20 Things You Don't Know About LSD: From Albert Hofmann To Ken Kesey To Steve Jobs
By | September 13, 2022
A man with LSD sign on May 5, 1967 in New York, New York. (Photo by Santi Visalli/Getty Images)
LSD (Lysergic acid diethylamide, or acid) permeates '60s and '70s pop culture -- it was the catalyst for psychedelic music, art, literature and fashion. Even if you never tuned in, turned on, and dropped out, you know a little about this mind altering drug created by Albert Hofmann and popularized by artists like The Beatles, Timothy Leary, and Steve Jobs. There's more to this drug than just hippies in the park with flowers in their hair. It's been used in government testing, and through its disciples Lysergic acid diethylamide has changed society in ways that we can't comprehend. People who've never experienced psychedelics might know that LSD is dispersed in tabs printed on blotter paper, but they don't know the research and development behind this mind expanding, trippy substance.
From witchcraft to psychedelia
The main thing that everyone knows about LSD is that it gives the user intense hallucinations. This property comes from ergot, a fungus found in tainted rye that has claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of people over centuries, while also causing the hallucinations and mania that led to accusations of witchcraft in Salem, Massachusetts in 1692 and 1693.
When consumed on its own, ergot can cause gangrene and convulsions. In the year 857 in a region of modern-day Germany, consumption of wheat poisoned with ergot caused a plague full of blisters and body parts that just sloughed off before someone died. The Swiss chemical company Sandoz wanted to see if there was anything they could do with something so poisonous and tests showed that small doses of the poison had positive side effects in childbirth by restricting blood flow.
Professor Still figured it all out
Professor Arthur Still isolated the the compounds in ergot that caused the constrictions, ergotamine and ergobasine, and concluded if used in small enough dosages they could stimulate the respiratory and circulatory systems. He called the chemical manufactured from the active compound in ergot lysergic acid.
LSD was discovered accidentally
As with many of history's greatest discoveries, chemist Albert Hofmann stumbled upon LSD by accident. On November 16, 1938, Hoffman was researching medically useful ergot alkaloid derivatives in Basel, Switzerland, basically just combining lysergic acid with different organic molecules, when he synthesized LSD-25.
At the time Hofmann didn't realize the psychedelic effects of the 25th chemical combination, but after accidentally ingesting some of the chemical in 1943 he realized that he had his hands on a powerful substance. Later that year he ingested 250 micrograms of LSD and had an extremely heavy trip. Hofmann described his first trip to his boss in a memo written to explain why he had to leave work early:
I was forced to interrupt my work in the laboratory in the middle of the afternoon and proceed home, being affected by a remarkable restlessness, combined with a slight dizziness. At home I lay down and sank into a not unpleasant intoxicated-like condition, characterized by an extremely stimulated imagination. In a dream-like state, with eyes closed (I found the daylight to be unpleasantly glaring), I perceived an uninterrupted steam of fantastic pictures, extraordinary shapes with intense, kaleidoscopic play of colors.
The second test
Albert Hofmann's second self-test led to a similar outcome, only this time he had a lab assistant take him home. The only problem was that the two men were riding bicycles. Undeterred by its psychedelic effects, Sandoz Laboratories put LSD on the market in 1947 as a cure all for mental issues, be it alcoholism or the all encompassing "criminal behavior."
The first trips were incredibly disorienting
Even if you've never experienced a trip you definitely know what it is. When Hofmann first started his home home research into LSD he attempted to codify the experience of taking the chemical, but that proved to be more or less impossible. Instead, he made a ton of journal entries that show the disorientation that he felt while dosing himself that he didn't really understand. Hofmann's early takeaway from his research is that LSD made him dizzy, thirsty for milk, and he had trouble placing people that he knew in his everyday life. He wrote:
Everything in the room spun around, and the familiar objects and pieces of furniture assumed grotesque, threatening forms. They were in continuous motion, animated, as if driven by an inner relentlessness. The lady next door, whom I scarcely recognized, brought me milk—in the course of the evening I drank more than two liters. She was no longer Mrs. R, but rather a malevolent, insidious witch with a colored mask.
