No Way Out
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No Way Out
Psychedelics: From Mind Control to Mind Expansion with Norman Ohler
In this intriguing episode of "No Way Out," we explore the multifaceted world of psychedelics, emphasizing LSD's historical context, its paradoxical effects against the intended mind control, and its profound cultural impact. We begin with Norman Ohler's insights into Nazi Germany's foray into drug use and how this dark heritage influenced American intelligence agendas, specifically the CIA’s MK-Ultra program. As the discussion unfolds, the irony of LSD as a tool for mind liberation, rather than control, is highlighted, emphasizing the unforeseen creative explosion it precipitated in the 1960s counter-culture, notably influencing figures like Timothy Leary and impacting musicians and the broader cultural milieu.
We delve into personal stories such as the poignant connection of LSD to family experiences with Alzheimer's, contrasting it with public narratives like Nixon’s bizarre encounter with Elvis Presley. The episode takes a philosophical turn as it discusses the flow state shared by skiing, and the potential transformative effects of psychedelics.
Takeaways from this expansive conversation include understanding the complex layers of psychedelic history, its potential therapeutic benefits, the ethical quandaries posed by government-sponsored drug experiments, and ultimately, how substances like LSD can dramatically reframe our perceptions of reality and authority. This episode not only educates on the historical scope of psychedelics but also encourages a deeper reflection on human consciousness and the societal structures that aim to manipulate it.
Norman Ohler on Wikipedia
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Tripped: Nazi Germany, the CIA, and the Dawn of the Psychedelic Age
Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich
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So a few weeks ago, mark, I was walking through the airport and I came across this book Tripped. It really caught my attention. I grabbed it, bought it, read it on the flight. It's about Nazi Germany, the CIA and the dawn of the psychedelic age Fantastic history about where LSD comes from. And I want to point out, before we go any further, we're not here to talk about the recreational use of psychedelics. We want to talk about one key center point around what you and I talk about all the time, and that is machines don't fight wars. Humans do, and they use their mind. And we get that from John Boyd.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:So our guest today is the author, norman Ohler. He's here with us from Berlin today. We want to welcome him to no Way Out and get some great insights about not only his book but his background in looking at things a little bit differently. His research also includes some lookbacks at Hitler and some potentialities there with different types of drugs. So, norman, welcome from Berlin. Hope you're doing well and you've already met mark, you've already met us. Uh, just want to open up with you and turn it over to you and say uh, any thoughts on, uh, on your book, how well is it going?
Norman Ohler:and let's start there well, first of all, thanks for having me on your podcast. I'm very happy to share some thoughts with you today, and if we come't come up with any but usually our brain does so let's just see where it goes. The book Tripped it's my let me count seventh book. Four of them are in English One novel and three non-fiction books. The book Tripped is a little bit of a special book because it has personal. It comes from a personal story which is a story within my family, um, my mother being, um being sick with alzheimer's disease and my father and my mother and me being, and my sister also being somewhat helpless and how to treat this dreadful disease.
Norman Ohler:And me personally. I have been interested in LSD, actually for self-discovery but also for recreational usage, for quite a long time, but I became interested in the scientific or in the neurological aspects of it only recently, about two years ago, and I had read a study by an American startup company that low doses of LSD might help against Alzheimer, and I discussed this. I showed the study to my father, who was a former quite a high judge in germany, so for him the idea of giving his wife an illegal drug is not natural, uh, but he he also found the study interesting and he asked me if lsd is maybe a good medicine, why is it not in the pharmacies? Uh, very, you know, rational question. And I said I will actually research this because I was also interested. What in the early years of lsd like long before the 60s when lsd the illegal lsd scene exploded in america? I mean, lsd was a company product and was to be on the market as a mental health, uh medicine. So what happened? That it didn't and that kind of sent me on my path.
Norman Ohler:And then, when I had researched the story, which is the book trip, I came back with it to my father and he, being a former judge, always is convinced by the by a good story. Because he says in the courtroom you can't really know. You know, usually you don't know what's the truth. You, you, you, you look, you listen to the story and the best you know if the story sounds truthful or the story sounds right and you believe in it and you follow it. And he thought that the my story of lsd that I came up in my during my research in several archives in germany, switzerland and america sounded right and he actually decided to then discuss it with my mother, his wife and they decided to then use LSD against her disease and the results were and are actually quite good. And they're only the results within my family.
Norman Ohler:But for me, you know, at that point of writing the book that was, that was already something that a book that I wrote had such a personal uh effect on.
Norman Ohler:You know very close people to me, so tripped for me already as a success, even if no one would read it.
Norman Ohler:But actually also people read it and I get even emails by other you know relatives of, you know spouses of someone who has lsd, for example, asking me where can I get LSD, which of course I cannot supply because I'm a writer, I'm not an LSD chemist or distributor.
Norman Ohler:But the communication with the readers is intense with this book and in America the resonance has been actually the biggest in all of the countries and I think this is because America does have a huge mental health crisis. Obviously it also does have, you know, particular groups of people, like a very large veterans movement which you know probably has a large quantity of trauma problems, trauma diseases where LSD might also help, and it also has a big hedonistic psychedelic scene, I would imagine, because it is the largest Western country where these drugs have been used in the last decades, even though they are illegal. So for all of these reasons, the resonance in America, which is also probably the country that suffers the most from the war on drugs, being the country that invented the war on drugs, you know the response has been quite good and I'm very happy to engage with my American audience.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:This is fantastic. Right now, I want to touch on a few points. Here in the US, the numbers are between 22 and 44 veterans take their lives every day due to either mental health issues or something associated with that. That's just not good. What's happening as a result is that veterans are going overseas to take care of their PTSD, their TBI, their anxiety or stress through the use of psychedelic assisted therapies. Right, Because it's not legal here in the US.
Norman Ohler:Where do?
