Norman Ohler

And then, I mean, not poison, but a very poisonous mushroom, you could say, like a fungus.

Like you don't want to eat this thing.

You know, you don't want to,

That was the problem.

You harvest rye, you make bread out of it.

And then there's like a little bit of ergot because on some of the rye, ergot grows and then the bread is poisonous.

That was the problem in the Middle Ages.

So farmers don't like it.

Now they had to produce it.

And suddenly, Sandoz in Basel, Switzerland, had huge amounts of ergot in their storage.

And they needed to make more and more products to use the raw materials that they had so expensively produced in the Emmental.

So Stoll hired further chemists.

One of them was Albert Hoffmann, the famous discoverer of LSD.

So he was not looking for...

A mind-blowing drug or anything.

He was looking for actually a stimulant because this was late 30s in Germany, Nazi Germany, a stimulant that was made from the nicotine acid, nicotine acid diethylamide.

No, it was actually a Swiss product, but from another company.

Nicotine acid diethylamide was... I don't know the brand name.

It had a brand name.

It was quite successful medicine.