By CRAIG S. SMITH
PARIS — Albert Hofmann, the mystical Swiss chemist who gave the world LSD, the most powerful psychotropic substance known, died Tuesday at his hilltop home near Basel, Switzerland. He was 102.
The cause was a heart attack, said Rick Doblin, founder and president of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, a California-based group that in 2005 republished Dr. Hofmann's 1979 book "LSD: My Problem Child."
Dr. Hofmann first synthesized the compound lysergic acid diethylamide in 1938 but did not discover its psychopharmacological effects until five years later, when he accidentally ingested the substance that became known to the 1960s counterculture as acid.
He then took LSD hundreds of times, but regarded it as a powerful and potentially dangerous psychotropic drug that demanded respect. More important to him than the pleasures of the psychedelic experience was the drug's value as a revelatory aid for contemplating and understanding what he saw as humanity's oneness with nature. That perception, of union, which came to Dr. Hofmann as almost a religious epiphany while still a child, directed much of his personal and professional life.
Dr. Hofmann was born in Baden, a spa town in northern Switzerland, on Jan. 11, 1906, the eldest of four children. His father, who had no higher education, was a toolmaker in a local factory, and the family lived in a rented apartment. But Dr. Hofmann spent much of his childhood outdoors.
He would wander the hills above the town and play around the ruins of a Hapsburg castle, the Stein. "It was a real paradise up there," he said in an interview in 2006. "We had no money, but I had a wonderful childhood."
It was during one of his ambles that he had his epiphany.
"It happened on a May morning — I have forgotten the year — but I can still point to the exact spot where it occurred, on a forest path on Martinsberg above Baden," he wrote in "LSD: My Problem Child." "As I strolled through the freshly greened woods filled with bird song and lit up by the morning sun, all at once everything appeared in an uncommonly clear light.
"It shone with the most beautiful radiance, speaking to the heart, as though it wanted to encompass me in its majesty. I was filled with an indescribable sensation of joy, oneness and blissful security."
Though Dr. Hofmann's father was a Roman Catholic and his mother a Protestant, Dr. Hofmann, from an early age, felt that organized religion missed the point. When he was 7 or 8, he recalled, he spoke to a friend about whether Jesus was divine. "I said that I didn't believe, but that there must be a God because there is the world and someone made the world," he said. "I had this very deep connection with nature."
Dr. Hofmann went on to study chemistry at Zurich University because, he said, he wanted to explore the natural world at the level where energy and elements combine to create life. He earned his Ph.D. there in 1929, when he was just 23. He then took a job with Sandoz Laboratories in Basel, attracted by a program there that sought to synthesize pharmacological compounds from medicinally important plants.
It was during his work on the ergot fungus, which grows in rye kernels, that he stumbled on LSD, accidentally ingesting a trace of the compound one Friday afternoon in April 1943. Soon he experienced an altered state of consciousness similar to the one he had experienced as a child.
On the following Monday, he deliberately swallowed a dose of LSD and rode his bicycle home as the effects of the drug overwhelmed him. That day, April 19, later became memorialized by LSD enthusiasts as "bicycle day."
Dr. Hofmann's work produced other important drugs, including methergine, used to treat postpartum hemorrhaging, the leading cause of death from childbirth. But it was LSD that shaped both his career and his spiritual quest.
"Through my LSD experience and my new picture of reality, I became aware of the wonder of creation, the magnificence of nature and of the animal and plant kingdom," Dr. Hofmann told the psychiatrist Stanislav Grof during an interview in 1984. "I became very sensitive to what will happen to all this and all of us."
Dr. Hofmann became an impassioned advocate for the environment and argued that LSD, besides being a valuable tool for psychiatry, could be used to awaken a deeper awareness of mankind's place in nature and help curb society's ultimately self-destructive degradation of the natural world.
But he was also disturbed by the cavalier use of LSD as a drug for entertainment, arguing that it should be treated in the way that primitive societies treat psychoactive sacred plants, which are ingested with care and spiritual intent.
