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As people filed out of the convention hall, I idly checked out the tables in the lobby and realized to my surprise that one was was covered with hallucinogens: a potted peyote cactus festooned with wrinkled buttons beige-capped mushrooms, identified as Psilocybe cubensis, sprouting in an aquarium and a bundle of black leaves labeled Salvia divinorum.Īre these for sale? I asked a lank, blond youth manning the table. On the last day of the conference, I had several hours to kill before dinner, which I planned to spend with two psychiatrists, American and Russian. In a letter in 1961, he compared his discoveries to nuclear fission just as fission threatens our fundamental physical integrity, he said, so do psychedelics “attack the spiritual center of the personality, the self.” Psychedelics, Hofmann fretted, might “represent a forbidden transgression of limits.” In his writings, Hofmann occasionally divulged misgivings about having brought LSD and psilocybin into the world. “I had feeling of being reborn! To see now again! And see what wonderful life we have here!” The gruff old man stared above my head, his eyes gleaming, as if born again this very moment. A terrible feeling!” When he emerged from this nightmare and found himself with friends again, he felt ecstatic. I had the feeling of absolute loneliness, absolute loneliness. Hofmann recalled a psilocybin trip during which he ended up in a ghost town deep inside the earth. "I said, ‘Oh, you should not tell everybody, even the children, “Take LSD! Take LSD!”'" LSD “can hurt you, it can disturb you," Hofmann said, "it can make you crazy.” But properly used, psychedelics stimulate the “inborn faculty of visionary experience” that we all possess as children but lose as we mature. “I had this discussion with him," Hofmann told me. One day we spoke during the lunch break, and Hofmann, in halting, heavily accented English, vigorously defended LSD, which he called his “problem child." He blamed Harvard-psychologist-turned-counterculture-guru Timothy Leary for giving LSD such a bad reputation. Hofmann's research inspired other scientists around the world to investigate LSD, psilocybin and similar compounds, which psychiatrist Humphry Osmond dubbed psychedelic, based on the Greek words for “mind-revealing.”Īt 93, Hofmann still avidly followed the field he helped create. In the 1950s, he analyzed Psilocybe cubensis, a “magic mushroom” consumed by Indians in Mexico, and deduced that its primary active ingredient is psilocybin. His contributions to psychedelic chemistry extended beyond LSD. The meeting's guest of honor was a stooped, white-haired man with fierce, Churchillian mien: Albert Hofmann. The other wore jackets and ties and employed clinical, objective rhetoric. One group sported hippy-ish threads and extolled altered states in subjective, even poetic language. The meeting’s schizoid character was reflected in its speakers, too. Giger, of pouty-lipped, warhead-breasted, cybernetic vixens transmogrified by titanic psychic forces.īeside this artistic evocation of psychedelic visions, a display of “scientific” posters-with titles like “Psychoneurophysiology of Personalized Regression and Experiential Imaginary Therapy”-seemed parodically dry. In the convention center’s lobby, vendors peddled visionary books, music and art, including drawings, by Swiss surrealist H.R. The meeting, held in a convention center within walking distance of my hotel, offered two divergent perspectives of hallucinogens. In 1999, while, researching a book on mysticism, I flew to Basel to attend “Worlds of Consciousness,” a leading forum for scientists studying altered states, especially drug-induced states.
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" To celebrate this Bicycle Day, I'd like to describe one of the strangest trips of my life, which took place in Basel and involved (sort of) Hofmann. Psychedelic enthusiasts now commemorate Hofmann's discovery of LSD's effects every April 19, a.k.a. He soon felt so disoriented that he rode his bicycle home, where he experienced all the heavenly and hellish effects of lysergic acid diethylamide. Exactly 71 years ago, April 19, 1943, Albert Hofmann, a chemist for Sandoz, in Basel, Switzerland, ingested a minute amount-just 250 micrograms-of a compound derived from the ergot fungus.