Related Stories
Did the Nazis and the CIA help shape the history of LSD?
Key Excerpts from Article on Website of ABC News
Posted: December 16th, 2025
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-11-01/lsd-nazis-cia-history...
LSD has had a colourful history. But there's a lesser-known part of this history: A quest by Nazi Germany to use psychedelics as a truth serum, with the CIA picking up where the Third Reich left off. "LSD, in a way, had a really bad start, because first it was the SS and then the CIA," German author Norman Ohler [said]. In 1938, chemist Albert Hofmann was working at the Swiss pharmaceutical company Sandoz, where he first synthesised lysergic acid diethylamide or LSD. Ohler dug around the Sandoz company archives. He says that the then-CEO Arthur Stoll, a "chemist maverick", had notable correspondences with a German man named Richard Kuhn. "[Kuhn was] a Nobel Prize winner for chemistry, but unfortunately, he was also Hitler's leading biochemist," Ohler says. At the time, the Nazis were increasingly paranoid about opponents within the regime. And they were finding that old-fashioned techniques like physical torture were not all that effective for extracting truth, so were looking at other means, including psychedelics. "These [LSD] samples were used by the Nazis for their experiments ... with [other] psychedelics in order to find new interrogation techniques," Ohler says. The Nazis "were looking for what they called the 'truth drug'". The Americans "basically continued the Nazi experiments in America on unwitting American citizens", Ohler says. The CIA examined the effects of psychoactive drugs like LSD on human subjects — often without their consent.
Note: Learn more about the MKUltra Program in our comprehensive Military-Intelligence Corruption Information Center. For more, read our concise summaries of news articles on intelligence agency corruption and mind control.
Related Stories
Latest News
Key News Articles from Years Past