After his discovery of LSD's properties, Dr. Hofmann spent years researching sacred plants. With his friend R. Gordon Wasson, he participated in psychedelic rituals with Mazatec shamans in southern Mexico. He succeeded in synthesizing the active compounds in the Psilocybe mexicana mushroom, which he named psilocybin and psilocin. He also isolated the active compound in morning glory seeds, which the Mazatec also used as an intoxicant, and found that its chemical structure was close to that of LSD.
During the psychedelic era, Dr. Hofmann struck up friendships with such outsize personalities as Timothy Leary, Allen Ginsberg and Aldous Huxley, who, nearing death in 1963, asked his wife for an injection of LSD to help him through the final painful throes of throat cancer.
Yet despite his involvement with psychoactive compounds, Dr. Hofmann remained moored in his Swiss chemist identity. He stayed with Sandoz as head of the research department for natural medicines until his retirement in 1971. He wrote more than 100 scientific articles and was the author or co-author of a number of books
He and his wife, Anita, who died recently, reared four children in Basel. A son died of alcoholism at 53. Survivors include several grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
Though Dr. Hofmann called LSD "medicine for the soul," by 2006 his hallucinogenic days were long behind him, he said in the interview that year.
"I know LSD; I don't need to take it anymore," he said, adding. "Maybe when I die, like Aldous Huxley."
But he said LSD had not affected his understanding of death. In death, he said, "I go back to where I came from, to where I was before I was born, that's all."
Albert Hofmann
Albert Hofmann, who died on Tuesday aged 102, synthesised lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) in 1938 and became the first person in the world to experience a full-blown acid trip.
The day, April 19 1943, became known among aficionados as "Bicycle Day" as it was while cycling home from his laboratory that he experienced the most intense symptoms.
Hofmann was working as a research chemist in the laboratory of the Sandoz Company (now Novartis) in Basel, Switzerland, where he was involved in studying the medicinal properties of plants. This eventually led to the study of the alkaloid compounds of ergot, a fungus which forms on rye.
In the Middle Ages, ergot was implicated in period outbreaks of mass poisonings, producing symptoms in two characteristic forms, one gangrenous (ergotismus gangraenosus) and the other convulsive (ergotismus convulsivus).
Popular names such as "mal des ardents," "ignis sacer," "heiliges Feuer," or "St Anthony's fire" — refer to the gangrenous form of the disease.
Hofmann's studies led to many new discoveries such as Hydergine, a medicament for improvement of circulation and cerebral function and Dihydergot, a circulation and blood pressure stabilising medicine.
His interest in synthesising LSD was stimulated at first by the hope that it might also be useful as a circulatory and respiratory stimulant.
But when his molecule, known as LSD-25, was tested on animals, no interesting effects were observed, though the research notes recorded that the beasts became "restless" during narcosis. The substance was dismissed as of no interest and dropped from Sandoz's research programme.
But five years later, acting on some intuition, Hofmann decided to resynthesise LSD. In his autobiography, LSD, My Problem Child (1979), he recalled that in the final stage of the synthesis, he was interrupted by some unusual sensations.
In a note to the laboratory's director, he reported "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 dreamlike state, with eyes closed, I perceived an uninterrupted stream of fantastic pictures, extraordinary shapes with intense, kaleidoscopic play of colours. After some two hours this condition faded away."
Hofmann concluded that he must have accidentally breathed in or ingested some laboratory material and assumed LSD was the cause. To test the theory he waited until the next working day, Monday April 19 1943, and tried again, swallowing 0.25 of a milligram.
Forty minutes later, his laboratory journal recorded "dizziness, feeling of anxiety, visual distortions, symptoms of paralysis, desire to laugh".
Unable to write any more, he asked his assistant to take him home by bicycle. "On the way home, my condition began to assume threatening forms.
