Albert Hofmann
“I entered a very strange psychic state. A kind of dream world emerged; a feeling of unity with the world.” After “bicycle day”, LSD spread throughout the world — but “it’s not LSD that’s bad”.
The Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann He was working on a routine experiment at a pharmaceutical company in Basel, Switzerland, when he accidentally made a discovery that changed the world.
His first experience with the substance that would come to be known as LSD it was light and intriguing. But the decision to take the psychedelic drug three days later brought terrifying visions — and one of the strangest bike rides in history.
It all started on Friday, April 16, 1943. The Swiss was preparing a new batch of lysergic acid diethylamide, a compound that he himself had synthesized for the first time, five years earlier.
At the time, Hofmann was 37 years old and studying medicinal plants. He was experimenting with ergot, a type of fungus that grows on corn. His goal was to try to produce a medicine that could helping midwives speed up births and prevent bleeding.
The name of the substance in German is Lysergsäurediethylamidwhich gave rise to its best-known name, LSD.
The first human experience with LSD
The BBC interviewed Hofmann in 1986. He stated that his unexpected experience with the drug led him to remember “mystical” moments from his childhood, spent in woods and forests. The feeling of “observing the true aspects of nature, the beauty” filled the scientist with happiness.
Hofmann wondered if this pleasant dream state was somehow linked to the LSD crystals he was purifying.
He had not deliberately ingested the compound, but he may have had a small amount of the substance on his fingers. This would indicate that it was something very potent and the chemist decided to find out by experimenting on himself when he returned to work on Monday.
Cautious by nature, he started with what he thought was the smallest dose that would have any effect.
“I started with 0.25 milligrams,” Hofmann recalled. I planned to increase the dose only if nothing happened.
“But even this very small dose, the first predicted in my experiments, it was very, very strong“, he said.
After taking the drug, Hofmann began to feel unwell and staggered home through the streets of Basel on his bicycle.
Along the way, everything got stranger. His vision became distorted, as if he were looking into a distorting mirror. And by the time he got home, his sense of reality had disintegrated. When he entered the living room, Hofmann was surprised to see how completely she seemed to have changed.
“The room itself and the objects within it had a very different shape, a different color, different meaning“, he told the BBC. Even an ordinary chair appeared to be a “living object”, as if it were moving. “It was so unusual that I really feared I had gone crazy”, recalls Hofmann.
The bizarre hallucinations lasted all night. A neighbor was kind enough to bring her milk as an antidote, but the same neighbor seemed to have turned into a witch.
The chemist only felt that he was returning to the normal world about six hours later of consuming the drug. Undeterred by the alarming experience, Hofmann I would take LSD again and again over the following decades to observe its effects.
LSD in hospitals
His bicycle journey home from the laboratory, on that Monday in 1943, is celebrated every year, on April 19, by people inspired by LSD, whether from a scientific or creative point of view. In 1985, professor Thomas B. Roberts, from Illinois, in the United States, coined the expression “Bicycle Day” to mark the date.
Hofmann told his boss at the pharmaceutical company about the discovery Sandoz. From the effect of LSD on him, the chemist calculated that one teaspoon would be enough for 50 thousand people. He and his colleagues “quickly realized that this was a very important agent that could be useful in psychiatry and research.”
Sandoz began distributing LSD to psychiatric hospitals in an experimental drug called Delysid. Some psychiatrists have administered it to patients because of its effects on the subconscious mind, which allowed the release of repressed memories and mental conflicts.
LSD spreads around the world
The effects of this powerful new substance caught the attention of the US Army, which began a highly secret research program, known by the code name MK-Ultra.
Ken Kesey (1935-2001) was one of the civilians exposed to LSD during this investigation. He would later write the book One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, which gave rise to the film of the same name, starring Jack Nicholson.
“I decided that It was too important to be left in the hands of the government“, Kesey told the BBC.
Impressed by the hallucinogenic power of the drug, which was still legal at the time, Kesey began distributing it to his friends. And in 1964, he brought together a group of like-minded people.
They called themselves the Merry Pranksters (“Merry Pranksters”, in free translation) and set off on a trip across the United States, in a bus painted in bright colors.
This is how LSD left the laboratories and reached the entire country, fueling the experience of counterculture.
At the time, it was already known that LSD users ran the risk of facing so-called bad trips — terrifying spirals of fear and panic, which can cause permanent psychological damage or induce psychosis. Still, many people taking the drug championed its potential to change the world for the better.
One of the most active promoters of LSD was the former psychologist at Harvard University in the United States, Timothy Leary (1920-1996). His famous phrase “turn on, tune in, drop out” became a defining slogan of the psychedelic era.
Leary wrote to the Swiss pharmaceutical company in 1963: he asked for 100g of LSD, enough for two million people. The letter was addressed to Hofmann. Already alarmed by the abuse of his discovery outside the field of medicine, Hofmann recommended that Sandoz not comply with Leary’s request.
“I realized immediately that it would be dangerous, because a substance with such a profound effect must be used with caution,” he told the BBC.
Hofmann noted that ancient cultures and indigenous communities have used hallucinogenic substances for centuries, but only in religious contexts and always “in the hands of the shaman, not in public.”
He stressed that, in modern society, the closest equivalent to the shaman, in this case, is the psychiatrist and that these drugs “should remain in the hands of the shaman”.
This is why he feared, from the beginning, that “bad things could happen” with reckless and uncontrolled use of LSD. And he felt that this fear would later be confirmed.
It is estimated that more than a million Americans took LSD in 1969 without medical supervision.
Many found the dark side of its effects on the mind unbearable. But Hofmann said he never felt guilty, because “it’s not the LSD that’s bad.” He argued that if consumed properly, LSD is not a harmful substance. It only becomes “very, very dangerous” when it is taken recklessly and without respect for its “profound influence on society and even conscience.”
But with so many people taking the drug carelessly, along with an increasing number of press reports about its harmful effects, the regulation quickly became inevitable.
The 1971 United Nations Convention on Psychotropic Substances imposed strict international control over LSD, which would later be banned in several countries.
LSD is currently illegal throughout most of the world and remains under strict control in countries that allow its use in medical research. The powerful effect of the substance on the mind and the risk of flashbacks in the long term they made it classified alongside cocaine and heroindue to its high potential for abuse.
Hofmann’s ambivalence
Albert Hofmann died in 2008, aged 102. He told the BBC that the main insight gained from his LSD experience was that “reality is not something fixed, but rather ambiguous”.
“Before, I always thought that there was only one reality, one true reality. And then I realized that there are other dimensions”, he said.
The title of his autobiography, LSD: My Problem Child, reflects his ambivalent stance towards the drug. But he maintained his faith in the therapeutic potential of LSD.
“I believe that if people learned to use the vision-inducing ability of LSD more wisely, under appropriate conditions, during medical practice and in conjunction with meditation, this problem child, in the future, could become a child prodigy.”
