[Juenger-list] The century of Dr Hofmann

[latinese at libero.it]

 January 7, 2006
> The Saturday Profile
> Nearly 100, LSD's Father Ponders His 'Problem Child'
> By CRAIG S. SMITH
>
> BURG, Switzerland
>
> ALBERT Hofmann, the father of LSD, walked slowly across the small
> corner office of his modernist home on a grassy Alpine hilltop here,
> hoping to show a visitor the vista that sweeps before him on clear
> days. But outside there was only a white blanket of fog hanging just
> beyond the crest of the hill. He picked up a photograph of the view on
> his desk instead, left there perhaps to convince visitors of what
> really lies beyond the windowpane.
>
> Mr. Hofmann will turn 100 on Wednesday, a milestone to be marked by a
> symposium in nearby Basel on the chemical compound that he discovered
> and that famously unlocked the Blakean doors of perception, altering
> consciousnesses around the world. As the years accumulate behind him,
> Mr. Hofmann's conversation turns ever more insistently around one
> theme: man's oneness with nature and the dangers of an increasing
> inattention to that fact.
>
> "It's very, very dangerous to lose contact with living nature," he
> said, listing to the right in a green armchair that looked out over
> frost-dusted fields and snow-laced trees. A glass pitcher held a
> bouquet of roses on the coffee table before him. "In the big cities,
> there are people who have never seen living nature, all things are
> products of humans," he said. "The bigger the town, the less they see
> and understand nature." And, yes, he said, LSD, which he calls his
> "problem child," could help reconnect people to the universe.
>
> Rounding a century, Mr. Hofmann is physically reduced but mentally
> clear. He is prone to digressions, ambling with pleasure through
> memories of his boyhood, but his bright eyes flash with the
> recollection of a mystical experience he had on a forest path more
> than 90 years ago in the hills above Baden, Switzerland. The
> experience left him longing for a similar glimpse of what he calls "a
> miraculous, powerful, unfathomable reality."
>
> "I was completely astonished by the beauty of nature," he said, laying
> a slightly gnarled finger alongside his nose, his longish white hair
> swept back from his temples and the crown of his head. He said any
> natural scientist who was not a mystic was not a real natural
> scientist. "Outside is pure energy and colorless substance," he said.
> "All of the rest happens through the mechanism of our senses. Our eyes
> see just a small fraction of the light in the world. It is a trick to
> make a colored world, which does not exist outside of human beings."
>
> He became particularly fascinated by the mechanisms through which
> plants turn sunlight into the building blocks for our own bodies.
> "Everything comes from the sun via the plant kingdom," he said.
>
> MR. HOFMANN studied chemistry and took a job with the Swiss
> pharmaceutical company Sandoz Laboratories, because it had started a
> program to identify and synthesize the active compounds of medically
> important plants. He soon began work on the poisonous ergot fungus
> that grows in grains of rye. Midwives had used it for centuries to
> precipitate childbirths, but chemists had never succeeded in isolating
> the chemical that produced the pharmacological effect. Finally,
> chemists in the United States identified the active component as
> lysergic acid, and Mr. Hofmann began combining other molecules with
> the unstable chemical in search of pharmacologically useful compounds.
>
> His work on ergot produced several important drugs, including a
> compound still in use to prevent hemorrhaging after childbirth. But it
> was the 25th compound that he synthesized, lysergic acid diethylamide,
> that was to have the greatest impact. When he first created it in
> 1938, the drug yielded no significant pharmacological results. But
> when his work on ergot was completed, he decided to go back to LSD-25,
> hoping that improved tests could detect the stimulating effect on the
> body's circulatory system that he had expected from it. It was as he
> was synthesizing the drug on a Friday afternoon in April 1943 that he
> first experienced the altered state of consciousness for which it
> became famous. "Immediately, I recognized it as the same experience I
> had had as a child," he said. "I didn't know what caused it, but I
> knew that it was important."
>
> When he returned to his lab the next Monday, he tried to identify the
> source of his experience, believing first that it had come from the
> fumes of a chloroform-like solvent he had been using. Inhaling the
> fumes produced no effect, though, and he realized he must have somehow
> ingested a trace of LSD. "LSD spoke to me," Mr. Hofmann said with an
> amused, animated smile. "He came to me and said, 'You must find me.'
> He told me, 'Don't give me to the pharmacologist, he won't find
> anything.' "
>
> HE experimented with the drug, taking a dose so small that even the
> most active toxin known at that time would have had little or no
> effect. The result with LSD, however, was a powerful experience,
> during which he rode his bicycle home, accompanied by an assistant.
> That day, April 19, later became memorialized by LSD enthusiasts as
> "bicycle day."
>
> Mr. Hofmann participated in tests in a Sandoz laboratory, but found
> the experience frightening and realized that the drug should be used
> only under carefully controlled circumstances. In 1951, he wrote to
> the German novelist Ernst Junger, who had experimented with mescaline,
> and proposed that they take LSD together. They each took 0.05
> milligrams of pure LSD at Mr. Hofmann's home accompanied by roses,
> music by Mozart and burning Japanese incense. "That was the first
> planned psychedelic test," Mr. Hofmann said.
>
> He took the drug dozens of times after that, he said, and once
> experienced what he called a "horror trip" when he was tired and Mr.
> Junger gave him amphetamines first. But his hallucinogenic days are
> long behind him.
>
> "I know LSD; I don't need to take it anymore," Mr. Hofmann said.
> "Maybe when I die, like Aldous Huxley," who asked his wife for an
> injection of LSD to help him through the final painful throes of his
> fatal throat cancer.
>
> But Mr. Hofmann calls LSD "medicine for the soul" and is frustrated by
> the worldwide prohibition that has pushed it underground. "It was used
> very successfully for 10 years in psychoanalysis," he said, adding
> that the drug was hijacked by the youth movement of the 1960's and
> then demonized by the establishment that the movement opposed. He said
> LSD could be dangerous and called its distribution by Timothy Leary
> and others "a crime."
>
> "It should be a controlled substance with the same status as 
> morphine," he said.
>
> Mr. Hofmann lives with his wife in the house they built 38 years ago.
> He raised four children and watched one son struggle with alcoholism
> before dying at 53. He has eight grandchildren and six
> great-grandchildren. As far as he knows, no one in his family besides
> his wife has tried LSD.
>
> Mr. Hofmann rose, slightly stooped and now barely reaching five feet,
> and walked through his house with his arm-support cane. When asked if
> the drug had deepened his understanding of death, he appeared mildly
> startled and said no. "I go back to where I came from, to where I was
> before I was born, that's all," he said.
-------------- next part --------------

