Albert Hoffmann
From the NY Times
January 7, 2006
The Saturday Profile
Nearly 100, LSD's Father Ponders His 'Problem Child'
By CRAIG S. SMITH
BURG, Switzerland
ALBERT Hofmann, the father of LSD, walked slowly across the small corner
office of his modernist home on a grassy Alpine hilltop here, hoping to
show
a visitor the vista that sweeps before him on clear days. But outside
there
was only a white blanket of fog hanging just beyond the crest of the hill.
He picked up a photograph of the view on his desk instead, left there
perhaps to convince visitors of what really lies beyond the windowpane.>
Mr. Hofmann will turn 100 on Wednesday, a milestone to be marked by a
symposium in nearby Basel on the chemical compound that he discovered and
that famously unlocked the Blakean doors of perception, altering
consciousnesses around the world. As the years accumulate behind him, Mr.
Hofmann's conversation turns ever more insistently around one theme: man's
oneness with nature and the dangers of an increasing inattention to that
fact.
"It's very, very dangerous to lose contact with living nature," he said,
listing to the right in a green armchair that looked out over frost-dusted
fields and snow-laced trees. A glass pitcher held a bouquet of roses on
the
coffee table before him. "In the big cities, there are people who have
never
seen living nature, all things are products of humans," he said. "The
bigger
the town, the less they see and understand nature." And, yes, he said,
LSD,
which he calls his "problem child," could help reconnect people to the
universe.
Rounding a century, Mr. Hofmann is physically reduced but mentally clear.
He
is prone to digressions, ambling with pleasure through memories of his
boyhood, but his bright eyes flash with the recollection of a mystical
experience he had on a forest path more than 90 years ago in the hills
above
Baden, Switzerland. The experience left him longing for a similar glimpse
of
what he calls "a miraculous, powerful, unfathomable reality."
"I was completely astonished by the beauty of nature," he said, laying a
slightly gnarled finger alongside his nose, his longish white hair swept
back from his temples and the crown of his head. He said any natural
scientist who was not a mystic was not a real natural scientist. "Outside
is
pure energy and colorless substance," he said. "All of the rest happens
through the mechanism of our senses. Our eyes see just a small fraction of
the light in the world. It is a trick to make a colored world, which does
not exist outside of human beings."
He became particularly fascinated by the mechanisms through which plants
turn sunlight into the building blocks for our own bodies. "Everything
comes
from the sun via the plant kingdom," he said.
MR. HOFMANN studied chemistry and took a job with the Swiss pharmaceutical
company Sandoz Laboratories, because it had started a program to identify
and synthesize the active compounds of medically important plants. He soon
began work on the poisonous ergot fungus that grows in grains of rye.
Midwives had used it for centuries to precipitate childbirths, but
chemists
had never succeeded in isolating the chemical that produced the
pharmacological effect. Finally, chemists in the United States identified
the active component as lysergic acid, and Mr. Hofmann began combining
other
molecules with the unstable chemical in search of pharmacologically useful
compounds.
His work on ergot produced several important drugs, including a compound
still in use to prevent hemorrhaging after childbirth. But it was the 25th
compound that he synthesized, lysergic acid diethylamide, that was to have
the greatest impact. When he first created it in 1938, the drug yielded no
significant pharmacological results. But when his work on ergot was
completed, he decided to go back to LSD-25, hoping that improved tests
could
detect the stimulating effect on the body's circulatory system that he had
expected from it. It was as he was synthesizing the drug on a Friday
afternoon in April 1943 that he first experienced the altered state of
consciousness for which it became famous. "Immediately, I recognized it as
the same experience I had had as a child," he said. "I didn't know what
caused it, but I knew that it was important."
When he returned to his lab the next Monday, he tried to identify the
source
of his experience, believing first that it had come from the fumes of a
chloroform-like solvent he had been using. Inhaling the fumes produced no
effect, though, and he realized he must have somehow ingested a trace of
LSD. "LSD spoke to me," Mr. Hofmann said with an amused, animated smile.
"He
came to me and said, 'You must find me.' He told me, 'Don't give me to the
pharmacologist, he won't find anything.' "
HE experimented with the drug, taking a dose so small that even the most
active toxin known at that time would have had little or no effect. The
result with LSD, however, was a powerful experience, during which he rode
his bicycle home, accompanied by an assistant. That day, April 19, later
became memorialized by LSD enthusiasts as "bicycle day."
Mr. Hofmann participated in tests in a Sandoz laboratory, but found the
experience frightening and realized that the drug should be used only
under
carefully controlled circumstances. In 1951, he wrote to the German
novelist
Ernst Junger, who had experimented with mescaline, and proposed that they
take LSD together. They each took 0.05 milligrams of pure LSD at Mr.
Hofmann's home accompanied by roses, music by Mozart and burning Japanese
incense. "That was the first planned psychedelic test," Mr. Hofmann said.
He took the drug dozens of times after that, he said, and once experienced
what he called a "horror trip" when he was tired and Mr. Junger gave him
amphetamines first. But his hallucinogenic days are long behind him.