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:they go Overseas. That's all I can say right now. Anywhere it's legal. There are countries where it is legal to use it or semi-legal to use it. We are seeing a resurgence or not resurgence, but a movement in the US to legalize things like MDMA. Potentially the legal, I believe, ketamine is legal in some states it depends on where you are. But this is exactly how we became aware of the psychedelic assisted therapy movement.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Again, we're not promoting the recreational use of psychedelics. I mean, that's not what we're here to talk about. We know that happens, but that's not what we're aiming for at the moment. So we do have that crisis here in the US. It's a full body crisis, either, driven by the food we eat, the medicines that we're putting in our body, the SSRIs that are given out to, you know, by psychiatrists and psychologists, to folks who are suffering through anxiety.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:So the way we want to shape this I think we want to shape this now is this war on drugs that you brought up earlier was a way for, I'll just say, an entity to suppress information or access to something that could provide you know, provide people healing Right, and I do believe that we're going to see that happen again by other agencies or other organizations that are going to want to suppress information like this because it will affect their business, it'll affect the way they govern, it will do so many things there. So there's a lot to unpack from this, including the story of your mother with Alzheimer's. We understand there's research going on that here as well, you know, with the use of psychedelic assisted therapies, either Ibogaine, 5-mu or DMT, lsd, psilocybin and more. So, norman, I don't know where you want to begin on that, but there's so many directions we can go. I just want to hear your thoughts on what I share with you.
Norman Ohler:Well, when I was researching in the company archive of Novartis which is one of the biggest pharmaceutical companies in the world, which bought Sandoz which is the company that discovered LSD in 1943, and came upon one memorandum that was published in the early 50s by the discoverer of LSD, the chemist Albert Hoffman, in which he tries to convince and I don't think this memo has ever been written about or seen, I just saw it among piles and piles of papers that I examined he suggested to the CEO of Sandoz, arthur Stoll, to transform the company of Sandoz into a pharmaceutical company that specializes in psychedelic medicines. So he said, it's not only LSD. Just if we stay with LSD, they still didn't know exactly what LSD was, how it could be used. It's a big topic. But he said, beyond LSD, there will be many more molecules that will be beneficial to mental health. And we at Sund sundance we should really just go for it, we should specialize in this, we should examine all of this and we should become the global leader in psychedelic medicine. And I mean the idea is, uh, fantastic. You know it would have. It would have created, uh, you know, a microsoft of the psychedelic. You know of the pharmaceutical world. You know it of the pharmaceutical world. You know it would have been, it would have, it would have been a game changer. But to see, oh he, he basically said no to the memo and sidelined LSD and was going for different medications with, with, with, with, with, you know, sometimes made a lot of money, a very profitable company.
Norman Ohler:So, um, the question is, did he make this only out of fiscal reasons? Like, did you really believe that? Uh, this call them german social pharmaca, I don't know how you say in english psychopharmaka, I don't know how you say it in English, psychopharmaceuticals, like SSRIs and antidepressants and all of these. Maybe he thought there's more money to be made in those than in the psychedelic medicines, because the psychedelic medicines they have the tendency, well, they don't make you addictive. So as a producer, you lose that nice effect that the product you sell into people will have to be taken every day for the rest of your life, for example, which is the case with some SSRIs. I know quite a few people actually who take SSRIs every day and cannot even imagine ever not taking them. So this is great for a pharmaceutical company. So maybe the chemist albert hoffman who was an idealist, I guess, because he had taken so many lsd so many times by then, when he wrote this memo, like he was convinced that this is actually a medicine that can really heal people. So the question is does the pharmaceutical industry really want to heal people?
Norman Ohler:I had my car today. I picked it up from my car repairman and I have an old Volvo and it has over 300,000 kilometers because it's an old motor. And my repairman, who's also a friend of mine, he said they don't make these motors anymore because why would they? They make motors that are not as good, so people have to buy a new car every couple of years. Because he said, my volvo actually can run over 1 million kilometers, which is like more than 700 000 miles, which is quite a lot for a car, you know.
Norman Ohler:So the question is this is capitalism interested in the good of the people or is capitalism interested in, you know, making profit? Obviously it's the latter. So the question is do psychedelics have a chance in a capitalist society? I mean, this is one question that I, that I that I find interesting. Then the other one is of, of course, do governments want?
Norman Ohler:Because what happens with LSD, basically with psychedelic medicines, is that they intensify your experience, they disrupt the ego. They give other parts of the brain more energy, so it creates. Your brain runs differently, you think a little bit differently. You experience the world a little bit differently. You experience runs differently, you think a little bit differently. You experience the world a little bit differently. You experience yourself differently. So these things are actually quite, you would imagine, healthy and interesting for a human being, especially the West.
Norman Ohler:The West is built on the idea of freedom and of always going somewhere else and experiencing new thoughts. Maybe the government doesn't really want you to actually do that. So maybe there's two factors kind of limiting the thriving of the psychedelic pharmaceutical industry. It's one, maybe the profit, which just somehow doesn't add up. It's one, maybe the profit which somehow doesn't add up. And number two, it's maybe the government makes it so difficult by prohibiting these substances that it's even impossible for the companies even if they wanted to investigate it. So the psychedelics are in a really tight spot in a.
Norman Ohler:I don't know if we would call our democracies authoritarian, but they have this tendency that governments try to regulate people, even though they are democracies. So it's a problem of governance and it's a problem of our economic system. That's why these psychedelics, I think, are in a tight spot. That's why these psychedelics, I think, are in a tight spot, and that's really sad, because we always want to have the optimized system for us humans. In America, you always say America is the greatest country in the world. Many people actually believe that the system is the best, but it's obviously highly questionable. So the topic of psychedelics quickly becomes like a political topic, right?
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:So the war on drugs actually changed our orientation, our perception of psychedelics here in the US. You know, we grew up, mark and I grew up in the 70s and 80s, so we grew up in that war. So psychedelics are bad. Don't even touch them, don't ever do that. We know that to be true, right, that is the truth, that that's a paradigm shift that we had to go through over the last several years. Now back to your point about capitalism and Mark can jump in here as well Our society I hate to say it, but it's all about manipulation, right?
