Posted on 01/11/2006 4:16:29 AM PST by beyond the sea
http://wjz.com/watercooler/watercooler_story_010144726.html
Father Of LSD Celebrating 100th Birthday
(AP) GENEVA LSD is an unlikely subject for a 100th birthday party. Yet the Swiss chemist who discovered the mind-altering drug and was its first human guinea pig is celebrating his centenary Wednesday — in good health and with plans to attend an international seminar on the hallucinogenic.
"I had wonderful visions," Albert Hofmann said, recalling his first accidental consumption of the drug.
"I sat down at home on the divan and started to dream," he told the Swiss television network SF DRS. "What I was thinking appeared in colors and in pictures. It lasted for a couple of hours and then it disappeared."
Hofmann, who also had bad experiences with the drug, continues to insist it should be legalized for medical treatment, particularly in psychiatric research. But LSD's reputation has been as turbulent as some acid trips.
The drug earned a bad reputation amid fatalities associated with hallucinations and reports of "flashbacks" — the recurrence of hallucinations when not taking the drug.
LSD inspired the 1960s hippy generation and was immortalized in the Beatles' hit "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds," although the band denied any connection. But it was also known as Like Swift Dead.
For decades after LSD was banned in the late 1960s, Hofmann defended his invention.
"I produced the substance as a medicine," he said. "It's not my fault if people abused it."
The chemist — who still takes nearly daily walks in the picturesque village where he lives in the Jura mountains with his wife of 70 years, Anita — discovered lysergic acid diethylamide-25 in 1938 while studying the medicinal uses of a fungus found on wheat and other grains at the Sandoz pharmaceuticals firm, now part of Novartis.
(Excerpt) Read more at wjz.com ...
......... I'm so confused.
Close the drapes and put on a Pink Floyd cd on. Stay there until you can sleep.
proofreading is a friend..............
;-)
"I only trip once a week."
--Dead Head in my dorm, '80
Her brain was already fried at the time.
Yes, only one time, and that was well over 20 years ago. I really don't know that I would be able to describe to you what the experience was like.
For starters, it was long, and definitely went in stages, some of which were quite gruelling. I don't know if it started off as a "bad trip" or not, but the point made on the other thread today about the "stripping away of the ego" was about right,and it certainly was not a happy "high," like a good martini or a hit of weed but a very profound and disorienting reappraisal of myself and my place in the world, socially and spiritually.
I guess the simplest way of expressing it was that by the end of it, my place as a part of a very beautiful and sentient natural universe seemed uniquely compelling, a feeling I have never really lost, although to be sure its more evident at some times than others. To me, this is analogous with what people mean when they talk about God, and about faith in God. How can each of us really know what one another's faith or belief really consists of? We probably cannot, and of course there are significant ontological variations depending on the specific faith to which one subscribes, but I hear enough echoes of my belief in other peoples' more eloquent descriptions that I think its describing the same sort of feeling.
I can certainly reconcile the rendition of God in my religion (Jewish) with the experience and feelings I had that day (May 1, 1983), and since then, in such a way that the writings and teachings in the Bible connect to me in a personal way now. I feel like I sometimes really understand those teachings where before that time, they were just words. Anyway, I disagree with the previous poster who said that this drug introduced people to a false God. The drug is not the God, the drug helped me strip away some of the intellectual baggage that prevented me from seeing the real One, who is so obvious and evident in all ways to believers.
An editor at Reason mag wrote a book a few years back, illuminating the "real" effect of drugs on society vis a vis the public "mythos" of what drugs do. I have no personal interest in drug use at all, but have always been skeptical of ANY manufactured government campaign. The author of this book using the govts own data, laid out how little harm drugs do relative to the number of people using them. As with anything, alcohol, food etc. there will always be people who have bad experiences, and suffer from addictive personalities. It's ludicrous to me that we waste so much money on attempting to ban adult behavior.
And to think my parents steered me away from trying drugs by repeating the sad story of Diane Linkletter.
