Artsy Shot: A psychedelic Explosion
A post by Martin Banweg
Executive Summary
Norman Ohler's book "The Strongest Stuff" traces the history of LSD as a complex web of science, politics, and culture. LSD appears not just as an intoxicant, but as a medical tool, a potential weapon, and a driver of social upheaval. Our review shows, among other things, how closely research, intelligence agencies, and counterculture were intertwined – from the laboratories at Sandoz to CIA experiments and the hippie movement of the 1960s. At the same time, it becomes clear that many of the narratives about LSD prevalent today are either superficial or distorted. The central question is what role psychedelic substances can play today: between scientific reevaluation, cultural heritage, and medical potential. A clear recommendation!
☝🏻 Disclaimer: Please be sure to observe our risk warnings.
"Battle of Materials in Emmental": From medical natural product research to weapon of war to cultural revolution – and back again.
In The Strongest Stuff. Psychedelic Drugs: Weapon, Intoxicant, Medicine, Norman Ohler dedicates himself to the history of LSD. He reconstructs in a fascinating and concise manner the personal and institutional networks that vied over the psychedelic: to spread or prevent it, to research it or to manufacture a weapon from it.
"Ergot means profit-maximized agriculture. [...] In this respect, too, it has nothing to do with the hippie ideals that were associated with LSD in the 60s," quotes Norman Ohler the Swiss expert Dr. Beat Bächi. Ohler's popular science examination of LSD, which he presents with The Strongest Stuff – Psychedelic Drugs: Weapon, Intoxicant, Medicine, clears up some judgments and prejudices surrounding the most famous psychedelic.
The insights collected by Ohler from the archives of Novartis and co., the personal networks from Arthur Stoll to Aldous Huxley, are so impressive in their content and so concise in their form that one can hardly put the book down. Ohler succeeds in writing a nuanced, yet never boring, history of LSD that does not moralize, but nevertheless takes a clear political stance: that the War on Drugs was and still is an unscientific and inhumane project.
A story that is more than just intoxication – why "The Strongest Stuff" must be read
The Strongest Stuff is Ohler's second non-fiction book dealing with the history of psychoactive substances. In The Total Rush. Drugs in the Third Reich, published in 2015, Ohler focused on the research into and use of drugs, such as the famous amphetamine Pervitin, by the National Socialists. In The Strongest Stuff, too, the Nazis play a significant, albeit not the main, role. The book does not begin, as one might expect, in Switzerland, but in bombed-out Berlin in 1945: There, a young Arthur Giuliani, employed by the American Federal Bureau of Narcotics, tries to get a grip on the booming black market for narcotics. Giuliani increasingly relies on the help of the old rulers, whose restrictive drug policy would soon become a model for the entire world. But the Nazis did not merely (albeit posthumously, after their downfall) hinder the development of LSD – they also promoted it during the Third Reich. But one thing at a time:
Between Laboratory, War and Coincidence
Ohler traces the history of LSD from its origins to the present. He fought his way through the archives of Novartis (then Sandoz), the employer of the famous discoverer of LSD: Albert Hofmann. Ohler describes that Sandoz did not intensify its research on ergot out of charity, nor in psychedelic truth-seeking or meaning-seeking. Sandoz's CEO Arthur Stoll and his chemist Hofmann promised themselves a variety of profitable medicinal innovations from ergot: In 1918, Stoll had isolated ergotamine from ergot, which was previously reviled as a highly toxic pest, and used it to produce a uterine-contracting and hemostatic drug. Hofmann's research built on this success and even surpassed it with the development of the drug Methergin. But Hofmann continued to search and try. He also undertook self-experiments, the most famous of which took place on April 19, 1943, and went down in history as bicycle day. Ohler's descriptions of these self-experiments, in which he also relies on Hofmann's protocols, are likely among the most amusing passages in the book.
