Lex Fridman Podcast

Podbit · Lex Fridman Podcast

#481 – Norman Ohler: Hitler, Nazis, Drugs, WW2, Blitzkrieg, LSD, MKUltra & CIA

Explore episode Sep 19, 2025
History
Ken Kesey's CIA Trip and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

#481 – Norman Ohler: Hitler, Nazis, Drugs, WW2, Blitzkrieg,… · Sep 19, 2025 History

One of the CIA's unwitting LSD guinea pigs was Ken Kesey, who received $75 to take LSD while working in a Menlo Park psychiatric ward. On that CIA-administered trip, he had the insight that the patients might not be crazy — they just saw the world differently. He wrote One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. MKUltra, meant to create mind control, accidentally seeded the counterculture.

1m 51s

Where this was said

Writing on drugs

At 3:59:59 · chapter starts 3:56:39

When Albert Hofmann accidentally discovered LSD at Sandoz in 1943, the company set up an 'intoxication room' where employees voluntarily tested it during the war — and everyone had transcendent experiences. Sandoz CEO Arthur Stoll recognized its potential as the first effective treatment for trauma at a time when millions had been traumatized by WWII. But Ohler discovered in the Novartis archive — after bribing the archivist with an LSD tab printed with the old Sandoz logo — that Stoll was simultaneously corresponding with Nazi biochemist Richard Kuhn, sending him ergotamine (LSD precursor) in October 1943. SS experiments at Dachau, which Ohler had documented while researching Blitzed, used mescaline and an unnamed hallucinogen (likely LSD). American forces liberated Dachau, debriefed Kuhn, flew a general to Basel, and obtained the LSD technology. The CIA then ran MKUltra, using LSD on unwitting subjects including Ken Kesey — who wrote One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest from his CIA trip. Sidney Gottlieb eventually pressured Stoll to restrict LSD to research only, and in 1966 it was prohibited.

History
The CIA Inherited Nazi Drug Experiments

#481 – Norman Ohler: Hitler, Nazis, Drugs, WW2, Blitzkrieg,… · Sep 19, 2025 History

Documents in the Novartis archive proved that Nazi biochemist Richard Kuhn received LSD precursors from the Sandoz CEO in 1943 for SS truth-drug experiments in Dachau. When Americans liberated the camp, they immediately debriefed Kuhn, acquired the LSD technology, and handed it to the CIA — which continued the same unethical experiments under MKUltra.

4m 20s

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