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