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Our food industry puts all kinds of chemicals in there to create some type of addiction. So you go back and get the potato chips or something else. That isn't really good for you. I would say the same thing about pharmacy and that's a good business model, by the way, getting people addicted to something, including an iPhone, where you get a dopamine rush every time you get a ping. That's a good business model to create some type of addiction for your customers. The same thing is true with SSRIs. We create some type of addiction. You go watch American television and you're just overwhelmed with pharmaceutical ads about this new thing that takes care of something you didn't even know existed and it has all these side effects. But you should probably take it because you need to take care of this unknown disease that a small percentage of the population has. So that is a fantastic business model as opposed to creating healthy people, right, and I think that's where you're going with this.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Psychedelics can break addictions. We've seen this through opioid use, alcoholism, even nicotine addictions. So that is breaking those. We're seeing evidence that psychedelics can break those addictions. So that's not a very good business model for many organizations around the world if those addictions are gone. So that suppression of information is critical to these organizations. That suppression of information is critical to these organizations that they I mean we're looking at another war here, potentially where pharmaceutical companies influence the government to not allow access to psychedelic assistive therapies and other potential uses of them. So I agree with you there, mark. Do you have any thoughts on the on that?
mark "Moose" McGrath:Yeah, I always tread around the word capitalism because I think there's a capital C capitalism and a small c capitalism. And I think of small c capitalism. I think of flow, where people are free to exchange, and peace, some of the things that I've written about where, if I had a truly free market and people were truly free, it would be emergent, there would be signals to show that psychedelics, in fact, would be a benefit to society, and the capitalism's large C, which is something more cronyist or mercantilist, where there's some kind of collusion between state and corporate bodies that ban these things, that are, basically they're creating an impediment to human excellence. Because I think what I hear Norman describing is that there's an opportunity for people to become more creative, collaborative, better off, by exploring and expanding what it is that they're encountering in reality via psychedelics, what it is that they're encountering in reality via psychedelics, or perhaps they're helping.
mark "Moose" McGrath:You know brothers and sisters of ours that we know that have received treatment from PTSD. You know women that have had postpartum depression, women that have had, you know, post-assault trauma, things like that. There's a lot of different valid uses of these things and, to Norman's point, anything that's not addictive, whether it's breakfast cereal or anything else. They're not going to want to market. People aren't going to want to market, that you know. So I really empathize, but I think that really, what it comes down to is like if the market were free. I think we're clearly getting signals that there is a price signal coming out to say that yeah, hey, these are actually really good for humanity and we should look into them.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:So I'm curious to go back in time and go back to Norman's book Tripped about what was the original use from Nazi Germany? In your book, in your research, what did you see when you're in the archives and doing your research? When you're in the archives and doing your research, what was the intent of using uh, lsd and other uh and and some pharmaceuticals out there by the Nazis?
Norman Ohler:Norman, Well, I mean, the Nazis were hugely into drugs actually, which is what I researched in the book list. They were mostly into methamphetamine for the german army and into opioids. Um, when the leaders were into opioids actually to calm their nerves and create artificial charisma and coolness, I guess you could say Psychedelic research was not a major focus and probably Hitler never heard about it, for example. But there was research going on in several concentration camps, for example in Auschwitz. There was psychedelic research but I didn't find the documents. I'm afraid they are lost. But major research was also done in Dachau, which is the concentration camp close to Munich, which was conducted by the SS, by one officer, one doctor, an SS doctor called Kurt Plötner. He did the SS research in Dachau and the headline of his research was basically mind control and the extraction of secrets.
Norman Ohler:The Nazi regime, being a totalitarian regime, is by definition a paranoic system that sees enemies everywhere and one has to know who belongs to us and who is the other. That needs to be basically killed or at least regulated, heavily regulated, punished. If you were, you know, the wrong other, for example if you were a jew or if you were a communist, that that, that that was a reason for you to be punished, but it's not so easy to see. You know who's who's what. And they had especially problems when they interrogated Polish resistance fighters. After Germany invaded Poland there was quite a bit of resistance in Poland against this occupation, and even under torture Polish resistance fighters didn't talk. And there's only so much torture you can do until the person is dead at the end, and some people just don't talk or they say something that might not be true, just so the torture stops. So torture is not really a good way to find out the truth, but there's not many other ways. And then they had the idea that maybe you give people drugs and then they would speak the truth, that that's like that was an original nazi idea. That idea they try to follow this idea.
Norman Ohler:When in 1943 this was company sandos discovered lsd, and even though they didn't really understand what lsd was, what they did understand was that this is the most potent substance that works on a human mind, and this is still true today. Lsd works in microgram dosages, not milligram but microgram. So a tiny amount already has an incredibly strong effect on the brain, which is great for an intelligence service or a service like. I don't know if service is the right word like an organization like the Gestapo or the SS. Because if you have something potent in such small quantities it's so easy to produce and easy to hide. And also LSD is odorless and tasteless, so it can slip like just one drop into the drink of another person. That person will never notice it and suddenly has a very, very strong change of mind or effect in the mind. So that is interesting. That was interesting to the nazis when they heard about this I will come in a second to how they heard about this, because this is actually very interesting, right.
Norman Ohler:But once they knew that LSD is such a strong agent, they became interested in this type of research. Um, they thought in interrogations, uh, you could, uh know someone unwittingly and, um, and make that person insecure, like just you know, make the ego dysfunctional. Just what happens when you take LSD? Now, the ego gets, it changes. But if you take it willingly, obviously you know what you're doing and you have to do it with a certain intent. You know searching within yourself for an answer for something, for example. But if you get LSD without knowing, and then if the person who interrogates you is very clever, they thought maybe they can then develop techniques on how they could actually make you so insecure, for example, that you spill the beans. They were interested in that angle.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Was there any evidence that they were successful with that? They were interested in that angle.
