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I myself became curious about the drug when my father, a retired judge, started to consider giving microdoses of LSD to my mother to treat her Alzheimer's disease. He had asked me why, if the drug was actually supposed to help, he couldn't just get it at the pharmacy. This launched me on my research.

The more I dug into the history, the more fascinated I became. I began to see how much of the early history of LSD was shaped by the shadow that lies over the molecule, a result of the personal connection between a Swiss pharmaceutical CEO named Arthur Stoll, a kind of unwilling forefather of psychedelics, and Richard Kuhn, the leading biochemist for the Third Reich. This relationship aided the National Socialists, who were beginning to study the use of psychedelics as potential "truth drugs"—questionable research, which, after the war, sparked the interest of the US military and its intelligence agencies in these substances.

This book is what emerged from my curiosity. In this moment when, after many decades, we are finally reconsidering the nature of our laws surrounding psychedelics, it feels more important than ever to look backward and understand how we arrived at those regulations in the first place.

The fact that the US government was introduced to LSD through Nazi research shaped much of the federal government's early attitudes around it and other psychedelics; once the Nazis elicited a potential weaponized use for LSD, the drug was never able to shake that taint. An entire class of medicines with the potential to help treat diseases that otherwise are essentially incurable was caught between the collapsing Nazi regime and the early stirrings of the Cold War and saw its early promise shattered.

In addition to LSD's militarized misconception from the Nazis, there were other areas of US drug policy influenced by the Third Reich. In fact, the eventual prohibition of all drugs, including psychedelics, can be traced back to Hitler's Germany, where the Nazi approach to banning drugs, their so-called Rauschgiftbekämpfung or fight against narcotics, the forerunner to the War on Drugs, also inspired US prohibition policy. Indeed it was a US narcotics control officer named Arthur Giuliani from the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, stationed in occupied Berlin after the fall of the Nazi regime, who imported much of the racist anti-drug policies back to the US. He would later reemerge to play a role in LSD's early history in America as well.

When people think of LSD, they don't think of the Nazis, and yet that unseen hand played a role in framing our laws around this class of drug and in limiting our ability to use psychedelics for medical research. Only by understanding the early history of LSD can we properly assess the current discussion around the "psychedelic renaissance," the next boom in the pharmaceutical industry. We must understand the flawed logic that limited therapeutic uses for psychedelics in the first place, because understanding the roots of that logic may, at long last, allow us to embrace fully the benefits of these drugs.

The first step to helping patients in need of psychedelic therapy—people like my mother—begins not in the present or in the future, but in the past.

PART I

CHAPTER ONE

THE ZONE

When the Federal Bureau of Narcotics agent Arthur J. Giuliani took up his post as narcotics control officer in the American sector of Berlin on April 8, 1946, he was thirty-seven years old and spoke, to his credit, a bit of French and Italian, both picked up on the streets of New York, but not a word of German. The former capital of the Reich was on its knees; the wounds carved by British and American bombs on the one hand, Russian artillery fire on the other, were still everywhere present. Rubble formed an eerie streetscape where the ghosts of the past roamed, while the geopolitical conflicts of the future were already making themselves felt and the battered residents were searching for the precious commodity of normalcy. Berlin was a place gone completely out of control, a place it hardly seemed possible to regulate; only bit by bit were the women who made up the rubble crews able to clear the streets and make them passable again. Here was a blasted metropolis in which thousands of people lived in ruins, almost all of them out of work, caught in a state between exhaustion and the exciting prospect of starting life over again from scratch.