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A Psychedelic ‘Problem Child’ Comes Full Circle

By BENEDICT CAREY
The New York Times
Published: May 4, 2008

ON the afternoon of Jan. 11, Albert Hofmann, the chemist who discovered LSD, had about a dozen friends and family up to his glass-walled home in the mountains near Basel, Switzerland, for a party. It was his 102nd birthday and, in an important sense, also a homecoming.

John Loengard/Time & Life Pictures — Getty Images

MOVING SLOWLY A Boston-area housewife considers a Buddha statue in 1963 after taking LSD as part of an experiment by Timothy Leary.

Related - Albert Hofmann, the Father of LSD, Dies at 102 (April 30, 2008)

Dr. Hofmann, who died last week, spent the latter part of his life consulting with scientists around the world who wanted to bring his “problem child,” as he called the drug, back into the lab to study as a therapeutic agent. Not long before his last birthday, he learned that health officials in his native Switzerland had approved what will be the first known medical trial of LSD anywhere in more than 35 years — to test whether the drug can help relieve distress at end of life.

“It was something to be there, in that house,” said Rick Doblin, president of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, a nonprofit group that supports research into LSD and related compounds. “He was walking around the place, telling jokes, being a host. He seemed ... I don’t know, peaceful somehow, comfortable to let the next generation carry on his spirit. And he was expressing how completely grateful he was that that we’d been able to restart LSD research — that his problem child had come home, had become a wonder child.”

Most drugs that capture the imagination of the wider culture seem at first to soothe the unease or gloom of their times, like Valium in the 1970s or Prozac in the late 1980s and early 1990s. But lysergic acid diethylamide, the substance Dr. Hofmann accidentally ingested in 1943 while working at the Swiss drug firm Sandoz, did exactly the opposite. It inflamed people’s hopes and fears, powerfully so.

LSD, it turns out, is one of the most potent consciousness-altering substances known; an amount the size of a grain of salt can induce swirls of emotion, and shimmering clear senses in which the ordinary becomes extraordinary, luminous, meaningful. It can infuse a person with creative energy or overwhelm the brain with a swarming feeling of loss and fear. Sometimes both: Even Dr. Hofmann had at least one bad trip, recalling in his autobiography, “Everything in the room spun around, and the familiar objects and pieces of furniture assumed grotesque, threatening forms.”

Looking back, scholars say, it’s hard to imagine that such a drug, once in circulation, could not have taken Western culture for a wild ride, especially given the forces at play in the postwar United States.

“It was probably inevitable, and I think the reason is that the common denominator, the common ground shared by all the various groups who made use of LSD, was that they got instantly excited about it as potentiator of their own agenda, whatever that was,” said Martin A. Lee, co-author of “Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD: The C.I.A., the ’60s and Beyond.” “It’s a terrible phrase, but I think of LSD as a potentiator of possibilities. It just evoked these grandiose possibilities with people.”

Scientists in the 1940s and 1950s, for instance, thought it might be the key to providing healing insight, a window on the soul, a way to transcend psychosis, mania, depression. Dr. Hofmann thought it could awaken a deeper awareness of mankind’s place in nature. About 1,000 studies crowd the medical literature of that era, many of them sloppy, a few tantalizing and some disastrous for the people being “treated” with an acid trip. The C.I.A. tested the drug as an aid to interrogation, a kind of truth serum. The Army modeled the possibility of using it as a madness gas, of dosing the enemy to gain quick advantage.

And this was all before acid met the counterculture on Haight Street in the 1960s.

But meet they did, and it was love at first sight. Dr. Hofmann’s child was no hustler from a shotgun lab in Tijuana, after all, but a bourgeois revolutionary, born into establishment medicine and able to travel the world and enter societies from the top down, through their most hallowed institutions.

The English novelist Aldous Huxley, who struck up a friendship with Dr. Hofmann, was one of the first prominent proponents of LSD use for personal transformation. Timothy Leary, LSD’s pied piper, was a Harvard professor whose public raptures over the drug were a strong cocktail of mystical and scientific jargon. Ken Kesey, founder of the protoraves known as acid tests, was at age 30 already an acclaimed novelist, author of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” He likened taking acid to “putting a tuning fork on your whole body.”

