Pubdate: Fri, 06 Jan 2006
Source: International Herald-Tribune (International)
Copyright: International Herald Tribune 2006
Contact:  http://www.iht.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/212
Author: Craig S. Smith, The New York Times
Audio: MAPS Albert Hofmann Birthday Broadcast (2005) 
http://www.maps.org/conferences/ah99/ah99b.mp3
Related: http://www.lsd.info/
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/people/Albert+Hofmann (Albert Hofmann)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/topics/LSD (LSD)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/hallucinogens.htm (Hallucinogens)

FATHER OF LSD, NOW 100, AND HIS 'PROBLEM CHILD'

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 window.

Hofmann turns 100 on Wednesday, a milestone to be marked by a
symposium in nearby Basel on the chemical compound that he discovered
and that famously altered consciousnesses around the world. As the
years accumulate and his time left on the planet grows short,
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.

"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, LSD, which he calls his "problem child," could help
reconnect people to the universe.

Rounding a century, Hofmann is physically reduced but mentally clear.
He is prone to digressions, 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," but it also left him
deeply connected to nature and helped shape his future.

He became particularly fascinated by the plant kingdom, 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.

He says that any natural scientist who is not a mystic is not a real
natural scientist.

Hofmann went on to study chemistry and took a job with Sandoz, a Swiss
pharmaceutical firm, because the company 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 the deadly material 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 Hofmann began combining other molecules with the unstable chemical
in search of pharmacologically useful compounds.

Hofmann's work produced several important drugs, including a compound
to prevent hemorrhaging after childbirth. But it was the 25th compound
that he synthesized, lysergic acid diethylamide, that was to have the
greatest impact, although it yielded no significant pharmacological
results.

When his other work on ergot was completed, he decided to go back to
LSD-25, hoping that improved pharmacological tests could detect the
stimulating effect on the body's circulatory system that he had
expected from the compound.

It was as he was synthesizing the drug on a Friday afternoon in April
1943, he recalled, that he first experienced the altered state of
consciousness for which it became famous. He rode his bicycle home,
lay down and spent hours mesmerized by hallucinations.

"Immediately, I recognized it as the same experience I had had as a
child," he said.

When he returned to his lab the next Monday, he tried to identify the
source of his strange 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.

He first experimented with the drug, taking a dose so small that even
the most active toxin known at that time would have little or no
effect. The result was a powerful LSD experience, during which he
again rode his bicycle home, this time accompanied by an assistant.

He later participated in clinical tests in a Sandoz laboratory, but
found the experience frightening and realized that the drug should be
used only under carefully controlled circumstances.

Later, he wrote to the German novelist Ernst Junger, who had
experimented with mescaline, and proposed that the two take the new
compound together. In 1951, together with a medical doctor, the two
men each took 0.05 milligrams of pure LSD at Hofmann's home,
accompanied by a vase of roses, music by Mozart and a stick of
Japanese incense.

"That was the first planned psychedelic test," Hofmann
said.

He took the drug dozens of times after that, he said, and once
experienced a bad trip, what he calls a "horror trip," when he was
tired and Junger gave him amphetamines first to freshen him up.

He 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.

But the drug was hijacked by the youth movement of the 1960s and then
unfairly demonized by the establishment that the movement opposed,
Hofmann said. He conceded that LSD could be dangerous and called its
promotion by Timothy Leary and others "a crime."

"You should only give it to people with a certain stability who can
survive a bad trip," he said. "It should be a controlled substance
with the same status as morphine."

Hofmann is a philosopher but no high priest. He did not quit his job
after his LSD experiences but worked to retirement and lives now 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 the age
of 53. He has eight grandchildren and six great-grandchildren.

As far as he knows, no one in his family other than his wife has tried
LSD.

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. 
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MAP posted-by: Richard Lake