Albert Hofmann

Albert Hofmann headed the research program at Sandoz, the Swiss drug and chemical company headquartered in Basel, where he worked to develop marketable drugs from natural products. At 37, with close-cropped hair and rimless glasses, Hofmann focused on derivatives of ergot, a fungus that attacks rye. Ergot had a mysterious, contradictory reputation: in China and some Arab countries it was thought to have medicinal powers, but in Europe it was associated with the horrible medieval malady called St. Anthony's Fire, which turned fingers and toes into blackened stumps and led to madness and death.¹

The Accidental Discovery

On April 16, 1943, Hofmann was hard at work in his laboratory when a wave of dizziness suddenly overcame him. The strange sensation was not unpleasant, and Hofmann felt almost as though he were drunk. But he became quite restless; his nerves seemed to run off in different directions. The inebriation was unlike anything he had ever known. Leaving work early, Hofmann managed a wobbly bicycle ride home. He lay down and closed his eyes, still unable to shake the dizziness. Now the light of day was disagreeably bright. With the external world shut out, his mind raced along. He experienced what he would later describe as "an uninterrupted stream of fantastic images of extraordinary plasticity and vividness accompanied by an intense, kaleidoscope-like play of colors."¹

These visions subsided after a few hours, and Hofmann, ever the inquiring scientist, set out to find what caused them. He presumed he had somehow ingested one of the drugs with which he had been working that day, and his prime suspect was d-lysergic acid diethylamide, a substance that he himself had first produced in the same lab five years earlier as part of his search for a circulation stimulant.¹

The First Intentional Trip

To test his theory, Hofmann spent three days making up a fresh batch of LSD. Cautiously he swallowed 250 micrograms (less than 1/100,000 of an ounce). Hofmann planned to take more gradually through the day to obtain a result, since no known drug had any effect on the human body in such infinitesimal amounts. He had no way of knowing that because of LSD's potency, he had already taken several times what would later be termed an ordinary dose. Unexpectedly, this first speck of LSD took hold after about 40 minutes, and Hofmann was off on the first self-induced "trip" of modern times.¹

Hofmann recalled he felt "horrific. I was afraid. I feared I was becoming crazy. I had the idea I was out of my body. I thought I had died. I did not know how it would finish. If you know you will come back from this very strange world, only then can you enjoy it." Of course, Hofmann had no way of knowing that he would return. While he had quickly recovered from his accidental trip three days earlier, he did not know how much LSD had caused it or whether the present dose was more than his body could detoxify. His mind kept veering off into an unknown dimension, but he was unable to appreciate much beyond his own terror.¹

CIA Interest and Psilocybin Research

Hofmann's discovery had profound implications beyond pharmaceutical research. Less than 200 miles from his laboratory, SS doctors at Dachau were simultaneously experimenting with mescaline on prisoners, seeking ways to control human behavior. Hofmann's work would later attract the intense interest of the CIA, which saw in LSD a potential tool for Mind Control. His research touched on a persistent human fascination: "the fantasies of the mind," accessible in ancient legends to witches and wizards who used spells and potions to bring people under their sway.¹

In 1953, CIA operative James Moore, posing as a university chemist, attempted to obtain a supply of LSD directly from Sandoz for Agency use, meeting with Hofmann and Sandoz official W. A. Stoll Jr. The CIA was simultaneously running its own procurement through other channels and had already spent $240,000 attempting to purchase the entire world supply.²

Hofmann isolated psilocybin, the primary psychoactive component of the Psilocybe family of mushrooms, in 1958, adding a second major psychedelic to Sandoz's portfolio. The CIA's interest in psilocybin paralleled its interest in LSD, and psilocybin entered the MKULTRA subproject funding network through researchers including Harold Abramson and Timothy Leary.

James Moore and the CIA's Mushroom Connection

CIA operative James Moore, a 29-year-old chemist working under cover as a natural-products researcher, was central to the Agency's effort to obtain psilocybin. In March 1953, Moore signed an initial CIA contract worth $8,000 per year, later expanded to $16,000 annually when he became an assistant professor at the University of Delaware in Newark in 1955. His cover funding flowed through the Geschickter Fund for Medical Research, a CIA conduit, categorized as MKULTRA Subproject 58. In his role, Moore maintained "the fiction that the botanical specimens he collects are for his own use since his field interest is natural-product chemistry."³

Moore's most significant operation in the psilocybin chain came through R. Gordon Wasson, vice president of J.P. Morgan and an amateur mycologist who had published a landmark account of a 1955 mushroom ceremony in Huautla de Jimenez, Mexico, in Life magazine in 1957. The Geschickter Fund provided Wasson with a $2,000 grant for his 1956 follow-up expedition (designated MKULTRA Subproject 58), which Wasson accepted not knowing it was an intelligence operation. Moore accompanied Wasson on the 1956 expedition, collected samples from the ceremony led by shaman Maria Sabina, but reportedly had a poor reaction to the mushrooms. When Hofmann isolated psilocybin from the samples that Roger Heim had grown in Paris and sent to Sandoz in 1958, Moore billed the CIA $1,147.60 for mushrooms and used the Sandoz synthesis to pursue the Agency's operational research agenda.³

LSD: My Problem Child

Hofmann published his memoir of LSD's discovery and cultural career as LSD: Mein Sorgenkind in German in 1979 (published in English translation by McGraw-Hill in 1980 as LSD: My Problem Child). The book recounted the 1943 discoveries, his collaboration with Wasson, his views on the misuse of LSD in the 1960s, and his advocacy for responsible psychedelic research. Hofmann attended a conference on psychedelic research at the age of 100 in 2006 and lived to see the beginning of renewed academic interest in the therapeutic uses of psychedelics. He died on April 29, 2008, in Baden, Switzerland, at the age of 102.⁴