals because we wanted to keep the drug also secret from others who are not you know from from apes or Neanderthals so rituals start existing like a person who kind of has the drugs and hands them out.

[398] So this is at the beginning of our race.

[399] I think and we were so powerful because we could develop that larger language than the apes who could only organize up until a hundred.

[400] And now we have the problem.

[401] We poor stone sapiens that we have created global problems, but we don't have a global narrative.

[402] we're falling into the Western camp, we have China, we have, like, we have, we don't have a global narrative, like our narrative usually stops within the national context, like there's the American narrative, there's the Western narrative, which also includes Europe, there's the German narrative, but there's no human global narrative, and that's what I intend to change with my book Stone Sapiens, which will be the next book and kind of conclude the trilogy of these, like how are drugs and humans kind of symbiotic?

[403] in a way.

[404] Well, there's a, for lack of a better term, there's a consciousness that exists in mushrooms.

[405] There's something that you interact with and we don't necessarily understand what's going on.

[406] But if you could imagine a lower primate interacting with a higher consciousness on a regular basis and then adapting.

[407] This is the theory of why the human brain size doubled over a period of two million years.

[408] And if you ever listen to Dennis McKenna described this, Dennis McKenna describes it brilliantly because he's an actual scientist in the way he explains the effects of psilocybin how it had you know what the effects it would have on the mind in terms of developing language and just expanding our creativity expanding our ability to see things it makes better edge detection makes you have better visual acuity makes them more more horny they're going to more likely to breed more community.

[409] There's a there's also this potential for a type of, you know, for lack of a better term, a type of mind melding, you know, there's a, there's a type of consciousness expanding energy that happens that it seems to be connected in a way that we can't measure or human beings interact with each other without words.

[410] You know, telepathine was a Exactly what they, when they first found harming, when they found some certain trees that were part of the components of ayahuasca, they try to call it telepathine.

[411] But due to the rules of scientific nomenclature, that substance had already been identified as harming.

[412] But the researchers that were taking this are saying, we are experiencing these telepathic melds.

[413] There's something that's going on with these things.

[414] And we want to get to the bottom of it.

[415] Let's call it telepathy because it imparts a type of telepathy.

[416] Well, if a trip became very interested in that question that you just articulated, what actually happens in the brain.

[417] Because that is quite hard to figure out actually how do they work and what actually changes in the brain.

[418] And there's one researcher in Zurich again in Switzerland.

[419] They're really experts on psychedelics, actually, because they didn't sign all the UN treaties.

[420] because they're like a neutral, more neutral country than others.

[421] So they actually have a little bit more freedom for research.

[422] And there is a professor called Franz Follenweider at university in Zurich.

[423] And he was able to start in the early 90s, giving his patients psilocybin and LSD and DMT.

[424] And then he put them in, like he examined their brains in brain scanners, like imaging, like high tech, you know, imaging technology.

[425] And he found that actually, you can actually measure.

[426] measure it.

[427] Or you can see the changes that happen in psychedelics.

[428] And what happens is that the so -called default mode network, that is a term that brain scientists use to describe what Freud would just would call the ego, like the center in our brain, like the boss in our brain.

[429] Like the guy, I guess it would be or the woman in our brain that like says, now I'm on the Joe Rogan podcast and everything's cool and, you know, I'm a writer, whatever.

[430] And you, like, This is like, we have always this controlling force within us.

[431] Otherwise, we would go basically insane, like, what's going on here?

[432] Is this cool?

[433] I'm in danger.

[434] You know, basically, I'm in danger.

[435] Like, there's this thing that the ghost with the rifle is going to shoot.

[436] So the default mode network makes sure that this doesn't happen, that we function, and it makes a lot of sense.

[437] And actually, under psychedelics, he could measure that this part of the brain gets a little less energy.

[438] So it's a little, it's not switched off completely.

[439] I mean, if you take a lot of psychedelics, it might.

[440] would be switched off completely, then you have what's called like a full immersion experience.

[441] But if you take a little, it's also switched off, like it gets a little less energy.

[442] And that other parts of the brain, peripheral parts that are usually like following the main guy, they can communicate more on psychedelics.

[443] So what happens in your brain is actually, it is actually a change in, you know, the brain chemistry.

[444] And what also happens is what is called the neuroplasticity is enhanced.

[445] Neurplasticity is the term for basically the brain is not obviously like a fixed, like non -moving object, like my fist or something.

[446] It's constantly kind of moving the brain, you know.

