TRIPPED

An idiosyncratic trip through the annals of LSD.

German author Ohler, author of Blitzed, took on the study of the history of lysergic acid, he recounts, when his father began to give Ohler's mother microdoses to help mediate her Alzheimer’s disease. Indeed, he writes, legalization looms largely because “more and more governments are beginning to rely on scientific knowledge rather than bow to the ideological demands of the Cold War,” with promising results in the treatment of dementia, addiction, and other maladies. The Cold War is an instrumental part of the history of psychedelic drugs, which stretches back into the annals of the Third Reich, developed by Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann and experimentally used in Nazi camps to break down prisoners under interrogation. American investigators puzzling through the experimenter’s records on “Chemical Methods for Neutralization of the Will” divined the possibilities such a drug might hold. Meanwhile, Ohler writes, postwar Germany was witnessing a narcotics boom as “more and more people took recourse to substances to help them get through the day—or the night.” The reluctance of the Soviets to enforce anti-drug laws led to the suspicion that they might possess Nazi secrets related to LSD; soon, CIA agents were at pharmaceutical giant Sandoz’s door buying up as much acid as they could. Enter the Ford Foundation, then Timothy Leary, the Beatles, and the psychedelic era. Ohler’s travels in search of information take him from archives to the inner recesses of the mind, thanks to a little dosing of his own, and they’re often entertaining. Jesse Jarnow’s Heads covers a lot of the same ground, but the interweaving of Cold War spy-versus-spy yarns, as well as the speculation that the Nazis were racing to make new psychotropic drugs as much as new rockets, lends considerable drama to the tale.

A winning addition to the literature of psychedelia.