Dr. Albert Hofmann is famous because he discovered/invented/synthesized LSD‑‑lysergic acid diethylamide-25–in 1938 in the process of looking for medicinal uses of a fungus found on rye, wheat and other grains. At the time he was an unknown if brilliant chemist working for Sandoz Pharmaceuticals in Basel, Switzerland. He was a Swiss scientist in the traditional mold searching for ways to improve human life. He succeeded beyond his wildest expectations in unexpected ways, and his discovery of LSD deeply altered the lives of millions of people and, thereby, the course of human events. LSD has been profoundly misunderstood and demonized by non-cognoscenti, seriously abused by some who could be called cognoscenti, banned for many years in much of the world and called with deep affection “My Problem Child” by Hofmann himself. It strikes terror into the quaking hearts and fearful souls of those authorities who mistake control for order and who quiver with rage or uncertainty at questions (or chemicals) that challenge their certainty about what is what. Still, LSD is alive and well, inspiring, enlightening and helping to heal the psychic and psychological wounds of many people.
When he died in 2008 at his home in Burg im Leimental, Switzerland at the age of 102, he was the head of a large family including eight grandchildren and six great-grandchildren. He was admired, respected and beloved by many people far outside the realms of science and his life as a Swiss professional. He took LSD many times and considered it a profound psychic medicine and thought that its use as a recreational “pleasure drug” was a mistake. Like many others—perhaps including some reading these words—at a certain point he realized he no longer had a use for LSD. Like many others, he turned to and recommended older methods of attaining “extraordinary states of consciousness”‑‑breathing techniques, yoga, fasting, dance, art, meditation. He said, “LSD brings about a reduction of intellectual powers in favor of an emotional experience of the world. It can help to refill our consciousness with this feeling of wholeness and being one with nature.” Which would seem to indicate a key element of any “extraordinary state of consciousness” is nothing more complicated than connecting the heart to the brain.
A good argument could be made that Albert Hofmann might accurately be described as the 20^th century father of reminding humanity that hearts and brains only work properly in unison. LSD was the tool he offered to connect them. This ancient knowledge‑‑heart/brain connection‑‑seemed like the newest, most profound wisdom to ever come down the road of life to those acid trippers of the 1960s and ‘70s who were trying to come to terms with the stultifying, repressive, heartless hypocrisies of the 1950s, the murders of John Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, the horrors and rationale of Viet Nam, the deceitful disservice to America of such public servants as Richard Nixon, Robert McNamara, Henry Kissinger and others whose hearts were ravaged by ambition, greed, hubris and disconnection from the world they so cavalierly manipulated. There was a general sense of things not right in the wealth-driven homogeneity that characterized the capitalist values of America, and many who took LSD were able to see a way to set them right.
And so they did, if you know what I mean. If you don’t, perhaps a dance class, some yoga, a fast or a meditation practice is in order.
Besides inadvertently taking the first LSD ‘trip’ on April 16 1943 after accidentally getting a tiny amount of it on his finger, Hofmann was a serious, socially conscious chemist with a long and distinguished career. As a graduate student, Hofmann revealed the structure of insect chitin. Later he mastered the complex chemical world found within ergot, a cereal fungus with an enormous range of effects on the human nervous system. He called these derivatives of ergot his “children,” and they include drugs that remain in the pharmacopoeia to this day: methergine to prevent obstetrical bleeding, the anti-dementia vasodilator hydergine, dihydergot for migraines, in addition to the problem child, LSD.
Psychedelics were well known by the time Hofmann discovered LSD, but LSD was some 10,000 times more powerful than mescaline. Through the 1940s and 1950s LSD created a revolution in psychiatry. It was used successfully in the treatment of neurosis, psychosis and depression. Some 40,000 people underwent psychedelic therapy, perhaps most notably the actor Cary Grant who received some 60 LSD psychotherapy sessions and said of them, “I have been born again.” Aldous Huxley requested an injection of LSD on his deathbed. And many psychotherapists took the drug along with their patients, a fact not noted nearly enough in the literature or appreciated enough by those unwilling to appreciate the healing and wholeness to be found in expanded and extraordinary consciousness.
In pop culture LSD is associated with Ken Kesey, Timothy Leary, Allen Ginsberg, the ‘hippie’ mores of San Francisco’s flower children, Grateful Dead concerts, Woodstock and psychedelic art as, of course, it should be.
But it was Albert Hofmann’s child, and though it was a problem child he never gave up his belief in its goodness and usefulness as “medicine for the soul.” He never believed in it as a pleasure drug for the masses. He said, “As long as people fail to truly understand psychedelics and continue to use them as pleasure drugs, and fail to appreciate the very deep psychic experience they may induce, then their medical use will be held back.” The LSD experience was somewhat familiar to him when he encountered it as an adult; it was very close to an epiphany he had as a child while roaming in the woods near his childhood home. He said, “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. 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.” Throughout his long life, pilgrims passed through Switzerland to visit Hofmann, to seek his counsel, and, perhaps, to score some of his stash of the original LSD. He considered it his responsibility to meet as many of these people as possible. He said, “I have tried to help, instructing and advising.”
On Hofmann’s 100^th birthday he was able to see an international symposium convene in Basel to discuss LSD research and a renewed interest in the therapeutic potential of LSD and other psychedelics. A year earlier the British Journal of Psychiatry called for a reappraisal of psychedelics “based upon scientific reasoning and not influenced by social or political pressures.”
Hofmann was active, vibrant and intelligent and involved to the end of his days. If he suffered any ill effects from his hundreds of LSD trips they were not evident. Since he lived to be 102 it would seem the medicinal properties of LSD did him some good. He lived to see his Prodigal Son come home to scientific respectability. What scientist could ask for more?