"A Warrior Pursues the Way of Knowledge, or the Way of Power"

That was Castenada's choice.

Clearly, Dr. Hofmann chose the Way of Knowledge.

Mr. Hofmann will turn 100 on Wednesday, a milestone to be marked by a symposium in nearby Basel on the chemical compound that he discovered and that famously unlocked the Blakean doors of perception, altering consciousnesses around the world. As the years accumulate behind him, Mr. Hofmann's conversation turns ever more insistently around one theme: man's oneness with nature and the dangers of an increasing inattention to that fact.

"It's very, very dangerous to lose contact with living nature," he said, listing to the right in a green armchair that looked out over frost-dusted fields and snow-laced trees. A glass pitcher held a bouquet of roses on the coffee table before him. "In the big cities, there are people who have never seen living nature, all things are products of humans," he said. "The bigger the town, the less they see and understand nature." And, yes, he said, LSD, which he calls his "problem child," could help reconnect people to the universe.

Rounding a century, Mr. Hofmann is physically reduced but mentally clear. He is prone to digressions, ambling with pleasure through memories of his boyhood, but his bright eyes flash with the recollection of a mystical experience he had on a forest path more than 90 years ago in the hills above Baden, Switzerland. The experience left him longing for a similar glimpse of what he calls "a miraculous, powerful, unfathomable reality."

"I was completely astonished by the beauty of nature," he said, laying a slightly gnarled finger alongside his nose, his longish white hair swept back from his temples and the crown of his head. He said any natural scientist who was not a mystic was not a real natural scientist. "Outside is pure energy and colorless substance," he said. "All of the rest happens through the mechanism of our senses. Our eyes see just a small fraction of the light in the world. It is a trick to make a colored world, which does not exist outside of human beings."

He became particularly fascinated by the mechanisms through which plants turn sunlight into the building blocks for our own bodies. "Everything comes from the sun via the plant kingdom," he said.

Mr. Hofmann studied chemistry and took a job with the Swiss pharmaceutical company Sandoz Laboratories, because it had started a program to identify and synthesize the active compounds of medically important plants. He soon began work on the poisonous ergot fungus that grows in grains of rye. Midwives had used it for centuries to precipitate childbirths, but chemists had never succeeded in isolating the chemical that produced the pharmacological effect. Finally, chemists in the United States identified the active component as lysergic acid, and Mr. Hofmann began combining other molecules with the unstable chemical in search of pharmacologically useful compounds.

His work on ergot produced several important drugs, including a compound still in use to prevent hemorrhaging after childbirth. But it was the 25th compound that he synthesized, lysergic acid diethylamide, that was to have the greatest impact. When he first created it in 1938, the drug yielded no significant pharmacological results. But when his work on ergot was completed, he decided to go back to LSD-25, hoping that improved tests could detect the stimulating effect on the body's circulatory system that he had expected from it. It was as he was synthesizing the drug on a Friday afternoon in April 1943 that he first experienced the altered state of consciousness for which it became famous. "Immediately, I recognized it as the same experience I had had as a child," he said. "I didn't know what caused it, but I knew that it was important."

Mr. Hofmann participated in tests in a Sandoz laboratory, but found the experience frightening and realized that the drug should be used only under carefully controlled circumstances. In 1951, he wrote to the German novelist Ernst Junger, who had experimented with mescaline, and proposed that they take LSD together. They each took 0.05 milligrams of pure LSD at Mr. Hofmann's home accompanied by roses, music by Mozart and burning Japanese incense. "That was the first planned psychedelic test," Mr. Hofmann said.

He took the drug dozens of times after that, he said, and once experienced what he called a "horror trip" when he was tired and Mr. Junger gave him amphetamines first. But his hallucinogenic days are long behind him...

LSD is a very minor component of most acid on the street. For one thing, people looking for simple mindless euphoria won't find it with LSD. So street acid is usually heavily laced with methamphetamine, so heavily laced that street "acid" is usually a mixture of methamphetamine, phencyclidine, 2-(2-chlorophenyl)-
2-(methylamino)-cyclohexanone (ketamine), 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine, or tropane alkaloids with little or no LSD-25. Street acid can kill you and its formulation has little relation to the compound developed by Hofmann.

"I know LSD; I don't need to take it anymore," Mr. Hofmann said. "Maybe when I die, like Aldous Huxley," who asked his wife for an injection of LSD to help him through the final painful throes of his fatal throat cancer.

But Mr. Hofmann calls LSD "medicine for the soul" and is frustrated by the worldwide prohibition that has pushed it underground. "It was used very successfully for 10 years in psychoanalysis," he said, adding that the drug was hijacked by the youth movement of the 1960's and then demonized by the establishment that the movement opposed. He said LSD could be dangerous and called its distribution by Timothy Leary and others "a crime."

"It should be a controlled substance with the same status as morphine," he said...

