This is the foreword, which you should read:
There are experiences that most of us
are hesitant to speak about, because they do not
conform to everyday reality and defy rational explanation. These are not particular
external occurrences, but rather
events of our inner lives, which are generally dismissed
as figments of the imagination and barred from our memory. Suddenly, the familiar view
of our surroundings is transformed in a strange, delightful, or
alarming way: it appears to
us in a new light, takes on a special meaning. Such an experience can be as light and
fleeting as a breath of air, or it can imprint itself deeply upon our minds.
One enchantment of that kind, which I experienced in childhood, has remained
remarkably vivid in my memory ever since. 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, Switzerland.
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. Was th
is something I had simply failed to notice
before? Was I suddenly discovering the spring fore
st as it actually looked? 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.
I have no idea how long I stood there spellbound. But I recall the anxious concern I felt
as the radiance slowly dissolved and I hiked
on: how could a vision th
at was so real and
convincing, so directly and deeply felt—how could it end so soon? And how could I tell
anyone about it, as my overflowing joy compelled me to do, since I knew there were no
words to describe what I had seen? It seem
ed strange that I, as a child, had seen
something so marvelous, something that adults obviously did not perceive - for I had
never heard them mention it.
While still a child, I experienced several more of these deeply euphoric moments on
my rambles through forest and meadow. It was these experiences that shaped the main
outlines of my world view and convinced me
of the existence of a
miraculous, powerful,
unfathomable reality that was hidden from everyday sight.
I was often troubled in those days, wondering if I would ever, as an
adult, be able to
communicate these experiences; whether I would
have the chance to depict my visions in
poetry or paintings. But knowing that I was not
cut out to be a poet or artist, I assumed I
would have to keep these experiences to
myself, important as they were to me.
Unexpectedly—though scarcely by chance—much later, in middle age, a link was
established between my profession and these visionary experiences from childhood.
Because I wanted to gain insight into
the structure and essence of matter, I became a
research chemist. Intrigued by the plant world since early childhood,
I chose to specialize
in research on the constituents of medicinal plants. In the course of this career I was led
to the psychoactive, hallucination-causing substances, which under certain conditions can
evoke visionary states similar to the spontaneous experiences just described. The most
important of these hallucinogenic substances has come to be known as LSD.
Hallucinogens, as active compounds of considerable scientific interest
, have gained entry
into medicinal research, biology, and psychiatry, and later—especially LSD also obtained
wide diffusion in the drug culture.
In studying the literature connected
with my work, I became
aware of the great
universal significance of visionary experience. It plays
a dominant role, not only in
mysticism and the history of religion, but also
in the creative process in
art, literature, and
science. More recent investigations have shown that many persons also have visionary
experiences in daily life, though most of us
fail to recognize their meaning and value.
Mystical experiences, like those that marked my childhood, are
apparently far from rare.
There is today a widespread striving for mystical experience, for visionary
breakthroughs to a deeper, more comprehensive reality than that perceived by our
rational, everyday consciousness. Efforts to
transcend our materialistic world view are
being made in various ways, not only by the
adherents to Eastern religious movements,
but also by professional psychiatrists,
who are adopting such profound spiritual
experiences as a basic therapeutic principle.
I share the belief of many of my contemporaries that the
spiritual crisis pervading all
spheres of Western industrial society can
be remedied only by a change in our world
view. We shall have to shift from the materi
alistic, dualistic belie
f that people and their
environment are separate, toward a new consciousness of an all-encompassing reality,
which embraces the experiencing ego, a reality in which people feel their oneness with
animate nature and all of creation.
Everything that can contribute to such
a fundamental alterati
on in our perception of
reality must therefore command
earnest attention. Foremost
among such approaches are
the various methods of meditation, either in a
religious or a secular context, which aim to
deepen the consciousness of reality by way of a total mystical experience. Another
important, but still controversial, path to the same goal is the use of the consciousness-
altering properties of hallucinogenic psychopharmaceuticals. LSD finds such an
application in medicine, by helping patient
s in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy to
perceive their problems in
their true significance.
Deliberate provocation of
mystical experience, part
icularly by LSD and related
hallucinogens, in contrast to spontaneous vision
ary experiences, entails
dangers that must
not be underestimated. Practitioners must take into account the peculiar effects of these
substances, namely their ability to influence our consciousness, the innermost essence of
our being. The history of LSD to date amply
demonstrates the catastrophic consequences
that can ensue when its profound effect is misjudged and the substance is mistaken for a
pleasure drug. Special internal and external advance preparations are required; with them,
an LSD experiment can become a meaningful experience. Wrong and inappropriate use
has caused LSD to become my problem child.