Norman Ohler:Was there any evidence that they were successful with that? Well, their findings were taken by the American forces that liberated the concentration camp. I think it was in April 1945, or maybe March. It was in the spring of 1945 when the Americans came into Munich, came into Bavaria, they liberated the camp. They found, you know, they confiscated all kinds of papers because they were very interested in Nazi research, because Nazi research had this air of being very good.
Norman Ohler:There was actually a secret group coming with the US Armed Forces, a part of the Armed Forces, called Alsos, and they had to investigate German nuclear scientists and also German biochemical scientists.
Norman Ohler:So when they found these records they took them and they sent them to their drug expert. And the army's drug expert, or the military's drug expert, was a Harvard professor called Beecher, and Beecher studied these reports and wrote reports about the reports which he called reports on ego-depressing drugs. And these reports were so interesting that actually the Central Intelligence Agency, which was founded in 1947, they landed on the desk of Sidney Gottlieb who was an official there and he was supposed to create this program and kind of finish the nazi research, because the nazis had just started, you know, they they had concluded yes, you can make someone. They actually had concluded you can extract secrets. But they were just in the beginning, so it was promising to the americans, to the cia. So then the CIA developed the MKUltra program, which was really an expansion of that Nazi program, and really tried to figure it out whether you could develop LSD as a mind-control weapon.
mark "Moose" McGrath:So, Norman, I was thinking as we were talking about how psychedelics were being used for mind control, but the discovery from the powers that be who were instituting or seeking them as mind control, realized that these were mind liberating and instead of mind control, the divulgence of secrets we wind up with things like the Beatles and other stuff. You know that becomes very creative, almost like it freed the mind. Is that one of the things that you ran into? Is that maybe the mind control? They realized it wouldn't work for that and it became too freeing and liberating for humans.
Norman Ohler:Yeah, maybe that's the irony of LSD, that it actually is the opposite of a mind control drug drug, because it has very different effects in the brain. It increases neuroplasticity, so it actually increases the ability of the brain to readjust to the challenges of the moment. Basically, the brain is constantly reforming and reforming itself and through LSD that process is enhanced. So it's like the opposite of a mind-control drug. So in a way the CIA went on the wrong Nazi path until at one point they realized that this point took them a few years and hundreds, if not thousands of people who were unwillingly dosed with LSD, american citizens who were just walking through Greenwich Village and meeting the wrong person, being brought into a so-called safe house, an apartment where they were then given LSD and observed from people behind a mirror and recorded and stuff like that. So that's how big the effort of the CIA was to exploit LSD as a mind control weapon and in the end they found out it doesn't work. So what did they do then? Obviously they were ashamed, because they also wasted a lot of taxpayers' money and they had Not even did it not work. It also had the effect that it entered the cultural scene and created you know, it was part of the creation of the counterculture movement of the 60s, which was a very anti-establishment movement.
Norman Ohler:John Lennon, for example, said we have to thank the CIA that gave us the LSD. I mean, they actually literally gave it to people. They, for example, gave it to the writer Ken Kesey, who then wrote the book One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and then stopped writing and bought a bus and drove with his bus and his friends across the country and distributed as much LSD as he could and called it the revolt of the guinea pigs. So it completely backfired what the CIA had in mind. So LSD is not a good tool for the CIA. So what can they do? Basically they can only legalize it. Obviously it wasn't. They can only legalize it. Obviously it wasn't the CIA that legalized it, but it was the American government. You could say probably it was President Nixon. It was during his tenure that LSD became illegal and he thought that LSD is a bigger danger to the country than communism.
mark "Moose" McGrath:Basically, it's like a lot of government programs that has the exact opposite effect of the stated intent. Yeah right.
Norman Ohler:Can you go back to the safe houses?
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:The safe houses? Are they connected to what is known as MKUltra? Is that correct?
Norman Ohler:Yeah, I mean, the whole program was called MKUltra. It was initiated by the CIA director, alan Dallas. The whole program was called MKUltra. It was initiated by the CIA director, alan Dulles. He called it brain warfare because it was a war of ideologies. It was communism versus the free world, free world.
Norman Ohler:In his terms, or you know West against East or you know them against us. And there was the big, you know, fear that they would use mind control techniques already, because American fighter pilots who were captured in the Korean War, some of them exhibited strange behavior after they were captured In front of Chinese cameras. They accused the American government of biotechnical warfare during the Korean War. So the response in America was this kind of you know, they must have been brainwashed. Why would they say something which is not obviously not true, because America never said that they would use such weapons in the Korean War. So there was this fear that the East, the communists, are using mind patrol techniques which they might have. You know, there was never proof that the East, the communists, are using mind patrol techniques which they might have. There was never proof that the East and China or the Soviet Union experimented with psychedelics in order to create a so-called truth drug. But obviously these were sinister entities which probably did try to develop mind patrols. These were sinister entities which they probably did kill, tried to develop mind controls. It was kind of a reaction it was claimed to be a reaction to that threat that while we, the Americans, must also develop mind control techniques. We must be armed against this threat. So this is MK Altra. This is the program that Alan Thomas mind control techniques. We must be armed against this threat. So this is MK Altra. This is the program that Alan Thomas invented.
Norman Ohler:The CIA director and the man that was carrying it out was Sidney Bartley, who had, you know, quite a large effect on American history, and if you Google him there's only like two pictures or something you can find online. So he's a very secretive man and a very secretive program within the CIA. Within the CIA it was also, you know, secret. It was a need-to-know principle, like who didn't have to know about and failed or didn't know about it, like it was not openly talked about. Even the fiscal aspect of it, like the financing, all that that was kind of taken out of the usual budgetary processes. So it was quite secret, mp Ultra. But it did exist and one of the things it did focus on LST, basically online control, how LST could be abused.
