LSD inventor, now 100, is still advocate for mind-altering drug

GENEVA – LSD is an unlikely subject for a 100th birthday party. Yet the Swiss chemist who discovered the mind-altering drug and was its first human guinea pig is celebrating his centenary today – in good health and with plans to attend an international seminar on the hallucinogen.

“I had wonderful visions,” Albert Hofmann said, recalling his first accidental consumption of the drug.

“I sat down at home on the divan and started to dream,” he told the Swiss television network SF DRS. “What I was thinking appeared in colors and in pictures. It lasted for a couple of hours and then it disappeared.”

Hofmann, who also had bad experiences with the drug, continues to insist it should be legalized for medical treatment, particularly in psychiatric research. But LSD’s reputation has been as turbulent as some acid trips.

The drug earned a bad reputation amid fatalities associated with hallucinations and reports of “flashbacks” – the recurrence of hallucinations when not taking the drug.

For decades after LSD was banned in the late 1960s, Hofmann defended his invention.

“I produced the substance as a medicine,” he said. “It’s not my fault if people abused it.”

The chemist – who still takes nearly daily walks in the picturesque village where he lives with his wife of 70 years, Anita – discovered lysergic acid diethylamide-25 in 1938 while studying the medicinal uses of a fungus found on wheat and other grains at the Sandoz pharmaceuticals firm, now part of Novartis.