“LSD spoke to me. He came to me an said, ‘You must find me.’ He told me, ‘Don’t give me to the pharmacologist, he won’t find anything.’” So said Albert Hoffman to Craig Smith writing for the New York Times. Hoffman, the Swiss chemist who first synthesized LSD-25 from ergot, is convinced that the psychoactive substance can help people reconnect to the universe:
“‘Outside is pure energy and colorless substance,’ he said. ‘All of the rest happens through the mechanism of our senses. Our eyes see just a small fraction of the light in the world. It is a trick to make a colored world, which does not exist outside of human beings.’”
Hofmann, who turns 100 next week, recalls the first planned psychedelic test when in 1951 he ingested the substance with German novelist Ernst Junger. Both individuals took 0.05 milligrams at Hofmann’s home “accompanied by roses, music by Mozart and burning Japanese incense.” The first psychedelic test was unplanned and occurred on 19 April 1943 when Hoffman and an assistant rode bicycles after taking a tiny dose. That day has since been universally known as “bicycle day.”
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