Posts Tagged ‘Albert Hofmann’
When LSD Was Legal (And Cary Grant Was Tripping)
Monday, 23 April 2012 18:07
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Albert HofmannIn honor of the latest lysergic episode of MAD MEN, a look back at the time before LSD was outlawed, by Devin Faraci for BadAss Digest:

In the latest episode of Mad Men Roger Sterling, the silver-haired drunkard rascal of SCDP, attends a high society LSD party. For some 21st century viewers this seemed strange – wasn’t LSD a hippie drug? Wasn’t it all about long hairs and weird tribal imagery? Eventually that would be the case, but the early of history of acid – before it became illegal – was filled with trippers who were at the very top of the social order – the richest and most famous people in America. (Read more…)

LSD was first synthesized in 1938 by Dr. Albert Hoffman in Switzerland, but it wasn’t until five years later that anybody knew what it did to you. That’s because it wasn’t until 1943 that Hoffman accidentally took some of the drug and embarked on history’s first acid trip. While man had been tripping on hallucinogens since the dawn of time – we have receptors in our brains designed to accept psychotropic chemicals – acid is quite different. And besides, it’s unlikely that Dr. Hoffman was doing a lot of peyote, so he wasn’t very prepared. His first experience was actually fairly nice, but three days later – April 19! A day before dumb 420! – he dosed himself on purpose. That didn’t go so well; bicycling home he really fell apart, thinking his neighbor was a witch and that LSD had poisoned him. Eventually he got his shit together and had a nice finale to the trip.

Everybody knows that the CIA seized on acid as a possible mind control drug, using it in their MKULTRA experiments. They would pay prostitutes to dose unsuspecting businessmen and then watch what happened; there were deaths, including that of Frank Olson, who either freaked out and jumped from a 13th floor window or was pushed by the CIA (the reason he was pushed, perhaps: he knew that in 1951 the CIA had dosed an entire French town, Pont-Saint-Esprit, leading to 50 psychotic episodes, a number of people being institutionalized and four deaths).

But acid wasn’t just being used for sinister purposes. At the same time that the CIA was conducting MKULTRA experiments, a Los Angeles psychiatrist named Oscar Janiger began experimenting with the drug for therapy, with a special focus on how it impacted creativity. While Timothy Leary will forever be remembered as the foremost medical advocate for LSD, Janiger was the true pioneer. His patients included Aldous Huxley (who had already written The Doors of Perception about his experiments with mescaline), Anais Nin, Andre Previn, James Coburn, Billy Wilder’s writing partner Charles Brackett and Cary Grant. Grant dropped acid probably well over a hundred times, a pretty remarkable number of trips for a guy who seems like the emodiment of the squarely suave 40s.

Grant swore by the drug…

[continues at BadAss Digest]



 
The LSD Portraits: Marc Franklin Spends 25 Years Photographing ‘Psychedelic Pioneers’
Saturday, 10 December 2011 21:37
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BurroughsRemember the Reagan administration’s “This is your brain on drugs” ads? In response a photographer started a lifelong project of photographing all the living “psychedelic pioneers,” including Timothy Leary, Jerry Garcia, William S. Burroughs, and Ken Kesey.

“I thought, ‘You know, that’s such a load of horseshit … I’m going to dismantle that poisonous propaganda lie visually… I’m going to portray these people how they are. (Read more…)” He started with the man who invented LSD — Albert Hoffman — on its 50th anniversary in 1988, and at one point drove over 11,000 miles in just 7 weeks (including a 26-hour drive to drink beer with William S. Burroughs).

He’s interviewed by the former editor of High Frontiers magazine (”the official psychedelic magazine of the 1984 Summer Olympics.)”, and the article includes three of his best photos. (He’s exhibiting them this month in Los Angeles). But the strangest fact of all?

He started his career taking photographs for the annual report of Mobil Oil!



 
Elves of the Apocalypse: “Machine Elves” and the Self-Sabotage of Psychedelic Research
Friday, 22 July 2011 21:42
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Machine ElfBeware the “clockwork [sic] elves” who control the global elite promising them “eternal life, total power, total control, everything you could ever want, just kill everyone [...] friendly little guys…” Via Modern Mythology:

Right. Most if not all mythologies include creatures resembling elves. Therefore the archetypal image must be based upon encounters with the Machine … Er … Clockwork Elves. As with all paranoid logic, this argument is easily felled by Occam’s Razor, which advocates that “entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity,” in short, that the “simplest answer is most likely the correct one.” It is much more plausible to propose that the entities encountered during the DMT-experience could very well bear some measure of resemblance to elves (elongated and angular shapes are common); that one comes to think “if they look like elves, they are elves” at least makes sense!

THERE ARE NO FUCKING MACHINE ELVES!

To be fair, Alex didn’t make this shit up. It’s not just conservatives, authoritarians, loons and republicans who make research concerning the nature and uses of psychedelics virtually impossible. In the years following the relatively methodical experiments of the first psychonauts — Albert Hoffman, Aldous Huxley and Ernst Jünger (the term “psychonaut” was coined by Jünger in his book Annäherungen [Approaches] (1970)] — A waves of naively uncritical and over-enthusiastic “researchers” provided untold amounts of ammunition to those wishing to delegitimize, halt and prohibit psychedelic research.

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