"Everything in my field of vision wavered and was distorted as if seen in a curved mirror. I also had the sensation of being unable to move from the spot. Nevertheless, my assistant later told me that we had travelled very rapidly."
Back home, when a friendly neighbour brought round some milk, he perceived her as a "malevolent, insidious witch" wearing "a lurid mask". After six hours of highs and lows, the effects subsided.
Sandoz, keen to make a profit from Hofman's discovery, gave the new substance the trade name Delysid and began sending samples out to psychiatric researchers.
By 1965 more than 2,000 papers had been published offering hope for a range of conditions from drug and alcohol addiction to mental illnesses of various sorts.
But the fact that it was cheap and easy to make left it open to abuse and from the late 1950s onwards, promoted by Dr Timothy Leary and others, LSD became the recreational drug of choice for alienated western youth.
An outbreak of moral panic, combined with a number of accidents involving people jumping to their deaths off high buildings thinking they could fly, led governments around the world to ban LSD.
Research also showed that the drug taken in high doses and in inappropriate settings, often caused panic reactions. For certain individuals, a bad trip seemed to be the trigger for full-blown psychosis.
Hofmann was disappointed when his discovery was removed from commercial distribution. He remained convinced that the drug had the potential to counter the psychological problems induced by "materialism, alienation from nature through industrialisation and increasing urbanisation, lack of satisfaction in professional employment in a mechanised, lifeless working world, ennui and purposelessness in wealthy, saturated society, and lack of a religious, nurturing, and meaningful philosophical foundation of life".
Albert Hofmann was born at Baden, Switzerland, on January 11 1906, the elder of two children. Having graduated from Zürich University with a degree in chemistry in 1929 he took a doctorate on the gastro-intestinal juice of the vineyard snail.
After leaving university, he went to work for Sandoz Pharmaceuticals where he researched the medicinal properties of the Mediterranean squill (Scilla maritima), before moving on to the study of Claviceps purpurea (ergot).
As a result of the use of LSD as a recreational drug Sandoz found itself bombarded with demands for information from regulatory bodies along with demands for statements after accidents, poisonings, criminal acts and so forth from the press. For scientists unaccustomed to the glare of publicity, it became a headache.
"I would rather you hadn't discovered LSD," Hofmann's managing director told him. In the end the decision was taken to stop all further production.
Hofmann laid some of the blame at the door of Dr Timothy Leary. In his autobiography, he described meeting Leary in 1971 in the railway station snack bar in Lausanne.
Hofmann began by voicing his regret that Leary's experiments had effectively killed off academic research into LSD and took Leary to task for encouraging its recreational use among young people. Leary was unabashed.
"He maintained that I was unjustified in reproaching him for the seduction of immature persons to drug consumption," Hofmann recalled, on the ground that American teenagers "with regard to information and life experience, were comparable to adult Europeans" and able to make up their own minds.
Hofmann continued to work at Sandoz until 1971 when he retired as Director of Research for the Department of Natural Products.
In addition to his discovery of LSD, he was also the first to synthesize psilocybin (the active constituent of "magic mushrooms") in 1958.
He also discovered the hallucinogenic principles of Ololiuqui (Morning Glory), lysergic acid amide and lysergic acid hydroxyethylamide.
In retirement, Hofmann served as a member of the Nobel Prize Committee. He was a Fellow of the World Academy of Sciences, and a Member of the International Society of Plant Research and of the American Society of Pharmacognosy.
In 1988 the Albert Hofmann Foundation was established "to assemble and maintain an international library and archive devoted to the study of human consciousness and related fields."
He disapproved of the appropriation of LSD by the youth movements of the 1960s, but regretted that its potential uses had not been explored. He had been due to speak at the World Psychedelic Forum in March, but ill health prevented him from attending.
Albert Hofmann was married and had three children.
Albert Hofmann, 102; Swiss chemist discovered LSD
His accidental experience of 'an extremely stimulated imagination' caused by the drug led to a lifetime of experiments and initiated the psychedelic generation.
