Tripping in LSD's Birthplace: A Tale for Bicycle Day
Artist Jon Farber sent me this portrait of of Albert Hofmann after reading the article below. Farber superimposed a bicycle wheel on Hofmann's face to commemorate Bicycle Day. The pattern of Hofmann's hair represents the molecular structure of LSD. Check out Farber's website at https://www.jonfarberart.com/homepage.
HOBOKEN, APRIL 17, 2023. Almost 80 years ago, on April 19, 1943, Albert Hofmann, a chemist in Basel, Switzerland, ingested a minute amount of a compound derived from ergot fungus. He soon felt so disoriented that he rode his bicycle from his lab to his home, where he experienced the terrifying, blissful effects of lysergic acid diethylamide.
Psychedelic enthusiasts now commemorate Hofmann's discovery of LSD's effects every April 19, or “Bicycle Day.” For this Bicycle Day, I'd like to describe one of the strangest trips of my life, which took place in Basel and involved Hofmann. I adapted this account from one I posted on Scientific American.com.
It was 1999, and I was researching my book Rational Mysticism, when I flew to Basel to attend “Worlds of Consciousness,” a conference on altered states. At the meeting, held in a convention center, two radically different groups converged. Academic scientists in jackets and ties described hallucinogens with clinical, scientific rhetoric, while independent scholars in hipster threads extolled psychedelics with evangelical fervor.
Both groups revered the meeting’s guest of honor, Albert Hofmann, a stooped, white-haired man with a bulldog mug. His contributions to psychedelic chemistry extend beyond LSD. In the 1950s, Hofmann discovered psilocybin, the primary active ingredient of the magic mushroom Psilocybe cubensis.
At 93, Hofmann still avidly followed research on psychedelics. One day we spoke between sessions, and in halting, heavily accented English, Hofmann defended LSD, his “problem child." He blamed Harvard-psychologist-turned-counterculture-guru Timothy Leary for giving acid a bad reputation.
“I had this discussion” with Leary, Hofmann told me. “I said, ‘Oh, you should not tell everybody, even the children, “Take LSD! Take LSD!”’” LSD “can hurt you, it can disturb you," Hofmann said, "it can make you crazy.” But properly used, psychedelics reawaken the “inborn faculty of visionary experience” that we possess as children.
After the final session of the conference, I had a few hours to kill before dinner, which I planned to spend with two coat-and-tie psychiatrists investigating psychedelics’ therapeutic potential. I checked out the convention hall lobby, where vendors were selling psychedelic books, posters and music. One table, to my surprise, displayed hallucinogenic plants, including a potted peyote cactus and black leaves labeled Salvia divinorum.
Are these for sale? I asked a skinny blond youth manning the table. Yes, he replied with a German accent and implied “Duh.”
Inspiration struck: I should supplement my objective reporting on this meeting with a trip! I asked the vendor if he could sell me something, not too strong or long-lasting. He suggested a mushroom that, he claimed, induced a mild high.
I bought four grams of dried mushroom, the dose the vendor recommended. Back at my hotel, just to be safe, I ingested only half of the brown and yellow fragments. Within 15 minutes the walls of my room were seething. Closing my eyes plunged me into a vat of boiling dayglo hues.
A dry, nerdy part of my brain recalled a neurobiological explanation of these visual effects: Psychedelics stimulate neurons in the visual cortex dedicated to detecting edges of objects; excessive firing of these neurons generates the convective swirls familiar to psychedelic users.
This reductionist recollection failed to stem my mounting panic. The walls of my room trembled like membranes about to burst; I feared that at any moment the clear light of the void would flood the room and annihilate me. I berated myself for taking the mushrooms so casually. This is not a game, I thought. This is not a game.
I stumbled into the bathroom and stuck my fingers down my throat, hoping to throw up the mushrooms--in vain. I considered skipping my dinner date with the two psychiatrists but decided I had nothing to fear. The psychiatrists had positive views of psychedelics, or they wouldn't be at this conference.
Walking down a boulevard to the convention center, where I was to meet my dinner companions, I found myself behind three humans and a dog. One was a male with short-cropped blond hair and cruel, chiseled features, clad in black leather. He strode beside an equally tall, blond female, also sheathed in leather, walking a pony-sized Doberman in a spiked collar. Skipping beside this Aryan god, goddess and beast was a tiny person, scarcely taller than the dog, wearing a belled jester’s cap. [1]
I skulked behind this bizarre foursome for a block or so. Fearing they might think I was stalking them, I veered away, past a pack of feral children swarming a shop window. Passing a hotel, I glanced through the glass doors and saw Albert Hofmann in a cluster of people in the lobby.
I had an eerie moment as my psilocybin-addled brain absorbed the image of this psychedelic Prometheus, this external personification of my subjective, inner state. I panicked. What if he spots me and calls me over! I will be tongue-tied and make a fool of myself! Albert Hofmann will know I’m tripping! I averted my gaze and scurried onward.
The convention-center lobby seemed deserted, then two men strode out of the shadows. One was John Halpern, the young Harvard psychiatrist who had arranged this dinner. He introduced me to Evgeny Krupitsky, a psychiatrist who headed a substance-abuse clinic in Saint Petersburg, Russia.
Krupitsky wore a gray-flecked Groucho Marx moustache and a perplexed, kindly expression. Halpern, in his late 20s, radiated jittery, impatient energy and spoke rapidly. He was a different species than Krupitsky and I, a spider monkey to our slow lorises. Briskly rubbing his hands together, Halpern said he had reserved a table at Basel's finest restaurant.
There’s something I should tell you, I stammered. The words came from someone else, a doppelganger standing beside me.