Norman Ohler:And one of the things they Sydney got it came up with were the safe houses. The first one was on Backfoot Street in Manhattan in 51. I actually went to that house it's a normal tenement house now. I wasn't able to get into the apartment, but the CIA rented two apartments that were touching each other. One was the investigators and the others were the LSD parties In French Village.
Norman Ohler:It was a so-called bohemian area, so they were like well, kind of suspicious types. Anyhow that were, you know, artists, pop tillers, I don't know, people who smoke weed and hang out in bars. So it was like the idea was, can we also kind of hack these people, like can we get on top of these people also? So they hired a very special agent for this. His name was White. He was like a notorious FBN agent, federal Bureau of Mechanics, who then worked for the CIA for the safe house program, and he was a very colorful figure. He also liked to take drugs, but he knew what he was taking.
Norman Ohler:Obviously, if you take LSD, you know it's a strong effect, but if you give it to someone, as I said before, without that person knowing, it's a highly deranging experience. So that's what they did. They went to bars. It's called White Horse Tavern, I think it's one of the most famous bars in Greenwich Village. They invited people to parties and obviously if you're invited to a nice party in a nice apartment, maybe you would go and they would give an LSD. So then they would try to figure out how people change. There was one experiment they did. They had another pad, as they called it. It was called the Pad in San Francisco where the CIA employed prostitutes who would then give their clients LSD.
Norman Ohler:These experiments sound kind of ridiculous. What are you going to learn if you observe someone who sleeps with a prostitute compared to someone who sleeps with a prostitute on LSD? What can you really learn from it? I think it was just. I think the fantasy of they didn't actually didn't learn so much. They wrote it down and it's ridiculous. I mean, it just shows you, I guess, the absurdity of, or the cruel. I guess it was also cruel. You know, if you got black with a very strong psychedelic and then you know recorded and yeah, it's not, it's not nice. So I guess people had traumas from that and you know later people said they remember that 10 years ago they had a very strange night in manhattan, san francisco. They never really recovered from their bizarre experience. So it's highly unethical and CIA never really found the way to control people. It's very hard to control the human mind.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:So MKUltra ended? Are we in the 50s or 1960s? Right now in the timeline we?
Norman Ohler:started in the 50s.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:And it ended roughly.
Norman Ohler:It ended in the 50s, okay, and then ended roughly and it ended in the early 60s and then at least he was prohibited in 66 all right now.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Now question there's a person that starts to come into prominence here soon and that's timothy leary. Uh, his background is kind of interesting. I don't think mark knows this, but he was a enrolled at west point at one point and then he's part what I think he enlisted in the Army as well. So I actually see a connection there. But can you walk us through how Timothy Leary comes into play or into the big picture here?
Norman Ohler:Yeah, leary was, as you said, a military man, I guess, but somehow he didn't stay with the military. But he was highly intelligent and went to Harvard. He was a professor, like. He was described as a very square kind of guy, always buttoned up and uh kind of boring professor.
Norman Ohler:Uh, at one time he was on vacation in mexico drinking um rum with a friend and then the friend said that he bought some magic mushrooms from an old woman or something in the village and Timothy Leary was not that interested in it because he probably didn't think so much would happen. You know, as an old woman selling some dried mushrooms. I mean, what can it be? You know, magic mushrooms were not known at the time. I mean, some people knew, but only very few magic mushrooms had been discovered. A little earlier a banker called Gordon Watson was into mushrooms and he had actually found. He was into all kinds of mushrooms and he had found these magic mushrooms in Mexico. So there were a few people who knew about them, for example a friend of Timothy Leary. So Leary took it and he had a very strong experience. He called it the most spiritual experience of his life. He saw God and he understood how everything is connected. He had a very spiritual, classical, religious awakening. So he changed, you know, during this trip, and he thought that it was a good change and that every American, every person in the world must make that change because we're all kind of alienated from nature and from each other and from God, which is obviously true, that's modern men and modern women is alienated and therefore unhappy. So we thought, if we all reconnect and I think it's a good thought, but he was very passionate about it First of all he started doing research at Harvard University with the students, which in the beginning was accepted because he was a psychology professor with the students, which in the beginning was accepted because he was a psychology professor.
Norman Ohler:So you know it was unusual work, but no one really thought it was weird. But then he lectures children at some kind of parties, sometimes at his house, and he's also connected to sex, but he also says it liberates you sexually. So this well, most people got very skeptical of what's happening at Harvard University and probably there were some ethical lines that Lurie was blurring, because he was always convinced that the bigger picture is so important that we all get turned on by psychedelics and we all change and all the wars in the world will stop and we'll become peaceful human beings. So it's a very naive conception of psychedelics. But it's also not totally unusual to have that reaction. I don't personally think that LSD makes people better, but he actually thought it will make people better slash, more empathetic towards other people. So he really took it to the extreme, turned on his students probably encouraged them to take psychedelics so at one point Harvard leadership fired him. It was the first time, I think in the 20th century, that Harvard actually fired a professor. He was a very popular professor because he gave people very strong drugs, which also are interesting if you take these drugs. So he had a following. It became like a cult.
Norman Ohler:So Leary and many other LSD researchers and psychedelic researchers criticized Leary for being too careless about it, too flamboyant about it. I guess his style was not to everyone's liking. Today my daughter probably would say he's a bit cringe. But he was also charismatic and I think what he did in a way is amazing. Not amazing, but it's noteworthy. But maybe he actually did make more damage than good. It's hard to say.
Norman Ohler:I mean, he was considered by Nixon the most dangerous man in America because he tried to turn on everybody with amnesty. He was also smoking weed, which was considered very bad at the time. It was not really the nicest in many states, or in some states as it is now. He was actually sentenced to I think one time something like 17 years in prison for having a little bit of weed in his car. So the government actually went after him also and he spent quite a bit of time in prison. He escaped from prison once and he was helped by the Wetterman, which was like a terrorist organization in the United States, helped by the weatherman, which was a terrorist organization in the United States, and he fled to Africa where the Black Panther headquarters were. He fled to Algeria.
