RIP, Albert Hoffman

[blue2blue]

Albert Hofmann, father of LSD, dies at 102 By The Associated Press Article Launched: 04/29/2008 10:21:30 PM PDT NEW YORK - Albert Hofmann, the father of the mind-altering drug LSD whose medical discovery grew into a notorious "problem child," died Tuesday. He was 102. Hofmann died of a heart attack at his home in Basel, Switzerland, according to Rick Doblin, president of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, in a statement posted on the association's Web site. Hofmann's hallucinogen inspired - and arguably corrupted - millions in the 1960's hippy generation. For decades after LSD was banned in the late 1960s, Hofmann defended his invention. "I produced the substance as a medicine. It's not my fault if people abused it," he once said. The Swiss chemist discovered lysergic acid diethylamide-25 in 1938 while studying the medicinal uses of a fungus found on wheat and other grains at the Sandoz pharmaceuticals firm in Basel. He became the first human guinea pig of the drug when a tiny amount of the substance seeped on to his finger during a repeat of the laboratory experiment April 16, 1943. "I had to leave work for home because I was suddenly hit by a sudden feeling of unease and mild dizziness," he subsequently wrote in a memo to company bosses. "Everything I saw was distorted as in a warped mirror," he said, describing his bicycle ride home. "I had the impression I was rooted to the spot. But my assistant told me we were actually going very fast." Three days later, Hofmann experimented with a larger dose. The result was a horror trip. "The substance which I wanted to experiment with took over me. I was filled with an overwhelming fear that I would go crazy. I was transported to a different world, a different time," Hofmann wrote. There was no answer at Hofmann's home on Tuesday and a person who answered the phone at Novartis, a former employer, said the company had no knowledge of his death. Hofmann and his scientific colleagues hoped that LSD would make an important contribution to psychiatric research. The drug exaggerated inner problems and conflicts and thus it was hoped that it might be used to recognize and treat mental illness like schizophrenia.

http://www2.presstelegram.com/news/ci_9101413

 

 

One has to wonder about the effects of his personal LSD experimentation on longevity. Who knows how much longer he might have lived had he not fooled around with his most famous discovery?

 

[Fendercaster]

Maybe he lived longer because of his experimentation with his discovery?!

[Jeff da Weasel]

 

Maybe he lived longer because of his experimentation with his discovery?!

 

 

Yeah, I doubt it. I've been personally acquainted with people who took enough of the substance and didn't live to be 30 (not because of the acid, but other dumb things). I think Hoffman, like most people who live beyond expectations, did it with good genetics.

 

Anyway, RIP, Mr. Hoffman. You really did change the world, like it or not!

[Magpel]

 

Maybe he lived longer because of his experimentation with his discovery?!

 

 

It is certain.

[Jeff da Weasel]

It is certain.

 

You're on acid.

 

:lol: :lol:

[blue2blue]

Not that I'd necessarily know anything about this sort of thing personally, mind you, but I knew a very, very wide spectrum of people who experimented with that drug.

 

Most of the people I know who 'died early' who also experimented with LSD were heavily involved with really dangerous drugs (not that LSD's psychotropia is not potentially very dangerous to the unitiated or the foolish) like heroin, speed, coke, and/or PCP. At this point, though, there seems to be a tie among my dead friends between chronic heroin use topped off with a final speedball (aneurisms) and the effects of chronic alcohol abuse/alcohol-related accidents.

 

 

Possibly one of the more interesting non-fatal cases (hell, it's acutally kind of a happy ending case) was a friend of mine, Ron, who bought 15 hits of acid, gave one away, remembered taking two, thinks he might have took another one, and has no idea what happened to the other 11 hits.

 

But he says he was mostly in 'another world' for what apparently was days. That was in 1969. He told me the story a couple weeks after the experience and mentioned that while he was in that other world he thought he'd gone to heaven, he found himself in a seemingly heavenly palace and in front of him was a figure in a throne he took for God. He said something under that assumption and the figure said, "What makes you think I'm God?" and then laughed as flames shot up from behind his throne.

 

My friend became a Christian, and later a minister, tied in with the original Calvary Chapel in Orange County. Years later his 'story' appeared in one of those little Chick comic book pamphlets, uncredited, IIRC.

 

I've looked him up on the web and it looks like he runs a cute little wedding chapel in Hawaii these days.

[rasputin1963]

I never dreamed the man was still alive.