By Thomas H. Maugh II, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
4:39 PM PDT, April 29, 2008
Albert Hofmann, the Swiss chemist who discovered LSD and thereby gave the psychedelic generation the pharmaceutical vehicle to turn on, tune in and drop out, has died. He was 102.
Hofmann died this morning at his home in Basel of a heart attack, according to Rick Doblin, the head of MAPS, the Multidisciplinary Assn. for Psychedelic Studies.
Hofmann also identified and synthesized the active ingredients of peyote mushrooms and a Mexican psychoactive plant called ololiuqui and developed at least three related, non-psychoactive compounds that became widely used in medicine.
Those other feats would have been little remembered, however, had he not accidentally gotten a trace amount of an experimental compound called lysergic acid diethylamide on his fingertips and taken the world's first acid trip.
Hofmann was a talented synthetic chemist working in the Basel research center of Sandoz Laboratories -- now Novartis -- in the 1930s when he began studying the chemistry of ergot, the common name for a fungus that grows on rye, barley and certain other plants. Although ergot is poisonous, midwives had used a crude extract for centuries to induce labor in pregnant women.
Twenty years earlier, researchers had isolated ergotamine, the first ergot alkaloid isolated in pure form, and the compound had become widely used for halting bleeding after childbirth and as a treatment for migraine headaches.
In the early 1930s, American researchers had identified the primary active ingredient of ergot, a chemical called lysergic acid. Hofmann devised a technique to make a series of derivatives of lysergic acid called amides and began systematically looking for medically useful compounds.
The twenty-fifth compound he synthesized, in 1938, was lysergic acid diethylamide (in German, lyserg-saure-diathylamid), or LSD-25. Because this compound had a chemical structure similar to an existing drug called Coramine, Hofmann had hoped that it would be a stimulant for the respiratory and circulatory systems.
But testing in experimental animals showed no significant activity for the drug -- although the animals were observed to become restless after its administration -- and it was abandoned.
During this period, Hofmann synthesized at least three amides that became drugs: Methergine, which is used to halt bleeding after birth; Hydergine, which improves circulation in the limbs and cerebral function in the elderly; and Dihydergot, which is used to stabilize circulation and blood pressure.
Prompted by what Hofmann later described as a "peculiar presentiment" that LSD-25 might have properties other than those established in the first investigations, he decided to look at it again.
On Friday afternoon, April 16, 1943, Hofmann had just completed synthesizing a new batch when, he subsequently wrote his supervisor, "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 slight dizziness.
"At home, I lay down and sank into a not-unpleasant intoxicated-like condition, characterized by an extremely stimulated imagination. In a dreamlike state I perceived an uninterrupted stream of fantastic pictures, extraordinary shapes with intense, kaleidoscopic play of colors. After some two hours, this condition faded away."
Hofmann suspected that the state had been caused by something in the lab. In an interview on his 100th birthday, he said, "I didn't know what caused it, but I knew that it was important."
After breathing the solvents he had used produced no effect, Hofmann suspected that the synthetic drug was the source. "LSD spoke to me," he said. "He came to me and said, 'You must find me.' He told me, 'Don't give me to the pharmacologist, he won't find anything.' "
The following Monday, he took what he considered to be an extremely small dose of LSD, so small that a similar dose of even the most powerful toxin known at the time would have had little or no effect. He had planned to gradually increase the dosage, but instead was surprised to encounter the first bad acid trip.
Feeling bad, he asked his laboratory assistant to accompany him home on his bicycle, no cars being available because of wartime restrictions. During the trip, "I had the feeling that I could not move from the spot. I was cycling, cycling, but the time seemed to stand still."
By the time they reached his home, its furnishings had transformed themselves into terrifying objects.
"Everything in the room spun around, and the familiar objects and pieces of furniture assumed grotesque, threatening forms," he wrote in his autobiography, "LSD -- My Problem Child." "They were in constant motion, animated, as if driven by an inner restlessness. The lady next door [became] a malevolent, insidious witch with a colored mask."