What’s the problem? Halpern replied, scrutinizing me.
I, uh, took something, I heard myself say. A drug.
What’d you take? Halpern asked. When I hesitated, Halpern added, incredulously, You don’t know what you took!? He barraged me with questions, to which I haltingly responded. Halpern knew the vendor who had sold me the mushrooms. He rapidly deduced that I had ingested Psilocybe semilanceata, also known as liberty caps, indigenous to the Pacific Northwest and other cool, moist climes. If had eaten two grams ninety minutes ago, I should be feeling quite high, seeing visual effects. I nodded, immensely relieved to have my condition so expertly diagnosed.
Halpern asked, Can you handle dinner?
If you and Evgeny can put up with me, I answered, I’d like to join you.
Great! Halpern said.
I blurted out that I felt like an idiot for having taken these mushrooms in such a casual manner. I knew how dangerous psychedelics could be; you could end up in a mental hospital.
Smiling, Halpern said he and Evgeny commit people to mental hospitals for a living. Evgeny would surely agree that psychedelics rarely cause genuine psychosis, the kind requiring hospitalization, in otherwise stable people; there is almost always a history of prior mental illness. Krupitsky nodded at me reassuringly.
During our cab ride to the restaurant, everything looked streamlined, underwater, and aroused in me a tactile, feathery pleasure. As we rounded a cobblestoned corner, a silver Porsche glided noiselessly past us, like a stingray cruising an ocean floor.
The restaurant bordered a canal, its surface satiny and textured as a raven’s wing. The restaurant’s windows were beveled like huge diamonds and ringed by Christmas lights. The restaurant was equally lovely within. The candles, crystal, silverware, flowers and lacquered wood all glowed, as did the young woman serving us.
Halpern ordered for Krupitsky and me and conducted our conversation. At Halpern’s urging, Krupitsky told me about his treatment of alcoholism with ketamine. Ketamine is an anesthetic—used more often in veterinary than human medicine--that when injected at sub-anesthetic doses triggers hallucinogenic episodes lasting an hour or so.
The ketamine experience can be ego-shattering, but that is the point. Therapists hope to get alcoholics to reject their former way of life. Therapists make subjects sniff booze, which ideally triggers permanent revulsion. Krupitsky told me all this in shaky English, and he showed no irritation when Halpern broke in to clarify, annotate or digress.
Halpern described his own research on peyote’s effects on members of the Native American Church. Church members show no ill effects from peyote; in fact, they are healthier and happier—and less prone to alcoholism—than non-church members. Halpern was careful to point out that these benefits could derive from church membership.
When Halpern asked how I was doing, I said I was “tripping my brains out” but otherwise fine. Halpern sang the praises of psilocybin: Here I am, quite intoxicated, and yet I can still handle myself in a highly structured social setting with no obvious signs of disorientation.
Yes, I crowed, I love my job! Halpern and Krupitsky laughed and said they love their jobs too. I raised my mug of beer, Halpern his goblet of wine and Krupitsky his tumbler of water. Clinking our glasses together, we toasted our good fortune.
Of course, psychedelics can be employed for insidious ends, Halpern reminded us. In the 1950s, the Central Intelligence Agency created top-secret programs such as Bluebird, Artichoke and MK-Ultra to investigate psychedelics’ potential as truth serums and brainwashing agents.
The CIA paid psychiatrists to test LSD on prisoners and mental patients. Ewen Cameron, former head of the American Psychiatric Association, “re-programmed” subjects by making them listen to tape-recorded messages after giving them LSD and electroshock therapy. The U.S. Army gave LSD to soldiers engaged in field exercises; Halpern had seen film footage of soldiers staggering about comically. [2]
In the 1960s and 1970s, the Army stockpiled canisters of an extremely potent hallucinogen, 3-Quinuclidinyl benzoate, or BZ. If wafted in aerosol form over enemy troops, BZ could turn them into gibbering idiots for up to 80 hours. BZ was never deployed, apparently because American military commanders feared its unpredictability. [3]
Halpern occasionally interrupted this history to ask if I found it disturbing. Not at all, I replied, I find it fascinating. And that was true. But I also thought this was my penance for eating mushrooms so blithely; the world, via Halpern, was reminding me that it does not exist merely for my aesthetic delectation.
Psychedelics, an acid-head-turned-psychologist once assured me, reveal existence to be a divine dance, a game that we should play joyfully. If only things were that simple. Yes, the world is a heartbreakingly beautiful miracle; but it is ugly, too, marred by injustice, cruelty and violence. This is what theologians call the problem of evil. There are bad people out there, including those who use psychedelics for evil ends. Drugs that awaken us can also enslave us or drive us mad.
Albert Hofmann acknowledged as much. He once compared his discoveries to nuclear fission; just as fission threatens our physical selves, so do psychedelics “attack the spiritual center of the personality, the self.” Psychedelics, Hofmann fretted, might “represent a forbidden transgression of limits.”
I didn’t mention these glum thoughts to Halpern. As he delved deeper into psychedelics’ dark history, I just nodded along, thinking, This is not a game. This is not a game.
Footnotes:
1. I learned later that Basel was hosting a carnival during which the normally staid Swiss dress in outlandish costumes.
2. Since my conversation with Halpern, footage of soldiers on LSD has been posted online.
3. In 1981, I took a drug that put me in a trance for 24 hours and left me with severe flashbacks. The friend who gave me the drug said it was being tested by a defense contractor in North Carolina. Halpern, after I described my trip (see my previous post, What Is It Like to Be God?), guessed that the drug was BZ or a similar compound.
Further Reading:
Rational Mysticism