It is my desire in this book to give
a comprehensive picture of LSD, its origin, its
effects, and its dangers, in order to guard
against increasing abuse
of this extraordinary
drug. I hope thereby to emphasize possible uses
of LSD that are compatible with its
characteristic action. I believe that if people would learn to use LSD's vision-inducing
capability more wisely, under suitable conditions, in medical practice and in conjunction
with meditation, then in the future this
problem child could become a wonder child.
This is basically a rough summary of chapter one. All I did was read it and regurgitate what he said.
Chapter 1.
LSD was only partially discovered by accident. Hoffman states the most important part of the discovery was his choice of employment after his chemistry studies at the University of Zurich. After the studies, he joined Sandoz Company's pharmaceutical research lab in Basel, as co-worker with Arthur Stoll, founder of the department. He chose that because it offered the chance to work with natural products whereas his other two offers involved synthetic chemistry work.
His doctoral thesis was rated with distinction by obtaining the chemical structure of chitin (from the cleavage product, "a nitrogen containing sugar") - which turned out to be an analogue of cellulose, the structural material of plants. This gave him a chance to work with his interest, plant & animal chemistry. Chitin is the material that composes shells, wings, claws of insects, crustaceans, and other lower animals.
His job at Sandoz (in 1929) was to isolate the active principles of known medicinal plants in order to produce pure specimens of the substances. There are numerous benefits to having the active ingredients in pure form. They worked mainly with Digitalis, Claviceps purpurea, and Scilla maritima.
For example, the active principles in Scilla are cardioactive glycosides (glycosides are sugar containing substances) and serve in the treatment of cardiac insufficiency. Being extremely active, it's important to have exact dosage, based on the pure compound rather than what's in the plant naturally. The therapeutic and toxic doses are nearly identical, so it's important to be able to do that.
What Hoffman did was elucidate their chemical structure, showing the differences from the Digitalis glycosides and, on the other hand, the close structural similarity of toxic principles found in toad skin.
After that project ended he asked to continue Arthur Stoll's ergot investigations. Ergotamine had already been isolated in 1918. He was happy to have the request granted. Other companies were beginning to focus on ergot alkaloids and he didn't want Sandoz to lose its leading role there. Ergotamine was useful for treating migraine and had some uses in obstetrics.
Ergot is a drug produced by the lower fungus Claviceps purpurea. It grows parasitically on rye and to a lesser extent other grains and wild grasses. Ergot first appeared in the Middle Ages as a poison, before being realized as a rich storehouse of remedies. H. H. Dale first discovered that ergotoxine had antagonistic activity on adrenaline in the nervous system which could lead to therapeutic uses of ergot alkaloids.
Jacobs and Craig of the Rockefeller Institute of New York discovered and isolated the common nucleus of all ergot alkaloids and named it lysergic acid. Hoffman set as his first goal to prepare ergobasine synthetically by linking the two cleavage products lysergic acid and propanolamine.
Okay so, the structure of ergobasine was reinforced through the first synthesis - artificial production - of it. Then, it was improved upon by substituting the propanolamine with butanolamine, which increased its activity. The medicine ergobasine is found only in "trifling quantities" so the synthesis was a valuable landmark. Today it's apparently the leading medicine for its use ("obstetrics") under the brand name Methergine.
He continued working with ergot compounds and began customizing them in a way that other interesting pharmacological properties could be expected. In 1938 the 25th one was produced, lysergic acid diethylamide (Lyserg-saure-diathylamid), LSD-25. The goal was to produce an analeptic, a respiratory stimulant because its structure was similar to an already existing one at the time, coramine (nicotinic acid diethylamide). During testing a strong effect (on the uterus) was noted, as well as the animals acting restless, but no special interest was aroused in the physicians or pharmacologists so testing was discontinued. Further work produced Hydergine, which is apparently Sandoz's most important pharmaceutical product.
Five years later, he couldn't get the relatively uninteresting LSD-25 out of his head. He had a hunch that it possessed other properties not found during the initial investigations so he resynthesized it which was unusual because as a rule once stricken, experimental substances were excluded from further testing since they were found by the program to be lacking in pharmacological interest. Nonetheless in 1943 he repeated the synthesis and obtained only a few centigrams of the compound.
In the final steps of his synthesis he was interrupted by unusual sensations. He sent in a report to Stoll:
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 then decided on a self experiment after assuming the LSD was the cause of this. It had become clear. He asked his assistant to escort him home and they went by bicycle since the use of automobiles was restricted due to the war. Hence, the infamous "bike ride home". After an initial scare:
Now, little by little I could begin to enj
oy the unprecedented colors and plays of shapes
that persisted behind my closed eyes. Kalei
doscopic, fantastic images surged in on me,
alternating, variegated, opening
and then closing themselves in circles and spirals,
exploding in colored fountains, rearranging a
nd hybridizing themselves in constant flux.
It was particularly remarkable how every ac
oustic perception, such as the sound of a door
handle or a passing automobile
, became transformed into optical perceptions. Every
sound generated a vividly changing image, with
its own consistent form and color.
