![]() ![]() He "had the feeling that I was not moving from the spot, although my colleague said I was moving at a fast pace." When he arrived home he called his neighbor, who summoned the nearest doctor. On the now famous bike ride, the symptoms became stronger: "I had great difficulty in speaking clearly and my field of vision fluctuated and swam like an image in a distorted mirror," he wrote at the time, very much as he described it in his 1979 memoir. At 5 PM, he began to feel dizzy, as he had previously, and decided to bike home. On the morning of April 19, he synthesized 0.5 milliliters of the compound, dissolved it in 10 cubic centimeters of water, and at 4:20 PM took 250 micrograms-0.000025 of a gram, the smallest dose he thought he might conceivably notice. Three days later, he decided to make a self-experiment with the substance he believed to be responsible: lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD. "The nature and course of this disorder made me suspect it was a toxic effect," the original report continued. He suspected he had inhaled some solvent vapors and went home to lie down in a darkened room, at which point he "sank into a not unpleasant, intoxicated-like condition, characterized by an extremely stimulated imagination. In this four-page document, Hofmann begins the story three days earlier, on April 16, when he felt himself becoming dizzy while working in his Sandoz lab with a couple of new chemical compounds. Yet the first ever acid trip was, according to Hofmann, not a blissed-out dreamscape but an unremitting nightmare. Among these, unreported until now, is the report he filed three days after his first acid trip for his employers at the Sandoz pharmaceutical company. ![]() The exhibition includes documents from Hofmann’s personal archive, recently acquired by Bern University. Hofmann’s trip is being commemorated in an exhibition at the National Library of Switzerland in Bern: LSD: A Problem Child turns 75. It’s an image that has been printed on many thousands of acid tabs. It’s an event commemorated annually on April 19 as "Bicycle Day"-the psychedelic precursor to weed’s 4/20 celebrations-with parades, gigs, parties and day-glo bike rides through cities around the globe. The image of him taking LSD before heading home on his bicycle, pedaling unsteadily into the technicolor future, is the acid heads’ own Nativity scene. Like the apple falling on Newton’s head, strait-laced scientist has mind-blowing cosmic epiphany was an irresistible meme. Hofmann’s legendary acid trip has become the founding chapter of modern psychedelic culture and a key Eureka moment in scientific history. ![]()
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