And as with Hofmann, Davy’s drug pulled him further away from science into something much squishier. Like Hofmann, Davy is part of a subset of researchers who risked health and reputation to pursue knowledge through a high. But early in his career that future success could have been derailed by his obsession with “nitrous air,” or what he later dubbed nitrous oxide. In his time Davy was a wildly popular chemist who discovered several elements and served as president of the Royal Society. Nearly 150 years before Hofmann first ingested LSD, British chemist Humphry Davy meticulously recorded his own self-experimentation with a peculiar new drug. Such a use accords entirely with the essence and working character of LSD as a sacred drug. I see the true importance of LSD in the possibility of providing material aid to meditation aimed at the mystical experience of a deeper, comprehensive reality. In the closing remarks of his memoir he described the drug’s misunderstood value: Hofmann never gave up on finding a use for LSD and continued to take it in small doses for the rest of his life. Ted Streshinsky/Corbis/Corbis via Getty Images Indeed, until LSD was made almost universally illegal in the mid-1960s amid fears of toxicity and addiction, psychologist Timothy Leary and other researchers conducted a variety of experiments from the late 1950s to the early 1960s that suggested LSD could help treat alcoholism and some mental disorders. Later, in his memoir, he reflected with dismay that a drug producing such a terrifying experience was being used recreationally, but at the time of discovery he believed LSD might find practical use in psychiatry and neurology. Hofmann, the first person to take purified LSD, woke up the next day without any lingering effects. Was I dying? Was this the transition? At times I believed myself to be outside my body, and then perceived clearly, as an outside observer, the complete tragedy of my situation. My body seemed to be without sensation, lifeless, strange. I was taken to another world, another place, another time. I was seized by the dreadful fear of going insane. This time his experience lasted longer and was even more surreal: Three days later Hofmann ingested 0.25 milligrams of lysergic acid and recorded his reactions in his journal. In his memoir he recounted the scene: “As I lay in a dazed condition with my eyes closed there surged upon me an uninterrupted stream of fantastic images of extraordinary plasticity and vividness and accompanied by an intense, kaleidoscope-like play of colors.”Īfter the hallucinations had subsided, Hofmann suspected a connection between the lysergic acid and his bizarre experience that afternoon. He soon felt strange and began hallucinating. While working with the synthesized acid, Hofmann accidentally touched his face. On April 16, 1943, Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann synthesized lysergic acid diethylamide, a molecule he had discovered five years earlier while searching for medicinal compounds in ergot, a poisonous fungus that grows on rye kernels.
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