What a brilliant post. I wish I would have said all you said, and the above quote of yours is simply perfectly beautiful.
Please be well, babble-on.
You really seem to like that "stuck on stupid" phrase. It's a little repetitive, don't you think?
You indicated that you haven't used drugs in years but your one post said, "... we all get together once a year and try it again..." and so I took that sentence to mean what it said - that you take LSD once a year with your old groovy buddies. On a later post, you stated that you have "only done it five times in the last decade" so I wonder which it is - that once a year you get together with old friends and drop A or you only did it 5x in the last 10. Gee, which is it?
While you certainly know a lot more than I do about this drug, I know just what I need to know. If you want to feel superior about knowing everything there is to know about LSD, that's your bag (I'm trying to use lingo here that you might understand since you are very limited with your language), but don't insult my intelligence. I don't need to eat feces or understand every single biological fact about them to know that ingesting them wouldn't be a healthy thing to do.
Further, LSD is illegal, so if you are doing it you are breaking the law.
Lastly, I feel sorry for you, only in that you are one of those individuals that are so less than satisified with this world and, apparently, your life, that you have had to take drugs to have your beautiful and ecstatic revelations and experiences. How blessed I am that I can have these beautiful experiences without any psychotropic help! Instead of "stuck of stupid," I'm just stuck on life!
And finally, while I understand the reasons a lot of young people did LSD and other drugs in the 60s and 70s and I feel no self-righteousness over the fact that I didn't foolishly drop acid, snort coke, smoke hash, or whatever. It's just that your posts are trying to glorify LSD. It's really pathetic. If anyone is stuck on stupid it is YOU.
Oh, and BTW, her name is "Scarlett" not "Scarlet;" It's "Signs, Signs, everywhere Signs," not "Sign, Sign..." and I think you've also screwed up the spelling of Al Qaeda in your tagline. You spell it Queda like it's an organization for cheese or something. You probably still listen to old Cheech and Chong albums too. Very scary.........
What can you learn from listening to the wind sighing through the Whitepark pines on a lonely Sierra ridgetop?
What can you learn from the deafening silence of the Canyonlands?
What can you learn from watching clouds evaporate over the Owens Valley at twilight?
Answer "nothing", and I feel sorry for you. If you have learned something in places like these, you go a long way to answering your own question.
;-)
See post # 85 for a little more perspective for your little gray tunnel.
Check out this if you wish .............. it's an excellent article about a very interesting guy!
****
http://www.thememoryhole.org/hubbard/
Do you remember the phrase.........IT'S LIKE A SHOWER ON THE INSIDE ?????? AND THE BOOK BE HERE NOW ? THERE IS A NEW WEBSITE CALLED " WHAT THE BLEEP " WHERE THE METAPHYSICIANS OF THE PAST NOW HAVE PHDS AND CAN PROVE SUCH THEORIES AS YOU CREATE YOUR LIFE WITH YOUR THOUGHTS !!!!!! CHECK IT OUT
I never knew for sure.
Hey, check this out (really).......... this man is/was the greatest!
****
http://www.fargonebooks.com/high.html
The Original Captain Trips
If you have time read this whole article on his life. Truly great, imo.
****
"Whereas (Timothy) Leary would naturally gravitate toward any microphone available, Hubbard preferred the role of the silent curandero, providing the means for the experience, and letting voyagers decipher its meaning for themselves."
If you got some around the mid-60's from the right people you were "there".
;-)
I always liked mushrooms and mescaline. LSD -- I always cut those things into smaller pieces, those orange sunshine little barrels were good for about four trips for me, I used to cut the window pane in half, etc.
I always though that the people taking the much bigger doses were really not too wise. A very little went a long way for me.
;-)
Morning glory seeds were pretty great too.
After it was outlawed in the US in the mid-'60s, you could go up to New Westminster, B.C. for a supervised trip featuring medically pure Hoffman LSD at Hollywood Hospital, a little treatment center for alcoholics that had a wing devoted to volunteers. Some of those volunteers were from Hollywood, some from the space agency, etc etc. Some distinguished "graduates," who'd come to try to increase their creativity with the drug.