 

I was watching the 2004 made-for-TV movie HELTER SKELTER just this morning. To me, there is no doubt that there is a very strong connection between LSD... and the resulting murders, wouldn't you agree?

 

Manson used LSD (and other techniques, of course) to brainwash those kids. He would give his "family" double the dose that he took, so he could remain in control during one of their mass orgies and thought control sessions.

 

In fact, I think brainwash was one of the initial interests the American government saw in the drug... with the MK-ULTRA experiment, they gave it to America troops and civilians without their knowledge, just to watch the ensuing merriment and confusion and gauge its possible usefulness as a warfare weapon.

 

It is a matter of declassified record now that the CIA unleashed megadoses of LSD upon the hippies protesting the war in the San Francisco environs. Hippies simply became too blissed-out to protest.

 

Stanley Owlsley III was the nerdy chem student who devised an extremely pure variant of LSD that hit the streets of SF in the 60's... unfortunately, not many subsequent trippers were able to get their hands on batches as clean as his, hence some bad trips.

 

Owlsley's take on acid? He said that the huge explosions at Hiroshima and Nagasaki were mankind creating enormous explosions of yang (masculine, outwardly projected) energy. He says that LSD basically invented herself... as the yin (feminine, inwardly directed) counter-reaction to the atomic blasts.

 

Thus LSD, he said, was part of the cosmos's celestial homeostasis, and her emergence saved the world....

 

_V4K7FepKw4 0J1NWG3nyrs

 

FqGegSpMVOA a5TJApnJ8X8&feature=related "Because I have a wife and seven kids at home to support!" LOLOL

 

kQHi9dpLmZI 76yWZcsgwF8

[coyote-1]

It is the height of irony that the US government wages a never-ending "war on drugs" at the same time that it is often a major supplier of them.

 

It is a matter of declassified record now that the CIA unleashed megadoses of LSD upon the hippies protesting the war in the San Francisco environs. Hippies simply became too blissed-out to protest.

 

It was the government, along with the Mafia, that brought the mass quantities of heroin into the inner cities starting in the 1950s and progressing through the 1970s.

 

That stopped just in time for Ollie North to finance his Iranian arms deals and his backing of the Nicaraguan contras by bringing in tons of crack cocaine.

 

Remember, our government learned a big lesson from the opium trade in China during the 1800s. That trade made the huge land docile enough for European powers (and America too) to carve out spheres of influence... it is no wonder the derivative heroin found its way so very easily into the inner cities during times of racial unrest.

[veracohr]

 

In fact, I think brainwash was one of the initial interests the American government saw in the drug... with the MK-ULTRA experiment, they gave it to America troops and civilians without their knowledge, just to watch the ensuing merriment and confusion.

 

 

It was tried in a broad range of research projects in MK-ULTRA, I think starting with a study on truth serums, and once it was found to be unuseable in that regard, they then tried it as an anti-truth serum, the idea being that captured agents would take it and babble nonsense.

 

MK-ULTRA, by the way, is responsible for LSD's becoming a street drug. Part of the project included paying prostitutes to slip it to their customers, so the CIA could observe its effects on unwitting people. This same practice resulted in the death of one of its own agents who was dosed without his knowledge. It eventually got onto the street and out of the control of the CIA. Before that, it was mostly used in the psychiatric community and by intellectuals.

[blue2blue]

I had a friend in college, whose father was a professor of psychiatry at a major university. They lived a high end lifestyle in an exclusive canal-laced area (not Venice, CA, to be sure). His father, he knew, did secret government research at the university.

 

My friend said he came home one night when he was around 15 or 16 from out drinking beer with school friends, and he was hoping his parents wouldn't bust him. This, I'm guessing would have been in the early or mid 60s.

 

He came in and his parents were having a cocktail party of a sort -- everyone was dresssed in suits and evening gowns -- only almost everyone there was on LSD, although many had martinis and highballs in their hands. These were all academics, intellectuals and US government elite types, intel-security types, he said. And they were all really, really loaded.

 

Suffice it to say, he didn't get busted for drinking beer that night.

[blue2blue]

Ras

 

That wall of YouTube reminds me of the David Bowie character's wall of TVs in The Man Who Fell to Earth.

 

 

LSD is a very potent drug. In the wrong head -- or the wrong hands -- the potential for damage can be high, indeed.

 

There are a lot of people out there already who are way too crazy. Put some LSD in them and they're potentially that much crazier.

 

 

I think what a lot of us find scary about things like the Mansons is the depths to which people who start out seemingly normal can degenerate.