How the strongest stuff came into being in the first place
The trail of LSD, however, leads not only to the sunny cycle paths along the Rhine, but also across the border to Germany. CEO Stoll maintained contact there with Richard Kuhn, then still the young director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Medical Research. In the early 1940s, Kuhn was a loyal National Socialist and not only researched weapons of war, but also ordered, as Ohler can show based on original documents, 5 times 0.1 g of ergotamine nitrate, from which LSD could be synthesized. It is highly likely that the Nazis at Dachau, in their search for a truth serum, not only tested mescaline, but also LSD.
However, LSD was never mentioned by name in the Nazi documents, and the pharmacological documents were removed by American agents (the Central Intelligence Agency, CIA, did not yet exist) before the Nuremberg Trials as part of Operation Alsos. The Americans wanted to prevent the Nazis' knowledge of the possibilities of a truth drug from falling into the hands of the new enemy – the Soviet Union. But even they initially had no idea that the Germans had researched LSD. Only in the course of the hype surrounding LSD in the 1950s, when it was initially touted as a therapeutic miracle drug (as Ohler also shows: not without reason!), did Harvard professor Henry K. Beecher, who knew about the Nazi experiments, become aware of LSD and, in a sense, 'put two and two together'.
From research project to weapon: When the strongest stuff fell into the hands of intelligence agencies
Beecher was captivated by the prevailing zeitgeist of McCarthyism and the paranoid hunt for alleged or actual communist spies and agitators at home. In the Korean War, the moral panic of brainwashing also gripped the American public: Had China drugged the American pilots shot down in Korea and brainwashed them? Allen Dulles, head of the newly founded CIA, then initiated the battle for minds with the MK Ultra program. He tried to be faster than the powers of the Eastern Bloc in the (supposed) race for the truth serum. Beecher's work on the search for a truth serum, which was intended to make communist agents talk, was continued in the notorious project.
Ohler dedicates several chapters to the instrumentalization of LSD by the CIA during MK Ultra. It is to Ohler's credit that he also describes the banality of this inhumane intelligence project. The chapters on MK Ultra are certainly the most exciting part of the book: The descriptions of psychic driving, in which people were tortured for days and weeks under the influence of LSD with repetitive mantras, are as terrifying as it is almost comical that the CIA used a magician(!) and his sleight of hand tricks to administer LSD to unsuspecting test subjects (some of whom were their own colleagues!).
Counterculture, Freedom, and Loss of Control: LSD and the 60s
Some doubts remain about Ohler's vague construction of connections between John F. Kennedy's assassination and his possible use of LSD. As exciting as the speculations are, they suggest too much certainty: Had JFK become uncomfortable for the CIA because, influenced by weed and acid, he wanted to cool down the Cold War even further?
Ohler's great merit, regardless, is also to offer an antidote to overly naive conspiracy myths about MK Ultra. For example, he shows how simply and, as mentioned, banally the CIA steered scientific research in its direction: It simply financed unsuspecting researchers through newly founded institutes. While they thought they were raising funds for research into therapeutic, medical psychopharmaceuticals, they inadvertently and incidentally provided results for psychological warfare.
However, LSD is not, as Frank Zappa polemicized against the hippie movement, a CIA project. Because even programs like MK Ultra have unintended side effects. They are exposed to the entropy of the social. The psychedelic cat was out of the bag and the counterculture, which was directed against the nuclear family, wage labor, and the Vietnam War, was in full swing. John Lennon therefore sarcastically said that one should actually thank the CIA for putting LSD into circulation (which the CIA, and Ohler's book shows this, actually did not do).
Between Hype and Prohibition
LSD thus enjoyed great popularity beyond American intelligence agencies. From the 1950s onwards, the number of scientific publications skyrocketed: more than a thousand (!) between 1950 and 1960, as Ohler emphasizes. After a famous report in LIFE Magazine about Magic Mushrooms, all of Hollywood was hooked on a hype around psychedelics. Among the prominent advocates of LSD was, for example, the acting legend Cary Grant, who publicly enthusiastically discussed his regular, therapeutic consumption. This is also probably why neither researchers nor the public in the 1950s and early 1960s found it strange that research on LSD and psychedelics was funded by new public institutions – MK Ultra notwithstanding, PsyOp aside.
