Albert Hoffman - Swiss chemist, father of LSD: biography

Albert Hoffman, a Swiss chemist who gave the world LSD, the most powerful psychotropic substance now known, died in April 2008 in his home on a hilltop near Basel, Switzerland. He was 102 years old.

According to Rick Doblin, founder and president of the multi-discipline Association of Psychedelic Research, based in California, the cause of death was a heart attack. This organization in 2005 reissued a book, which in 1979 was published by Albert Hoffman, "My Difficult Child LSD."

The Swiss scientist for the first time synthesized a compound of lysergic acid in 1938, but did not discover its psychopharmacological effects until five years later he accidentally consumed a substance that in the counterculture of the 1960s was called "acid."

Then he took LSD hundreds of times, but considered it as a powerful and potentially dangerous psychotropic drug, requiring respect. But more important than the pleasures of psychedelic experience for him was the value of the drug as an aid in contemplation and understanding of what he called the unity of mankind with nature. This perception, which came to Dr. Hoffman as almost religious insight as a child, led most of his personal and professional life.

Ozarenie

Albert Hoffman was born in Baden, a resort 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 on the street.

He wandered over the hills above the city and played at the ruins of the Habsburg castle "Stein." "There was a real paradise," he said in an interview in 2006. "We did not have money, but I had a wonderful childhood."

During one of the walks, insight came to him.

"It happened in the morning of May - I forgot the year, but I can still pinpoint 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 the singing of birds and illuminated by the morning sun, and all of a sudden it appeared in an unusually clear light. Nature was enveloped in the most beautiful radiance, touching to the depth of the soul, as if wishing to embrace me with its greatness. I was overwhelmed with an inexpressible sense of joy, unity and blissful tranquility. "

Although Hoffman's father was Catholic and his mother a Protestant, he himself from an early age believed that religion missed the most important thing. When he was 7 or 8 years old, Albert spoke with a friend about whether Jesus was a god. "I said that I do 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 surrounding 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 in the Sandoz laboratory in Basel, where he was attracted by a program to synthesize pharmacological substances from medicinal plants.

«Day of a bicycle»

While working with an ergot affecting rye, he stumbled upon LSD, and accidentally on Friday afternoon, in April 1943, used the drug inside. Soon he experienced an altered state of consciousness, similar to the one he experienced in childhood.

On the following Monday, Albert Hoffman LSD deliberately. The drug began to work when he was riding his bike home. That day, April 19, was later immortalized by drug lovers. They called it "Day of the bicycle".

Chemistry of Revelation

Dr. Hoffman has created other important drugs, including metergin, used to treat postpartum hemorrhage - the main cause of death during childbirth. But it was LSD that formed his career and his spiritual quest.

"Thanks to my feelings 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 psychiatrist Stanislaw Grof in 1984. " "I became very sensitive to what will happen to all of this and to all of us."

Sacred Drugs

Dr. Hoffman became an ardent defender of the environment. He said that LSD is not only a valuable tool in psychiatry, but can be used to awaken a deeper awareness of people's 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 the psychotropic substance, Albert Hoffman spent years studying the sacred plants. Together with his friend Gordon Wasson, he participated in psychedelic rituals of shamans-Mesatheks in southern Mexico. He managed to synthesize the active compounds of the mushroom of psilocyb Mexicana, which he named psilocin and psilocybin. In addition, the chemist isolated an active component of cornflower seeds, which were also used as a drug, and found that its chemical composition is 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 inject him with LSD to relieve the pain of throat cancer.

Heritage

However, despite the interest in psychoactive compounds, the father of LSD remained to the end a Swiss chemist. In the Sandoz laboratory, he headed the research department of natural medicines before retiring 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: Disclosure of the Sacraments (1978), he claims that a number of ancient Greek religious rites were accompanied by the use of hallucinogenic fungi. He also co-authored the books "Botany and the chemistry of hallucinogens" (1973), "Plants of the Gods: the origins of the use of hallucinogens" (1979). In 1989, his book Insight / Outlook (1989) about the perception of reality was published, and after the death the work "Elixir Hoffman: 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 in 53 years. Hoffman survived several grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

Although the Swiss chemist called LSD "medicine for the soul," by 2006, the days when he took hallucinogens, long ago were left behind. "I know LSD; I no longer need to take it, "he said and added," maybe when I die 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

Below are some well-known statements by a Swiss chemist.

• The evolution of mankind is accompanied by the growth and expansion of self-consciousness.
• LSD is only a means to turn us into who we should be.
• Go to the fields, go to the gardens, go into the forest. Open your eyes!
• God speaks only to those who understand his language.
• I believe that if people had learned to use the stimulation of LSD visions in medicine and for meditation more reasonably, then under certain conditions this problem child could become a child prodigy.
• Consciousness is God's gift to humanity.