Albert Hofmann

May 2 2008 Liverpool Daily Post

IT IS something of a poisoned chalice to become branded as the father of LSD.

It all started rather comically, too, when the Swiss research chemist Albert Hofmann accidentally imbibed synthesised lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD). He experienced a complete "acid trip" of the most intense symptoms while cycling home from his lab at the Sandoz company, Basel. This event, on April 19, 1943, became known in drug-lore as "bicycle day". However, the subsequent history of LSD use deeply tarnished its image.

Hofmann, who has died aged 102, blamed the US psychologist Dr Timothy Leary to his face for promoting LSD’s recreational use. This had led to Sandoz being blitzed by regulatory bodies demanding information and the press wanting reaction to LSD-linked accidents, poisonings, criminal acts and deaths.

The diffident boffins of Basel found all this sudden attention a little upsetting.

Hofmann’s managing director told him: "I would rather you hadn’t discovered LSD." After some vogue in psychiatric use (and available on prescription for 20 years), it was banned in the US and Britain in 1966 and most other countries thereafter.

In fact, Hofmann relished his fame. This was the drug that induced a new genre of pop music, art textiles and even wallpaper designs. It inspired musicians such as Bob Dylan, Pink Floyd, Jimi Hendrix, the Grateful Dead and The Beatles, who sang about it on their albums Sgt Pepper and Revolver. Writ- ers including Ken Kesey and Aldous Huxley used it.

Debonair film star Cary Grant revealed his darker side, claiming he was born again after taking it. LSD proved to be 1,000 times stronger than mescaline, the previously most famous psychedelic drug which was described by Huxley in The Doors of Perception (itself inspiring Jim Morrison’s band The Doors).

Hofmann himself described his "bike trip" in his memoir LSD: My Problem Child, saying: "In a dreamlike state I perceived an uninterrupted stream of fantastic pictures, extraord- inary shapes with intense kaleidoscopic play of colours." He also reported its downside, when he asked a neighbour for milk and she became "a malevolent witch with a coloured mask."

Hofmann also made a serious contribution to therapeutics with circulatory drugs, including one to stop bleeding during childbirth.

Albert Hofmann, LSD chemist;born, January 11, 1906; died, April 29, 2008