[447] And neuroplasticity describes that ability to constantly adapt to like the situation and be, flexible, make new connections, that's neuroplasticity.

[448] And he could also measure that neuroplasticity is enhanced when you take psychedelics.

[449] That's why also it could become dangerous if it's enhanced too quickly and you're not experienced.

[450] I mean, we're on the Joe Rogan experience.

[451] So we're all experienced.

[452] I hope we'll have an experienced audience.

[453] But if you're unexperienced, that could be too much, you know, then the stimulation of your brain or the change or the disruption of your day -to -day way of thinking.

[454] could be overwhelming, but if you handle it properly, it's actually, that is, I guess, what is the beneficial aspect of the psychedelic experience.

[455] You enhance neuroplasticity in a way, I don't know if becoming smarter is the right term, because what is smart, what is intelligence, but it's the fact that neuroplasticity is enhanced, and because of this kind of orthodox thought forms, like depressed people always think the same thing, like, I'm not worthy, or I can't, And, you know, depression is a loop or loops in your brain of always this.

[456] And LSD, especially psilocybin, they disrupt that because, you know, other parts of the brain suddenly come into play.

[457] And the default mode network, which has, you know, this disease of depression suddenly is not, you know, calling the shots anymore.

[458] That's why psychedelics have proven effective against depression.

[459] The first study that showed this clinical study was done in 2015, actually in America at Johns Hopkins University, that psilocybin helps against, you know, very severe depression when nothing else helps.

[460] So we know a little bit about what happens in the brain, but obviously the brain is still a black box.

[461] That's why so many scientists, when LSD came out in the late 40s and early 50s, especially in America, we're enthusiastic.

[462] They thought, finally, we have a tool with which we can, you know, shine like a torch shining into the black box of the brain.

[463] because it works in such small quantities.

[464] There was actually a lot of hope in the beginning that original enthusiasm by Sanders that I talked about when they thought we have a game changer, we have a blockbuster, everyone will become, will heal from LSD.

[465] Many scientists actually believed that.

[466] And the interesting question is, and we're making a long circle, what went wrong?

[467] Why wasn't it developed into a medicine that you can get at your dispensary, like you can get cannabis products now, for example, in the state of California.

[468] Well, you can get them here too, which is weird.

[469] Okay.

[470] You get him here, like I said, there's like different deltas.

[471] So we can get legal cannabis here.

[472] They sell it.

[473] Society is still very insecure when it comes to drugs because we have been bombarded with the drugs are horrifically dangerous.

[474] propaganda.

[475] When I was in high school was this is your brain on drugs.

[476] You know, it was just say no, Nancy Reagan.

[477] Everyone was just say no. I was also in America actually in high school.

[478] I graduated from Flint Powers Catholic High School in Michigan class of 88.

[479] And I had been taught because I was sent from Germany as like a German exchange student.

[480] I was taught before don't mix with the drug people.

[481] There will be drug people at the high school and they will approach you.

[482] and they will try to draw you in, and then you won't get out again.

[483] And I really believed that.

[484] I mean, I was like 17.

[485] Well, there are people like that.

[486] I'm sure.

[487] Look, if you fall into the opiate crowd.

[488] Yeah.

[489] If you fall into a crowd of people.

[490] I'm talking about weed now.

[491] Right.

[492] Well, weed is very different, but the problem is the blanket term, right?

[493] The blanket term of drugs.

[494] Yeah, it's a big problem.

[495] Yeah.

[496] But also, if you fall into the weed crowd in high school, it's very possible that you'll fall into a crowd of Ner Duels who will ruin their lives and they just get high all day and they wake and bake and they abuse it just like you can abuse sugar, right?

[497] Just like you can abuse alcohol.

[498] I actually think that cannabis is a dangerous drug because it is quite addictive.

[499] Yeah, it can be.

[500] Unlike LSD, LSD is not addictive.

[501] LSD is actually when the guy who invented AA, he himself had made an LSD therapy and got away from alcohol using LSD.

[502] And he wanted to incorporate LSD therapy into the AA program and then didn't do it because I guess it was pressure or whatever.

[503] We'll come to the pressure in a second.

[504] So LSD is actually a non -addictive drug.

[505] That's, for example, in Germany now we legalized cannabis.

[506] It's legal everywhere in the country.

[507] I think they should have legalized LSD and not cannabis because cannabis is actually harder to use.

[508] I think it should, I think it should be legal.

[509] I think it's good that it's legal, but I think it's a little bit of a more problematic drug actually to legalize because it's also so easy to use.

