Albert Hoffmann, the Swiss chemist who gave the world LSD, the most powerful psychotropic substance known, died in April 2008 at his hilltop home near Basel, Switzerland. He was 102 years old.
According to Rick Doblin, founder and president of the multidisciplinary Psychedelic Research Association based in California, the cause of death was a heart attack. This organization in 2005 republished a book published in 1979 by Albert Hoffman, My Problem Child LSD.
A Swiss scientist first synthesized the compound lysergic acid in 1938, but did not discover its psychopharmacological effects until five years later when he accidentally ingested a substance that became known as "acid" in the 1960s counterculture.
He then took LSD hundreds of times, but viewed it as a powerful and potentially dangerous psychotropic drug that demanded respect. But more important than the pleasures of the 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 humanity withnature. This perception, which came to Dr. Hoffman as an almost religious insight as a child, guided much of his personal and professional life.
Illumination
Albert Hoffmann was born in Baden, a spa town in northern Switzerland, on January 11, 1906. He was the eldest of four children. His father, who did not have a higher education, was a toolmaker at a local factory, and the family lived in a rented apartment. But Albert spent most of his free time outside.
He wandered the hills above the city and played at the ruins of the Habsburg castle "Stein". “It was a real paradise there,” he said in an interview in 2006. “We didn’t have money, but I had a wonderful childhood.”
During one of his walks, he had an insight.
"It happened on a May morning - I forgot the year, but I can still pinpoint exactly where it happened, on a path in the woods near Martinsburg," he wrote in his book. “I was walking through a forest with fresh leaves, filled with birdsong and illuminated by the morning sun, and suddenly everything appeared in an unusually clear light. Nature was seized by the most beautiful radiance, touching to the depths of the soul, as if wanting to embrace me with its greatness. I was overwhelmed with an indescribable feeling of joy, unity and blissful calm.”
Although Hoffman's father was a Catholic and his mother a Protestant, he himself felt from an early age that religion was missing the point. When he was 7 or 8 years old, Albert was talking to a friend about whether Jesus was God. I said I didn'tI believe, but there must be a God, because there is a world 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 around him at levels where energy and chemical elements combine to create life. In 1929, when he was only 23, he received his Ph. D. He then took a job at the Sandoz laboratory in Basel, where he was attracted by a program to synthesize pharmacological substances from medicinal plants.
Bicycle Day
While working with ergot, which affects rye, he came across LSD, and accidentally took the drug by mouth on a Friday afternoon in April 1943. He soon experienced an altered state of consciousness similar to the one he experienced as a child.
The next Monday, Albert Hoffman took LSD on purpose. The drug began to work when he was cycling home. That day, April 19, was later memorialized by drug lovers. They called it Bicycle Day.
Chemistry of Revelation
Dr. Hoffman created other important drugs, including methergine, which is used to treat postpartum hemorrhage, the leading cause of death in childbirth. But it was LSD that shaped his career and his spiritual quest.
“Thanks to my feelings while taking LSD and my new picture of reality, I realized the miracle of creation, the magnificence of nature, animal and plant life,” saidHoffman to psychiatrist Stanislav Grof in 1984. “I have become very sensitive to what will happen to all of this and to all of us.”
Sacred drugs
Dr. Hoffman has become an ardent environmentalist. He said that LSD was not only a valuable tool in psychiatry, but could be used to awaken people to a deeper awareness of their place in nature in order to stop the destruction of nature.
But he was also concerned about the growing use of LSD as a recreational drug. According to him, the drug should be used in the same way that primitive societies use psychoactive sacred plants - carefully and with spiritual intentions.
After discovering the properties of the psychotropic substance, Albert Hoffman spent years studying sacred plants. Together with his friend Gordon Wasson, he participated in the psychedelic rituals of the Mesatec shamans in southern Mexico. He succeeded in synthesizing the active compounds of the psilocybe mexican fungus, which he named psilocin and psilocybin. In addition, the chemist isolated the active component of bindweed seeds, which the Mazatecs also used as an intoxicant, and found that its chemical composition is close to LSD.
During the psychedelic era, Hoffman struck up friendships 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 injections of LSD to ease the pain of throat cancer.
Legacy
However, despite his interest in psychoactive compounds, the father of LSD remained a Swiss chemist to the end. At Sandoz Laboratories, he headed the Natural Medicines Research Department until his retirement in 1971.
Written more than a hundred scientific articles, authored by Albert Hoffman. The books of the Swiss chemist are devoted to hallucinogenic substances. In Eleusis: Revealing the Mysteries (1978), he argues that a number of ancient Greek religious rites were accompanied by the use of hallucinogenic mushrooms. He also co-authored The Botany and Chemistry of Hallucinogens (1973) and 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 Hoffmann'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 the age of 53. Hoffman was survived by several grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
Although the Swiss chemist called LSD "medicine for the soul", by 2006 his days of taking hallucinogens were long gone. “I know LSD; I don't need to take it anymore," he said, and added, "maybe when I'm dying like Aldous Huxley." According to him, LSD did not affect his ideas about death. “After death, I will return to where I was before I was born, that’s all.”
Albert Hoffman quotes
The following are somefamous sayings of the Swiss chemist.
- The evolution of mankind is accompanied by the growth and expansion of self-consciousness.
- LSD is just a means to make us who we are meant to be.
- Go to the fields, go to the gardens, go to the forest. Open your eyes!
- God only speaks to those who understand his language.
- I believe that if people learned to use LSD vision stimulation in medicine and for meditation more intelligently, then under certain conditions this problem child could become a child prodigy.
- Consciousness is God's gift to humanity.
