On this date, in 1943, Dr. Albert Hoffman, working as a chemist at Sandoz Laboratories in Basel, Switzerland, at 4:20 PM in the afternoon, according to his notes below, ingested some LSD that he was working with , and as it it came on began to feel a little bit woozy.
So he left work early.
It being WW II, and all, there were restrictions on driving and gas was being rationed, so as a war time measure people of that time and place switched riding their cars for bicycles, which is what Dr. Hoffman did.
On LSD.
Wheeeeee!!!!!!
Having done so myself on numerous occasions, I can't recommend the experience enough, it's a lot of fun, once you get your bearings.
Here are his notes from his experiment:
"But the compound did not seem to be of further pharmacological interest and work on LSD then fell into abeyance for a number of years. As I had a strange feeling that it would be worthwhile to carry out more profound studies with this compound, I prepared a fresh quantity of LSD five years later, in 1943.
In the course of this work, an accidental observation led me to carry out a planned self-experiment with this compound. The following is an extract of my original report on this experiment, addressed to the head of the pharmaceutical department -- at that time, to Professor Stoll.
“Last Friday, April 16th, ‘43, I was forced to stop my work in the laboratory in the middle of the afternoon and to go home, as I was seized by a peculiar restlessness associated with a sensation of mild dizziness. On arriving home, I lay down and sank into a kind of drunkenness which was not unpleasant, and which was characterized by extreme activity of imagination. “As I lay in a dazed condition with my eyes closed, I experienced daylight as specially bright. There surged up from me an uninterrupted stream of fantastic images of extraordinary plasticity and vividness and accompanied by an intense, kaleidoscopic-like play of colors. This condition gradually passed off after about three hours.”
The nature and the cause of this extraordinary disturbance raised my suspicions that some exogenic intoxication may have been involved, and that lysergic acid diethylamide -- with which I had been working that afternoon -- could have been responsible. I had separated two isomeric forms which are produced by the synthesis -- namely, lysergic acid diethylamide and iso-lysergic diethylamide.
However, I could not imagine how this compound could have accidentally have found its way into my body in a sufficient quantity to produce such symptoms. Moreover, the nature of the symptoms did not tally with those previously piously associated with ergot poisoning. In order to get to the root of the matter, I decided to conduct some experiments on myself, with the substance in question. I started with the lowest dose which might have been expected to have any effect, namely with 0.25 milligram LSD. The note in my laboratory journal reads as follows:
“April 19th: Preparation of 0.5% aqueous solution of d-lysergic acid diethylamide tartrate. “4:20 pm: 0.5 ml., corresponding to 0.25 mg. LSD, ingested orally. The solution is tasteless. “4:50: no trace of any effect. “5:00: slight dizziness, unrest, difficulty in concentration, visual disturbances, marked desire to laugh . . .”
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