[510] But to legalize LSD, which is like, I think it should be legalized, you know, all over the globe because I think it's a brain food.

[511] That's what I think after studying it, you know.

[512] But saying this sounds like completely outrageous, you know, LSD, like so many people are afraid of it.

[513] So I hope with Tripp to take a little bit of the edge of, you know, to actually show where it comes from.

[514] And I would like to tell that story where that comes from.

[515] Yeah.

[516] If I may. Because that's the core story Because when I had found these SS records that they had used Because you asked before, was there another psychedelic substance?

[517] Yes, there was masculine.

[518] Masculin was already kind of investigated by scientists since the 20s.

[519] It was also a German, there was a German scientist called Beeringer.

[520] He was at the University of Heidelberg and he was really into masculine and he was like doing it with his students and making tests.

[521] and how does it change consciousness and what happened.

[522] So he was basically one of the pioneers of psychedelic research, you could say.

[523] So the Nazis knew about masculine, and the Nazis wanted to find a truth drug.

[524] Hitler was a paranoid person.

[525] He always thought, and it's actually true, that people are conspiring against him.

[526] There were quite a lot of assassination attempts on his life.

[527] He survived them all.

[528] But there were a lot of people who didn't like him.

[529] I mean, Germany was a totalitarian dictatorship and most people supported Hitler, but there were also people who did not.

[530] You know, there were people in the resistance, even within, you know, the army who thought he was an idiot, high -ranking officers who were like, were like a bit more brilliant than him and who knew that he was running things to the ground.

[531] So he wanted, he gave the order to find a truth drug.

[532] Like, it's the wet dream of intelligence.

[533] You give someone a substance and then you can control that.

[534] person.

[535] You can extract secrets from that person.

[536] You can kind of, you can control a person.

[537] And the Nazis, the SS, even with their torture methods, had been unable to extract all the secrets they wanted to extract from prisoners, especially Polish resistance fighters, had been very resistant, even against SS torture.

[538] Like they wouldn't say, I got the job from the British intelligence or what, But, you know, they just wouldn't talk even when you tortured them.

[539] So Hitler wanted the drug that would solve this problem.

[540] And one man that was put in charge with this is a chemist called Richard Kuhn, Richard Kuhn, who actually received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry.

[541] He was a brilliant mind, but he was a Nazi.

[542] So he didn't, like many scientists left Germany or writers, left Thomas Mann, left Germany when the Nazis took power.

[543] But some people stayed, some writer states, some scientists stayed.

[544] And this Kuhn actually became, you know, he's really working for Hitler.

[545] He was developing a nerve poison, Zarin, which was deadly for Hitler.

[546] He was, and if you worked for Hitler as a scientist, obviously, you got all the grants you need, the money you need it.

[547] You were, you know, you had a great time, basically, if you sold your soul to the devil.

[548] So Richard Kuhn was in charge with finding the truth drug.

[549] And then the interesting thing is because I was in the Novartis archive of Sandoz because I wanted to find the link between a Swiss pharmaceutical company who develops LSD and then the SS who tests it in Dachau.

[550] Like how did the SS know?

[551] And did they really test LSD also in Dachau or was it just masculine?

[552] Because they write in the reports that I then found in the US, masculine and another odorless, colorless substance was being used.

[553] And LSD is that famous odorless, colorless substance.

[554] Like I could put a drop of LSD in your coffee.

[555] You wouldn't even notice it, which is good for Sikh for intelligence service.

[556] You want to dose someone without that person knowing it.

[557] So LSD was kind of perfect.

[558] But how did the Nazis, did they actually know about LSD?

[559] Was it LSD?

[560] That was kind of what I wanted to find out.

[561] and when I was in the archive of Sandoz I wanted to find papers like did they sell LSD to the SS I was curious to find something and the archivist he was very skeptical of me because he sensed that I was onto something like he was protecting basically the archive because the archive at Sandoz is not a public archive if you go to the national archives of the United States or the federal archive of Germany it's a public archive the archivists want you to find the information.

[562] They will reveal like the find book, which like it's a database.

[563] It shows you everything that's in the archive.

[564] So it takes sometimes days or weeks to actually figure out what's all there.

[565] But you have theoretically an overview of everything that's in the archive.

[566] But a company archive like Novartis archive, there was no find book.

