"Wrong and inappropriate use has caused LSD to become my problem child."
Albert Hofmann
Lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) is a powerful psychedelic drug. While now commonly associated with 1960s dropout youth culture, it was heralded as a wonder drug in the 1940s and 1950s and was used to treat thousands of psychiatric patients.
Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann (1906-2008) first synthesized LSD in 1938, expecting it to be useful as a medicinal stimulant. In 1943 he returned to studying it and after experiencing some pleasant sensations while working with the drug. .he took a dose of 0.25 mg. Hofmann bicycled home and began to experience its psychedelic effects, the world's first "trip." He reported that the morning after he felt entirely renewed and that his senses were "vibrating in a condition of highest sensitivity."
Today LSD is mainly taken as a recreational drug for its psychological effects. Common accounts are of colorful hallucinations, time distortions, loss of identity, and synesthesia. A trip can last up to around twelve hours, depending on dose. Physical effects include hypothermia, fever, increased heart rate, perspiration, tremors, and insomnia. LSD has been known to induce psychosis, and more commonly can result in intermittent flashbacks to the trip.
Due to LSD's extraordinary impact on the psyche, it has attracted a number of high profile users, who believed that it could unlock certain aspects of experience that are otherwise hidden. Preeminent among these were countercultural psychologist Timothy Leary, who urged Americans to "turn on, tune in, and drop out," and author Aldous Huxley, who chose to be injected with LSD as he died.