It wasn't the ideal trip, but as Hofmann came to understand the chemical he found that his negative experiences came from his own unfamiliarity with the chemical and not the chemical itself. Hofmann later realized that if he ingested LSD with a positive attitude things went smoother, and he continued taking the drug for the rest of his life.
LSD testing has always been morally iffy
Compared to many other drugs (pharmaceutical and illegal), LSD doesn't really have any negative side effects. Bad trips are possible, but it's not an addictive substance, and it's not deadly like a lot of the harder drugs on the market. But to discover its characteristics, researchers conducted a myriad of tests that wouldn't fly today.
LSD was tested on animals pretty much across the board: cats, mice, fish, chimps, they've all been dosed under the auspices of science and none of them suffered acute harm at the active dose, although it likely freaked them out. Hofmann continued testing himself outside of the lab, later saying that the psychedelic experiences from this era instilled within him "a feeling of ecstatic love and unity with all creatures in the universe."
CIA testing
In the 1950s, LSD testing came to America via the CIA. At the height of the cold war, the organization was searching for a mind control drug and they thought LSD was the ticket. CIA chemist Sidney Gottlieb led the program, dubbed MKUltra, and after buying the world's entire supply of LSD for $240,000, distributed it to hospitals, clinics, and prisons where research projects were carried out to see how people reacted to the drug. Their hopes of the perfect mind control drug were dashed fairly early on, and actually led to the counterculture of the 1960s.
Can LSD help the human brain?
Aside from the CIA's morally unsound LSD tests, a large amount of the testing that's been done with LSD has yielded positive results. Researchers have found that low doses of LSD have helped to improve focus and performance, although the results are purely anecdotal as of this writing. In the '50s and '60s there were psychedelic therapy tests that looked to unblock subconscious material while producing self-acceptance. Most notably, LSD seems to be a tool for unlocking, or at the very least harnessing creativity. A researcher named Oscar Janiger felt that LSD was akin to a "creativity pill," and found that through guided psychedelic sessions it was possible to work users into a state where they're more creative.
We're still figuring out microdosing
With all of the research being done with LSD, there's still a lot to learn about this chemical. Even if you're never going to try the drug, it's important to know where it came from and the reasoning behind its creation. You may have visions of hippies rolling through fields out of their minds on acid, but just like Aspirin and every medicine you can find on the shelves, LSD was created in a lab by people who were trying to help humanity. Writing of his later experiences with mircrodosing LSD, Hofmann wrote:
I see the true importance of LSD in the possibility of providing material aid to meditation aimed at the mystical experience of a deeper, comprehensive reality. Such a use accords entirely with the essence and working character of LSD as a sacred drug.
BUT WAIT! There's More
Under the right circumstances LSD can do more to harness our imaginations than anything on the planet. It beats coffee and a 10 minutes of meditation by a long shot. Keep reading to see how it helped create the internet (sort of).
LSD Helped create the internet... sort of
The internet: part useful resource, part LSD trip. For all its "information superhighway" rhetoric, the 'net is just as often used to binge cat videos, listen to people chewing ice, or zone out to extremely satisfying but useless clips of things being made. This shouldn't be surprising given that the internet and our everyday computer tech grew by leaps and bounds during the psychedelic era.
Silicon Valley was once full of tech-hippies
People were tuning in, turning on, and dropping out - including the burgeoning Silicon Valley sect made up of students and computer scientists living in Northern California. While we tend to think of hippies and dropouts taking psychedelics to get high out of their mind before running through muddy fields barefoot and blasting the Grateful Dead, there was also a large contingent of young men and women who used LSD as a way to get in touch with themselves and nature while thinking of ways to make the future a better place. The internet, iPhones, and all of that beautiful email that you love so much wouldn't be possible without Silicon Valley's wonderboys expanding their minds.
Stanford computer scientists were experimenting with LSD throughout the '60s
How do you take psychedelics correctly? Is there a right or a wrong way to handle it? Should you just dive right in or take it in small doses until you’ve found the perfect amount to feed your brain? That’s what computer scientists in Palo Alto were trying to figure out in the early 1960s.