[567] The archive is said to me, just tell me what you're looking for and then I will find it for you, which is basically shit because in a way you have to it's basically under his control the documents that he gives to you you know you have no you don't even know what's in the archive behind that guy sitting in front of you but and I wanted to see like I knew that Albert Hoffman wasn't a Nazi like I had known a lot about Albert Hoffman and he I never heard anything about him having Nazi connections like giving LSD to Richard Kuhn or something but I wanted to see what his boss Stoll, the one we talked about before, who had the whole, like the Urgot god, like who was this guy?

[568] Because he as the CEO called the shots for Sandoz, the pharmaceutical company.

[569] And then the archivist didn't want me really to see these papers.

[570] I could sense that.

[571] And I wanted to come again to the archive.

[572] How did you sense that?

[573] Well, the first time I was there, he said, why is everyone always so interested in LSD?

[574] You know, we have so many beautiful products here.

[575] And there was like a show.

[576] with all the products that Sandoz has made it.

[577] LSD wasn't one of them.

[578] I said LSD is actually missing from that showcase here.

[579] And he said, well, it was never a product.

[580] I said, it was a product.

[581] It actually had a name.

[582] It was called De Luzid.

[583] That was the brand name of LSD.

[584] It existed, you know.

[585] And he's like, yeah, you know, but we are not so, you know, it's illegal.

[586] So they don't, they have a difficult relationship with LSD.

[587] And what the only thing he gave me were the original lab books of Albert Hoffman.

[588] And it's very easy to.

[589] to flatter like it stuns you like if you're interested in LSD you see like the original lab book you see like his handwriting when he for the first time takes LSD and then his handwriting like he can't hold the pen anymore and you see like this line on the paper that's exciting you know yeah but it's not new you know people have seen that before but so he kind of tricks you into like you see that you're saying oh great thank you bye bye like after you go home but then I was on the Swiss mountain I was actually visiting a scientist that had research this ergot producing and in Emmental, I visited this guy on the mountain, he showed me the form of fields of Sandoz.

[590] And then I had the idea, I must go back to the archive and look at the papers of the CEO because the CEO calls the shots.

[591] Why wasn't the CEO able to turn this potential game changer into a lucrative medicine?

[592] What went wrong was probably on the CEO level of the company, not on like the chemist level of the company.

[593] So I wrote an email to the archive, He said, I'm going to come back tomorrow, and I want to look at the papers of the CEO.

[594] And then he wrote back to me, well, sorry, tomorrow I have too much work.

[595] He cannot come anymore, kind of like that.

[596] But I just showed up.

[597] I just showed up at the archive, and he opened.

[598] And he said, well, you're here.

[599] I don't have any time.

[600] And I said, well, I'm here.

[601] You know, it's an archive.

[602] I can use it.

[603] And then I was sitting there and I was thinking, what can I do?

[604] And I actually, at the time, I had some LSD with me because I was already, I was already getting it for my mother.

[605] So I had it with me and I said to him, I suddenly had an idea and I said to him, have you ever actually seen LSD?

[606] And he's like, in a Swiss act, I'm like, no, it's illegal.

[607] I have not seen it.

[608] And then I asked him, do you want to see it?

[609] And he said, sure, I would like to see it.

[610] But where could I see it?

[611] It's, no one has it anymore.

[612] And I said, well, here, here you go.

[613] This is LSD.

[614] And he's like studying it.

[615] He was quite interesting.

[616] Suddenly it became interested like, oh, this is actually LSD.

[617] That's how it looks.

[618] And the LSD I had received, had printed on it, like these papers, the old logo of Sandoz.

[619] So like the chemist who had made this actually in Basel, it was made in the black lab obviously, kind of made a joke and put like the logo of Sondos on it.

[620] And he said, this is the logo of our old company?

[621] How is this possible?

[622] And I said, well, maybe it's like an homage by the chemist who made these.

[623] I said, do you want one?

[624] And he said, What do you mean?

[625] I said, well, I give you one as a gift, you know, you've been so helpful to me. And he's like, oh, this, but this is, yes, okay, I'll take one.

[626] And I gave him a trip.

[627] And what is the dose?

[628] That was like 100 micrograms, which is quite strong, you know, I said to him.

[629] It's legit.

[630] I said to him, take it like when you're in the beautiful Swiss mountains.

[631] Like you want to walk, you know, then maybe it's a good.

[632] good time and he's like interested yeah and then he gave it back to me he said i can't i can't for legal reasons i don't think i can accept this i said okay fine took it back and then he said but is there something you want to see maybe today in the archive because he was you know we had we had formed a connection suddenly right right right and i said yeah actually i would be interested in seeing the the paper of the CEO of ator stol he said that's not a problem at all and he just went and he brought me the folder and as i'm looking through the folder i I can see that there's one man that Stoll was communicating with all through his career.

