[N]o other class of medications in virtually all of medicine inspires more baseless fears, intentional disinformation, and wild beliefs as do the stimulants used to treat ADHD.
Interestingly, these fears are almost entirely an American phenomenon that hardly exists elsewhere in the world.
[H]aving ADHD lowers a person’s estimated life expectancy by 12.7 years.
From other articles on the site:
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ADHD medication use lowers risk of death by 19%, risk of overdose by 50%, and it reduces hospitalizations
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[T]he risk of substance abuse decreases substantially when [ADHD] patients are treated with stimulant medication
I’m going to need more time to work through it. It’s pretty dense with facts, as expected.
Ohler starts by very quickly recounting the tale of William Pickard and his apprehension. I don’t think Ohler even mentioned that his base was in a missile silo. Maybe he comes back to Pickard later.
Then Ohler explains how his mother had Alzheimer’s and his retired federal judge father wanted to treat her with LSD. His father said something like, “if this is such a useful medicine, why can’t you just go buy it at the store?” This was Ohler’s inspiration for the book.
After that he jumps to divided Germany after the end of WWII. He explains what the war time drug policies were and how the situation developed after the collapse of government. He tells how US personnel were impressed with the Nazi policies and worked with former Nazis in their attempts to reassert control and to export those policies to the US. He clearly calls out the policies for being racist and racially-motivated.
Naturally Anslinger’s name comes up a lot and Ohler explains how he pushed UN members to enforce draconian drug laws to crush the market worldwide. Previously Anslinger had engineered a US stockpile on opium, and with production and trade cratered this stockpile became a monopoly. Anslinger used his financial interests in this monopoly to make himself the head of a global drug cartel.
The USSR refused to adopt Nazi drug policy for East Germany or for themselves. Because they continued to allow production (which threatened his plan), Anslinger fear-mongered to the UN that the USSR was planning to flood other countries with drugs. His intelligence sources did not support this conclusion.
That’s about as far as I’ve gotten. The book only really gets started once it jumps to the end of WWII, and this section hasn’t even mentioned psychedelics yet - it’s still focused on speed, opiates, etc. It reads like a direct continuation of Blitzed (so far as I recall it). Of course this is all very important context before jumping into the discussion of psychedelic criminalization. It seems clear that the direction it is going is that psychedelic policies were not based on the drugs themselves, but on the corrupt policies and strategies applied to drugs that existed prior to the psychedelic era.
Excellent summary so far. Is it meeting your expectations?
Yes, definitely. So far he manages to connect the dots in through history in an engaging way and gives enough glimpses into the real world through anecdotes that you can imagine the general vibes on the ground. The geopolitics are also explained enough to understand how the individual facts reflect the bigger picture. It is a bit dense but at the same time he keeps a pretty good pace even if it means skipping some details - it’s not written like an all-encompassing academic reference. It seems to be an honest, well-edited peek behind the curtains of history for popular audiences.