The Palo Alto experiments of the 1960s saw the young scientists testing the ways in which LSD allowed them expand their consciousness and further understand the new systems they were creating. Many of the scientists found that once they altered their sense of reality, they were no longer deterred by what they’d been told was impossible.
One Silicon Valley CEO wanted his employees to open their minds
In order to inspire his employees to go full universe brain and figure out ways to make their business better a former CEO of Ampex encouraged his employees to dose themselves with LSD. The company’s board members weren’t crazy about that, and they were even less enthused with the fact that the CEO took a group of seven or eight subordinates on a hike where they were fed the hallucinogen anyway. The CEO was fired but his mark was made.
The Word Gets Out
The word got out about the positive uses of LSD amongst the computer scientists of Palo Alto and between 1961 and 1965 hundreds of people underwent their own brand of personal research. One of those scientists was Douglas Engelbart, father of the computer mouse. Thanks to LSD we can move our cursors around all we want. That’s not the only invention that came out these experiments. At the same time as Engelbart was expanding his consciousness computer scientists across the area were figuring out ways to send messages to one another via computers (email, heard of it?) and creating wiki pages to easily share information. Who knew using the web could be so trippy?
The International Foundation for Advanced Study dosed hundreds of engineers
It turns out that we have Ampex to thank for mind expanding use of psychedelics; not only did their former CEO take his employees on a mind expanding hike but employee Myron Stolaroff set up the International Foundation for Advanced Study to methodically study the use of LSD and the like. Stolaroff dosed hundreds of engineers and kept them under constant observation as they went on with their trip. Stolaroff found that 83 percent of his first 152 volunteers had “lasting effects from the experience.” Many of the engineers felt an increase in self-esteem and 78 percent of the engineers found that they were more capable of feeling love.
Steve Jobs said that LSD was a mind opening experience
Psychedelics were so influential throughout the 1960s and ‘70s that even Steve Jobs was trying them out. He didn’t just dip his toe into LSD but he used the drug to change his creative process. Rather than approach things methodically he was able to look at problems from all new angles, some foreign to this plane of existence. Long after he cemented his legacy with Apple Computers, Jobs said that taking LSD was one of the most enlightening experiences in his life, allowing him to be a creative force who understood what people wanted. Do you think he kept extra tabs inside his turtleneck?
The LSD experiments of Palo Alto inspired some researchers to leave California
Not every young person who spent the ‘60s in a haze of psychedelics and research stuck around. Stewart Brand, a biology student at Stanford in the 1960s, participated in a government study of LSD at Menlo Park. Brand explained that after getting into psychedelics he was inspired to start seeing the world:
The hippie phenomenon was to go and discover how the world works, so all the kids went out with backpacks doing the same thing. And we learned a lot.
Brand visited Native American reservations to research their experiences with peyote before joining up with Ken Kesey and pushing himself as far as he could while taking acid. He explained to The Guardian:
Weird s**t would be tried… Can you make it through the night without being killed or killing anybody?
A Bus Named Furthur
In 1964, Ken Kesey bought a twenty-five-year-old bus and outfitted it into a true hippie-mobile so he and his groupie-like followers could travel the country. They named the bus “Furthur”—a purposeful misspelling—and Kesey and his friends, calling themselves the “Merry Band of Pranksters,” customized it with a sound system, an observation turret on top, and motorcycle platform. The bus already had bunk beds, a small kitchen, and a bathroom from its previous owner. With the psychedelic artwork the Pranksters added, Furthur became the perfect symbol of the anti-establishment, free love, enlightenment vibe that characterized Kesey’s life.
Hitting The Road
Inspired by Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, Kesey and the Pranksters took to the highway in their tricked-out bus, which they called Furthur (the misspelling was intentional), seeking to go “furthur” than ever before. Kesey packed a stash of pre-rolled marijuana joints, a bunch of speed, and a large supply of LSD. At that point in time, LSD hadn’t yet been classified as an illegal drug. The plan was to film their misadventures, and release a true-life road movie. The movie they shot was never released, but footage was used to make the 2011 documentary Magic Trip.