Late in the evening my wife returned from Lucerne. Someone had informed her by
telephone that I was suffering a mysterious
breakdown. She had return
ed home at once,
leaving the children behind with her parents.
By now, I had recovered myself sufficiently
to tell her what had happened.
Exhausted, I then slept, to awake next morning refreshed, with a clear head, though
still somewhat tired physically. A sensati
on of well-being and re
newed life flowed
through me. Breakfast tasted delicious and gave
me extraordinary pleasure. When I later
walked out into the garden, in which the s
un shone now after a spring rain, everything
glistened and sparkled in a fresh light. The wo
rld was as if newly created. All my senses
vibrated in a condition of highest sensitiv
ity, which persisted for the entire day.
This self-experiment showed that LS
D-25 behaved as a psychoactive substance with
extraordinary properties and potency. Th
ere was to my knowledge no other known
substance that evoked such profound psychic e
ffects in such extremely low doses, that
caused such dramatic changes in human cons
ciousness and our experience of the inner
and outer world.
What seemed even more significant wa
s that I could remember the experience of LSD
inebriation in every detail. This could only
mean that the conscious recording function
was not interrupted, even in the climax
of the LSD experience, despite the profound
breakdown of the normal world view. For the
entire duration of the experiment, I had
even been aware of participating in an e
xperiment, but despite th
is recognition of my
condition, I could not, with every exertion
of my will, shake off the LSD world.
Everything was experienced as completely
real, as alarming reality; alarming, because
the picture of the other, familiar everyday rea
lity was still fully preserved in the memory
for comparison.
Another surprising aspect of LSD was
its ability to produce such a far-reaching,
powerful state of inebriation without leavi
ng a hangover. Quite the contrary, on the day
after the LSD experiment I felt myself to be, as already described,
in excellent physical
and mental condition.
I was aware that LSD, a new active com
pound with such properties, would have to be
of use in pharmacology, in neurology, and espe
cially in psychiatry, and that it would
attract the interest of concerned specialists.
But at that time I had
no inkling that the new
substance would also come to be used beyond me
dical science, as an
inebriant in the drug
scene. Since my self-experiment had revealed
LSD in its terrifying, demonic aspect, the
last thing I could have expect
ed was that this substance co
uld ever find application as
anything approaching a pleasur
e drug. I failed, moreover, to recognize the meaningful
connection between LSD inebriation and spont
aneous visionary experience until much
later, after further experiments, which were
carried out with far lower doses and under
different conditions.
The next day I wrote to Professor
Stoll the above-mentioned report about my
extraordinary experience with LSD-25 a
nd sent a copy to the director of the
pharmacological department, Professor Rothlin.
As expected, the first reaction was incr
edulous astonishment. Instantly a telephone call
came from the management; Professor Stoll asked: "Are you certain you made no
mistake in the weighing? Is the stated dose re
ally correct?" Professor Rothlin also called,
asking the same question. I was certain of this
point, for I had executed the weighing and
dosage with my own hands. Yet their doubts were
justified to some extent, for until then
no known substance had displayed even the s
lightest psychic effect in fraction-of-a-
milligram doses. An active compound of such
potency seemed almost unbelievable.
Professor Rothlin himself and two of
his colleagues were the first to repeat my
experiment, with only one-third of the dose I had utilized. Bu
t even at that level, the
effects were still extremely impressive,
and quite fantastic. All doubts about the
statements in my report were eliminated.
And so LSD became a thing.
This is important because like Tim Leary:
Though like many of those associated with the origins of the psychedelic movement, Albert Hofmann is called “divine,” evidence has come to light which exposes him as both a CIA and French Intelligence operative. Hofmann helped the agency dose the French village Pont Saint Esprit with LSD. As a result five people died and Hofmann helped to cover up the crime. The LSD event at Pont Saint Esprit led to the famous murder of Frank Olson by the CIA because he had threatened to go public. It was the exposure of Olson’s murder and his involvement with the MK-ULTRA program that caused the national uproar leading to the Church Commission.
http://www.gnosticmedia.com/manufac...cial-engineering-by-joe-atwill-and-jan-irvin/
Albert Hoffman is implicated in being a spy, which was news to me. This was the reason why I have said I never preferred acid and thought other, truer, if you will, psychedelics were more interesting and potent. But note the humble beginnings of the substance. It must have not been until later that they realized it could be abused or used for mind control, the term being thrown around somewhat loosely. It's mind control because people were taught it to be cool but it goes much deeper than that. However, people take the drugs to attain a higher consciousness. That must mean someone somewhere along the lines thought it could be used for otherwise. Is it bullshit? Either way, the substances are going to be used and people get what they get out of it. No one knows for sure what happens when you take the drugs, whether it's bullshit or not, but one thing is for certain, it's rather strange indeed.