Hofmann thought he was dying and sent for a doctor, but the physician could find nothing wrong.
After about six hours, the experience began to change into a pleasant one. "After some time, with my eyes closed, I began to enjoy this wonderful play of colors and forms, which it really was a pleasure to observe. Then I went to sleep and the next day I was fine. I felt quite fresh, like a newborn."
That day, April 19, has subsequently been celebrated by LSD proponents as "Bicycle Day."
Psychiatrist calls for end to 30-year taboo over use of LSD as a medical treatment
Sarah Boseley, health editor
The Guardian, Wednesday January 11 2006
British psychiatrists are beginning to debate the highly sensitive issue of using LSD for therapeutic purposes to unlock secrets buried in the unconscious which may underlie the anxious or obsessional behaviour of some of their patients.
The UK pioneered this use of LSD in the 1950s. But psychiatrists found their research proposals rejected and their work dismissed once "acid" hit the streets in the mid-60s and uncontrolled use of the hallucinogenic drug became a social phenomenon.
Today, on the 100th birthday of Albert Hofmann, the scientist who discovered the mind-expanding properties of lysergic acid diethylamide in Switzerland, one consultant psychiatrist is openly risking controversy to urge that the debate on the therapeutic potential of LSD be reopened. Ben Sessa has been invited to give a presentation on psychedelic drugs to the Royal College of Psychiatrists in March - the first time the subject will have been discussed by the institution in 30 years.
"I really want to present a dispassionate medical, scientific evidence-based argument," says Dr Sessa. "I do not condone recreational drug use. None of this is tinged by any personal experience.
"Scientists, psychiatrists and psychologists were forced to give up their studies for socio-political reasons. That's what really drives me."
LSD was brought to the UK in 1952 by psychiatrist Ronnie Sandison who had visited the labs of the drug company Sandoz, where Dr Hofmann worked. He came home with 100 ampoules in his bag and began to use them at Powick hospital, near Malvern in Worcestershire, on selected patients with conditions such as obsessional hand-washing or anxiety who did not respond to psychoanalysis.
Dr Sessa has looked back on the papers published by Dr Sandison and others from the heyday of psychedelic psychiatry, and thinks they may have modern relevance. They claim positive results in patients who were given LSD in psychotherapy to get to the deep-seated roots of anxiety disorders and neuroses. It took them, as the title of Aldous Huxley's book has it, from the poem of William Blake, through "the doors of perception". Yet when he was a student, says 33-year-old Dr Sessa, all his textbooks stated categorically that LSD had no medical use.
"It is as if a whole generation of psychiatrists have had this systematically erased from their education," he says. "But for the generation who trained in the 50s and 60s, this really was going to be the next big thing. Thousands of books and papers were written, but then it all went silent. My generation has never heard of it. It's almost as if there has been an active demonisation."
He says he understands why. LSD became a huge social issue. But he argues that nobody would ask anaesthetists to forgo morphine use because heroin is a social evil, and cannabis is now being formulated as a therapeutic drug.
Since the 1960s, when research was stopped on LSD, "depression and anxiety disorders have risen to almost epidemic proportions and are now the greatest single burden on today's health services. Therefore, today's political climate may be just right for the medical profession to reconsider the use of psychedelic drugs", writes Dr Sessa in an as-yet unpublished paper with Amanda Feilding of the Beckley Foundation which promotes research into the nature of consciousness.
A major conference is being held in Basel, Switzerland, this weekend in honour of Dr Hofmann's birthday. Scientists in the burgeoning psychedelic psychiatry movement will be there, alongside artists, musicians and those who look to hallucinatory drugs for spiritual experience.
In the past five years, the international climate has been changing, albeit very slowly. In the US, Israel, Switzerland and Spain, a few research projects have been permitted into the effects of LSD, MDMA (ecstasy) and psilocybin - the active ingredient in magic mushrooms - on the brain. They look at the use of the drugs in conditions such as post-traumatic stress, obsessive compulsive disorder and the alleviation of distress in the dying.
