79 years ago, on the 19th of April 1943 the Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann was the very first person to intentionally take an LSD. He synthesized LSD-25 already in 1938 as part of a range of lysergamides. At the time Hofmann was working at Sandoz pharmaceuticals in Basel. He asked his assistant (who was aware of the situation) to escort him home. Due to war time restrictions no cars were available, so they took bicycles. Hofmann: “On the way home, my condition began to assume threatening forms. Everything in my field of vision wavered and was distorted as if seen in a curved mirror. I also had the sensation of being unable to move from the spot. Nevertheless, my assistant later told me we had traveled very rapidly.”
The effect is somewhat like looking through a microscope. Suddenly when you look through a microscope you discover that there is an invisible world around you that you hadn’t known about. The same is true about the psychedelic drug. You are aware of processes that going on inside your own brain. You are aware of the exchange of energy going on between your sense organs and the ones around them that you weren’t aware of before.
Timothy Leary
Read: LSD — My Problem Child by Albert Hofmann
