QUOTE
Turn On, Tune In, Drop Deap: LSD Inventor Albert Hoffman, RIP
The creator of LSD, Albert Hoffman, is dead at the ripe old age of 102 (he's pictured at the right by artist Alex Gray). The man who launched a thousand trips first synthesized the drug in 1938 and then learned of its hallucinatory effects five years later, after accidentally ingesting it.
From the NY Times obit:
[Hoffman] then took LSD hundreds of times, but regarded it as a powerful and potentially dangerous psychotropic drug that demanded respect. More important to him than the pleasures of the psychedelic experience was the drug's value as a revelatory aid for contemplating and understanding what he saw as humanity's oneness with nature. That perception, of union, which came to Dr. Hofmann as almost a religious epiphany while still a child, directed much of his personal and professional life....
Though Dr. Hofmann called LSD "medicine for the soul," by 2006 his hallucinogenic days were long behind him, he said in the interview that year.
"I know LSD; I don't need to take it anymore," he said, adding. "Maybe when I die, like Aldous Huxley."
But he said LSD had not affected his understanding of death. In death, he said, "I go back to where I came from, to where I was before I was born, that's all."
The creator of LSD, Albert Hoffman, is dead at the ripe old age of 102 (he's pictured at the right by artist Alex Gray). The man who launched a thousand trips first synthesized the drug in 1938 and then learned of its hallucinatory effects five years later, after accidentally ingesting it.
From the NY Times obit:
[Hoffman] then took LSD hundreds of times, but regarded it as a powerful and potentially dangerous psychotropic drug that demanded respect. More important to him than the pleasures of the psychedelic experience was the drug's value as a revelatory aid for contemplating and understanding what he saw as humanity's oneness with nature. That perception, of union, which came to Dr. Hofmann as almost a religious epiphany while still a child, directed much of his personal and professional life....
Though Dr. Hofmann called LSD "medicine for the soul," by 2006 his hallucinogenic days were long behind him, he said in the interview that year.
"I know LSD; I don't need to take it anymore," he said, adding. "Maybe when I die, like Aldous Huxley."
But he said LSD had not affected his understanding of death. In death, he said, "I go back to where I came from, to where I was before I was born, that's all."