Not that acid was a hard sell to young people in the early 1960s, at least to those who longed not only to shake free of mainstream suburban-corporate culture but also to transform it, and themselves. They weren’t looking for an angry fix but something far grander. “To put matters bluntly: the hippies were an attempt to push evolution, to jump the species toward a higher integration,” wrote Jay Stevens in his 1987 book, “Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream.”

A joint is not going to get you there.

Nor, in the end, did LSD. By 1966 a raft of toxic knockoffs were on the street, and the authorities recognized that, whatever its upside, acid had become part of a self-devouring drug culture that exposed many users to a poisonous menu of illicit drugs. The government outlawed distribution of LSD, and research into its effects soon ground to a near halt. Where some saw a long-overdue crackdown on abuse, others saw an overreaction.

“Once the drug illegalization crowd gets hold of it, that’s that,” said Alexander Shulgin, a former Dow chemist who discovered the effects of MDMA, or ecstasy, which has also been made a controlled substance. “People start talking about protecting little children, and worrying about whether someone’s going to jump out the window, and meanwhile we have these substances — MDMA and LSD — that may be of tremendous value in psychotherapy and couldn’t be explored.”

They can now; several trials testing psychedelics are in the works, thanks in part to the steady example set by Dr. Hofmann. “I think people in this country, when they see a patient in pain, will not deny that person a medication just because the drug has abuse potential,” said Dr. John Halpern, a Harvard psychiatrist who is testing the effect of MDMA-assisted psychotherapy in late-stage cancer patients. “LSD is always going to be a touchy subject but I think it’s kind of fallen back to earth.”

The trip is over, the hangover gone, and the prodigal child arrived home, just in time to say goodbye.

1 comment Tags: psychology, pharmacology, legalize it, alternative medicine

Albert Hofmann, the Father of LSD, Dies at 102

By CRAIG S. SMITH
The New York Times
Published: April 30, 2008

PARIS — Albert Hofmann, the mystical Swiss chemist who gave the world LSD, the most powerful psychotropic substance known, died Tuesday at his hilltop home near Basel, Switzerland. He was 102.

Patrick Straub/European Pressphoto Agency

Albert Hofmann in 2006.

Novartis, via A.F.P. — Getty Images

Dr. Hofmann, date unknown, with a chemical model of LSD.

The cause was a heart attack, said Rick Doblin, founder and president of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, a California-based group that in 2005 republished Dr. Hofmann’s 1979 book “LSD: My Problem Child.”

Dr. Hofmann first synthesized the compound lysergic acid diethylamide in 1938 but did not discover its psychopharmacological effects until five years later, when he accidentally ingested the substance that became known to the 1960s counterculture as acid.

He then took LSD hundreds of times, but regarded it as a powerful and potentially dangerous psychotropic drug that demanded respect. More important to him than the pleasures of the psychedelic experience was the drug’s value as a revelatory aid for contemplating and understanding what he saw as humanity’s oneness with nature. That perception, of union, which came to Dr. Hofmann as almost a religious epiphany while still a child, directed much of his personal and professional life.

Dr. Hofmann was born in Baden, a spa town in northern Switzerland, on Jan. 11, 1906, the eldest of four children. His father, who had no higher education, was a toolmaker in a local factory, and the family lived in a rented apartment. But Dr. Hofmann spent much of his childhood outdoors.

He would wander the hills above the town and play around the ruins of a Hapsburg castle, the Stein. “It was a real paradise up there,” he said in an interview in 2006. “We had no money, but I had a wonderful childhood.”

It was during one of his ambles that he had his epiphany.

“It happened on a May morning — I have forgotten the year — but I can still point to the exact spot where it occurred, on a forest path on Martinsberg above Baden,” he wrote in “LSD: My Problem Child.” “As I strolled through the freshly greened woods filled with bird song and lit up by the morning sun, all at once everything appeared in an uncommonly clear light.