Norman Ohler:So he stayed with them and he pissed them off too, because he was always talking about drugs and they were into the socialist revolution, so they didn't really take a part in all that. That drug taking is actually counter-revolutionary. So Leary was a powerful figure. I think he's a very interesting person and he's mostly connected to LSD. But that's why most people think LSD equals Leary's flamboyant way to treat it. Is he a diversion? He?
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:could be a diversion.
mark "Moose" McGrath:Do you think he's a diversion to the core concepts? To just make it look like he's a quacky professor.
Norman Ohler:He's a bit quacky, and then some people said he's actually been an agent at one point. I don't know if that's true. I mean he used to write completely like life sentence in prison and then something that was changed. So I guess I don't know. I mean I'm not a literary expert so I don't know if he was an agent.
mark "Moose" McGrath:Did you ever look into Chaos by Tom O'Neill about the Manson family? And they were talking about a similar situation that you described in Green by Tom O'Neill about the Manson family and they were talking about a similar situation that you described in Greenwich Village happening in San Francisco in the Haight-Asbury District, which there was another cultural renaissance with things like the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane that everybody came out of.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Well, I think there's an interesting connection about the Grateful Dead and the bear. Right, am I saying his name, right? The bear.
Norman Ohler:Yeah, it's the Bear. Well, yeah, I mean Manson obviously is a very historic NSD chapter because I guess the Manson murders happened on NSD and they were like NSD cults and like all the French DCCP have and it's NSD kind of manifesting Manson and these horrific things that they did. The Bear is a different story. I mean the bear is the bear because when Sandoz, the Swiss company, was not allowed to produce LSD anymore and there was still a huge demand for LSD, illegal chemists or chemists had to make it illegally. The bear was one of them. The first one was actually the son of the grandson of the contracting governor, stan Owsley III. He claimed that his girlfriend was a chemist and he just looked it up in the library, like in the local library, how to make LSD.
Norman Ohler:Making LSD is not that hard. It's not easy. It's not easy but you can do it. If you're a chemist you can do it. You can do it in any lab, let's put it that way. So some people took on the job and the bear was one of the earliest LSD chemists. And his way of distributing it. He didn't make it to make money. I think he gave away every other trip and I think one trip was one dollar. He made it basically to make it available for many people. It was like an ideological reason. He was like an idealist. You know, like a weasel. He was like an idealist.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:You could also say but his distribution network was pretty amazing though, right.
Norman Ohler:Yeah, I mean that was his work, his work distribution network. It was a very popular band at the time, I guess, and they found concerts being, you know, concerts being happening and so they used that distribution channel. Because he used the sound, he became the sound, one of the sound engineers of the Great Footed that created the wall of sound. That was their big.
mark "Moose" McGrath:And he designed this Deal, your Face emblem. I wonder. Like you know, grateful Dead is an interesting study because they took a completely differentiated approach to the marketing of music and it was more of a free market system. That's true there was a lot of peripheral things around that they were known for. But I wonder if that creativity that they had maybe came from some of the use of psychedelics and not only freeing your mind, but freeing your business policies, they allowed people to record music.
mark "Moose" McGrath:I mean, they did so many unconventional things through the connection.
Norman Ohler:Yeah, I mean I think LSD also in a way can be a capitalist tool, like you described it with a small c, because it does create ideas of networking and sharing or it does support these ideas. And this is how we all thought maybe capitalism might evolve when the internet came about and it was all about sharing economy. But also the 90s that saw the rise of the internet, saw the rise of the giant corporations, which is kind of the opposite. So these two faces of capitalism kind of stare at each other. Maybe the three and the NSD or the Grateful Dead model of distributing music and pharmaceuticals in the space of NSD is very different from the corporate model of distributing music and pharmaceuticals in the space. I see it's very different from the corporate model of distributing music and pharmaceuticals.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:In your book you bring up Mary. I'm going to get her name wrong Mary Pinchot. Am I saying it right or Pinchot?
Norman Ohler:I heard it's pronounced Pinchot Mary.
mark "Moose" McGrath:Pinchot Meyer.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:What's the connection there to John F Kennedy? If you can cover that for us, Well, the C-type and lovers.
Norman Ohler:She was in the White House quite a lot so she was a very intimate friend of his, a very preferred friend. It was not like he had many, many lovers. One of them was pretty sure. She seemed to have been a Pinchot connection to JFK and they, for example, were seen smoking weed together in the White House. And then it is a fact that Pinchot's mayor actually had a meeting with Neri Because Neri was so famous and she wanted to get LSD like best food, lsd for an influential friend, as she said to Miri. Miri immediately became very interested and wanted to join in but she said, no, I'm going to do this alone with my influential friend. And she didn't say JFK to Miri and she might have written it into a diary. But her diary was taken because she was also assassinated. A few months after JFK was assassinated she was assassinated and the same day her diary was taken, removed from her apartment in Washington DC. So she received LSD in April 1963 from Leary for this influential friend. She had a few influential friends, she was like a socialite in Washington DC. So it's not proven that she meant JFK. It could have been someone else. But JFK then meets her. I mean they did meet after she received the LSD from my new friend. It's kind of like a relationship. It really has a sense of respect for people. It's simple. It's sector is altitude support May 63 or in summer, 63.
