Tim Lott: My LSD trip down memory lane
Dr Albert Hofmann, who died last week, was the inventor of LSD. But he was not merely a chemist. He was a revolutionary.
Hofmann changed the way a whole generation looked at the world. This is the sort of statement that is customarily made about thinkers and scientists of the stature of, say, Marx or Einstein. But it is more directly and vividly true of Hofmann than any of these otherwise much more formidable intellectual titans. Freud theorised about the existence of the unconscious, but LSD made it an experiential reality, as tangible as touching stone or seeing light.
Hofmann’s discovery is still widely misunderstood. But those who have known its glory – and its agony – will also know that no one really comes back from the altered state of consciousness that LSD induces quite the same person that they were before. Like no other experience imaginable, it rips to pieces your understanding of what it is to be alive.
When you return from the unimaginable shore to which LSD takes you, putting those pieces back together can be a lifelong task. It can make you mad. But it can also make you understand that your life is not what you thought it was – that it is bigger, richer and, above all, stranger.
This epiphany-in-a-pill is an idea that makes us deeply uncomfortable for a raft of reasons – the lack of spiritual or moral effort involved in attaining the experience, the impossibility of explaining its effects to non-users, and the moral panic over its distribution and use in the 1960s and 1970s.
Nowadays, LSD has been quietly consigned to the medicine cabinet of history. It is no longer fashionable, nor widely available, nor especially potent. It has lost ground to gentler drugs such as MDMA or more violent narcotics such a crack, crystal meth and heroin.
This isn’t to say it isn’t bad, harmful or dangerous. LSD can certainly be all those things. But LSD – like its natural counterparts mescaline or peyote – is not quite in the same category as any other mind-altering narcotic. It is potentially, I think, the only truly creative drug – that is, a drug which enables the mind to shake off the shackles of habit and conditioning and arrive at the heart of – for want of a better word – the human soul.
And it is the only “recreational” drug that has a real element of intellectual and cultural respectability, with thinkers and writers such as Aldous Huxley, Ken Kesey and Allen Ginsberg all affirming its uses, while the remarkable phenomenon we call “the Sixties” would not have happened at all without this psychoactive shamanic medicine.
Before I continue, I should make it clear that I am not a habitual or long-term user of the drug. I have taken it twice – both times when I was 15 years old. On one occasion, it gave me an experience of bliss, lasting some 12 hours, that lay far beyond words or images to express. On the other, I was cast into the darkest reaches of hopelessness and terror. I ended up running down my street naked, and being locked up in a police cell. It is not an exaggeration to say that these experiences, to this day, are always with me.
This will sound like hyperbole to anyone who hasn‘t experienced the drug, so I will make an effort to explain what it was like, knowing that such an effort must fail. I wrote about it in my memoir, The Scent of Dried Roses. Here are two brief extracts:
“The tower blocks shine like mirrors and the blue of the sky seems to have concentrated and leaked out into the air, so that everything is soaked in aquamarine. There is a deep relentless and secret whirr within me, a dynamo that has been switched on to full power for the first time. I am so full of delight I want to leave my skin and melt.”
Tags: albert hofmann, bet, chemist, consciousness, crystal meth, dr albert, ego, experiential reality, hasn, huxley, impossibility, intellectual titans, lifelong task, lsd, mdma, medicine cabinet, memory lane, mescaline, moral panic, narcotics, natural counterparts, occ, peyote, pot, raft, state of consciousness, stature, thinkers, Trip, trip down
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Saturday, May 3rd, 2008 at 11:54 pm under