"White light trips" were common. One trip was enough. "After you get the message, you can hang up the phone."
YES _____
http://www.fargonebooks.com/high.html — The Original Captain Trips
Hubbard's secret connections allowed him to expose over 6,000 people to LSD before it was effectively banned in '66. He shared the sacrament with a prominent Monsignor of the Catholic Church in North America, explored the roots of alcoholism with AA founder Bill Wilson, and stormed the pearly gates with Aldus Huxley (in a session that resulted in the psychedelic tome Heaven and Hell), as well as supplying most of the Beverly Hills psychiatrists, who, in turn, turned on actors Cary Grant, James Coburn, Jack Nicholson, novelist Anais Nin, and filmmaker Stanley Kubrick.
Laura Huxley met Captain Hubbard for the first time at her and her husband's Hollywood Hills home in the early 1960s. "He showed up for lunch one afternoon, and he brought with him a portable tank filled with a gas of some kind. He offered some to us," she recalls, "but we said we didn't care for any, so he put it down and we all had lunch. He went into the bathroom with the tank after lunch, and breathed into it for about ten seconds. It must have been very concentrated, because he came out revitalized and very jubilant, talking about a vision he had seen of the Virgin Mary."
"I was convinced that he was the man to bring LSD to planet Earth," remarks, Myron Stolaroff, who was assistant to the president of long-range planning at Ampex Corporation when he met the captain. Stolaroff learned of Hubbard through philosopher Gerald Heard, a friend and spiritual mentor to Huxley. "Gerald had reached tremendous levels of contemplative prayer, and I didn't know what in the world he was doing fooling around with drugs."
Procuring a Ph.D. in biopsychology from a less-than-esteemed academic outlet called Taylor University, the captain became Dr. Alfred M. Hubbard, clinical therapist. In '57, he met Ross MacLean, medical superintendent of the Hollywood Hospital in New Westminster, Canada. MacLean was so impressed with Hubbard's knowledge of the human condition that he devoted an entire wing of the hospital to the study of psychedelic therapy for chronic alcoholics.
According to Metcalfe, MacLean was also attracted to the fact that Hubbard was Canada's sole licensed importer of Sandoz LSD. "I remember seeing Al on the phone in his living room one day. He was elated because the FDA had just given him IND#1," says one Hubbard confidante upon condition of anonymity.
His Investigational New Drug permit also allowed Hubbard to experiment with LSD in the USA. For the next few years, Hubbard--together with Canadian psychiatrist Abram Hoffer and Dr. Humphry Osmond--pioneered a psychedelic regimen with a recovery rate of between 60% and 70%--far above that of AA or Schick Hospital's so-called "aversion therapy." Hubbard would lift mentally-disturbed lifelong alcoholics out of psychosis with a mammoth dose of liquid LSD, letting them view their destructive habits from a completely new vantage point. "As a therapist, he was one of the best," says Stolaroff, who worked with Hubbard until 1965 at the International Federation for Advanced Study in Menlo Park, California, which he founded after leaving Ampex.
Whereas many LSD practitioners were content to strap their patients onto a 3' x 6' cot and have them attempt to perform a battery of mathematical formulae with a head full of LSD, Hubbard believed in a comfortable couch and throw pillows. He also employed icons and symbols to send the experience into a variety of different directions: someone uptight may be asked to look at a photo of a glacier, which would soon melt into blissful relaxation; a person seeking the spiritual would be directed to a picture of Jesus, and enter into a one-on-one relationship with the Savior.
But Hubbard's days at Hollywood Hospital ended in 1957, not long after they had begun, after a philosophical dispute with Ross MacLean. The suave hospital administrator was getting fat from the $1,000/dose fees charged to Hollywood's elite patients, who included members of the Canadian Parliament and the American film community. Hubbard, who believed in freely distributing LSD for the world good, felt pressured by MacLean to share in the profits, and ultimately resigned rather than accept an honorarium for his services.
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