[633] And that one man, Stoll himself, had learned under Wilsstetter.

[634] Wiltzstetter was the Jewish -German master of biochemistry, who was later, he had to leave Germany.

[635] You know, the Nazis were prosecuting him also because he was Jewish.

[636] And Wiltzscheta was this genius who also received the Nobel Prize and who had found out that Stoll's idea from potent plants you extract and then you make medicines from plants basically because plants are very powerful, obviously.

[637] So Wilsteader was like the scientific father of Stoll.

[638] And Stoll had one other prodigy child.

[639] And that was Richard Kuhn, who by then had been the leading Nazi biochemist.

[640] So Kuhn and Stoll, which I saw then in the letters in front of me, had been best friends because they had the same.

[641] They had had the same, like, you know, teacher.

[642] They had exchanged already in the 20s, all their research in the 30s, especially the Ergod research.

[643] Kuhn was very interested in it.

[644] So now he has the job by Hitler to find the truth drug.

[645] And then Stolz says, we found this almost magical substance that even in microgram dosages has this strong effect on the mind.

[646] And Kuhn obviously became very interested in it.

[647] and I found a letter maybe we can pull that one up I don't know if you can find it from 1943 October Wercun and I found this in the archive this was the smoking gun basically Wercun thanks Stoll for sending Ergotamin which is the precursor to LSD it's like from Ergotamine you do one step and then you have LSD and we received Ergotamine in October 1943 from the Swiss company and then you know the Nazis had their hand on LSD and then it becomes very interesting what happens when the Americans find out about that because when the Americans liberated Germany from national socialism when they won the war basically certain units had attached to them the so -called Alsos unit A -L -S -O -S -O -S -O -E and the Alsos unit was responsible for finding German nuclear scientists and interviewing them about their research for the nuclear bomb in Nazi Germany because Nazi Germany was also trying to develop a nuclear weapon.

[648] And the Americans thought they're probably quite far ahead because they're good in science, like everything they do, they fucking rock, which in this case actually probably wasn't true.

[649] I don't think the Nazis were so advanced.

[650] It's still a bit obscure, like how far the Nazis, really were with nuclear technology.

[651] But this Altsos was in place, and the second job of Altsos was to find out about biochemical weapons because they also thought, rightly so, that Hitler had biochemical weapons.

[652] So one of their first scientists they interviewed was Richard Kuhn, because Richard Kuhn was a leading Nazi biochemist.

[653] So in the spring of 1945 and liberated Heidelberg after World War II, Kuhn is being interviewed.

[654] And for Kuhn, it's a question of, will I cooperate with Americans or will I go to the Nuremberg trial as like a war criminal?

[655] Because he could have ended up on the bench for developing Sarin, a nerve poison.

[656] So he decided to rather extend his career.

[657] He later came to America, I was teaching in America.

[658] So he told them about LSD.

[659] He said we were very interested in LSD.

[660] And those experiments in Dachau could not be finished because there was not enough time.

[661] Dachau was already liberated.

[662] They were in the middle of finding out if I give.

[663] a psychedelic to a prisoner, can I extract his secrets, can I fully control him?

[664] These tests take a bit of time, you know, you have to do it with several, you know, you don't do it like in a day.

[665] So these tests were not finished yet, but these findings then were very interesting to the American military.

[666] Because after the war, what started immediately the next war, the Cold War against the Soviet Union, which was what the then CIA was founded, which CIA called the CIA.

[667] director Dallas, he called it.

[668] This is brain warfare.

[669] It's a totally new type of war.

[670] And we have to get ahead of them.

[671] And they probably are working on brainwashing techniques.

[672] So we have to be ready to defend ourselves against the Soviet onslaught with their brainwashing techniques.

[673] So the Americans learned actually a lot from the Nazis.

[674] I once met in Florida on the beach, together with my father, an SS Marine that was in the 80s when I was an exchange student in Flint, Michigan.

[675] We took a vacation, met my German parents in Florida, and we spoke with this Marine, and he said, yeah, we learned so much from the SS.

[676] And it's true, you know, the SS, the German system was a very, was an evil system, obviously, but it was a very functional system.

[677] You know, there was a lot to be learned from them in terms of warfare, you know.

[678] So the Americans, because the Nazis were so interested in this truth drug, thought this must be, you know, this must be interesting.

[679] We have to look at this.