 

But you don't need potent drugs for that. Look at lynch mobs. Look at the Third Reich. Look at various Balkan genocides. Look at Rwanda.

 

Civilization is a thin veneer, my friend.

 

 

Long ago I coined what I called Tom Major's Rule of Thirds:

 

One third of everyone is basically good, on balance. One third is basically bad. And the other third just sort of float in between, sometimes sloshing this way and sometimes sloshing that way.

[rasputin1963]

I had a friend in college, whose father was a professor of psychiatry at a major university. They lived a high end lifestyle in an exclusive canal-laced area ( not Venice, CA, to be sure). His father, he knew, did secret government research at the university. My friend said he came home one night when he was around 15 or 16 from out drinking beer with school friends, and he was hoping his parents wouldn't bust him. This, I'm guessing would have been in the early or mid 60s. He came in and his parents were having a cocktail party of a sort -- everyone was dresssed in suits and evening gowns -- only almost everyone there was on LSD, although many had martinis and highballs in their hands. These were all academics, intellectuals and US government elite types, intel-security types, he said. And they were all really, really loaded. Suffice it to say, he didn't get busted for drinking beer that night.

 

 

I think a number of "straight" types tried acid. I know Cary Grant took it 70 times as part of his psychotherapy in the late-1950's. [Hell, I was gobsmacked to learn that Mary Tyler Moore was an avid potsmoker during the whole filming of her MARY TYLER MOORE SHOW in the early 70's!]

 

I was just a tot in the 60's, but my friend Terry who was a teenager/young adult then, recently told me, "What you have to realize is that most American parents encouraged a lot of the free-thinking and hippie behavior that you saw in the 60's... They had come from the privations of the Depression and WWII and they were thrilled to see their kids having so much abundance and sex and freedoms and fun that they never had..." (and Terry's dad was a captain in the Navy in the 60's!)

 

But I guess we've all read that bitter "retraction" issued by Dr. Benjamin Spock in the 1990's? It was his book in the 1940's-- BABY AND CHILD CARE-- which had urged parents NOT to spank their kids, and so many Baby Boomers (b. 1946--1963) were raised this way. Decades later, he said (I believe it was in TIME or NEWSWEEK) that he had been very wrong back in 1948, the parents should've azzwhooped these Boomer brats after all, and that we had produced the most selfish, self-absorbed generation the world had even known.

[spokenward]

Long ago I coined what I called Tom Major's Rule of Thirds: One third of everyone is basically good, on balance. One third is basically bad. And the other third just sort of float in between, sometimes sloshing this way and sometimes sloshing that way.

 

Could you make it Fifths?

 

Frankly, I don't like my odds.

 

It would explain MSNBCs weekend programming format, though.

[rasputin1963]

One third is basically bad.

 

 

I was considering this just today after reading about the aftermath of the Manson trial. Get this: their star witness for the prosecution was Linda Kasabian, a member of the Manson family who had been along for the ride on both nights of the Tate-LaBianca killings.

 

Lawmakers granted her TOTAL IMMUNITY if she would finger Charlie in a full confession. This she agreed to do, all her myriad little indictments were dropped, and she was let off scot-free and put into the Witness Protection Program, (having presumably learned her lesson about messin' with the Dark Side).

 

Then, in 1996, she and her teenaged daughter are arrested for reckless driving and possession of rock and powder cocaine with intent to sell. Some folks don't learn, I guess.

 

I wonder if some people really are B-B-B-bad to the B-B-B-bone?

[rasputin1963]

 

(not that LSD's psychotropia is not potentially very dangerous to the unitiated or the foolish) like heroin, speed, coke, and/or PCP. .

 

 

 

Those of us of a certain age will remember the urban legend surrounding Art Linkletter's daughter.

 

One simply could not find an "Establishment" character more "straight" than genial TV host Art Linkletter.... but sometime in the late-60's, his teenaged daughter dropped acid, and, imagining that she could fly, lept off of a tall city building.

 

That incident really drove home the wideness of the "generation gap" for a lot of Americans, I do believe....

[Hard Truth]

For those curious about the USA government's role in the spread of LSD use, I recommend the book:

 

Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD: The CIA, the Sixties, and Beyond by Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain (Paperback - Jan 21, 1994)

 

It seems to be well researched with solid information, not paranoid speculation.

 

Timothy Leary's autobiography "Flashback" is also fascinating.

