Albert Hoffman, the Swiss chemist who gave the world LSD, the most powerful psychotropic substance known today, died in April 2008 in his house on a hilltop near Basel, in Switzerland. He was 102 years old.
According to Rick Doblin, founder and president of the California-based Multidisciplinary Psychedelic Research Association, the cause of death was a heart attack. This organization reprinted a book in 2005, which Albert Hoffman, My Difficult Child in LSD, published in 1979.
The Swiss scientist first synthesized the compound of lysergic acid in 1938, but did not discover its psychopharmacological effects, until five years later he accidentally used a substance that was called “acid” in the counterculture of the 1960s.
Then he took LSD hundreds of times, but saw it as a powerful and potentially dangerous psychotropic drug that required respect. But more important than the pleasures of psychedelic experience for him was the value of the drug as an aid in the contemplation and understanding of what he called the unity of mankind with nature. This perception, which came to Dr. Hoffman as an almost religious insight as a child, guided most of his personal and professional life.
Inspiration
Albert Hoffman was born in Baden, a spa town in northern Switzerland, on January 11, 1906. He was the eldest of four children. His father, who had no higher education, was a toolmaker at a local factory, and his family lived in a rented apartment. But Albert spent most of his free time on the street.
He wandered the hills above the city and played at the ruins of the Stein castle of the Habsburg castle. “There was a real paradise,” he said in an interview in 2006. “We had no money, but I had a wonderful childhood.”
During one of the walks, insight descended upon him.
“This happened in the morning of May — I forgot the year, but I can still indicate exactly where it happened on the path in the forest near Martinsburg,” he wrote in his book. - I was walking through the forest with fresh foliage, filled with birdsong and lit by the morning sun, and suddenly everything turned out to be in an unusually clear light. Nature was captured by the most beautiful radiance, touching to the depths of my soul, as if wishing to embrace me with its greatness. I was overwhelmed by an indescribable feeling of joy, unity and blissful calm. ”
Although Hoffman's father was a Catholic and his mother a Protestant, he himself believed from a young age that religion was missing the most important thing. When he was 7 or 8 years old, Albert talked with a friend about whether Jesus was a god. “I said I did not believe, but God must be, because there is peace and someone who created it,” he said. “I have a very deep connection with nature.”
Choice of profession
Hoffman went to study chemistry at the University of Zurich, as he wanted to explore the world at levels where energy and chemical elements combine to create life. In 1929, when he was only 23, he received a Ph.D. Then he got a job at the Sandoz laboratory in Basel, where he was attracted by a program for the synthesis of pharmacological substances from medicinal plants.
"Bicycle Day"
While working with ergot affecting rye, he stumbled on LSD, and accidentally took the drug inside on Friday afternoon in April 1943. Soon, he experienced an altered state of consciousness, similar to the one he experienced in childhood.
The following Monday, Albert Hoffman deliberately accepted LSD. The drug began to act when he was cycling home. That day, April 19, was later perpetuated by drug lovers. They called it "Bicycle Day."
Chemistry of revelation
Dr. Hoffman has also created other important drugs, including metergin, which is used to treat postpartum hemorrhage, the main cause of death in childbirth. But it was LSD that shaped his career and his spiritual quest.
“Thanks to my sensations when taking LSD and my new picture of reality, I realized the miracle of creation, the splendor of nature, the animal and plant world,” Hoffman told the psychiatrist Stanislav Grof in 1984. “I became very sensitive to what will happen to all this and to all of us.”
Holy drugs
Dr. Hoffman has become an ardent environmentalist. He said that LSD is not only a valuable tool in psychiatry, but can be used to awaken people to a deeper awareness of their place in nature, to stop the destruction of nature.
But he was also worried about the growing use of LSD as a drug for entertainment. According to him, the drug should be used in the same way as primitive societies use psychoactive sacred plants - carefully and with spiritual intentions.
After discovering the properties of a psychotropic substance, Albert Hoffman spent years studying sacred plants. Together with his friend Gordon Wasson, he participated in psychedelic rituals of Mesatek shamans in southern Mexico. He managed to synthesize the active compounds of the Mexican psilocybe fungus, which he called psilocin and psilocybin. In addition, the chemist isolated the active component of the bindweed seeds, which the Masatecs also used as a stupefying substance, and found that its chemical composition was close to LSD.
During the psychedelic era, Hoffman made friends with such extraordinary personalities as Timothy Leary, Allen Ginsberg and Aldous Huxley, who, on the verge of death in 1963, asked his wife to give him LSD injections to ease the pain of throat cancer.
Heritage
However, despite the interest in psychoactive compounds, the father of LSD until the end remained a Swiss chemist. At the Sandoz Laboratory, he headed the Natural Medicines Research Department until his retirement in 1971.
Over a hundred scientific articles have been written by Albert Hoffman. The books of a Swiss chemist are devoted to hallucinogenic substances. In the work “Eleusis: Exposing the Sacraments” (1978), he argues that a number of ancient Greek religious rites were accompanied by the use of hallucinogenic mushrooms. He also co-authored the books Botany and Chemistry of Hallucinogens (1973), Plants of the Gods: The Origins of the Use of Hallucinogens (1979). In 1989, his book Insight / Outlook (1989) on the perception of reality was published, and after his death, the work “Hoffman's Elixir: LSD and the New Eleusis” (2008) was published.
Albert Hoffman and his wife Anita, who died shortly before his death, raised four children in Basel. The son died of alcoholism at 53 years old. Hoffman survived several grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
Although the Swiss chemist called LSD “a medicine for the soul,” by 2006, the days when he was taking hallucinogens were long over. “I know LSD; “I don’t have to take it anymore,” he said and added, “maybe when I die, like Aldous Huxley.” According to him, LSD did not affect his perception of death. "After death, I will return to where I was before I was born, that's all."
Albert Hoffman Quotes
The following are some famous sayings by a Swiss chemist.
- The evolution of mankind is accompanied by the growth and expansion of self-awareness.
- LSD is just a means of turning us into who we should be.
- Go to the fields, go to the gardens, go to the forest. Open your eyes!
- God speaks only to those who understand his language.
- I believe that if people learned to use the stimulation of visions of LSD in medicine and for meditation more intelligently, then under certain conditions this problem child could become a child prodigy.
- Consciousness is a gift from God to humanity.