Tripped
Nazi Germany, the CIA, and the Dawn of the Psychedelic Age
-
- USD 15.99
-
- USD 15.99
Descripción editorial
“A fleet-footed and propulsive account . . . Brilliantly sifting a massive history for its ideological through lines, this is a must-read." — Publishers Weekly (starred review)
The author of the New York Times bestseller Blitzed returns with a provocative new history of drugs and postwar America, examining the untold story of how Nazi experiments into psychedelics covertly influenced CIA research and secretly shaped the War on Drugs.
Berlin 1945. Following the fall of the Third Reich, drug use—long kept under control by the Nazis’ strict anti-drug laws—is rampant throughout the city. Split into four sectors, Berlin's drug policies are being enforced under the individual jurisdictions of each allied power—the Soviet Union, Britain, France, and the US. In the American zone, Arthur J. Giuliani of the nascent Federal Bureau of Narcotics is tasked with learning about the Nazis’ anti-drug laws and bringing home anything that might prove “useful” to the United States.
Five years later, Harvard professor Dr. Henry Beecher began work with the US government to uncover the research behind the Nazis psychedelics program. Begun as an attempt to find a “truth serum” and experiment with mind control, the Nazi study initially involved mescaline, but quickly expanded to include LSD. Originally created for medical purposes by Swiss pharmaceutical Sandoz, the Nazis coopted the drug for their mind control military research—research that, following the war, the US was desperate to acquire. This research birthed MKUltra, the CIA's notorious brainwashing and psychological torture program during the 1950s and 1960s, and ultimately shaped US drug policy regarding psychedelics for over half a century.
Based on extensive archival research on both sides of the Atlantic, Tripped is a wild, unconventional postwar history, a spiritual sequel to Norman Ohler’s New York Times bestseller Blitzed. Revealing the close relationship and hidden connections between the Nazis and the early days of drugs in America, Ohler shares how this secret history held back therapeutic research of psychedelic drugs for decades and eventually became part of the foundation of America’s War on Drugs.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Bestseller Ohler follows up Blitzed, his exploration of Nazi drug use, with a fleet-footed and propulsive account of how the U.S. government picked up where the Nazis left off when it came to drugs. Concisely recapping the mid-century birth of psychedelics, he shows that the Nazis' approach to drugs—punitive regulation coupled with extensive utilization for military purposes—was adopted by the U.S. after WWII. (Juicing up the troops was the Nazi goal, achieved via amphetamines; interrogation and mind control became the American military aims for LSD.) So too the Nazi penchant for unethical drug testing was taken up by the U.S.—the sordid history of MKULTRA is elegantly laid out, including a Greenwich Village CIA safe house where beatniks unwittingly dosed with LSD were recorded and observed. Ohler laments this history while tracking it (mainly through scientists and officials who over time had a foot in both the Nazi and U.S. government orbit), pointing to the promising medicinal uses of LSD (especially for Alzheimer's, from which his mother suffers) that were quashed by American officials, who imagined the drug to be a powerful weapon. (LSD was powerful, but in a different way, according to Ohler, who argues the 1960s' cultural upheaval stemmed from widespread psychedelics use; he even insinuates that JFK's 1963 speech calling for world peace resulted from an acid trip.) Brilliantly sifting a massive history for its ideological through lines, this is a must-read.
