Albert Hoffmann, the discoverer of LSD, turned 100 years old this year on Juanary 11th.  Happy Birthday, Albert!  Scienceblogs.com relates the story of Hoffmann’s first deliberate LSD trip on April 19th, 1943.  You might recall that Hoffmann was the Sandoz chemist who stumbled upon the psychotropic activity of lysergic acid diethylamide.  

Just this last week, the medical journal The Lancet called for an end to the “demonization” of psychedelic drugs, according to Guardian Unlimited.  The motivation behind the editorial in the Lancet was to urge a loosening of taboo’s connected with the use of psychedelic compounds.  The widespread criminalization of psychedelics has made research with these interesting molecules quite problematic. 

Perhaps the day will come when such materials are decriminalized and it will be possible to visit a psychedelic spa where one could go to have a safe dosage administered by qualified staff.  But it wouldn’t be all fun and games, though.  While the euphoric experience can be prolonged and profoundly vivid, there is a dark side.  An account of the experience of the psychiatrist Werner Stoll is described in Chapter 4 of Hoffmanns book “LSD. My Problem Child”.

Hoffmann and Sandoz would watch their discovery move from a psychiatric adjunct to a full fledged inebriant adopted by a counter culture movement.  In his book, Hoffmann laments-

    This joy at having fathered LSD was tarnished after more than ten years of uninterrupted scientific research and medicinal use when LSD was swept up in the huge wave of an inebriant mania that began to spread over the Western world, above all the United States, at the end of the 1950s. It was strange how rapidly LSD adopted its new role as inebriant and, for a time, became the number-one inebriating drug, at least as far as publicity was concerned. The more its use as an inebriant was disseminated, bringing an upsurge in the number of untoward incidents caused by careless, medically unsupervised use, the more LSD became a problem child for me and for the Sandoz firm.

    It was obvious that a substance with such fantastic effects on mental perception and on the experience of the outer and inner world would also arouse interest outside medical science, but I had not expected that LSD, with its unfathomably uncanny, profound effects, so unlike the character of a recreational drug, would ever find worldwide use as an inebriant. I had expected curiosity and interest on the part of artists outside of medicine-performers, painters, and writers-but not among people in general. After the scientific publications around the turn of the century on mescaline-which, as already mentioned, evokes psychic effects quite like those of LSD-the use of this compound remained confined to medicine and to experiments within artistic and literary circles. I had expected the same fate for LSD. And indeed, the first non-medicinal self-experiments with LSD were carried out by writers, painters, musicians, and other intellectuals.

Today, psychedelic substances are considered to be drugs of abuse and their use will lead to a long stay at the Gray Bar Hotel. Our Puritanical heritage seems everlasting. But rather than wallow in pity for my unenlightened brothers and sisters, I look forward to a brighter future where one could sit in a licensed psychotropic suite and explore the deepest recesses of consciousness brought out in full non-linear display, say, while listening to music. Everybody associates acid rock with LSD. That’s too easy. I’ve often wondered what it’d be like to listen to Leon Redbone in an altered state of consciousness.  Kinda curious about what a baritone sax does to a brain on acid.  Or David Bowie- Major Tom.  I’m showing my age.