LSD (1938)

Lysergic Acid Diethylamide (LSD) (1938)

Hofmann discovers the world's most powerful mind-altering drug.

Lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) is a powerful psychedelic drug. While now commonly associated with 1960s dropout youth culture, it was heralded as a wonder drug in the 1940s and 1950s and was used to treat thousands of psychiatric patients

Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann (1906-2008) first synthesized LSD in 1938, expecting it to be useful as a medicinal stimulant. In 1943 he returned to studying it and after experiencing some pleasant sensations while working with the drug he took a dose of 0.25 mg.

Hofmann bicycled home and began to experience its psychedelic effects, the world's first "trip." He reported that the morning after he felt entirely renewed and that his senses were "vibrating in a condition of highest sensitivity."

Today LSD is mainly taken as a recreational drug for its psychological effects. Common accounts are of colorful hallucinations, time distortions, loss of identity, and synesthesia. A trip can last up to around twelve hours, depending on the dose. Physical effects include hypothermia, fever, increased heart rate, perspiration, tremors, and more commonly can result in intermittent flashbacks to the trip.

Due to LSD's extraordinary impact on the psyche, it has attracted a number of high profile users, who believed that it could unlock certain aspects of experience that are otherwise hidden. Preeminent among these were countercultural psychologist Timothy Leary, who urged Americans to "turn on, tune in, and drop out," and author Aldous Huxley, who chose to be injected with LSD as he died.

On November 22, 1963, Aldous Huxley, bedridden and dying, requested on a writing tablet that his wife Laura give him a 100 microgram dose of LSD. As she went to get the drug from the medicine cabinet, Laura was perplexed to see the doctor and nurses watching TV. She gave him a second dose a few hours later, and by 5:20 p.m. he had died. Laura later learned that the TV had been showing coverage of the assassination of John F. Kennedy, who had been pronounced dead at 1:00 p.m. that day.