But Dr Sessa knows it will be an uphill struggle to get research proposals approved and funded in the UK. He believes the drugs are safe in medical use - given in a pure form in tiny doses and in controlled and supervised surroundings. But LSD is associated with flashbacks, and brain scans of clubbers using ecstasy have shown damage. Some psychiatrists are likely to be appalled at the idea. Former patients of Dr Sandison claimed his use of LSD had caused them long-term problems and attempted to bring a court action for compensation.
Dr Sandison says his early experimentation with LSD in the 50s produced results in difficult cases. "I recall one young woman. She had a near-drowning experience. She developed a severe anxiety state. It coloured everything.
"We didn't get anywhere with ordinary psychotherapy, so we went on to LSD. She recalled an extraordinary memory of how, when she was eight, she had gone into a store with her mother and become separated from her. She went to a counter to ask an assistant and felt a man behind her trying to feel her up. She felt very confused by this and said she thought it was an odd way of stealing her purse." he said.
"It was pretty alarming. She had suppressed all this. We began to get somewhere and we discovered why she had sexual difficulties with her husband and felt angry towards men."
In 1954 he wrote his first paper, for the Journal of Mental Sciences, on LSD use in 36 patients. It concluded: "We consider that the drug will find a significant place in the treatment of the psychoneuroses and allied mental illnesses." But by the mid-60s, Dr Sandison had had enough. The drug had become a street problem. He gave evidence in a couple of Old Bailey cases where arson and a murder were committed under the influence of LSD.
"I don't see either ethically or professionally or technically why it shouldn't be used in the future," he says. "But anything done now has to be very different from what we did. All the expertise developed in those years by a large number of people has been lost so we have to start again."
The trip goes on
It was the drug that fuelled the psychedelic 60s - and was tested as a weapon by MI6. But whatever became of LSD? Duncan Campbell traces its colourful past, and finds that the acidheads are still out there
Duncan Campbell
The Guardian, Wednesday February 28 2007
'I was seeing what Adam had seen on the morning of his creation - the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence ... flowers shining with their inner light and all but quivering under the pressure with which they were charged ... words like 'grace' and 'transfiguration' came to mind."
That was the writer Aldous Huxley extolling the benefits of LSD from his vantage point in the Hollywood Hills in 1953, and he remained, right up to his death - and possibly beyond - an admirer of the substance. He even took it on his deathbed in 1963 so that he could enter the afterlife with, as it were, his doors of perception wide open. Some of LSD's other proponents are still with us. Albert Hofmann, the biochemical researcher credited with discovering LSD in Switzerland in 1943 - he described it as his "problem child" - celebrated his 100th birthday in Basle last year. But where does LSD feature in the drugs firmament today?
This month sees the updated republication, after 20 years, of The Brotherhood of Eternal Love by David May and Stewart Tendler, the book that charted the history of the LSD counter-culture and the so-called Brotherhood that distributed it so energetically in the 60s and 70s. The book's epilogue brings us up to date with the surviving members of the tale.
LSD has certainly had a long, strange trip since it gained worldwide attention in the 60s. Timothy Leary, its most famous promoter, dropped out of his earthly existence in 1996 and his ashes were, appropriately enough, blasted into space. His book, The Politics of Ecstasy, still sells well and there have been reports in the past few months of plans for various feature films. One of them would involve Leonardo DiCaprio, who knew Leary and has always been interested in a life that involved espousing the drug, being busted, escaping from prison, holing up in Algeria and eventually ending up on the lecture circuit as a double-act with the Watergate burglar Gordon Liddy.