------- Forwarded message follows -------
Send reply to:  	pkd at jazzflavor.com
Date sent:      	Sun, 8 Jan 2006 13:00:16 -0800
From:           	David Gill <dcgill at pacbell.net>
To:             	pkd at jazzflavor.com
Subject:        	Re: [pkd] The century of Dr Hofmann

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it worries me a bit that no fewer than six people forwarded this 
article to me.

what is the law? get this forwarded to you ten times and you're 
criminally insane?

+dg


On Sunday, January 8, 2006, at 12:32  PM, Andre Welling wrote:

> January 7, 2006
> The Saturday Profile
> Nearly 100, LSD's Father Ponders His 'Problem Child'
> By CRAIG S. SMITH
>
> BURG, Switzerland
>
> ALBERT Hofmann, the father of LSD, walked slowly across the small
> corner office of his modernist home on a grassy Alpine hilltop here,
> hoping to show a visitor the vista that sweeps before him on clear
> days. But outside there was only a white blanket of fog hanging just
> beyond the crest of the hill. He picked up a photograph of the view on
> his desk instead, left there perhaps to convince visitors of what
> really lies beyond the windowpane.
>
> Mr. Hofmann will turn 100 on Wednesday, a milestone to be marked by a
> symposium in nearby Basel on the chemical compound that he discovered
> and that famously unlocked the Blakean doors of perception, altering
> consciousnesses around the world. As the years accumulate behind him,
> Mr. Hofmann's conversation turns ever more insistently around one
> theme: man's oneness with nature and the dangers of an increasing
> inattention to that fact.
>
> "It's very, very dangerous to lose contact with living nature," he
> said, listing to the right in a green armchair that looked out over
> frost-dusted fields and snow-laced trees. A glass pitcher held a
> bouquet of roses on the coffee table before him. "In the big cities,
> there are people who have never seen living nature, all things are
> products of humans," he said. "The bigger the town, the less they see
> and understand nature." And, yes, he said, LSD, which he calls his
> "problem child," could help reconnect people to the universe.
>
> Rounding a century, Mr. Hofmann is physically reduced but mentally
> clear. He is prone to digressions, ambling with pleasure through
> memories of his boyhood, but his bright eyes flash with the
> recollection of a mystical experience he had on a forest path more
> than 90 years ago in the hills above Baden, Switzerland. The
> experience left him longing for a similar glimpse of what he calls "a
> miraculous, powerful, unfathomable reality."
>
> "I was completely astonished by the beauty of nature," he said, laying
> a slightly gnarled finger alongside his nose, his longish white hair
> swept back from his temples and the crown of his head. He said any
> natural scientist who was not a mystic was not a real natural
> scientist. "Outside is pure energy and colorless substance," he said.
> "All of the rest happens through the mechanism of our senses. Our eyes
> see just a small fraction of the light in the world. It is a trick to
> make a colored world, which does not exist outside of human beings."
>
> He became particularly fascinated by the mechanisms through which
> plants turn sunlight into the building blocks for our own bodies.
> "Everything comes from the sun via the plant kingdom," he said.
>
> MR. HOFMANN studied chemistry and took a job with the Swiss
> pharmaceutical company Sandoz Laboratories, because it had started a
> program to identify and synthesize the active compounds of medically
> important plants. He soon began work on the poisonous ergot fungus
> that grows in grains of rye. Midwives had used it for centuries to
> precipitate childbirths, but chemists had never succeeded in isolating
> the chemical that produced the pharmacological effect. Finally,
> chemists in the United States identified the active component as
> lysergic acid, and Mr. Hofmann began combining other molecules with