 

By almost all accounts, LSD did show a lot of potential as a tool for psychiatric treatment. (as did Ecstasy) It is unfortunate that the panic over its growing recreational use ended all of the research in that area.

 

Someday, if we ever establish sane drug policies, I would like to see facilities with specially trained "travel agents" guide people through the safe use of psychedelic drugs. There are many potential benefits to inner space exploration.

[lowendnyc]

 

My friend became a Christian, and later a minister, tied in with the original Calvary Chapel in Orange County. Years later his 'story' appeared in one of those little Chick comic book pamphlets, uncredited, IIRC.

 

 

That's pretty amazing. The world view is so completely cracked, but I have long been a BIG fan of those Chick Tracts. While there was no official connection, my first job was at a Chik-fil-a restaurant run by a hard core evangelical, and he had crates of those comics in the back.

[deanmass]

I have err.....read alot about it...

 

Mind set, setting and company have everything to do with the outcome of an LSD experience.

 

LSD is also a chemical that has little difference in efficacy based on dose quantity. It has more to do with the purity of the chemical than the size.

 

Lots of studies have been done on it and MDMA ( which is street named ecstasy) , and in controlled environments, psychological breakthroughs that would have taken years are accomplished in much shorter times. Whatever it is, however it works, both are effective treatments for some serious, debilitating mental illnesses.

 

Lids off to Albert Hoffman...Happy Carpet Ride:)

[oldman2]

RIP

Sampled some product back in the day. Sometimes great, a couple of times very, very bad.

[blue2blue]

Ras

 

I don't imagine your friend grew up in OC, California.

 

Things were pretty tightened down, there. There were undoubtedly some dads who took pride in their sons "getting some" but, by and large, it was really quite repressive -- with the usual results.

 

The "traditional" kids used pills -- usually seconal -- and alcohol (a sometimes lethal combination but amusing to watch in a cynical, human-hating kind of way) and the hippy kids used pot and, to some extent by the end of the 60s, LSD.

 

I had one friend I found out later had been tripping with her older Sunset Strip friends when she was 13, in 1964. She came home and told her best friend, another girl who I later became very good friends with that she'd taken this strange new drug,"Lysergic Acid Diethylamide-25" -- a mouthful for a 13 year old, but she was a very bright girl and a very wild girl. My other friend, of course, had never head of it. And she was no future Sunday school teacher. (She actually became a software engineer and exec. Another story.)

 

 

Oh, and the traditional girls all got knocked up. In fact, of 7 Prom 'princesses,' my LSD-dropping friend was only one of two who were not preggers. Do not ask me how she ended up a potential prom queen. Although she had stopped doing drugs and drinking and then started going out with the class valedictorian (one of the only decent "soshes" in the school and legitimately a smart guy).

 

So, everyone got in trouble in that battened down milieu... there was just nothing for kids to do in OC in those days except drive around, drink, and use drugs. In various combinations.

 

Oh, yeah, driving around in the hills, "ghost hunting" was big. There were some famous ghosts up there but, you know, it was really just an excuse to drive around, drink, and use drugs.

[VideoRacer]

Albert Hoffman's dead. No, no, he's outside, looking in...

[rasputin1963]

 

Ras I don't imagine your friend grew up in OC, California. Things were pretty tightened down, there. There were undoubtedly some dads who took pride in their sons "getting some" but, by and large, it was really quite repressive -- with the usual results.

 

 

My step-dad grew up in Anaheim of the late-1950's and the full decade of the 60's.

 

It was-- still is-- very religious and battened down. Churches everywhere.

 

My stepdad was an expert surfer, and hung out with the whole surfing crowd as that phenomenon emerged. Booze-- beer and vodka-- were the drugs of choice for his crowd, as he tells it, and he had plenty of "lost weekends" back in the day...

[leopardstar]

at 102, i think that pretty much kills the idea that LSD is bad for you. here was a man who untill recently was still tripping once and a while. he never gave up the fight to allow doctors the right to use it and study it.

[blue2blue]

 

at 102, i think that pretty much kills the idea that LSD is bad for you. here was a man who untill recently was still tripping once and a while. he never gave up the fight to allow doctors the right to use it and study it.

 

Well... I'm afraid all this really proves is that at least one person who took LSD a few times can live to be 102.

[Jeff da Weasel]

 

at 102, i think that pretty much kills the idea that LSD is bad for you.

 

 

Dude, that's terrible logic. That's no more a proof than if a guy who had done acid and died at 25 proves it is bad for you. Neither statement is close to accurate.