(The man who first isolated and extracted the drug LSD dies at age 102)
It’s a mistake to say that Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann “invented” LSD, just as it would be a contradiction of logic to say Sir Isaac Newton “invented” gravity. LSD, lysergic acid diethyl amide, has been with us at least as long as human beings have been collecting and storing grain. Not to be too terribly technical, but LSD is merely an extract from a type of fungus, ergot, that infects raw cereals under the right conditions. Rye is especially susceptible.
What Doctor Hofmann did, all unawares, was to allow a small amount of the extract to seep onto his finger, as he was experimenting with medicinal uses of ergot back in the 1940’s. The LSD entered his system through his pores and thus, on April 18th, 1943, Hofmann became the first known human to take an “acid trip”, even though it was unintentional. The first reaction he noticed was dizziness and unease, then a distortion of vision and other senses. Returning home that day, Hofmann said he began to experience “wonderful visions”. The genie was out of the bottle.
Yet, in previous centuries, there were well-documented stories, notably from France, in which entire villages “went mad”, and some died, from eating ergot-infected grain. There are other alkaloids than LSD in ergot and they no doubt had a part in these episodes, for which none but the overly superstitious had any explanation at the time. But the “madness” can be primarily attributed to LSD.
Hofmann, however, had isolated and extracted LSD, and after the novel sensations of his first encounter wore off, he went back to the lab to try a bigger dose. That didn’t work out so well: “The substance which I wanted to experiment with,” Hofmann wrote, “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.” Within a generation, LSD gained fame and a certain cachet through the promotions of Harvard’s Doctor Timothy Leary and celebrities such as Cary Grant, who praised its “mind-expanding” properties. The drug Hofmann had hoped would be a boon to psychiatry for its tendency to bring forth and exaggerate inner problems and conflicts, escaped from the lab like Frankenstein’s monster and soon was being used largely and widely as a “recreational” drug among young people.
But there were persistent horror stories of LSD-affected people leaping from high windows and even committing murder under the influence of the delusions and illusions (hallucinations) the drug produces. I remember that time. The U.S. government banned LSD in 1966, and my contemporaries and I, in the ignorance and arrogance of our youth, shrugged off those stories as “Establishment propaganda.” Too bad for us. There are no known estimates of how many people of my generation, I’m 54, were left with permanent psychological damage from using large quantities of LSD. I knew quite a few. We used to say such people “had ‘bad trips’ and never came back.” Accurate enough.
To make matters worse, the dealers in LSD discovered that, while the drug itself is not all that expensive to manufacture, it was even cheaper to use less LSD per dose and give it a “boost” with more common drugs, primarily amphetamines. Some underground labs even used the poison strychnine, which in small quantities can produce similar effects. But these “boosters” greatly intensified the acute paranoia and delusional thinking that even LSD alone can bring forth. All in all, “acid” was a curse upon an entire generation.
The story of LSD is not all in past tense, sad to say. A substantial percentage of high school kids today say they have taken or occasionally take it. The same risk factors apply. And the same sort of unscrupulous manufacturers are plying their deadly game of “bait and switch” with another popular street drug, “X”, short for ‘Ecstasy’. The active ingredient is MDMA, discovered nearly a hundred years ago as a step in the process of synthesizing amphetamines. But guess what else is in there? Since MDMA was banned in the 70’s, its purveyors have used anything they could get their hands on to make production cheaper and try to simulate MDMA’s sensory-stimulating effects. They tend to use a lot of methamphetamine and even LSD in the “cutting” process. Hofmann’s brainchild lives on, though he has died at his home in Switzerland, aged 102.
MDMA appears to work by stimulating a massive release of brain chemicals known as ’endorphins’, mainly dopamine, producing a feeling of intense well-being and a compulsive desire to touch and be touched by others. Trouble is, the drug drains the brain of these ’neuraltransmitters’ and the user cannot recapture the good feelings no matter how much more he or she takes. This had led to many overdoses and the subsequent deep depression to many suicides. Conclusion: there is no cheap path to bliss, and no matter how attractive the concept may be, happiness and fulfillment do not come in pill form. These drugs, and others, turn on their users like mad dogs. We will be shocked when researchers fully quantify the damage done.