“It shone with the most beautiful radiance, speaking to the heart, as though it wanted to encompass me in its majesty. I was filled with an indescribable sensation of joy, oneness and blissful security.”

Though Dr. Hofmann’s father was a Roman Catholic and his mother a Protestant, Dr. Hofmann, from an early age, felt that organized religion missed the point. When he was 7 or 8, he recalled, he spoke to a friend about whether Jesus was divine. “I said that I didn’t believe, but that there must be a God because there is the world and someone made the world,” he said. “I had this very deep connection with nature.”

Dr. Hofmann went on to study chemistry at Zurich University because, he said, he wanted to explore the natural world at the level where energy and elements combine to create life. He earned his Ph.D. there in 1929, when he was just 23. He then took a job with Sandoz Laboratories in Basel, attracted by a program there that sought to synthesize pharmacological compounds from medicinally important plants.

It was during his work on the ergot fungus, which grows in rye kernels, that he stumbled on LSD, accidentally ingesting a trace of the compound one Friday afternoon in April 1943. Soon he experienced an altered state of consciousness similar to the one he had experienced as a child.

On the following Monday, he deliberately swallowed a dose of LSD and rode his bicycle home as the effects of the drug overwhelmed him. That day, April 19, later became memorialized by LSD enthusiasts as “bicycle day.”

Dr. Hofmann’s work produced other important drugs, including methergine, used to treat postpartum hemorrhaging, the leading cause of death from childbirth. But it was LSD that shaped both his career and his spiritual quest.

“Through my LSD experience and my new picture of reality, I became aware of the wonder of creation, the magnificence of nature and of the animal and plant kingdom,” Dr. Hofmann told the psychiatrist Stanislav Grof during an interview in 1984. “I became very sensitive to what will happen to all this and all of us.”

Dr. Hofmann became an impassioned advocate for the environment and argued that LSD, besides being a valuable tool for psychiatry, could be used to awaken a deeper awareness of mankind’s place in nature and help curb society’s ultimately self-destructive degradation of the natural world.

But he was also disturbed by the cavalier use of LSD as a drug for entertainment, arguing that it should be treated in the way that primitive societies treat psychoactive sacred plants, which are ingested with care and spiritual intent.

After his discovery of LSD’s properties, Dr. Hofmann spent years researching sacred plants. With his friend R. Gordon Wasson, he participated in psychedelic rituals with Mazatec shamans in southern Mexico. He succeeded in synthesizing the active compounds in the Psilocybe mexicana mushroom, which he named psilocybin and psilocin. He also isolated the active compound in morning glory seeds, which the Mazatec also used as an intoxicant, and found that its chemical structure was close to that of LSD.

During the psychedelic era, Dr. Hofmann struck up friendships with such outsize personalities as Timothy Leary, Allen Ginsberg and Aldous Huxley, who, nearing death in 1963, asked his wife for an injection of LSD to help him through the final painful throes of throat cancer.

Yet despite his involvement with psychoactive compounds, Dr. Hofmann remained moored in his Swiss chemist identity. He stayed with Sandoz as head of the research department for natural medicines until his retirement in 1971. He wrote more than 100 scientific articles and was the author or co-author of a number of books

He and his wife, Anita, who died recently, reared four children in Basel. A son died of alcoholism at 53. Survivors include several grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

Though Dr. Hofmann called LSD “medicine for the soul,” by 2006 his hallucinogenic days were long behind him, he said in the interview that year.

“I know LSD; I don’t need to take it anymore,” he said, adding. “Maybe when I die, like Aldous Huxley.”

But he said LSD had not affected his understanding of death. In death, he said, “I go back to where I came from, to where I was before I was born, that’s all.”









You have my never-ending gratitude for all your difficult and surreal work, dear Uncle Albert.  May you have great and fortunate rebirths, and reach complete and total enlightenment.

Shouldn't take you long.  :)

1 comment Tags: psychology, legalize it, psychiatry, alternative medicine, alternative health