Norman Ohler:And if you listen to that speech, there's a recording you can find online. Looking a bit surprised by JFK's heathenic kind of lingo where he says basically, brothers and sisters, and we all live on the same planet and the Russians are also humans and we should start this stupid arms race. And you know that's ridiculous, it's a pissing contest. He doesn't say we're pissing contests in speech, but in show play. She said to Jake it's not a pissing contest with the Russians. What's going on? You know we're wasting billions of dollars for arms and creating these monsters, why we're wasting so many resources. And he basically addresses that in that speech that he gives at the American University and obviously that could be one of the reasons his change of mind that leads to his assassination, which of course is also speculation because we don't have any proof that the killer thought that this man has to be stopped before the arms race is over. But it is interesting. So it's just like another layer of the JFK narrative that comes into play when we think of LSD also being.
mark "Moose" McGrath:It's an enigma wrapped in a conundrum. Oliver Stone uses that actual speech as part of his film JFK to talk about that. And Pinchot-Meyer's husband I was going to say, and Pinchot-Meyer's husband I was going to say Pinchot-Meyer's husband was also in the CIA. Yeah, gordon Meyer, I know that.
Norman Ohler:All right, but they were separated already, so she might really have hated to know her going to him.
mark "Moose" McGrath:I had read that she and Kennedy had known each other since their board school days because the Pinchot family was a prominent family. He'd been governor of Pennsylvania and a cabinet secretary and all this. So there was some, you know, upbringing familiarity.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:All right. The next characters are Nixon and Elvis. I read about that. You know we grew up around Elvis. When we were a little bit younger, parents followed Elvis and you know we know how he died, which is often made fun of. But can you walk us through the relationship there?
Norman Ohler:What happened with Nixon and Elvis. I mean, it's just another side story actually, but it kind of sheds some light on the ongoings I think. I mean Nixon received a very strange letter by Elvis that he had written in the first class of the American Airlines plane where he says and the handwriting I looked at the notes, the handwriting is very shaky which is connected to the plane's movements but maybe not, you know, it's connected to his pill-taking. So Presley was taking a lot of medicines which were all legal medicines, of course not drugs which are all legal medicines, of course not drugs. So he writes in this shaky handwriting that he wants to be an anti-drug agent for the American government. He wants to lead Nixon. He would be able to penetrate basically those drug-taking hippie-esque music little circles like the Beatles.
Norman Ohler:There was one meeting between Elvis Presley and the Beatles that they didn't really vibe, as you can say today. I guess it's like John Lennon made fun of him or something and Elvis Presley just really pissed at that. So for him these were like European leftists who came to America, made a lot of profit, co-opted the American youth and then went back to England. That's when he said to Nixon that Nixon had had the advice by his advisors that he should mix more of the cultural scene of America. So he thought, when Elvis sent him this note, that he should invite him to the White House and this was probably more of the cultural scene of America. So he thought, when Elvis sent him this note, that he should invite him to the White House.
Norman Ohler:And this was probably one of the weirdest encounters in the White House. There's photos of it where you see this president with a big belt and his coat and sunglasses and he's smiling. He's just high on antidepressants and he's making pills. He's shaking his hand. He's probably also high on antidepressants and for making pills and shaking groups' hands, probably also high on the same pills. So they like shake hands and talk bullshit, basically talking about nothing. And you know how we get the American to be healthy and corrupted by this weed and by this LSD and all these dangerous things. They had a whiskey together also, I don't know, and Elvis gave them a World War II colt, like a weapon, like a colt. I guess you'd say it was a pistol.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:It was a pistol right.
mark "Moose" McGrath:So as a present right.
Norman Ohler:So, as of present, nixon was flattered with it. Basically he talked about nothing and then President said I want to be a DA agent, I want to rat on my fellow musicians. Basically he said that and Nixon was a little bit, you know, he didn't really know how to react and he kept on saying let's just make sure you don't lose your credibility and maybe you do an anti-proc song, which personally thought was a good idea, and thought about recording plays for this anti-proc song. And it suggested a recording song called I Don't Lie. It's funny, you know where they suggested that President Trump would be born in so-called I don't lie. It's funny, you know, if Trump turned into a movie, that would be a funny scene. President Trump, I mean it's very sad because I was a big Arrows fan when I was a kid. I grew up in West Germany. We had a lot of Americans in our hometown, american soldiers, right, president Trump was a soldier in the 50s, I think, in Germany, in Grafenwoe yeah, it's in the area. So that whole American soldiers.
mark "Moose" McGrath:Do you think? You know so I've been to Grayson with my boys a few years ago and I never knew this about Elvis, but he was a very serious reader that he would travel with trunks of books and he would consume all these things. He was very much an interdisciplinary autodidact and some of the, a lot of the books that I saw there and that were on display, with his underlining and marginalia, a lot of them had to do with sort of the topic that we're talking about, that LSD would create interest in, like that, your creativity and everything is within you. So a lot of Eastern philosophy, a lot of Hindu Buddhism and that's yeah, yeah, elvis.
Norman Ohler:That's weird. Why was he so close against that idea?
mark "Moose" McGrath:I don't know, or is it another diversion that maybe he really wasn't, because I had never heard that about him. That, um, that eastern philosophy was a very you've you've seen, like the elvis karate things, but it's kind of a like a cartoon of el version of elvis, but in reality that he had a very deep interest in eastern philosophy and he studied it um in depth. And then the museum. They have again all these underlined books like Kingdom of the Mind and Seth Speaks and Khalil Gibran and all these other things that were Elvis would travel with trunks of books.
Norman Ohler:Yeah, I don't know, it's interesting.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:It's possible that the meds that he was taking suppressed that access to what he was reading right, and I think that happens quite often in today's society.
Norman Ohler:I mean, the meds are a fact. Yeah, it's been killed in the end.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Yeah, so yeah, it did kill him in the end. Okay, there's a couple other questions I have here. There's a connection. So we have Hoffman, we have April. I think it's April 19th 1943, bicycle Day. I think quite a few people know, that there's a connection to the author of Brave New World in the timeline as well, and I think Brave New World was written before the discovery of LSD. But what is that connection between Hoffman and Huxley?
