Father Of LSD Albert Hoffman On His Final Trip

My Top 3

The LSD discoverer, Swiss professor Albert Hoffman, has died at the honorable age of 102. From 1938 he had been developing lysergic acid diethylamide - also known as lsd-25, acid, blotter acid, window pane, dots, tickets and mellow yellow - in his lab. During the fifties, outlaws like Timothy Leary picked it up and promoted it to a hugely popular drug in the infamous Sixties.

So why do I report about this? Because I witnessed the victims of this drug myself last week in San Francisco? Because I love to romanticize stuff, including drugs? Not really. I write this post because I think Internet is the new LSD. It’s a theory I came up with when I visited the exhibition Summer of Love: Art of the Psychedelic Era in The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York last June. Read “My inspiration: Internet is the new LSD” for an explanation, which you probably eager to hear by this point ;-).

Hoffman’s death inspires hundreds of writers to cover the history of LSD again. I think especially John Walsh from the Independent has done a great job with his artice “Trip of a lifetime: How LSD rocked the world - Features, Music - The Independent”.

Now before you think I’m some tripping-on-acid blogger, let me conclude with a quote from Hunter S Thompson’s book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas:

All those pathetically eager acid freaks who thought they could buy Peace and Understanding for three bucks a hit. But their loss and failure is ours, too. What Leary took down with him was the central illusion of a whole life-style that he helped to create…a generation of permanent cripples, failed seekers, who never understood the essential old mystic fallacy of the Acid Culture: the desperate assumption that somebody-or at least some force-is tending the Light at the end of the tunnel.