[680] So they started now, first the American military, then the CIA started now to investigate, can LSD actually be the truth drug?

[681] Can it be like a pharmaceutical weapon?

[682] So this is actually what went wrong.

[683] so what went wrong was the Swiss CEO sending samples to the German Nazi biochemist from him the knowledge goes to the American military and then intelligence apparatus that LSD could be abused as a weapon this is what really put LSD on the wrong foot in a way because there was also at the same time in the early 50s a lot of hopeful research at universities in America, like brain scientists where they were looking at LISC.

[684] It wasn't illegal yet, you know, it was an interesting thing but then the CIA took over the military research.

[685] First it was the U .S. military.

[686] They had a professor at Harvard University called Beecher.

[687] Beecher was like the drug expert of the American Army.

[688] He had also been in the war and then he, like he looked at the SS reports from Dachau and he made a report called report on ego depressive drugs, which he sent to Washington.

[689] So he was kind of the knowledgeable guy that would interpret, you know, how could psychedelic molecules be used as drugs?

[690] And then when in 47, the CIA was founded, basically the CIA took over this truth drug research from the, from the military.

[691] And then Beecher was sending his reports to the CIA.

[692] This was done by a guy called Sidney Gottlieb.

[693] I don't know if you've heard that name.

[694] He was the head of M .K. Ultra.

[695] M .K. Delta is basically a program first to see whether LSD could be used as a weapon.

[696] And Godlieb traveled to Basel, Switzerland, because he had heard that Sondos was also selling LSD to the other side of the Iron Curtain.

[697] There was rumor that the Soviet Union had purchased like 20 million dosages of LSD.

[698] So he flew to Basel with a suitcase full of cash and put it on the table of Stoll, the CEO, and said, I want the whole world supply of LSD.

[699] I'm hereby buying the world supply of LSD, which was, he said, your supply, like his intelligence, told him that Sandoz had produced something.

[700] Like, I don't know.

[701] It's in the book.

[702] I forgot the number, like, four kilograms of LSD, and he said, I want to buy the whole, you know, four kilograms quite a lot, you know, because it's already potent in microagum dosages.

[703] Stoy said, well, we only made 400 grams so far.

[704] They hadn't even made that much.

[705] But so he bought the 400 grams, and he set a mechanism in place that Stoll would always inform, Stoll would not sell to the other side of the iron curtain.

[706] That's what Sondos had to basically assure him.

[707] Of course, the payback is Sondos can still sell all the other medicines in America doesn't have problems with the FDA and the American, you know, that's the pressure.

[708] And then, like, Godley takes, you know, the 400 gram back to the states and it's now from now on always informed when like a scientist in an American university acquires LSD from Zandos because they would not sell it openly in the beginning they would only give it away basically to scientists they were still in the product development phase because they still weren't sure what can LSD like what do we write on the package basically?

[709] What is what's the indication?

[710] So Gottlie was basically in the driving chair of LSD at that time He got all the information from Basel, Switzerland, who had LSD in the country.

[711] He had the most LSD.

[712] And then he had the idea to really look at how LSD can be used to manipulate people, basically.

[713] That was like the big goal.

[714] And that's not an easy thing to achieve.

[715] And the way he did it was he let all the universities in the country, I think, over like, over six.

[716] 60 institutions, like, you know, the big universities of this big country, he let them all, you know, in their special, you know, departments investigate LSD.

[717] But these tests are expensive.

[718] And what Godlib, the idea Godlib had was, university tests are often funded by foundations, let's say the Rockefeller Foundation.

[719] Like a university He wants to make some pharmaceutical test series that goes over two years and involves all these people that, you know, have to be paid.

[720] And it's expensive.

[721] Like it costs, let's say, $200 ,000 to make, like, one serious clinical test.

[722] So that money comes from the Rockefeller Foundation, for example.

[723] And the money first goes from the CIA to the Rockefeller Foundation.

[724] So he used not only the Rockefeller Foundation, but also the Rockefeller Foundation, but other foundations as, like, go between.

[725] So he gave them money, and they would finance research done in universities, which are supposed to be, I guess, neutral, like just trying to figure out, like, what is, you know, science is, you know, you don't want a CIA guy to finance your science and then kind of manipulate through that money, how your research is being done, and especially all the results going back to the people who, you know, bring the money.

[726] So that he was, he was, he was, He was very efficient in setting up this program, which then I guess was called MK Ultra.

[727] But that's also, that's, that's, that's how LSD really, that's what really went wrong with LSD.

[728] MK