Every environment is terrible, each in its own way. On Saturday afternoon, a special group gathered at the Hotel Château Royal in Berlin-Mitte to celebrate the premiere of Norman Ohler’s new non-fiction book in the conservatory there. It’s called “The Strongest Material” and won’t be published until next week, which is why it can’t be officially discussed at this point at the behest of the publisher. It explores the question of why LSD is not actually available in pharmacies and tells the extremely exciting story, which may be revealed, of how this substance, which is known to have been synthesized from grain by the Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann, was not only used by unrestricted hippies in discredited, but also between the fronts of the Cold War. Although there was enormously promising research into LSD and psilocybin for relieving depression or anxiety as early as the 1960s, psychedelics were demonized, banned and all medical research halted. Now the tide has turned, new studies are underway in many countries, and in some places psilocybin is being used medically again to treat depression, for example in the US state of Oregon.
Book presentation “The Strongest Material”: If only it weren’t for this laughter – culture