> the unstable chemical in search of pharmacologically useful compounds.
>
> His work on ergot produced several important drugs, including a
> compound still in use to prevent hemorrhaging after childbirth. But it
> was the 25th compound that he synthesized, lysergic acid diethylamide,
> that was to have the greatest impact. When he first created it in
> 1938, the drug yielded no significant pharmacological results. But
> when his work on ergot was completed, he decided to go back to LSD-25,
> hoping that improved tests could detect the stimulating effect on the
> body's circulatory system that he had expected from it. It was as he
> was synthesizing the drug on a Friday afternoon in April 1943 that he
> first experienced the altered state of consciousness for which it
> became famous. "Immediately, I recognized it as the same experience I
> had had as a child," he said. "I didn't know what caused it, but I
> knew that it was important."
>
> When he returned to his lab the next Monday, he tried to identify the
> source of his experience, believing first that it had come from the
> fumes of a chloroform-like solvent he had been using. Inhaling the
> fumes produced no effect, though, and he realized he must have somehow
> ingested a trace of LSD. "LSD spoke to me," Mr. Hofmann said with an
> amused, animated smile. "He came to me and said, 'You must find me.'
> He told me, 'Don't give me to the pharmacologist, he won't find
> anything.' "
>
> HE experimented with the drug, taking a dose so small that even the
> most active toxin known at that time would have had little or no
> effect. The result with LSD, however, was a powerful experience,
> during which he rode his bicycle home, accompanied by an assistant.
> That day, April 19, later became memorialized by LSD enthusiasts as
> "bicycle day."
>
> Mr. Hofmann participated in tests in a Sandoz laboratory, but found
> the experience frightening and realized that the drug should be used
> only under carefully controlled circumstances. In 1951, he wrote to
> the German novelist Ernst Junger, who had experimented with mescaline,
> and proposed that they take LSD together. They each took 0.05
> milligrams of pure LSD at Mr. Hofmann's home accompanied by roses,
> music by Mozart and burning Japanese incense. "That was the first
> planned psychedelic test," Mr. Hofmann said.
>
> He took the drug dozens of times after that, he said, and once
> experienced what he called a "horror trip" when he was tired and Mr.
> Junger gave him amphetamines first. But his hallucinogenic days are
> long behind him.
>
> "I know LSD; I don't need to take it anymore," Mr. Hofmann said.
> "Maybe when I die, like Aldous Huxley," who asked his wife for an
> injection of LSD to help him through the final painful throes of his
> fatal throat cancer.
>
> But Mr. Hofmann calls LSD "medicine for the soul" and is frustrated by
> the worldwide prohibition that has pushed it underground. "It was used
> very successfully for 10 years in psychoanalysis," he said, adding
> that the drug was hijacked by the youth movement of the 1960's and
> then demonized by the establishment that the movement opposed. He said
> LSD could be dangerous and called its distribution by Timothy Leary
> and others "a crime."
>
> "It should be a controlled substance with the same status as 
> morphine," he said.
>
> Mr. Hofmann lives with his wife in the house they built 38 years ago.
> He raised four children and watched one son struggle with alcoholism
> before dying at 53. He has eight grandchildren and six
> great-grandchildren. As far as he knows, no one in his family besides
> his wife has tried LSD.
>
> Mr. Hofmann rose, slightly stooped and now barely reaching five feet,
> and walked through his house with his arm-support cane. When asked if
> the drug had deepened his understanding of death, he appeared mildly
> startled and said no. "I go back to where I came from, to where I was
> before I was born, that's all," he said.
>

------- End of forwarded message -------
--
 
Umberto Rossi