"I know LSD; I don't need to take it anymore," Mr. Hofmann said. "Maybe
when
I die, like Aldous Huxley," who asked his wife for an injection of LSD to
help him through the final painful throes of his fatal throat cancer.
But Mr. Hofmann calls LSD "medicine for the soul" and is frustrated by the
worldwide prohibition that has pushed it underground. "It was used very
successfully for 10 years in psychoanalysis," he said, adding that the
drug
was hijacked by the youth movement of the 1960's and then demonized by the
establishment that the movement opposed. He said LSD could be dangerous
and
called its distribution by Timothy Leary and others "a crime."
"It should be a controlled substance with the same status as morphine," he
said.
Mr. Hofmann lives with his wife in the house they built 38 years ago. He
raised four children and watched one son struggle with alcoholism before
dying at 53. He has eight grandchildren and six great-grandchildren. As
far
as he knows, no one in his family besides his wife has tried LSD.
Mr. Hofmann rose, slightly stooped and now barely reaching five feet, and
walked through his house with his arm-support cane. When asked if the drug
had deepened his understanding of death, he appeared mildly startled and
said no. "I go back to where I came from, to where I was before I was
born, that's all," he said.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY DOCTOR HOFMANN
by michaelcirclewider
I am so glad to hear that Dr Hofmann is still with us.
It takes me back to the time when I actually met the
man. It was at the First Conference on Poisonous and
Hallucinogenic Mushrooms.
The time was the mid seventies I was still deeply
involved in my career as a distributor of
paraphernalia. You know, tobacco bongs and miniature
spoons for the feeding of small sick birds. Oh yes,
and the industry was just getting started developing
mushroom kits.
The First Conference on Poisonous and Hallucinogenic
mushrooms, I don't remember if there was a second. I
am still trying to pin down the year. It was fall and
the venue was some kind of college in Port Townsend
Washington, prime time and location for wild
mushrooms.
The line up of mushroom luminaries was very
impressive.
There was of course Dr. Hofmann, Andrew Wield, the
anthropologist Shulties, psychologist and drug
researcher Norman Zinber a leading mycologist from
Mexico Dr. Guzman and many others.
Dr Hofmann lead off with a presentation on the origins
of Lisergic Acid and the process of developing it into
LSD 25.
I still vividly remember the slide of Ergot growing on
Rye.
Under fine magnification the Ergot fungi were
manifested as perfectly formed miniature mushrooms.
The mycologists referred to then as carbifors. That
is the fruited body of the fungi (the mushroom) which
is the most visible part of the life cycle of a
mushroom.
One evening on the chow line, this young woman,
obviously an admirer of Dr Hofmanns work, came up
behind him and gave him a very loving and spontaneous
back massage. He was rather taken aback and it turned
into an embarrassing moment for the young lady and Dr
Haufman.
Another night in the chow line I was taken aback when
the guy behind me was introducing himself to the guy
behind him.
"Hi I am John Johnson D.E.A."
Myself and some of the less scientific attendees had a
lot of fun going around the campus and picking up
mushrooms and taking them back to the mycologists for
identification. Some of the mycologists were more
interested in edibles than psychedelic mushrooms. A
lot of them had a term for small mushrooms that that
looked allot like one another. They called them LBM's,
short for little brown mushrooms. They usually
differed to Dr. Guzman. He seemed to be the authority
on LBM's. Another interesting point, there are a whole
lot of LBM's in the northwest that have no psylocybin
at all. Some of them can even make you ill.
In spite of our great efforts looking for psylocybin
mushrooms we could not find any. Isn't that why the
organizers held the conference where they did? No one
found a single wild psilobisin mushroom that I know of
on the Port Townsend campus. I guess it just wasn't
there time.
As for my years dabbling in armature mycology I only
learned to collect one wild psylocybin mushroom, that
beibg Psylocybe Semilanciata, aka the liberty cap. It
is called liberty cap because the the cap seemes to
wag back and forth on it's stem in a breeze, like a
bell.
I felt at the time that I should validate my
attendance at the mushroom conference by eating some
of the wild magic mushroom.
Since there were none to be found at that time and
place, I bought some from a fellow attendee who
brought them in from another locale. I guess he was
thinking the same thing.
One other aspect of an otherwise great conference,
that comes to mind was that there was a thief going
through our un lockable rooms stealing our stuff. I
lost several newly autographed mushroom books. Much to
my credit I went to meals lectures and workshops with
my Nikon camera hanging from my neck. I still have it
today. Gabriella the publisher of High Times Magazine
was not so Lucky. I only hope that Dr. Hoffmann and
the the other VIP's were provided with locks on there
doors
All things considered it was a great conference, I
learned allot and had a great time.
After the conference I got a ride with a fellow
attendee back to Sea-Tac Airport. On our way back we
stoped in Bremmerton where we visited a big field and
found some of the illusive liberty cap magic
mushrooms. We ate them right there in the field. We
stopped in Seattle and went to see the movie Fantasia.
So that is how I got to meet the good Dr. Hofmann.
Loving You
michaelcirclewider
To find out more about Dr. Albert Hoffman, go to the Erowid Albert Hoffman Pages
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