Was LSD a “Chance Discovery”?
Was LSD a “Chance Discovery”?
We all know how the story of Bicycle Day goes. Hofmann was busy synthesizing various ergot derivatives in the Sandoz lab one day, when he accidentally took in a miniscule dose of LSD through his fingertips. Struck by a sense of restlessness and heightened imagination, he returned to the lab a few days later to carefully measure out a deliberate dose of just a quarter of a milligram, only to confirm for the first time the undeniable effects of LSD-25, on what would come to be called Bicycle Day.
But David Nichols thinks it’s kind of curious that something so sloppy could happen to such a meticulous Swiss chemist.[1]
And, LSD probably can’t be absorbed transdermally, he argues, pointing to sloppier lab accidents that haven’t resulted in the same fate.
But LSD does meet the criteria of a pharmacological substance that could penetrate the skin, in the right conditions (having a low molecular weight, reasonable lipid and water solubility, and low melting point).
Nonetheless, even explicitly applying it directly on skin with the help of a solvent often used for enhancing this kind of transdermal absorption (called DSMO), still had no effect, Nichols says…
Even stranger, by Hofmann’s own account, his first encounter with LSD lasted only a few hours. Yet LSD’s effects typically lasts 8-12, Nichols points out.
He argues, therefore: Hofmann might have had a spontaneous mystical experience the very same day he was synthesizing LSD.
He was prone to having them, after all.
Recounting in LSD, My Problem Child,[2]
“While still a child, I experienced several more of these deeply euphoric moments on my rambles through forest and meadow. It was these experiences that shaped the main outlines of my world view and convinced me of the existence of a miraculous, powerful, unfathomable reality that was hidden from everyday sight.”
But the symptoms Hofmann describes experiencing: dizzy and restless with stimulated imagination, don’t quite line up with the characteristics of mystical experience he was used to.
Wouldn’t he have recognized it?
It is somewhat curious that such a serendipitous explanation would come out of such a prolific Purdue neurochemist…
Alan Piper[3] brings us a 1933 German-language novel called St Peter’s Snow[4] (St. Petri-Schnee) by Austrian author and mathematician Leo Perutz, which depicts a hallucinogen similar to mescaline, derived from alkaloids found in the ergot fungus that grows on wheat and rye (known as the source of St. Anthony’s Fire), just five years before Hofmann synthesized this very same substance, and ten years before announcing its psychoactive effects.
“Faith […] can be kindled by chemistry,”
writes Perutz,
not “only by patient work, by loving service, and by prayer.”
—thirty years before the Good Friday Experiment[5] finds LSD capable of catalyzing religious mystical experience…
The novel’s protagonist, Dr. Amberg, observes his former colleague and love interest, Bibiche, drawing geometric figures on a sheet of paper—spirals, small circles, rosettes, and a highly elaborate ornamental number nine (the time she was due back at the lab the next day).
“What we call the fervour and ecstasy of faith, […] whether as an individual phenomenon or as a group phenomenon, nearly always presents the clinical picture of a state of excitation produced by a hallucinogenic drug,” he explains.
A handful of pages later, Perutz outlines (via discussion between Dr. Amberg and Baron von Malchin) the idea that ergot was the most likely source of the secret sacrament of ancient religions:
“I have followed the route taken by the wheat parasite through the centuries. I have tracked all its migrations, and I have established that all the great religious movements of the Middle Ages and the modern age […] all the religious struggles, all the ecstatic upheavals began in areas in which St Peter’s Snow had appeared immediately before.”
– fourty five years before Wasson’s famous 1978 work, ‘The Road to Eleusis: The Unveiling of the Mysteries.’[6]
It’s hard to believe that a German-speaking Swiss chemist, working under Arthur Stoll, who had been researching ergot long before him, wouldn’t have known of Perutz’ popular novel at the time, and had no hint that they might be plunging into the depths of a powerful hallucinogen in the ergot alkaloids.
Hallucination was the most famous symptom of St Anthony’s Fire, after all.
How couldn’t they know?
Hofmann insists LSD was a chance discovery.[2]
If it is true, as Nichols and others find, that LSD can’t really be absorbed transdermally, it might be more likely that he got his first peak of LSD while rubbing his eyes or touching his lips. Few (if any) substances were known with such powerful properties, so it’s plausible it could have slipped through standard protocols at the time.
But as Nichols emphasized, Swiss chemists have a reputation for meticulousness—a reputation that in fact led one of the world’s most eminent psychedelic neurochemists to believe that Hofmann’s first experience must have been entirely unrelated to The Substance he was synthesizing that very day.
Did Arthur Stoll or Hofmann himself know what they were looking into all along? The Theosophical Society, followers of Rudolf Steiner, and their recreation of Eleusinian plays, did start in German-speaking Swiss cities, including Basel in the early 20th century, after all.
To be continued…