Absolutely agreed here. LSD became a street drug intended to short circuit the VietNam antiwar movement shortly after the CIA finished its initial testing of the drug. It had precisely the opposite effect intended.

Its effects were so profound on so many it became absolutely outlawed, although the same system in the brain is today modulated pharmacologically in a milder way by drugs like Prozac, Zoloft, Xanax and the other more selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors.

But why is LSD so terribly and profoundly different than, say, the opiates, or other hallucinogens? Why is it unlike tropanes which the military has settled on (unwisely) for wartime use? Why can't it be used like the serotonin re-uptake inhibitors, which are used to "control" depression and mood swings?

LSD is, by weight, one of the most potent drugs yet discovered. Both subjective reports and pharmacological methods such as receptor binding assays determine LSD to be, per mole, around 100 times more potent than psilocybin and psilocin and around 4000 times more potent than mescaline. Dosages of LSD are measured in micrograms (µg), or millionths of a gram. By comparison, dosages of almost all other drugs, both recreational and medical, are measured in milligrams, or thousandths of a gram.

The dosage level that will produce a threshold hallucinogenic effect in humans is generally considered to be 25 micrograms, with the drug's effects becoming markedly more evident at higher dosages. In the late 1990s, LSD obtained during drug law enforcement operations in the United States has usually ranged between 20 and 80 micrograms per dose. During the 1960s, dosages were commonly 300 micrograms or more. Dosages by frequent users can be as high as 1200 micrograms, although such a high dosage may precipitate unpleasant physical and psychological reactions.

Estimates for the lethal dosage (LD50) of LSD range from 200 micrograms per kilogram to more than 1000 micrograms per kilogram of human body-weight, though most sources report that there are no known human cases of such an overdose...

LSD affects an enormous number of receptors, including all dopamine receptor subtypes, all adrenoreceptor subtypes as well as many others. LSD binds to most serotonin receptor subtypes except for 5-HT3 and 5-HT4. The hallucinogenic effects of LSD are attributed to its partial agonist effects at 5-HT2A receptors. Exactly how this produces the drug's effects is unknown, but it is thought that it works by increasing excitation in cortical layers which facilitate the spread of information throughout the cortex. Through this, LSD causes parts of the brain which would not normally be activated by a given stimulus to become engaged...

LSD's psychological effects (colloquially called a "trip") vary greatly from person to person, from one trip to another, and even as time passes during a single trip. Widely different effects emerge based on set and setting — the 'set' being the general mindset of the user, and the 'setting' being the physical and social environment in which the drug's effects are experienced...

Generally beginning within thirty to ninety minutes after ingestion and continuing for the following six to twelve hours, the user may experience anything from subtle changes in perception to overwhelming cognitive shifts and vivid illusions.

Sensory shifts include "high-level" sensory distortions such as the perception of movement. Not infrequently, users report that the inanimate world appears "to come alive." While there is much subjective variation in what is meant by such words, it is commonly reported that static objects appear to be engaged in undulating movements that give the appearance of "breathing," as illustrated in this optical illusion.

Other common visual effects include appearance of moving geometrical patterns and textures on objects, blurred vision, image trailing, shape suggestibility, and color variations. Users often describe seeing new colors that they have not previously experienced, or colors may appear to have greater intensity. Perspective distortions may occur where items in the foreground appear to become part of the background, or the foreground and background may become temporarily indistinguishable. Changes in aural and visual perception are common, ranging from mild to overwhelming. LSD trips, however, are described to be only alterations of "reality" and not the loss of contact with "reality". Many people report that the boundaries between themselves and the physical world become permeable.

Higher doses often bring about shifts at a lower cognitive level - causing intense and fundamental distortions of sensory perception such as synaesthesia, the experience of additional spatial or temporal dimensions, and temporary dissociation...

LSD's primary effects normally last from 6 to 12 hours. It is typical for users of LSD to be unable to sleep restfully (or at all, despite desperate attempts) until at least 12 hours have passed, and they do not feel completely "back to normal" until after getting one or two full nights of restful sleep, although they will exhibit no outward signs of impairment after the drug has worn off.

LSD has an extremely short half life in the body. Most of the drug's already minuscule dose is eliminated before the trip is even over, suggesting that LSD triggers some sort of neurochemical cascade rather than acting directly to produce its effects...

LSD is a mind altering drug that tends to change the world view of many. Strangely enough the effect it has on some simply reinforces feelings we've had about the world all along. Unlike most drugs of abuse, a user gets to the point where they judge they've had enough, often the point where administering more of the drug has only minor additional effects.

Sometimes the user walks away from substance abuse entirely at that point, regarding it as a childish waste of time and energy.

Finally, the drug has this effect on many, as it has with Dr. Hofmann:

When asked if the drug had deepened his understanding of death, he appeared mildly startled and said no. "I go back to where I came from, to where I was before I was born, that's all," he said.

A drug that promotes secular humanism.

No wonder they outlawed it.