Today we celebrate the 80th Bicycle Day!
This is not a celebration of pedalled vehicles, but of psychedelic science!
Although psychedelic plants and fungi had been used in therapeutic settings already for thousands of years, modern psychedelic research began only when LSD was first synthesised in 1938 at the Sandoz research labs in Basel, Switzerland by Dr. Albert Hofmann.
Hofmann and his colleagues were conducting research into ergot, a fungus which grows on rye and other grains, and had caused mass poisonings in the middle ages which were commonly known as “Saint Anthony’s fire”.
The symptoms included gangrene in the extremities due to a contraction of the blood vessels, and research was being done to see if this vasoconstrictive property could be useful in modern medicine, in reducing blood loss during childbirth.
Another important symptom of Saint Anthony’s fire was hallucinations, and one theory of the Salem witch trials after the harvest in 1692 blames ergot poisoning for the behavior of the men and women accused.
Hofmann isolated ergometrine from ergot, a drug that is still used today to manage post partum bleeding. Lysergic acid diethlyamide (abbreviated to LSD-25 as it was the 25th modification of the natural alkaloid) was only 70% as effective as ergometrine in controlling blood flow in the uterus, and had no other observable effects, so testing was stopped and the compound was shelved and forgotten. It was set aside for five years, until 16 April 1943, when Hofmann decided to re-examine it. While re-synthesizing LSD, he accidentally absorbed a small amount of the drug through his fingertips and discovered its powerful effects.
Three days later, on 19 April 1943, Dr. Hofmann subsequently carried out a self-experiment to confirm that it was in fact LSD that was the psychoactive compound, and took 250µg (he had no way of knowing this was a large dose - no other chemical had ever been synthesised which produced physical effects at lower doses). This led to his famous bike ride home, heavily under the influences of a full-blown LSD experience. He was able to make it home guided by his assistant, although during the journey he was unsure at times whether he was moving or not. At home, he called a doctor, worrying that he was going mad, or even dying. The doctor examined him, but could find nothing abnormal except for extremely dilated pupils. The horrific nature of the experience slowly waned, to be replaced by pleasant visual hallucinations – intense, alternating colours. The next day, Hoffman awoke feeling refreshed.
In his memoir, he emphasized it as a "sacred drug": He said, "I see the true importance of LSD in the possibility of providing material aid to meditation aimed at the mystical experience of a deeper, comprehensive reality."
A few years after this, psilocin and psilocybin were isolated by Dr. Hofmann at Sandoz. They had come to him from the explorations of the ethnobotanist Gordon Wasson. He had been attempting to locate the semi-mythical hallucinogenic plants used in the religions of the native tribes of the South American rainforests. After a year of searching he finally located the teonanacatl or “flesh of the gods”, as they were known: mushrooms of the genus Psilocybe and took part in a ceremony with Maria Sabina, a revered shaman, whose confidence he later betrayed. Eventually, a number of the mushrooms were sent to Sandoz, where Hofmann isolated the psychoactive alkaloids. These new psychedelics produced an effect similar to LSD, but one which is often characterised as being gentler, or less intense.
LSD was tested by several other researchers at Sandoz. After verifying its effects, LSD-25 was tested for toxicity in animals, and Sandoz decided to continue research in the hope of producing a marketable product. The son of Arthur Stoll (who was the head of the pharmaceutical department at Sandoz), Werner Stoll, was the first person to use LSD in a psychiatric environment, where he discovered that low doses allowed repressed material to surface more easily. After Stoll published his findings in 1947, Sandoz marketed LSD under the trade name “Delysid” as a tool to aid the release of repressed material during psychotherapy.
LSD research would eventually give an important boost to the nascent field of neurochemistry. The fact that such a vanishingly small number of LSD molecules could exert such a profound effect on the mind was an important clue that a system of neurotransmitters with dedicated receptors might play a role in organizing our mental experience. This insight eventually led to the discovery of serotonin and the class of antidepressants known as SSRIs.
More than 40,000 patients were administered LSD alongside therapy between 1950 and 1965, and more than a thousand scientific papers were published. Most of the trials were very poorly designed compared to today’s standards however. The record was a complete muddle until 2012, when a meta-analysis that combined data from the six best randomized controlled studies done in the 1960s and 1970s (involving more than five hundred patients in all) found that indeed there had been a statistically robust and clinically “significant beneficial effect on alcohol misuse” from a single dose of LSD, an effect that lasted up to six months. “Given the evidence for a beneficial effect of LSD on alcoholism,” the authors concluded, “it is puzzling why this treatment has been largely overlooked.” (Krebs and Johansen, 2012).
A recent meta-analysis of 19 studies of psychedelics for mood disorders published between 1949 and 1973 found that 79% of patients showed ‘clinically judged improvement’ post treatment (Rucker et al, 2016).
In December 2007, Swiss medical authorities allowed psychotherapist Peter Gasser to perform psycho-therapeutic experiments on patients suffering from terminal-stage cancer and other terminal diseases. Completed in 2011, these represent the first study of the therapeutic effects of LSD on humans in 35 years. (Gasser, 2014)
Psilocybin is currently the drug of choice for the new wave of psychedelic research, due to its shorter half life and because of the stigma still attached to LSD from Nixon's 1960s War on Drugs. We have Albert Hofmann to thank for both of these medicines which are promising to finally bring relief to so many people's suffering. 79 years on, the question still remains; do we have the courage to embrace them like Hofmann did on that fateful day?
This blog post contains extracts from Michael Pollan’s ‘How to Change Your Mind’.
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