LSD — My Problem Child
Albert Hofmann
10. Various Visitors
The diverse aspects, the multi-faceted emanations of LSD are
also expressed in the variety of cultural circles with which this substance has
brought me into contact. On the scientific plane, this has involved
colleagues-chemists, pharmacologists, physicians, and mycologists—whom I met at
universities, congresses, lectures, or with whom I came into association through
publication. In the literary-philosophical field there were contacts with
writers. In the preceding chapters I have reported on the relationships of this
type that were most significant for me. LSD also provided me with a variegated
series of personal acquaintances from the drug scene and from hippie circles,
which will briefly be described here.
Most of these visitors
came from the United States and were young people, often in transit to the Far
East in search of Eastern wisdom or of a guru; or else hoping to come by drugs
more easily there. Prague also was sometimes the goal, because LSD of good
quality could at the time easily be acquired there. [Translator's Note: When
Sandoz's patents on LSD expired in 1963, the Czech pharmaceutical firm Spofa
began to manufacture the drug.] Once arrived in Europe, they wanted to take
advantage of the opportunity to see the father of LSD, "the man who made the
famous LSD bicycle trip." But more serious concerns sometimes motivated a visit.
There was the desire to report on personal LSD experiences and to debate the
purport of their meaning, at the source, so to speak. Only rarely did a visit
prove to be inspired by the desire to obtain LSD when a visitor hinted that he
or she wished once to experiment with most assuredly pure material, with
original LSD.
Visitors of various types and with diverse
desires also came from Switzerland and other European countries. Such encounters
have become rarer in recent times, which may be related to the fact that LSD has
become less important in the drug scene. Whenever possible, I have welcomed such
visitors or agreed to meet somewhere. This I considered to be an obligation
connected with my role in the history of LSD, and I have tried to help by
instructing and advising.
Sometimes no true conversation
occurred, for example with the inhibited young man who arrived on a motorbike. I
was not clear about the objective of his visit. He stared at me, as if asking
himself: can the man who has made something so weird as LSD really look so
completely ordinary? With him, as with other similar visitors, I had the feeling
that he hoped, in my presence, the LSD riddle would somehow solve itself.
Other meetings were completely different, like the one with
the young man from Toronto. He invited me to lunch at an exclusive
restaurant—impressive appearance, tall, slender, a businessman, proprietor of an
important industrial firm in Canada, brilliant intellect. He thanked me for the
creation of LSD, which had given his life another direction. He had been 100
percent a businessman, with a purely materialistic world view. LSD had opened
his eyes to the spiritual aspect of life. Now he possessed a sense for art,
literature, and philosophy and was deeply concerned with religious and
metaphysical questions. He now desired to make the LSD experience accessible in
a suitable milieu to his young wife, and hoped for a similarly fortunate
transformation in her.
Not as profound, yet still liberating
and rewarding, were the results of LSD experiments which a young Dane described
to me with much humor and fantasy. He came from California, where he had been a
houseboy for Henry Miller in Big Sur. He moved on to France with the plan of
acquiring a dilapidated farm there, which he, a skilled carpenter, then wanted
to restore himself. I asked him to obtain an autograph of his former employer
for my collection, and after some time I actually received an original piece of
writing from Henry Miller's hand.
A young woman sought me out
to report on LSD experiences that had been of great significance to her inner
development. As a superficial teenager who pursued all sorts of entertainments,
and quite neglected by her parents, she had begun to take LSD out of curiosity
and love of adventure. For three years she took frequent LSD trips. They led to
an astonishing intensification of her inner life. She began to seek after the
deeper meaning of her existence, which eventually revealed itself to her. Then,
recognizing that LSD had no further power to help her, without difficulty or
exertion of will she was able to abandon the drug. Thereafter she was in a
position to develop herself further without artificial means. She was now a
happy intrinsically secure person—thus she concluded her report. This young
woman had decided to tell me her history, because she supposed that I was often
attacked by narrow-minded persons who saw only the damage that LSD sometimes
caused among youths. The immediate motive of her testimony was a conversation
that she had accidentally overheard on a railway journey. A man complained about
me, finding it disgraceful that I had spoken on the LSD problem in an interview
published in the newspaper. In his opinion, I ought to denounce LSD as primarily
the devil's work and should publicly admit my guilt in the matter.
