[tag]Albert Hofmann[tag], the Swiss chemist who discovered LSD and gave the psychedelic generation the pharmaceutical vehicle to turn on, tune in and drop out, died yesterday at his home in Basel, Switzerland of a heart attack at the ripe old age of 102.

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 1930s for Sandoz Laboratories, when in 1938, he discovered that he could use one of the derivatives of lysergic acid to make lysergic acid diethylamide or LSD-25.

Hofmann’s hopes for the drug did not blossom so he abandoned any further experimentation until 1943 when he decided to take another look at the drug’s possibilities.

LSD began to be hailed as a wonder drug for use in psychoanalysis, particularly for gaining insights into schizophrenia; and more than 2,000 research papers appeared over the succeeding decade.

The Central Intelligence Agency investigated LSD as a potential agent for mind control, and the British government studied it as a truth drug. In both cases, the drug was administered to subjects who were not informed of its nature which prompted many lawsuits to be filed years later by the victims of those experiments.

By the 1960s, largely at the instigation of Harvard University psychologists Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert, LSD began to be seen first as a pathway to spiritual enlightenment, then as a major recreational drug.

Not enough credit is given to the overall impact that LSD had on that generation besides its portrayal in the movies and MSM as the drug that caused people to jump off buildings and stare into the Sun until they were blind.

“Instead of a `wonder child,’ LSD suddenly became my `problem child,’” Hofmann said, and in 1966 the United States banned the use of LSD as is usually the case with any drug that in enjoyed by the public.

Except of course, alcohol!