Pubdate: Wed, 16 Apr 2003
Source: Reuters (Wire)
Copyright: 2003 Reuters Limited
Author: Michael Shields
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/hallucinogens.htm (Hallucinogens)

LSD TAKES TRIP DOWN MEMORY LANE AT AGE 60

ZURICH (Reuters) - LSD, the hallucinogenic drug that launched a million
trips for hippies, was discovered 60 years ago when a Swiss chemist
accidentally inhaled a substance that made his bike ride home something
special.

Albert Hofmann was actually trying to develop stimulants for the circulatory
system in his Sandoz AG lab on April 16, 1943 when he mixed up a batch of
LSD from ergot, a fungus that grows on rye.

Instead, he created one of the most powerful agents ever to change
perceptions of reality, an icon of the 1960s Flower Power movement and the
drug of choice for a generation of musicians and writers who rode the
psychedelic wave.

Hofmann, now 97 and living near Basel, recalled in a newspaper interview 10
years ago that he had made LSD in his lab that fateful day after discovering
it five years before.

"Afterwards on the way home I suddenly had hallucinations, a beautiful and
pleasant trip. The only thing was, I could not at first explain what had
made me so high," he recalled.

Only three days later did he conduct a direct experiment on himself with
lysergic acid diethylamide-25.

"I took what I then thought to be a very small amount, namely 25 mg. Then it
all became clear," he remembered.

Researchers seized on the drug as a tool to probe human consciousness and
perhaps shed light on psychoses such as schizophrenia, but it also became an
underground cult drug whose illicit use Hofmann came to decry.

Sandoz, which also isolated hallucinogen psilocybin from Mexican mushrooms
in 1958, never marketed either drug but distributed them free to research
labs and clinics until 1966, when it halted shipments.

"Unfortunately, increasing abuse of hallucinogenic drugs is being noticed of
late, especially among young people abroad," it said at the time, blaming
sensational media reporting that gave rise to "an unhealthy interest" in
mind-bending drugs.

Hofmann always insisted LSD should remain administered only by researchers
and psychiatrists because of the danger that people high on the drug could
unwittingly do themselves harm.

"The great danger of LSD is that one cannot come to grips with and integrate
the shock of being transported into a different reality, that one 'flips
out'," he once recalled.
- ---
MAP posted-by: Doc-Hawk