One Hundred and Two Years

“Hofmann lived to 102. He took LSD on his hundredth birthday. He said the experience restored something he had felt as a child in the Swiss countryside, a quality of luminous presence in ordinary things.”

Albert Hofmann was born in 1906 and died in 2008. Between these dates, he synthesized LSD, isolated psilocybin and psilocin, studied the chemistry of morning glory seeds, wrote My Problem Child, attended the 2006 Basel symposium on LSD's medical potential, and gave his last major interview at 101.

He took LSD at 100. He was not performing nostalgia or staging a statement. He took it the way he'd always taken it, carefully, in appropriate surroundings, with people he trusted, because the experience still did for him what he had discovered it could do in 1943: restore the quality of perception he had first known as a child.

Hofmann returned throughout his life to a specific memory: a morning walk in the Swiss countryside as a young boy, when the world had appeared luminous and saturated with presence, each thing exactly itself and impossibly significant. This quality had gradually faded with education and maturity, replaced by the ordinary adult perception of objects in terms of their usefulness and category. LSD had not introduced something foreign, it had recovered something that had been there before and been trained away.

This is the deepest claim in My Problem Child, and it is not pharmacological but autobiographical: that the state LSD produces is not aberrant but prior. The drug does not add content to consciousness; it removes the learned suppressions that make ordinary adult perception feel normal. What is revealed is not the drug's creation but consciousness's original condition.

Hofmann died on April 29, 2008, a Tuesday, four months after his hundred-and-second birthday. He had lived long enough to see the research program he'd hoped for begin again: MAPS-sponsored clinical trials of LSD for anxiety, the first in decades. He did not live to see the clinical results published, but he knew the direction.

Sources

• Hofmann, LSD: My Problem Child (1979)
• Various interviews, Albert Hofmann, 2006-2008 [Source not found; under review]
• MAPS obituary, Albert Hofmann (2008)