Psychedelic drug completes 80 years. Once celebrated, the serendipitous substance was banned for decades and is currently experiencing a renaissance. Ever since Prince Harry wrote about drug experiments in his biography, the world has known that even royalty sometimes resort to psychedelics. Since Michael Pollan’s 2018 book How to Change Your Mind became a bestseller and was later adapted into a Netflix series, one thing is clear: alterations in the state of consciousness interest millions. The funding of a clinical study on the treatment of depression with psychedelic drugs by the German Ministry of Health shows that LSD & co. are emerging from the sordid corner of decades of stigmatization. Psychedelics are still banned and only accessible with special licenses, but they have once again become the subject of scientific research. They are still the basis of the business models of companies listed on the stock exchanges and have returned to popular culture. LSD, a problem for its discoverer With what joy Albert Hofmann would have experienced this! For more than a quarter of a century, the inventor of LSD, about whom chemists always said “it was LSD that found him”, fought for the scientific rehabilitation of the drug. Despite having titled his autobiography LSD in 1979 – my problem child (LSD, my problem child, in free translation), Hofmann always wished that the substance could become a child prodigy. He saw great potential for the drug in treating mental illness and exploring consciousness. But when Hofmann died in 2008, aged 102, the “psychedelic renaissance” was taking its first steps. The search term “microdosing” for merely the mood-enhancing effect of LSD still generated less than 12 million Google results. There were no psychedelic-assisted self-discovery groups on Facebook yet. And most importantly, scientific research on LSD and its relatives was at rock bottom after decades of prohibition. Psychedelic renaissance But that has changed radically in recent years. Conventions and conferences on psychedelics take place all over the world. At one of these congresses, Insight, in Berlin in 2021, DW met Rick Doblin, founding director of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS). According to him, 20 years ago the research interest in psychedelic drugs was a career killer. The situation today is just the opposite. “If you run a psychiatric institute, you won’t be able to recruit new colleagues if you don’t offer something about psychedelics,” Doblin described the trend in the US. “The best example is Harvard, where psychologist Timothy Leary worked on LSD. Harvard now has a psychedelic research center at Massachusetts General Hospital,” he continued. 1943: “first trip” with LSD Science and medicine were also the starting point for LSD: in 1943, chemist Albert Hofmann, then aged 37, was looking for a medicine for circulation in a laboratory of the Swiss pharmaceutical company Sandoz. On April 16, he recalled a substance he had synthesized five years earlier but then discarded: lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD. Uncharacteristically for the meticulous researcher, Hofmann appears to have been careless and came into contact with a minimal amount of the drug. He noticed an incredible transformation in himself: “Everything I imagined was before me in the form of images, deeply gratifying. It lasted three or four hours and then disappeared”, recalled Hofmann in 2006 at a panel on the occasion of his 100th birthday . Curious, Hofmann decided to try LSD three days later. On April 19, 1943, the chemist ingested what was scientifically presumed to be a careful amount of LSD: 250 micrograms, a quarter of a thousandth of a gram. And yet it was an overdose. The substance first catapulted Hofmann into a nightmare experience. The young chemist thought he was dying; later, however, he experienced the most intense images and feelings of happiness. The next day, he could remember exactly what he experienced – and he felt no physical problems. On the contrary: the world, as Hofmann later described it, seemed “new” to him. Sandoz seeks usefulness A substance that in such a small amount has such a strong effect on consciousness − without any physical side effects? This aroused Sandoz’s interest and the pharmaceutical company began to look for a use for the new drug. The company produced LSD on a larger scale and distributed it free of charge to research institutes around the world under the name Delysid. In the 1950s, the drug was popular in medicine. Good results were obtained, for example, in the treatment of alcoholism with LSD sessions. The substance has also been used in psychotherapy. When actor Cary Grant became delirious with the substance after a series of therapy sessions in 1959, Look magazine ran a story on “The Wonderful Story Behind the New Cary Grant.” The number of searches exploded; around 100 scientific articles appeared each year in the specialized press. In Germany, in 1960, the psychiatrist Hanscarl Leuner, from Göttingen, opened the “First European Symposium on Psychotherapy under LSD 25”. The beginning of the end At the same time, LSD left the fields of research and initially infiltrated the circles of artists and intellectuals. More and more individuals embarked on psychedelic journeys. The substance was still legal, the media was benevolent. In the 1960s, LSD made its mark on art and especially music. A student revolution, fueled at least in part by drugs, was causing profound upheavals in culture and society. And at the same time started the countermovement. With the popularization of the drug, abuse, accidents, bad trips and psychoses increased. The tone of the reports, long positive, has changed. The hitherto miraculous substance came to be stylized in the media as an insanity drug. In 1965, then US President Lyndon B. Johnson banned LSD in the United States. Sandoz stopped producing the drug. And, LSD went underground. End and new beginning With prohibition, research with the drug was suspended for several decades. Only in the early 2000s, the scenario began to change and the first studies with psychedelic drugs were approved again. And they brought encouraging results, especially for depression. Peter Gasser is one of the few doctors in Switzerland licensed to work with LSD psychotherapeutically. For him, the most therapeutically important property of the substance is “that it allows us to establish bonds and maintain connections. Since depression is the disease of loss of connection with oneself and with the world”. According to estimates by the World Health Organization (WHO), about 300 million people worldwide live with depression. Treatment with psychedelics is the first promising new therapeutic approach in many years. Perhaps, after 80 years of troubled history, Hofmann’s problem child will still turn into a child prodigy. Author: Matthias von Hein
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