Sacred Drug: Hofmann's Most Unfashionable Word

“Hofmann called LSD a sacred drug and was never persuaded to replace the word with something more clinical. He was 102 and he stood by it.”

Albert Hofmann called LSD a sacred drug. Not a useful drug. Not a promising therapeutic agent. A sacred drug.

The word is unfashionable in biomedical discourse. Sacred implies a quality of experience that resists quantification, something not merely effective but meaningful in a way that transcends its mechanisms.

Hofmann was not careless with language. He was a precise chemist. When he chose 'sacred' rather than 'therapeutic' or 'psychoactive,' he was making a claim about the category of thing LSD was.

His argument: LSD works, when it works, by providing access to an experience that human beings have recognized across traditions and millennia as the most important class of experience available, the direct encounter with what is variously called the divine, the sacred, the ground of being. The clinical benefit in patients was, in his account, a consequence of this experience, not its cause.

The current clinical literature has approached this claim through the Mystical Experience Questionnaire, through the finding that mystical experience quality predicts therapeutic outcomes, through the language of 'meaning' and 'insight' that populates patient reports. It has not used the word 'sacred.' But it is measuring something that Hofmann would have recognized.

Sources

• Hofmann, LSD: My Problem Child (1979)