TRIPPED: NAZI GERMANY, THE CIA, AND THE DAWN OF THE PSYCHEDELIC AGE - NORMAN OHLER

Typically, I do not review books I don’t like, because I don’t finish reading them. I’m under no pressure to read stuff that is stupid, there is only so much time in the day and there is a long, long list of things I’d like to read. If you go back on this blog, you’ll notice that the only negative book reviews I’ve given are for things I’m reading for a specific purpose (I’m discussing it with someone, etc.). That being said, it’s the end of the year, I wanted to squeeze in one more book (this thing is short) and I found it at my parent’s house. I read it over two nights and, boy, is it not good. This book covers very familiar ground for me, it’s about the history of LSD, which, by necessity, involves a lot of CIA/deep state shenanigans. Ohler gives the paints a very misleading picture of what went on with acid. The machinations of the so-called deep state or CIA fuckery are becoming more popular and well-known. Regular people know about MKULTRA now, or at least they know the name, and they have a specific idea of what went on.The mainstream idea, that this book pushes, is that the CIA made some wacky mistakes in the heat of the cold war. They tried some silly stuff and none of it worked and they feel bad about it. This narrative usually contains the Midnight Climax stuff (where unsuspecting Johns were given acid in San Francisco and recorded, no curiosity as to where else the idea of drugging and recording sex acts might lead to or how it might connect to, say, Epstein), the Olson Stuff (tho, not the part about who was the bellhop at the hotel, typically this telling leaves the idea that he killed himself as a possibility), and a narrative about how it got “out of the CIA’s control and into the counterculture.” This is a harmful narrative that leaves the really bad stuff out. For example, Jolly West isn’t even in this book at all. This book pushes the idea that these experiments aren’t “who we really are.” The beginning of the book tries to suggest that America’s racist drug laws were borrowed from Nazi Germany. Anyone with a brain would understand it went the other way. We were using drugs as a way to suppress dissent and long, long before the Nazis got into power, they learned it from us. In the epilogue of the book, he writes, “In doing so [suppressing drugs], the democratic countries of the West especially, whose appeal and prosperity is based on the freedom of the individual, do themselves a disservice.” which is an insane and, frankly, evil, understanding of history. The prosperity of the West is based on organizations like the CIA being able to do endless holocausts on the so-called third world. That’s what history since the end of WWII is actually about. That’s the context you have to understand MKULTRA within. It’s not a sad aberration, a failure to live up to our highest ideals, it’s business as usual. My worry is that books like this are supposed to act as limited hangouts or soft-disclosures to keep people from really understanding what went on. The book to read on this subject is Acid Dreams. This is garbage.