A Really Good Day(10)
Moreover, the Swiss research chemist who first synthesized the drug, and who consumed it and other hallucinogens frequently throughout his life, including microdosing during his last decades, lived to be 102 years old!
When he discovered LSD in Basel in 1938, Dr. Albert Hofmann was employed by Sandoz Pharmaceuticals, a company founded in the middle of the nineteenth century that was, among other things, one of the earliest producers of saccharin, the sugar substitute beloved of little old Jewish ladies the world over. (My grandmother kept a pill dispenser of saccharin on her kitchen table, and another in her purse, to guarantee ready access to calorie-free Sanka that tasted vaguely like aspirin.) Hofmann was the lead Sandoz researcher investigating ergot, a fungus that had visited periodic plagues of madness and misery on medieval cities. During the Middle Ages, ergot would infest grain stores, leading to widespread outbreaks of ergotism, commonly known as St. Anthony’s Fire, named for the order of monks devoted to treating its victims. Victims of ergotism suffered two different forms of the illness. The gangrenous form caused full-body blistering and the rotting away of limbs. The convulsive form caused seizures, delusions, and death.
In small doses, ergot also causes uterine contractions, and was thus a common, if dangerous, abortifacient.*2 All of this made the compound very interesting to chemists like Hofmann, whose work involved altering chemicals to make them useful in treating disease. Hofmann worked with the ergotamine molecule, synthesizing subtle variations in search of one with medicinal applications. As he worked, he numbered his variations. The two diluted drops I placed under my tongue two days ago were his twenty-fifth variation, LSD-25.
When Hofmann first created this iteration of the chemical and tested it, he found that it had a uterine contracting effect, but not as much as other ergot compounds he had synthesized. He noticed that the lab animals tested with LSD-25 became highly excited, but since he was focused on discovering a substance that would stimulate circulation and respiration, that effect held no interest for him. He put LSD-25 in the metaphorical cupboard along with LSD-1 through 24, and moved on with his ergot research, eventually producing an ergot alkaloid known as Hydergine, which improved circulation and cerebral function and is still used in the treatment of dementia and Alzheimer’s.
Years later, for no reason that Hofmann could explain, he felt called to return to his experiments with LSD-25. In his book LSD, My Problem Child, Hofmann said he experienced “a peculiar presentiment—the feeling that this substance could possess properties other than those established in the first investigations.” It might simply have been a scientist’s instinct; it might have had something to do with the laboratory animals’ unusual reaction to the compound. Hofmann, however, believed that something more mysterious drove him to return to that particular variant. It was as if the drug wanted to be found. Believe that or not, five years after first synthesizing LSD-25, Hofmann did so again.
As he worked with the compound in his laboratory, Hofmann began to feel dizzy and restless. Then he began to hallucinate. He wrote, “I perceived an uninterrupted stream of fantastic pictures, extraordinary shapes with intense, kaleidoscopic play of colors.”
Assuming correctly that he’d accidentally ingested the chemical, and intrigued by those fantastical and vivid images, Hofmann decided to try the drug again, this time in a controlled experiment with a verified dose. Three days later, in the company of a group of lab assistants, he stirred 250 millionths of a gram (250 micrograms) into a beaker of water and drank it down. This is approximately twice what became the average dose for a “trip.”
Within half an hour, Hofmann began again to experience the same hallucinatory symptoms, but with a disturbing intensity. He asked one of his assistants to accompany him home, and they made the curious decision, which Hofmann attributes to its being wartime and his having no car, to ride their bicycles. This was, it turned out, a bad idea. According to Hofmann, “Everything in my field of vision wavered and was distorted as if seen in a curved mirror.” When his research assistant helped him into his room, things became even worse. “A demon had invaded me, had taken possession of my body, mind, and soul….I was seized by the dreadful fear of going insane. I was taken to another world, another place, another time. My body seemed to be without sensation, lifeless, strange. Was I dying?”
The very question I had asked myself, after taking 4 percent of the dose he had taken!
And yet Hofmann’s research assistant found that he was in no physical danger. “Pulse, blood pressure, breathing were all normal.” Then things changed. Hofmann stopped panicking and began to “enjoy the unprecedented colors and plays of shapes that persisted behind my closed eyes.” The day after that dizzy bicycle ride and its aftermath, Hofmann was himself transformed. “A sensation of well-being and renewed life flowed through me.”
Thus was launched the era of human experimentation with LSD. Sandoz made the drug available to scientists for traditional analytical research as well as for more unusual experiential experiments. In the materials that accompanied the drug, Sandoz suggested that psychiatrists who took the medication might gain insight into the minds of their patients. LSD could help them understand what it was like to be insane.
From the 1930s through 1968, when the United States and other governments criminalized LSD and effectively terminated research, scientists throughout the world experimented on thousands of volunteers, both healthy individuals and the mentally ill. They tried LSD on alcoholics and catatonics, on schizophrenics and depressives, and, most notably, on themselves. Many LSD researchers became their own subjects. It’s easy to understand why. How many of us have enough willpower to turn away from a “sensation of well-being and renewed life”? Not so much chasing the dragon as reaching for the cuddly kitty of contentment.