Norman Ohler:if there is one. They became like pen pals, I think is the word, which is an interesting word because we don't write letters anymore, but they were writing letters to each other and Huxley started with mescaline. So the perception that was written before LSD because mescaline is an older, it's a natural synogenic that people used before LSD was discovered and Huxley was one of the first western writers and he was British but he lived in the United States and he was, and Huxley was one of the first Western writers. I mean, he's British but he lived in the United States and he was looking at trying to describe what happens in the brain, what happens in the head, what happens in regards to mental health when taking psychedelics. Like he was saying that the doors of perception open and you have more perceptions than you usually have. But he only went into detail. So when he heard of LSD he became very interested in LSD. Also, he experimented with LSD to experiment and to figure out what's different about it and he wrote about it.
Norman Ohler:Actually, when he died he died of cancer. In the last hours of his life, when those were happening to him, he demanded of his wife to inject him LSD. So he wanted to be as conscious as possible in the moment of his death, as possible in the moment of his death. He was also into Eastern philosophy, and Tibetan Buddhism, for example, teaches you that you should be as conscious as possible when you die, because then your mind is able to go into the other world and reincarnate or become one with the light, while if you're, like, dosed down and you're kind of intoxicated in the opposite way, say by alcohol or by a downer or by an SSRI that closes you, then it's not good if you die this way. It's as good as a human to die as conscious as possible. Death is not something to be afraid of, but it is a transformation.
Norman Ohler:So, he was really convinced and that is a basic principle of spirituality that death is not bad, but a transformation.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:It's just a change, If I understand correctly, Norman, I believe that some type of DMT, like a 5-mega-yard DMT, is released when we die, and if we're under the influence of what you said SSRIs and alcohol then we don't have access. It may be true, I'm not sure, but that's what I understand. We do have access through a DMT that's natural in our body. Have you tracked any of that?
Norman Ohler:Well, it seems to be true that dmt is released. I don't know if it's not released. People have taken a lot of ssris and what that means. I I'm actually more than expert in that we can.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:We have some folks coming on that could uh answer that?
Norman Ohler:so I'll write that down as a question I just thought about that now.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:But, uh, based on what you were bringing up there like, there may be a connection. We'll we'll ask. Ask the researchers on that down the road, anything else? What's next for you after TRIP? Are you going to look more into psychedelics or what's your next phase of your profession?
Norman Ohler:I would like to write more on drugs, but I'm not only writing on drugs. My next book is actually a book about a skiing vacation with my daughter in Parfos, switzerland, which is called the Magic Mountain, the Magic Mountain being a famous novel by Thomas Mann which came out a hundred years ago, where Thomas Mann kind of examines the end of modernity and what kind of world are we getting to our children. So I kind of wrote a prequel to that just during the skiing vacation with my daughter you know a lot of I was writing, she Was Skiing, and I wrote about that experience as a completely different book. It's a fictional book that I was working on and that's coming out now in Germany in September and I'll see you in America also next year. It's just finished, though.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Great. So on the topic of skiing and I'm going to try to make a connection here back to psychedelics one of the reasons I like to ski is it gets you into a flow state. You have to be present right and if I understand psychedelics correctly, it has a similar effect. It reduces that ego, allows you to reconstruct some things in the past. So to me and we're seeing connections between flow states and the use of psychedelic assisted therapies Can you comment on that?
Norman Ohler:Well, I can comment on the flow state of skiing. I mean, the flow state of psychedelics is what it's all about, but the flow state of skiing is also interesting. I had a very traumatic experience in my life once and I don't need to explain now what the trauma was, but what it was a very heavy trauma or the only result was only resolved when I was skiing, because when you're skiing this you can't think about your trauma. You actually, you know, actually are flowing and you have to be so much in the moment. The same maybe with surfing. I heard people say the same about surfing. It could be with many sports that you've been into. The flow thing it certainly works. I guess skiing on LSD should be good.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:I don't know if I'd want anybody to do that, by the way.
mark "Moose" McGrath:We're not endorsing that, we're not recommending that.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:But I think the overlap is there and for those that are not interested in psychedelics, it's fine. There are other modalities, other ways you can get to a similar state, and that's what I understand. So, skiing, prayer, meditation, yoga, I believe there's overlap between all of those uh, and, if I understand it correctly, uh, things like lsd, ibogaine, ayahuasca, they can, they can accelerate that experience for you also love making anything, a thing that puts you in a flow state.
Norman Ohler:That's why I was interviewed about jfk and msd and then maybe and I said at the time that it was on tv, uh, american tv and I said at the time that maybe it was also just the love making between pin show and jfk that changed him, because you know that that can also be transformative thoughts on that work well, I.
mark "Moose" McGrath:So I had read the book mary's mosaic, uh, about, about pinchell meyer and her assassination and what led up to it, and there was sort of it was sort of an intersection of a couple of books. One was jfk and the unspeakable by james douglas, about, um, some of his influence that moved him to peace, um. But yes, you know, I think what I understand of pinchell meyer was more of like a, of a soulmate with, with jfk, like a, like a, like a. They did have some kind of a conscious connection beyond. You know, she wasn't a, you know, like a mistress to him, like that. She was some kind of, uh, of some someone that you know gave him a lot of elevated thinking or whatever, and maybe it doesn had something to do with psychedelics, but it is funny how those things kind of weave together. But then you bring in the CIA, her husband, her estranged husband or whatever he was, was in the CIA. Yeah, it's weird.
Norman Ohler:Yeah, if I would keep the movie not JFK, I would start making it into a JFK. I would never make an English JFK show. That connection is a lot of interesting yeah.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Well, norman, I want to thank you for coming on. The book is Tripped Again. I came across it at an airport, read it on the flight. A fantastic read for anybody who's listening to the podcast. And I'm going to turn it over to Norman to see if you have any questions to us.
Norman Ohler:Mark or I about anything we cover here on the podcast. Well, I'm good. I mean, I'm going to listen to your podcast from now on, because I hadn't done that before and I think it's very interesting to talk about flow and some of the other ideas you have started to mention in our talk. So thank you very much for having me and connecting and hopefully we'll stay in touch.
mark "Moose" McGrath:I appreciate it Absolutely.
