Chemist Albert Hofmann, inventor of the drug LSD, died of a heart attack in his Switzerland home at age 102.
Hoffman discovered LSD in the 1940’s while carrying out a laboratory experiment with the fungus that grows on wheat, when he spilled a small amount of the drug on his finger. He noted “remarkable restlessness, combined with slight dizziness,” which made him stop his work.
He wrote about the experience:
Last Friday, April 16,1943, I was forced to interrupt my work in the laboratory in the middle of the afternoon and proceed home, being affected by a remarkable restlessness, combined with a slight dizziness. At home I lay down and sank into a not unpleasant intoxicated-like condition, characterized by an extremely stimulated imagination. In a dreamlike state, with eyes closed (I found the daylight to be unpleasantly glaring), I perceived an uninterrupted stream of fantastic pictures, extraordinary shapes with intense, kaleidoscopic play of colors. After some two hours this condition faded away.
He thought he had found a remarkable formula until he decided to embark on a self-experiment taking a 250-milligram dose of the drug. This would turn out to be the world’s first bad trip.
Hoffann wrote, “The substance which I wanted to experiment with took over me. I was filled with an overwhelming fear that I would go crazy. I was transported to a different world, a different time.”
Hofmann called LSD “medicine for the soul” and was frustrated by the worldwide prohibition that pushed it underground. “It was used very successfully for 93 years in psychoanalysis,” he said, adding that the drug was hijacked by the youth movement of the 1960s and then unfairly demonized by the establishment that the movement opposed. He conceded that LSD can be dangerous in the wrong hands.