[MD] Julian Baggini Interview with Pirsig

Fri Jan 13 18:02:38 PST 2006

David,

What you said (pasted below) is very much how I felt about the Baggini 
interview.  In fact, I'll go as far to say that it reflected my experience 
of the usual academic response to Pirsig, Zen etc.

For instance, do you think I chose Spinoza as part of my PhD on Pirsig's 
work?

Anyway, moving away from yesterday's ideas, here's a glass to Albert 
Hofmann's 100th birthday and a Dynamic high quality future:

"Father of LSD, now 100, and his 'problem child'"

By Craig S. Smith "The New York Times"

MONDAY, JANUARY 9, 2006

Switzerland - Albert Hofmann, the father of LSD, walked slowly across the 
small corner office of his modernist home on a grassy Alpine hilltop here, 
hoping to show a visitor the vista that sweeps before him on clear days.

But outside there was only a white blanket of fog hanging just beyond the 
crest of the hill. He picked up a photograph of the view on his desk 
instead, left there perhaps to convince visitors of what really lies beyond 
the window.

Hofmann turns 100 on Wednesday, a milestone to be marked by a symposium in 
nearby Basel on the chemical compound that he discovered and that famously 
altered consciousnesses around the world. As the years accumulate and his 
time left on the planet grows short, 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.

"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, LSD, which he calls his "problem child," could help reconnect 
people to the universe.

Rounding a century, Hofmann is physically reduced but mentally clear. He is 
prone to digressions, 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," but it also left him deeply connected to nature and helped shape 
his future.

He became particularly fascinated by the plant kingdom, 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.

He says that any natural scientist who is not a mystic is not a real natural 
scientist.

Hofmann went on to study chemistry and took a job with Sandoz, a Swiss 
pharmaceutical firm, because the company 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 the deadly material 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 Hofmann began 
combining other molecules with the unstable chemical in search of 
pharmacologically useful compounds.

Hofmann's work produced several important drugs, including a compound to 
prevent hemorrhaging after childbirth. But it was the 25th compound that he 
synthesized, lysergic acid diethylamide, that was to have the greatest 
impact, although it yielded no significant pharmacological results.

When his other work on ergot was completed, he decided to go back to LSD-25, 
hoping that improved pharmacological tests could detect the stimulating 
effect on the body's circulatory system that he had expected from the 
compound.

It was as he was synthesizing the drug on a Friday afternoon in April 1943, 
he recalled, that he first experienced the altered state of consciousness 
for which it became famous. He rode his bicycle home, lay down and spent 
hours mesmerized by hallucinations.

"Immediately, I recognized it as the same experience I had had as a child," 
he said.

When he returned to his lab the next Monday, he tried to identify the source 
of his strange experience, believing first that it had come from the fumes 
of a chloroform-like solvent he had been using. Inhaling the fumes produced 
no effect, though, and he realized he must have somehow ingested a trace of 
LSD.

He first experimented with the drug, taking a dose so small that even the 
most active toxin known at that time would have little or no effect. The 
result was a powerful LSD experience, during which he again rode his bicycle 
home, this time accompanied by an assistant.

He later participated in clinical tests in a Sandoz laboratory, but found 
the experience frightening and realized that the drug should be used only 
under carefully controlled circumstances.

Later, he wrote to the German novelist Ernst Jünger, who had experimented 
with mescaline, and proposed that the two take the new compound together. In 
1951, together with a medical doctor, the two men each took 0.05 milligrams 
of pure LSD at Hofmann's home, accompanied by a vase of roses, music by 
Mozart and a stick of Japanese incense.

"That was the first planned psychedelic test," Hofmann said.

He took the drug dozens of times after that, he said, and once experienced a 
bad trip, what he calls a "horror trip," when he was tired and Jünger gave 
him amphetamines first to freshen him up.

He 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.

But the drug was hijacked by the youth movement of the 1960s and then 
unfairly demonized by the establishment that the movement opposed, Hofmann 
said. He conceded that LSD could be dangerous and called its indiscriminate 
distribution by Timothy Leary and others "a crime."

"You should only give it to people with a certain stability who can survive 
a bad trip," he said. "It should be a controlled substance with the same 
status as morphine."

Hofmann is a philosopher but no high priest. He did not quit his job after 
his LSD experiences but worked to retirement and lives now with his wife in 
the house they built 38 years ago. He raised four children and watched one 
son struggle with alcoholism before dying at the age of 53. He has eight 
grandchildren and six great-grandchildren.

As far as he knows, no one in his family other than his wife has tried LSD.

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.

Basel on the chemical compound that he discovered and that famously altered 
consciousnesses around the world. As the years accumulate and his time left 
on the planet grows short, 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.

"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, LSD, which he calls his "problem child," could help reconnect 
people to the universe.

Rounding a century, Hofmann is physically reduced but mentally clear. He is 
prone to digressions, 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," but it also left him deeply connected to nature and helped shape 
his future...