Blitzed and Tripped

Please join my Substack Live discussion with author Norman Ohler today at 2 pm EST

Today at 2pm EST, please join me for a Substack Live conversation with Norman Ohler:

Ohler is a German novelist, screenwriter, and journalist who moved from experimental fiction to archival nonfiction that reframes 20th-century history through the lens of drugs and state power. After early novels (including a 1995 hypertext experiment and the “City Trilogy”), he broke out with Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich, a New York Times bestseller. Drawing on medical files and security archives, Blitzed argues that methamphetamine (Pervitin) and other pharmaceuticals saturated German society and the Wehrmacht, while Hitler himself relied on an escalating cocktail administered by his physician Theodor Morell—an angle that complicates standard accounts of Nazi decision-making and military performance. Reviews and interviews emphasized the book’s archival base and its claim that drug dependency and shortages shaped the regime’s final phase.

Ohler’s follow-up, Tripped: Nazi Germany, the CIA, and the Dawn of the Psychedelic Age (Mariner/Harper, 2024), tracks how wartime and Nazi-era thinking about mind-altering substances bled into U.S. Cold War programs, especially CIA research with LSD, and how those covert experiments later fed into both the counterculture and the War on Drugs. Reviewers describe it as a concise, propulsive synthesis that links punitive drug control with clandestine state use, suggesting a through-line from Nazi practices to MK-Ultra and beyond. Chillingly, Ohler describes use and study of LSD and other psychedelics in the Nazi concentration camps. In his personal exploration of psychedelics, Ohler recently took Ibogaine at a clinic in New Mexico, which he found life-changing.

See you at 2!