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Kitchen Table Kibitzing 4/16/25: Great Moments in Recreational Chemistry [1]
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Date: 2025-04-16
On this date in 1943, Swiss chemist Albert Hoffmann accidentally took the first LSD trip. He had been working with a fungus that made people sick.
Quick, stab it with your fork!
In 1938, chemist Albert Hofmann was working with alkaloids of ergot, a rye fungus responsible for several epidemic-like poisoning events throughout European history, when he synthesized lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD-25). Hofmann was trying to create new obstetrics medicines, and his LSD-25 seemed to have little scientific use. Nevertheless, on a whim, Hofmann synthesized it again five years later. How the substance was first absorbed into his bloodstream remains a mystery, but it set off a psychedelic revolution that would eventually transform pop culture and technological innovation forever. Upon returning home from his lab on April 16, 1943, Hofmann lay on his couch and closed his eyes to experience an “uninterrupted stream of fantastic pictures, extraordinary shapes with intense, kaleidoscopic play of colors,” according to his 1979 memoir LSD: My Problem Child. The curious intoxication so intrigued Hofmann that he planned a series of secret, intentional experiments with the drug.
It had quite an effect.
He described what he felt as being:
.. affected by a remarkable restlessness, combined with a slight dizziness. At home I lay down and sank into a not unpleasant intoxicated[-]like condition, characterized by an extremely stimulated imagination. In a dreamlike state, with eyes closed (I found the daylight to be unpleasantly glaring), I perceived an uninterrupted stream of fantastic pictures, extraordinary shapes with intense, kaleidoscopic play of colors. After some two hours this condition faded away.[12]
He dosed himself intentionally with 250 µg of it, which is a lot. It made for a rather harrowing experience.
On the morning of April 19, he synthesized 0.5 milliliters of the compound, dissolved it in 10 cubic centimeters of water, and at 4:20 PM took 250 micrograms—0.000025 of a gram, the smallest dose he thought he might conceivably notice. At 5 PM, he began to feel dizzy, as he had previously, and decided to bike home. On the now famous bike ride, the symptoms became stronger: “I had great difficulty in speaking clearly and my field of vision fluctuated and swam like an image in a distorted mirror,” he wrote at the time, very much as he described it in his 1979 memoir. He “had the feeling that I was not moving from the spot, although my colleague said I was moving at a fast pace.” When he arrived home he called his neighbor, who summoned the nearest doctor. The symptoms soon became overwhelming. Hofmann recorded them at the time as “dizziness, visual disturbance, the faces of those present seemed vividly colored and grimacing; powerful motor disturbances, alternating with paralysis; my head, body and limbs all felt heavy, as if filled with metal; cramps in the calves, hands cold and without sensation; a metallic taste on the tongue; dry and constricted throat; a feeling of suffocation; confusion alternating with clear recognition of my situation, in which I felt outside myself as a neutral observer as I half-crazily cried or muttered indistinctly.” Given that Hofmann had taken a full-trigger dose of acid with no idea what it was going to do, it’s not surprising he thought he was going crazy or dying.
If only
Dosing somebody unintentionally is a dick move, but I can think of a few people who deserve it.
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