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Death of a Modern Pandora
(The man who first isolated and extracted the drug LSD dies at age 102)
It’s a mistake to say that Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann “invented” LSD, just as it would be a contradiction of logic to say Sir Isaac Newton “invented” gravity. LSD, lysergic acid diethyl amide, has been with us at least as long as human beings have been collecting and storing grain. Not to be too terribly technical, but LSD is merely an extract from a type of fungus, ergot, that infects raw cereals under the right conditions. Rye is especially susceptible.
What Doctor Hofmann did, all unawares, was to allow a small amount of the extract to seep onto his finger, as he was experimenting with medicinal uses of ergot back in the 1940’s. The LSD entered his system through his pores and thus, on April 18th, 1943, Hofmann became the first known human to take an “acid trip”, even though it was unintentional. The first reaction he noticed was dizziness and unease, then a distortion of vision and other senses. Returning home that day, Hofmann said he began to experience “wonderful visions”. The genie was out of the bottle.
Yet, in previous centuries, there were well-documented stories, notably from France, in which entire villages “went mad”, and some died, from eating ergot-infected grain. There are other alkaloids than LSD in ergot and they no doubt had a part in these episodes, for which none but the overly superstitious had any explanation at the time. But the “madness” can be primarily attributed to LSD.
Hofmann, however, had isolated and extracted LSD, and after the novel sensations of his first encounter wore off, he went back to the lab to try a bigger dose. That didn’t work out so well: “The substance which I wanted to experiment with,” Hofmann wrote, “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.” Within a generation, LSD gained fame and a certain cachet through the promotions of Harvard’s Doctor Timothy Leary and celebrities such as Cary Grant, who praised its “mind-expanding” properties. The drug Hofmann had hoped would be a boon to psychiatry for its tendency to bring forth and exaggerate inner problems and conflicts, escaped from the lab like Frankenstein’s monster and soon was being used largely and widely as a “recreational” drug among young people.
But there were persistent horror stories of LSD-affected people leaping from high windows and even committing murder under the influence of the delusions and illusions (hallucinations) the drug produces. I remember that time. The U.S. government banned LSD in 1966, and my contemporaries and I, in the ignorance and arrogance of our youth, shrugged off those stories as “Establishment propaganda.” Too bad for us. There are no known estimates of how many people of my generation, I’m 54, were left with permanent psychological damage from using large quantities of LSD. I knew quite a few. We used to say such people “had ‘bad trips’ and never came back.” Accurate enough.
To make matters worse, the dealers in LSD discovered that, while the drug itself is not all that expensive to manufacture, it was even cheaper to use less LSD per dose and give it a “boost” with more common drugs, primarily amphetamines. Some underground labs even used the poison strychnine, which in small quantities can produce similar effects. But these “boosters” greatly intensified the acute paranoia and delusional thinking that even LSD alone can bring forth. All in all, “acid” was a curse upon an entire generation.
The story of LSD is not all in past tense, sad to say. A substantial percentage of high school kids today say they have taken or occasionally take it. The same risk factors apply. And the same sort of unscrupulous manufacturers are plying their deadly game of “bait and switch” with another popular street drug, “X”, short for ‘Ecstasy’. The active ingredient is MDMA, discovered nearly a hundred years ago as a step in the process of synthesizing amphetamines. But guess what else is in there? Since MDMA was banned in the 70’s, its purveyors have used anything they could get their hands on to make production cheaper and try to simulate MDMA’s sensory-stimulating effects. They tend to use a lot of methamphetamine and even LSD in the “cutting” process. Hofmann’s brainchild lives on, though he has died at his home in Switzerland, aged 102.
MDMA appears to work by stimulating a massive release of brain chemicals known as ’endorphins’, mainly dopamine, producing a feeling of intense well-being and a compulsive desire to touch and be touched by others. Trouble is, the drug drains the brain of these ’neuraltransmitters’ and the user cannot recapture the good feelings no matter how much more he or she takes. This had led to many overdoses and the subsequent deep depression to many suicides. Conclusion: there is no cheap path to bliss, and no matter how attractive the concept may be, happiness and fulfillment do not come in pill form. These drugs, and others, turn on their users like mad dogs. We will be shocked when researchers fully quantify the damage done.
This entry was posted on April 30, 2008 at 1:28 pm and is filed under general commentary. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.