PARIS — Albert Hofmann, the mystical Swiss chemist who gave the world LSD, the most powerful psychotropic substance known, died Tuesday at his hilltop home near Basel, Switzerland. He was 102.
Albert Hofmann in 2006.
The cause was a heart attack, said Rick Doblin, founder and president of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, a California-based group that in 2005 republished Dr. Hofmann’s 1979 book “LSD: My Problem Child.”
Dr. Hofmann first synthesized the compound lysergic acid diethylamide in 1938 but did not discover its psychopharmacological effects until five years later, when he accidentally ingested the substance that became known to the 1960s counterculture as acid.
He 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.
Dr. Hofmann was born in Baden, a spa town in northern Switzerland, on Jan. 11, 1906, the eldest of four children. His father, who had no higher education, was a toolmaker in a local factory, and the family lived in a rented apartment. But Dr. Hofmann spent much of his childhood outdoors.
He would wander the hills above the town and play around the ruins of a Hapsburg castle, the Stein. “It was a real paradise up there,” he said in an interview in 2006. “We had no money, but I had a wonderful childhood.”
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.
“It shone with the most beautiful radiance, speaking to the heart, as though it wanted to encompass me in its majesty. I was filled with an indescribable sensation of joy, oneness and blissful security.”
Though Dr. Hofmann’s father was a Roman Catholic and his mother a Protestant, Dr. Hofmann, from an early age, felt that organized religion missed the point. When he was 7 or 8, he recalled, he spoke to a friend about whether Jesus was divine. “I said that I didn’t believe, but that there must be a God because there is the world and someone made the world,” he said. “I had this very deep connection with nature.”
Dr. Hofmann went on to study chemistry at Zurich University because, he said, he wanted to explore the natural world at the level where energy and elements combine to create life. He earned his Ph.D. there in 1929, when he was just 23. He then took a job with Sandoz Laboratories in Basel, attracted by a program there that sought to synthesize pharmacological compounds from medicinally important plants.
It was during his work on the ergot fungus, which grows in rye kernels, that he stumbled on LSD, accidentally ingesting a trace of the compound one Friday afternoon in April 1943. Soon he experienced an altered state of consciousness similar to the one he had experienced as a child.
On the following Monday, he deliberately swallowed a dose of LSD and rode his bicycle home as the effects of the drug overwhelmed him. That day, April 19, later became memorialized by LSD enthusiasts as “bicycle day.”
Dr. Hofmann’s work produced other important drugs, including methergine, used to treat postpartum hemorrhaging, the leading cause of death from childbirth. But it was LSD that shaped both his career and his spiritual quest.
“Through my LSD experience and my new picture of reality, I became aware of the wonder of creation, the magnificence of nature and of the animal and plant kingdom,” Dr. Hofmann told the psychiatrist Stanislav Grof during an interview in 1984. “I became very sensitive to what will happen to all this and all of us.”
Dr. Hofmann became an impassioned advocate for the environment and argued that LSD, besides being a valuable tool for psychiatry, could be used to awaken a deeper awareness of mankind’s place in nature and help curb society’s ultimately self-destructive degradation of the natural world.
But he was also disturbed by the cavalier use of LSD as a drug for entertainment, arguing that it should be treated in the way that primitive societies treat psychoactive sacred plants, which are ingested with care and spiritual intent.
After his discovery of LSD’s properties, Dr. Hofmann spent years researching sacred plants. With his friend R. Gordon Wasson, he participated in psychedelic rituals with Mazatec shamans in southern Mexico. He succeeded in synthesizing the active compounds in the Psilocybe mexicana mushroom, which he named psilocybin and psilocin. He also isolated the active compound in morning glory seeds, which the Mazatec also used as an intoxicant, and found that its chemical structure was close to that of LSD.
During the psychedelic era, Dr. Hofmann struck up friendships with such outsize personalities as Timothy Leary, Allen Ginsberg and Aldous Huxley, who, nearing death in 1963, asked his wife for an injection of LSD to help him through the final painful throes of throat cancer.
Yet despite his involvement with psychoactive compounds, Dr. Hofmann remained moored in his Swiss chemist identity. He stayed with Sandoz as head of the research department for natural medicines until his retirement in 1971. He wrote more than 100 scientific articles and was the author or co-author of a number of books
He and his wife, Anita, who died recently, reared four children in Basel. A son died of alcoholism at 53. Survivors include several grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
Though Dr. Hofmann called LSD “medicine for the soul,” by 2006 his hallucinogenic days were long behind him, he said in the interview that year.
“I know LSD; I don’t need to take it anymore,” he said, adding. “Maybe when I die, like Aldous Huxley.”
But he said LSD had not affected his understanding of death. In death, he said, “I go back to where I came from, to where I was before I was born, that’s all.”
The medicines they use are called cognitive- or brain-enhancing drugs. But you won't find a dedicated shelf in your local chemist's. Instead, healthy people are popping prescription pills designed to treat conditions such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), narcolepsy or even Alzheimer's.
The drugs of choice are Ritalin and Modafinil. Prescribed to ADHD sufferers to help calm them down, Ritalin, dubbed "kiddie coke" by some, can boost concentration and alertness in healthy people. Modafinil, meanwhile, is designed to combat narcolepsy, but it can also stave off tiredness in those without a diagnosed sleep disorder.
The British Medical Association believes this kind of drug abuse is growing rapidly, as healthy pill-poppers dupe doctors into writing prescriptions, or buy medicines from unlicensed online pharmacies, usually based abroad.
The true scale of the problem in the UK is unknown but studies in America suggest brain-boosting drug use is rife. A 2005 survey of more than 10,000 US university students found that 4-7 per cent of them had tried ADHD drugs at least once to pull pre-exam all-nighters. At some institutions, more than one in four students said they'd sampled the pills.
Anecdotal evidence suggests as many as three in four classical musicians in the US take beta blockers such as Inderal, which block adrenalin receptors in the brain, helping to control conditions such as high blood pressure, or stage fright in jittery musicians. source
April 9, 2008 -- One in five Nature readers -- mostly scientists -- say they up their mental performance with drugs such as Ritalin, Provigil, and Inderal.
The online poll from the British science magazine didn't ask readers how they felt about professional athletes using drugs to enhance their physical performance. But when asked how they felt about professional thinkers using drugs to enhance their cognitive performance, nearly 80% said it should be allowed.
While only a fifth of the poll's 1,400 respondents admitted to drug use to improve concentration, nearly two-thirds said they knew of a colleague who did. And if there were "a normal risk of mild side effects," nearly 70% of the scientists said they'd boost their brain power by taking a "cognitive-enhancing drug."
Scientists from all over the world participated in the poll, but 70% of respondents said they were from the U.S.
The most popular drug was Ritalin, used by 62% of responders. Provigil was the drug of choice for 44% of those polled -- suggesting that many of the users take more than one drug. Beta-blockers, such as Inderal, accounted for 15% of the drug use.
Most respondents said they took the drugs to improve concentration or to improve focus for a specific task. Counteracting jet lag was also a popular reason for drug use.
One alarming poll finding was how often respondents used brain-boosting drugs. It was an even split, with about 25% of users saying they took the drugs daily, weekly, monthly, or once a year at most.
When asked how big an effect the drugs had on their mental function, most users gave them a 3 or 4 on a 5-point scale with 1 being "mild" and 5 being "large." On the other hand, more than half of the users said the drugs had side effects they did not like. source
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