Why the strongest stuff lost its credibility
Ohler extensively examines the life of psychologist Timothy Leary, who significantly contributed to this popularity. Initially, Leary was a professor at Harvard. He was even said to be somewhat boring. After coming into contact with psychedelics, Leary enthusiastically proselytized to students, friends, and acquaintances, increasingly gaining the status of, one might almost say, an LSD pope. In his euphoria, he ordered 100 grams of LSD and 25 kilograms of psilocybin from Sandoz. The initial joy of Hofmann and his colleagues soon turned into worry and doubt: Under pressure from the authorities, the order was finally canceled. Leary soon after lost his professorship.
Leary's zeal and his self-aggrandizement, which ultimately cost him his job, turned even his friendly colleagues against him. They feared that Leary could jeopardize the scientific work on LSD, which was booming at the time. They were right: on October 6, 1966, LSD was banned in the USA. Leary certainly wasn't solely to blame; and in any case, only a comparatively small amount. Ohler shows, however, how susceptible the psychedelic scene is to esotericism, grifting, and charlatanry. It constantly risks shooting itself in the foot and losing its credibility. It is telling that the modern Western or North American cultural history of psilocybin in the 20th century begins with an invented pseudo-traditional ritual and its reportage in LIFE Magazine.
Return of research: What role LSD could play again today
In the epilogue, which is essentially a chapter of its own, Ohler shows that this misconception could be corrected. This does not require an elitist restriction of the use of psychedelics to shamans, priests, intellectuals and philosopher kings, as Aldous Huxley, for example, demanded (Mark Fisher in Acid Communism rightly emphasized the democratization of psychedelic experiences as a success of the psychedelic counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s). It only requires an unbiased, but nevertheless strictly scientific clarification of the risks and possibilities of consuming psychedelics. And this is now being actively researched again.
In recent psychedelic research, as Ohler notes, it appears that LSD may reactivate 5HT2A receptors, which are particularly affected in cases of dementia. Ohler's book offers hope that research building on Hofmann's groundbreaking discovery may soon be able to counteract terrible and deadly neurodegenerative diseases. Ohler's autobiographical chapters about his mother's dementia are particularly impressive. It is to be hoped that Ohler is right in his assumption about the medical power of LSD, and that "drop days" may one day dawn for those affected by dementia and their relatives.
More than a book about LSD: Why "The Strongest Stuff" is a key to understanding our time
The Strongest Stuff impresses with its construction of a network of individuals who were instrumental in the cultural, medical, and political success or temporary failure of this psychedelic. Ohler draws a common thread between Stoll and Hoffman, the Nazis and the CIA, Harvard and hippies. In addition, The Strongest Stuff fascinates with a multitude of interwoven anecdotes. Many may not know that research with and about LSD laid one of the many foundations of modern neurobiology: A lecture by Harvard professor Max Rinkel on a series of tests with LSD at the annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association advanced the thesis of a biochemical rather than 'electronic' mode of action of the brain. The brief digression into Hofmann's own ethnological research (not, as Ohler mistakenly writes, ethnographic research: it would only be that if Hofmann himself had been there!) on the ancient Eleusinian Mysteries also provides insights into the millennia-old history of intoxication. And incidentally, the reader learns how difficult and at the same time exciting working in an archive can actually be!
With The Strongest Stuff, Ohler has succeeded in writing a popular science history of LSD in the best sense of the word. Even aficionados will learn a lot of new things here and see old things in a new light. Ohler writes entertainingly, without being flippant; critically, without moralizing; enlightening and thorough, without ever becoming boring. That this is a clear recommendation should be beyond question!
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