Review: (1) Charles Graeber, New books on altered states
Maladies of mind have a physical component. Diseases, age, and trauma atrophy the tendril-like connections that allow individual brain cells to communicate into something synergistically complex, a matrix capable of learning and consciousness. Sometimes cells get woven into a habit of communication that’s difficult to get out of, a hardwired funk. This synaptic rut may manifest as PTSD, chronic depression, obsessive compulsive disorder, or addiction. Electroshock therapy and serotonin-boosting antidepressants are attempts to shake up the Etch-a-Sketch of those cellular connections—the neurological equivalent of restarting a glitching laptop or banging on an old TV set. Sometimes it works. But wouldn’t we be lucky to stumble on a way to trigger brain cells to regrow their connections? A chemical stuff that might open the door to the brain’s plasticity?
So-called serotonergic psychoplastogens have the unique capacity to slip through a brain cell’s fatty surface and bind with serotonin receptors inside the cell, prompting the neuron to regrow lost connections to the surrounding cells. Under the microscope you can actually see the triggered neural cells branching out like a healthy tree in response to these drugs. But these drugs have been illegal in most states since 1966, and federally classified since 1970 as “Schedule 1” under the Controlled Substances Act, along with quaaludes, fentanyl, and heroin. Schedule 1 drugs are the most serious criminal class, deemed to have no medical value to weigh against their potential abuse. As a result, for much of the last fifty years it has been illegal for researchers to evaluate their potential benefits through clinical trials.
Two new books examine the history of our relationship with the best known of these serotonergic psychoplastogens, one developed in the 1940s in Switzerland. Lysergic acid diethylamide, better known as LSD, arrived on the cusp of great changes for humanity and the sciences. The following decade would see the field of psychiatry on the rise, new drugs like Thorazine replace straightjackets and locked doors as a treatment for debilitating mental illness, and the creation of ENIAC, the first programable digital computer, proposing a new model for the human mind as something debuggable and rewireable. As US psychiatrists took their first look at LSD, US military chemists were there too. With the horrors of the last war still fresh, they recognized a potent new tool for psychological warfare.
Thus diverged the two tracks of LSD research, split between those who saw LSD as a potential weapon of the new “Cold War” and those who saw the novel molecule as an important potential adjunct to therapy, one that with the right dosage and guidance might unlock mental doors long closed. Dr. Humphry Osmond, finding that a controlled experience with the drug helped the alcoholics in his clinic break the neural chains of addiction, termed the action of this new class of chemical compounds psychedelic—i.e., mind-revealing. 150 universities pursued academic LSD research including testing on human subjects; over a thousand academic papers were published on this research in the 1950s alone. Nearly all that research was backed by funding covertly funneled through shell companies of the newly formed offices of the CIA.
Like LSD, CIA was a new acronym for something previously unimagined. And like LSD, in the 1950s it did not have the baggage of negative association it would come to carry. Norman Ohler’s new book Tripped: Nazi Germany, the CIA, and the Dawn of the Psychedelic Age takes up this story on behalf of a very personal quest of the author’s: to persuade his father, a former judge, that there is a scientific justification for feeding illicit microdoses of an illegal psychedelic to his mother, dying of Alzheimer’s. Ohler makes the Nazi connection of the title through Sandoz, the Swiss pharmaceutical company that invented and marketed LSD to researchers under the trademark Delysid. There is clear evidence of brisk business between Sandoz and the chief chemist of the Third Reich and of the horrific human drug experiments Nazi scientists conducted on concentration camp inmates and Soviet POWs. But there’s no direct evidence that the Nazis ever had LSD.
After the war, the US raced to claim German science and technology before the USSR did, resulting in, among other things, a secret CIA program, code named MK-Ultra, that would become infamous for testing LSD on unwitting Americans on home soil. In 1951, the CIA received intel that Soviet agents had placed a large LSD order from Sandoz as part of a program to use hypnosis and “truth drugs” to break spies or reprogram Americans into “Manchurian Candidate”-type secret Soviet agents. In fact, the Soviets weren’t on the LSD thing at all, but in 1953 MK-Ultra nevertheless sent agents to Switzerland with a suitcase of cash and an order for 100 million doses, more than twice the amount Sandoz had created in its entire history, putting the CIA at the controls of the global supply of pharmaceutical-grade LSD.
As head of a secret organization within a secretive government organization, MK-Ultra chief and clubfooted square-dancing enthusiast Sidney Gottleib wielded creepy unchecked power. He began secretly dosing subordinates in the office during working hours and after-work drinks, testing both the drug and his men. Soon MK-Ultra’s freewheeling cowboy agents had hep cat disguises, fake identities, and a groovy “pad” on Bleecker Street in the heart of New York City’s bohemian West Village, where unsuspecting hipsters were dosed with LSD and recorded from behind a two-way mirror. The agents seemed to enjoy their assignment. A similar operation in San Francisco employing prostitutes as lures was code-named Midnight Climax. Scalding Congressional Hearings in 1977 scrutinized the few records that remained of the then disbanded op. There’s no telling how many lives were changed by an intense neuroplastic experience without context or consent. Between MK-Ultra and the human trials in universities one might argue that it was the CIA that turned Americans on to LSD.
Benjamin Breen’s meticulously researched book Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Meade, the Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science adds another layer to the story, examining the social history of LSD through the utopian goals of famed social anthropologist Margret Meade and her fellow travelers. Most prominent of these is Mead’s third husband Gregory Bateson, a serious and tweedy scion of British scientific royalty …
Stay tuned for Part Two!
Charles Graeber is a journalist and the author of The Good Nurse: A True Story of Medicine, Madness, and Murder and The Breakthrough: Immunotherapy and the Race to Cure Cancer. He has received an Overseas Press Club Award for Outstanding International Journalism and a New York Press Club Prize for reportage.
Book Post is a by-subscription book review delivery service, bringing snack-sized book reviews by distinguished and engaging writers direct to our paying subscribers’ in-boxes, as well as free posts like this one from time to time to those who follow us. We aspire to grow a shared reading life in a divided world. Thank you for your subscription! Your payment supports our writers and our effort to build a common reading culture across a fractured media landscape. Please help us to grow our audience by giving Book Post as a gift, extending your subscription by referring a friend, or sharing a piece you like.
City Lights in San Francisco, is Book Post’s Spring 2024 partner bookstore! We partner with independent booksellers to link to their books, support their work, and bring you news of local book life across the land. Read our portrait of City Lights here, or, for more, plunge into Reading the Room, a new memoir-in-conversation by City Lights’ book-buyer of fifty years, Paul Yamazaki, published in collaboration with former Book Post partner, Chicago’s Seminary Co-op, in their new Ode imprint. Paul will have six in-person appearances in West Coast bookstores in May and early June, schedule here.
We send a free three-month subscription to any reader who spends more than $100 at our partner bookstore during our partnership. To claim your subscription send your receipt to info@bookpostusa.com.
Follow us: Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Notes, Bluesky, Threads @bookpostusa
If you liked this piece, please share and tell the author with a “like.”