Drugs, like wars, are dangerous. The German author Ernst Jünger feasted on both. As a young soldier in the Kaiser’s army he fought furiously in the trenches, before burying himself under mountains of Weimar Berlin’s cocaine. As he aged, Jünger’s taste in chemical delicacies grew more refined: hashish, morphine, peyote. His novel Heliopolis (1949) is set in a dystopian future city where a scientist defies its miseries through drug-induced mental voyages. Jünger coined the term “psychonaut” to describe the character who “captured dreams, just as others seem to pursue butterflies with nets”. But how could the psychonaut uncover dreamlike truths?
The method had a formula: C₂₀H₂₅N₃O, or lysergic acid diethylamide — LSD. This unbelievably potent, ego-dissolving, madness-teasing drug was discovered, synthesized and first ingested by Jünger’s friend and spiritual mentee, the Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann. While Jünger was one of the greatest artists to experiment and enjoy the drug — JG Ballard tried it once in 1967, said it opened up a “vent into hell” and refused to take anything stronger than a whiskey and soda ever again — it is Hofmann, not Jünger, who is the hero of Norman Ohler’s entertaining, if occasionally melancholic, study of LSD, Tripped: Nazi Germany, the CIA and the Dawn of the Psychedelic Age.
Ohler has experimented with drugs before. He is the author of Blitzed: Drugs in Nazi Germany. In this rampant account of cocaine, heroin, morphine and, above all, methamphetamine-addled Nazis, including a truly pepped-up Adolf Hitler, Ohler made obscure knowledge popular. Blitzed was controversial with more traditional historians. The way Ohler told it, the Nazis were just colossally spangled and the invasion of France in 1940 was powered by pills, not Panzers.
Tripped is a less provocative tale. Here we find gentle Hofmann, not ranting Hitler, sex schemes conducted by the CIA, not the blood-drenched SS, and trippy LSD, not terrifying methamphetamines. And of course, it would not be complete without accounts of tripping. The first is Hofmann’s — Friday, April 16, 1943. “With my eyes closed (I found the daylight unpleasantly harsh),” Hofmann wrote in his lab notes, “fantastical images of extraordinary plasticity and with an intense kaleidoscope-like play of colors pressed in on me without cease.”
The Nazis were just colossally spangled and the invasion of France in 1940 was powered by pills, not Panzers.
Three days later Hofmann ups the dose, “a massive trip” begins — Ohler’s account of this surreal moment is funny and moving — and he emerges with the revelation that lysergic acid diethylamide was the “most potent substance heretofore known”. Extraordinary, fearful powers were contained within LSD. And over the next quarter of a century those powers were alternately celebrated and feared.
Ohler begins from a place of bafflement. How did LSD, considered “the most promising pharmaceutical development of all time”, with the potential to relieve dementia, depression and anxiety disorders, end up disreputable, derided and banned across every time zone?
Enter the Nazis, yet again. As the war swung towards the Allies, and plots against Hitler intensified, the Nazis had begun to study the use of psychedelics like LSD as potential truth serums for interrogations. Tripped explains how this Nazi taint led the CIA and the US government to believe the drug was a dangerous weapon rather than a potentially revolutionary medicine.
How did LSD, considered “the most promising pharmaceutical development of all time,” end up disreputable, derided and banned across every time zone?
By the end of the 1940s the Americans believed that the Soviet Union might want to weaponize the drug. The spooks thought that LSD had vast potential as a “psychotomimetic” weapon: “a substance that made it possible to look at the psyche as if under a magnifying glass”. That would be incalculably useful during the Cold War, a “fight for the brains of the people of the world”.
In the 1950s, the CIA carried out “the most systematic research that had ever been conducted in the field of human consciousness”, with LSD playing a significant role at every turn. This is a story of front organizations, dodgy funds, bizarre experiments, assassinations, scientists, magicians, hookers and spies. In one instance, during the infamous “MKUltra” program, the CIA set up a soundproofed, camera-stuffed pad in New York’s bohemian Greenwich Village. It was a vantage from which the agency bruiser Sidney Gottlieb could “secretly test LSD — not on his own colleagues [he’d already done that] or at universities, but out in the wild.”
What happened in the safe house “remains shrouded in darkness” — all the recordings and photographs were destroyed in 1973. They also played dirty games on the West Coast, with another CIA apartment set up in San Francisco. Another unorthodox mission, code-named “Operation Midnight Climax”, used prostitutes to lure individuals into the CIA’s net, where they could be dosed with “substances they didn’t even know existed”. As Ohler stacks up these morally queasy missions, you start to wonder what the CIA is getting up to now.
Framed initially as a therapeutic medicine, then used as a weapon, LSD finally became a narcotic in the 1960s. Under the dubious banner of Timothy Leary, the bearded, wall-eyed Harvard professor who urged the children of America to “Turn on, tune in, drop out”, acid, along with magic mushrooms, became synonymous with the woozy countercultural moment. Being a psychonaut became hip.
Tripped is a story of front organizations, dodgy funds, bizarre experiments, assassinations, scientists, magicians, hookers and spies.
When Allen Ginsberg took shrooms at Leary’s house, he ripped his clothes off and attempted to run through the streets of Boston to spread the good news: “Leary held him back — it was winter and freezing cold outside — Ginsberg grabbed the nearest telephone and tried to call the US president, the general secretary of the USSR, and Mao Zedong.” If only politicians could get high, chill out and learn to love each other as much as people off their nuts on mushrooms do! But Ginsberg’s calls went unanswered. Lyndon B Johnson did not want to get high. The US government, unnerved by the emerging youth culture, declared LSD an illegal substance in 1966.
For Ohler this is a moment when history failed to turn, when the drug’s potential was ignored. LSD and associated psychedelic drugs do show promise as treatments for mental and physical afflictions. His argument will please old-school hippies and the growing numbers of investors who see psychedelics as their next golden pharmaceutical payday. The moneymen and tech chief executives are moving hard into psychedelic therapy, and what Ohler grandly calls “the specter of legalization” looms over the West. Far from being a dropout solution to the ills of our politics, psychedelics are now being touted as work-optimizing substances.
It’s hard to imagine a field more promising, and also more susceptible to quackery and charlatanism. Tripped showcases the fearful life-giving and death-dealing powers concealed within psychedelics. Ernst Jünger was alive to these awesome potentialities. He would, perhaps, find it amusing to see where they have ended up today, with microdosed LSD being put forward in trite ways to optimize productivity. The psychonauts are gone, but their drugs will be with us for many years to come.
Will Lloyd is a reporter at The Sunday Times