Augustus Stanley Owsley III, the San Francisco chemist who produced the famous "Owsley" dosages of LSD, is now in his 70s. He has long since left the production game and lives in Australia, where he sells jewellery, carvings and music from a website under his nickname, Bear. Owsley, described by US agents as "the man who did for LSD what Henry Ford did for the motorcar" and called "God's secret agent" by Leary, also writes essays on his website, still campaigning against the drugs laws and arguing that "the use of substances which alter in various ways the consciousness of man is an extremely ancient and established practice."
The Brotherhood of Eternal Love ran the drug's largest international network, stretching from California to Hawaii and Afghanistan, with a UK branch in the unlikely spot of Broadstairs, Kent. Described by the California department of justice as "a pseudo-religious organisation responsible for the manufacture and distribution of LSD on a worldwide level", it operated more or less with impunity between 1966 and 1971 and had an estimated 750 people involved before it came unstuck. Many of them ended up behind bars, but some are still out there, somewhere, hoping that the FBI has forgotten them.
Britain's best-known LSD network, which prompted what became known as Operation Julie, included a couple of doctors, two chemists, a teacher and an author. A total of 15 people were jailed for up to 13 years at Bristol crown court in 1978 after they were infiltrated by undercover police, some of whom inadvertently ingested some of the drug and had their own trippy experiences.
The drug also had a sinister sub-life within the intelligence world: the CIA experimented with it and even made an unsuccessful attempt to slip some into Fidel Castro's system before he made a TV broadcast. In Britain, in the 50s, servicemen were given the drug without being told, so that MI6 could study its effects. Last year, three of the servicemen received thousands of pounds in damages for being used as unwitting guinea pigs. One had described seeing, "Salvador Dali-style faces and cracks in people's faces". He had been told the tabs he was instructed to take were an attempt to find a cure for the common cold.
Officially, the production and use of LSD have diminished considerably since the days when psychedelia was fashionable, but there is still a strong underground market. "The interesting thing about LSD is that 20 years ago it cost £1.75 and it still costs about the same today," says Mike Jay, a trustee of the drugs policy foundation Transform and author of The Emperor of Dreams, a history of drugs in the 19th century. "It tends to be distributed now by enthusiasts rather than profiteers. It's an insider market and it's a seasonal thing. Every May or June, reasonably large amounts come in from California and Holland. The quality is quite good and it's not watered down as it was in the 70s and 80s."
"It is used much less than even a few years ago," says Matt McNamee of the drugs advice organisation Release. "People usually still put much more spiritual significance into it; they prepare for it in a way they don't with most other drugs." Users preferred the notion of taking LSD while "running across meadows with wildflowers" rather than ingesting it in a noisy club, he says. Dr Luke Mitcheson, a clinical psychologist with the South London and Maudsley NHS Trust, has just published with colleagues a study of hallucinogens among UK dance users. They noted that "the marked decline in LSD prevalence would seem very curious ... One possibility is that LSD's much longer duration is less compatible with leisure lifestyles that are organised around an evening out."
But there are still risks for anyone seeking to produce the drug, and dealing in it carries a 14-year jail sentence. In 2000, there was a spectacular bust in Kansas when William Pickard and Clyde Apperson were arrested by Drugs Enforcement Administration agents as they tried to move their mobile lab out of a grain silo. The agents claimed to have found 41.3 kilos (90lbs) of the drug - enough, they said, to make an estimated 10 million doses. But by 2004, a total of just 317,321 doses were seized worldwide. Seizures in this country are relatively tiny - around 7,000 doses in 2004, the last year for which figures are available. Jay reckons that well over 90% of the LSD trafficked around the world is below the radar of customs officers as it remains one of the easiest of drugs to smuggle, whether in liquid form - in, say, a nasal spray, or on blotting paper hidden in a book or wallet.
"I don't think that the Brotherhood had a beginning and I don't think that the Brotherhood had an end," says Nick Sand, one of the original bootleg chemists interviewed for the new edition of the book. "The Brotherhood exists. We are still brothers because we shared the light. The Brotherhood is still there between us. So has the Brotherhood died? No, of course not".
