Reviewed by Rhiannon, Communications Team Lead and Wellington Regional Manager
Overview
Tripped is basically the book version of Norman Ohler’s research into LSD to treat his mum’s Alzheimer’s. It starts with the author explaining how his Mum’s Alzheimer’s kicked off his whole research project, then covers the major events which make up LSD’s timeline up to the 1970s. It’s written in a super engaging way that brings the reader along for the ride (trip?).
I feel like this book is a good example of the principle that drugs are neither good nor bad, but can be used for either good or bad things, depending on who’s using them.
Good bits
The author’s mum
Norman Ohler starts looking into LSD because he wants his mum to try it to see if it helps her Alzheimer’s. At the start of the book she’s really deteriorating, and his Dad is struggling to help her. She fights him and refuses to take her medication and it’s heart-breaking to read as she gets worse and worse.
In the last chapter, Ohler suggests a microdose to his Mum over Christmas dinner. She agrees, and they all drop and go for a post-Christmas lunch walk in the woods. She sticks with the microdosing for months, and at the end of the chapter his Mum is bathing on her own and is functioning like she was before she got sick.
Reader, I cried (happily).
The Archivist at Sandoz laboratories
As someone who is both old and also a massive nerd; I related to the Archivist at Sandoz labs, Sandoz being the place where Albert Hoffman synthesised LSD in the 1930s.
When Ohler first comes to Sandoz to ask for Hoffman’s research the Archivist starts out being suspicious of Ohler as another Hoffman fanboy (apparently Sandoz labs gets a LOT of those). But when Ohler asks more questions about Sandoz’s research and less about the LSD chemical itself, the he warms up and is a delightful nerd. My favourite bit was where Ohler offers the Archivist a tab of ‘original Sandoz print’ LSD and you can read how badly he’s tempted before he regretfully declines.
Interesting bits
When you think about the history of LSD you generally think of
- Timothy Leary and the 1960s counterculture movement, or
- of Bicycle Day as a discrete event and no background context.
I enjoyed this book because half the time I was reading it there were cool and nerdy historical contexts I’d never heard of to pick over. I still remember a fair amount of the end of the counterculture movement from when I was little (I did say I was old), but there was a bunch of new fascinating stuff.
Shooting your crops with ergot in the name of science.
When Hoffman was synthesising LSD, Sandoz basically changed the agricultural output of Basel, Switzerland for the course of the second World War. Just casually.
Originally, local farmers grew wheat. Wheat is good for making flour out of because it’s quite hardy and resistant to the ergot fungus that LSD is derived from. This makes it safer to eat because the risk of ergot poisoning is reduced.
When Hoffman was synthesising LSD the local farmers were encouraged to only grow rye, and actively infect their crops with ergot. Given how scarce food was in WWII-era Europe, this shows how important the production of LSD was to the Reich.
The ‘failure’ of the earlier experiments and Bicycle Day
The original experiments in the late 1930s were a bust. Hoffman notes in one experiment on mice in 1938 that the mice that he’d dosed with LSD were unresponsive to stimulus. The subjects were ‘lying around, only moving occasionally’.
Sir, respectfully, your subject mice were most probably tripping out of their heads. The stimulus you were providing them with was probably blowing their tiny mousy minds.
Which brings me on to Bicycle Day – the day where Albert Hoffman took 250 micrograms of LSD then decided to bike home. For reference, a standard tab of acid has about 100-125 micrograms of LSD.
It took him about half an hour to cycle the six miles (9.6ish km) from the Sandoz labs to his house while being on a double dose of (what I can only assume) was some damn strong acid.
This would be challenging enough, but tripping balls for the first time and cycling through a town occupied by actual Nazis during World War II? If that’s not a lesson in set, setting, and dose management I don’t know what is. No wonder Hoffman thought he was being chased all the way home.
LSD was meant to create a mind-control and brainwashing drug. Whoops.
When we look at the origin story of LSD we can’t get away from the fact that it was created in a Nazi lab with the intention of controlling a population.
The official name of the experiment was ‘Chemical Methods for the Neutralisation of the Will’ (pg 65). The Nazis were carried away by the success they’d had with Pervitin (a type of amphetamine) and basically wanted a wonder-drug that would make people easier to control. Instead what they got was LSD.
This video from a 1964 study on British marines shows why LSD maybe isn’t the drug they want for an easily-controlled population. (Shout out to the mad lad that nearly cut down a whole damn tree using only a shovel).
Horrifying bits
In this book there are things that sound so absolutely bonkers that there’s no way they could possibly be real. And then I went and looked them up and yeah. They were real.
Trust us, we’re from the Government
Another thing you can’t get away from when talking about the history of LSD is the CIA using it in MK Ultra’s Operation Midnight Climax. Essentially, the CIA paid sex workers to spike their clients with LSD. Their session was recorded to see if LSD would be useful in getting the clients to give up any secrets (and for blackmailing purposes if the LSD didn’t work).
LSD was also tested on CIA staff members with neither their knowledge nor their consent, mainly by the CIA’s spymaster Sidney Gottlieb*. It became so common that people in the CIA’s staff room were getting their coffees spiked regularly. If anyone went to a party or after work drinks with Gottlieb, they brought their own bottles and didn’t leave them unattended. This kind of behaviour would have gotten anyone else arrested.
Psychotherapy and LSD
In 1954 Dr. Ewen Cameron of McGill University, Montreal was paid by the CIA to try LSD in ‘depatterning’ patients with schizophrenia (pg 107). Basically the patient would be put into an induced coma, then given electroshock therapy to create a ‘blank slate’ of their minds. Then they were played pre-recorded messages while under the influence of LSD to ‘create new ways of thinking’. Honestly, it’s no wonder contemporary medicine is so loathe to go anywhere near psychedelics as a potential therapy after that.
I hate that all of these things are real.
Tenuous bits
Tripped has enough fact-based government sketchiness in it to keep the biggest conspiracy theorist happy. But there are moments where it feels like it’s stretching a bit hard. These are the bits I couldn’t find evidence for. The book hints that
- LSD influenced President John F. Kennedy’s decision to quit the arms race with Russia,
- that Mary Pinchot supplied Kennedy with said LSD, and
- Pinchot was then assassinated quickly after Kennedy.
Would I recommend it?
All in all, yes. There are some parts which are particularly challenging to one’s faith in humanity to read, for sure. But it’s worth learning the history to understand how LSD got to where it is now. And it has a happy ending.
Where to find Tripped
Auckland library
Hamilton library
Wellington Library
Christchurch library
If your local library doesn’t have it, ask for an interloan 😉
*Who, coincidentally, worked with Harry Anslinger, the guy who was one of the main inspirations for the 1961 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs and what our MoDA 1975 is based on. We wrote about Anslinger in Part 1 and Part 2 of our The Misuse of Drugs Act Must Go blog series.