Shine On Dr. Hoffman!

Dr. Albert Hoffman died Tuesday at his "hilltop home" in Basel Switzerland. He was 102 years old. Now that's a ripe old age. Good job Albert. It is fitting that he lived on a hilltop. The good doctor was the man who synthesized the compound lysergic acid diethylamide (from ergot) in 1938. His first trip happened a a couple years later when he inadvertently absorbed some of it through his fingertips. He then intentionally tripped on a bicycle ride home. Must have been quite a bike ride.

I wrote a play a couple of years ago now that featured Albert Hoffman as a sort of mystic force in Pop Culture. Certainly much of the Sixties (and all that came afterwards) as we know it probably would not have been the same without LSD. Would Ken Kesey's "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" ever been written? Would the Beatles "Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band" ever been recorded? Would Jimi Hendrix have worn so many scarves and blasted the radio waves with "Purple Haze?"

It turns out the CIA used LSD as a truth serum and used real people as experimental guinea pigs. Plus the promise of some kind of trippy utopia gave way to burn out and drugged out cul de sacs. There were many drug casualties along the way - think Brian Jones, Syd Barret, Peter Green, Jimi Hendrix - Timothy Leary was the P.T. Barnum of "turn on, tune in and drop out." Was there a continuum from that to Peter Townsend's "teenage wasteland?"

Was one man's transcendence another's dead end?

Anyway this is what kind of grabbed me reading the obit in the NY Times yesterday:

"He (Hoffman) then took LSD hundreds of times, but regarded it as a powerful and potentially dangerous psychotropic drug that demanded respect. More important to him than the pleasures of the psychedelic experience was the drug’s value as a revelatory aid for contemplating and understanding what he saw as humanity’s oneness with nature. That perception, of union, which came to Dr. Hofmann as almost a religious epiphany while still a child, directed much of his personal and professional life.

It was during one of his ambles that he had his epiphany.

“It happened on a May morning — I have forgotten the year — but I can still point to the exact spot where it occurred, on a forest path on Martinsberg above Baden,” he wrote in “LSD: My Problem Child.” “As I strolled through the freshly greened woods filled with bird song and lit up by the morning sun, all at once everything appeared in an uncommonly clear light."

So the great insight (the oneness of the universe) that later John Lennon and George Harrision so famously promoted after they took LSD, came to Albert Hoffman when he was child, long before his first trip. Beautiful. Shine on Dr. Hoffman!