Persons in LSD delirium, whose condition could have given rise to such
indignant condemnation, have never personally come into my sight. Such cases,
attributable to LSD consumption under irresponsible circumstances, to
overdosage, or to psychotic predisposition, always landed in the hospital or at
the police station. Great publicity always came their way.
A
visit by one young American girl stands out in my memory as an example of the
tragic effects of LSD. It was during the lunch hour, which I normally spent in
my off
ice under strict confinement—no visitors, secretary's office closed up.
Knocking came at the door, discretely but firmly repeated, until eventually I
went to open it. I scarcely believed my eyes: before me stood a very beautiful
young woman, blond, with large blue eyes, wearing a long hippie dress, headband,
and sandals. "I am Joan, I come from New York—you are Dr. Hofmann?" Before I
inquired what brought her to me, I asked her how she had got through the two
checkpoints, at the main entrance to the factory area and at the door of the
laboratory building, for visitors were admitted only after telephone query, and
this flower child must have been especially noticeable. "I am an angel, I can
pass everywhere," she replied. Then she explained that she came on a great
mission. She had to rescue her country, the United States; above all she had to
direct the president (at the time L. B. Johnson) onto the correct path. This
could be accomplished only by having him take LSD. Then he would receive the
good ideas that would enable him to lead the country out of war and internal
difficulties.
Joan had come to me hoping that I would help her
fulfill her mission, namely to give LSD to the president. Her name would
indicate she was the Joan of Arc of the USA. I don't know whether my arguments,
advanced with all consideration of her holy zeal, were able to convince her that
her plan had no prospects of success on psychological, technical, internal, and
external grounds. Disappointed and sad she went away. Next day I received a
telephone call from Joan. She again asked me to help her, since her financial
resources were exhausted. I took her to a friend in Zurich who provided her with
work, and with whom she could live. Joan was a teacher by profession, and also a
nightclub pianist and singer. For a while she played and sang in a fashionable
Zurich restaurant. The good bourgeois clients of course had no idea what sort of
angel sat at the grand piano in a black evening dress and entertained them with
sensitive playing and a soft and sensuous voice. Few paid attention to the words
of her songs; they were for the most part hippie songs, many of them containing
veiled praise of drugs. The Zurich performance did not last long; within a few
weeks I learned from my friend that Joan had suddenly disappeared. He received a
greeting card from her three months later, from Israel. She had been committed
to a psychiatric hospital there.
For the conclusion of my
assortment of LSD visitors, I wish to report about a meeting in which LSD
figured only indirectly. Miss H. S., head secretary in a hospital, wrote to ask
me for a personal interview. She came to tea. She explained her visit thus: in a
report about an LSD experience, she had read the description of a condition she
herself had experienced as a young girl, which still disturbed her today;
possibly I could help her to understand this experience.
She
had gone on a business trip as a commercial apprentice. They spent the night in
a mountain hotel. H. S. awoke very early and left the house alone in order to
watch the sunrise. As the mountains began to light up in a sea of rays, she was
perfused by an unprecedented feeling of happiness, which persisted even after
she joined the other participants of the trip at morning service in the chapel.
During the Mass everything appeared to her in a supernatural luster, and the
feeling of happiness intensified to such an extent that she had to cry loudly.
She was brought back to the hotel and treated as someone with a mental disorder.
This experience largely determined her later personal life.
H.S. feared she was not completely normal. On the one hand, she feared this
experience, which had been explained to her as a nervous breakdown; on the other
hand, she longed for arepetitionof the condition. Internally split, she had led
an unstable life. In repeated vocational changes and in varying personal
relationships, consciously or unconsciously she again sought this ecstatic
outlook, which once made her so deeply happy.
I was able to
reassure my visitor. It was no psychopathological event, no nervous breakdown
that she had experienced at the time. What many people seek to attain with the
help of LSD, the visionary experience of a deeper reality, had come to her as
spontaneous grace. I recommended a book by Aldous Huxley to her, The
Perennial Philosophy (Harper, New York & London, 1945) a collection of
reports of spontaneous blessed visions from all times and cultures. Huxley wrote
that not only mystics and saints, but also many more ordinary people than one
generally supposes, experience such blessed moments, but that most do not
recognize their importance and, instead of regarding them as promising rays of
hope, repress them, because they do not fit into everyday rationality.
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